Mixed Race Studies

Changing Race, Changing Sex: The Ethics of Self‐Transformation

Journal of Social Philosophy
Volume 37, Issue 2 (Summer 2006)
pages 266-282
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9833.2006.00332.x

Cressida J. Heyes, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality
University of Alberta, Edmonton

Every year when I teach an introductory course in feminist philosophy, I see individual women and men drastically rethinking their previous understandings of gender and race, and of their own place in a gendered and racialized world. Often as a part of this rethinking, we struggle over what an ethical life amounts to; ethical, that is, in the sense of being responsive and responsible to one’s relation to others, and to the work one does on oneself.1 To talk in this way of the self as, at least in part, self-making, presumes another set of questions about the very possibility of changing oneself. So, for example, feminists are not only interested in establishing who to count as “women” with regard to some already foundational definition, but also in troubling and transforming the definition itself—in part through changing ourselves.

To address these simultaneously ontological and ethical questions, we need to ask what makes it possible to change one’s identity—and not just incrementally within a defined category (e.g., as by becoming a more assertive woman through feminist consciousness raising), but also more drastically. Specifically, what are those people who “change sex” undertaking, and what makes sex into the kind of thing that can be changed? How is changing sex different from “passing”—the phenomenon central to the histories of both race and sex, in which one is read as, or actively pretends to be, something that one avowedly is not? It is in light of questions like the above that my interest in identity categories extends to asking: what makes a particular facet of identity into something the individual can transform? And what implications do answers to this question have for all our ethical lives?…

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Sources of Racialism

Journal of Social Philosophy
Volume 41, Issue 3 (Fall 2010)
Special Issue: New Thinking in Race Theory. Edited by Paul C. Taylor and Ronald Robles Sundstorm
pages 272–292
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9833.2010.01498.x

Ron Mallon, Associate Professor of Philosphy
University of Utah

Work in social philosophy on racial classification generally shares a commitment to “social constructionism” in two quite distinct senses of that term. In the first sense, to be constructionist is to hold that race (the subject of racial classification) does not exist as a biological kind in the way ordinary or folk ideas of race seem to assume and is therefore “merely a construction.” Call this constructionist view anti-racialism and the folk view it opposes racialism. As we understand it here, racialism involves the idea that humans can be divided into natural groups whose members have characteristic, unseen differences that explain group-typical properties, including physical, psychological and characterological properties, and anti-racialism is the denial of this view.

But much of this work is also committed to social constructionism in a quite different, empiricist sense: it holds that racial classification itself is primarily the product of social and cultural practices, which is to say that we (as individuals and as cultural groups) have the theoretical representations of race that we do, rather than some other theories or no theories at all because of historically and culturally specific conventions, decisions, practices, and so forth. Call this second sort of social constructionism representational constructionism.

Recent work by evolutionary and cognitive psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers has posed a challenge to representational constructionism (e.g.. Gil-White 1999. 200la.b; Hirschfeld 1996; Kurzban. Tooby. and Cosmides 2001; Machery and Faucher 2005a.b). While these theorists join in the endorsement of anti-racialism, they go on to explain folk racial theories at least in part as the result of cognitive mechanisms which are culturally canalized, species-typical and domain-specific. To call them “culturally canalized” is here to say that they have a property associated with (and often considered a condition for) innateness: they develop stably across a wide range of different cultural environments.’To say they are “species-typical” is to say that, like having two arms and legs, eyes, ears. hair, and so forth, these cognitive capacities are traits that humans typically possess. And to say that they are “domain-specific” is to say that, unlike domain-general cognitive capacities (like memory, attention, or perception) that are employed across a wide range of problem domains, these mechanisms are specialized for solving a particular sort of problem. But while evolutionary-cognitive theorists hold that racial cognition is subserved by culturally canalized, domain-specific mechanisms that were shaped by evolution in ways that adapted them to solving certain problems, they do not hold that these mechanisms are adaptations for…

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The Racial Politics of Mixed Race

Journal of Social Philosophy
Volume 30, Issue 2, Summer 1999
pages 276–294
DOI: 10.1111/0047-2786.00018

Lisa Tessman, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies
Binghamton University, State University of New York

Recently there has been an increasing amount of attention given in academic, political, and popular settings in the United States to the experience and identities of mixed-race or multiracial people.  In the academic realm, there is a growing body of work that can generally be called mix-race racial theory, including, for instance, pieces anthologized in Maria P. P. Root’s 1992 and 1996 volumes Racially Mixed People in America and The Multiracial Experience, and Naomi Zack’s 1995 collection American Mixed Race.  There are also many popular autobiographical pieces about mixed race, several periodicals devoted to mixed-race people, a deluge of talk shows on the subject, and both local and national organizations that serve as support groups or political interest groups for mixed-race people.  Much of the more theoretical work emphasizes the issue of individual rights for mixed-race people—particularly the right to an “accurate” racial identity on forms such as the Census.  An enormous portion of the literature also analyzes the experiences of mixed-race individuals from a sociological or psychological point of view. Frequently the discussion of the rights of mixed-race people in fact draws upon the social scientific research that indicates that such things as the lack of opportunity to identify officially as mixed race or multiracial has detrimental effects on the self-concept, self-esteem, and development of mixed-race people, particularly children…

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