I have been telling my students since the 1970s that “race is a pigment of our
imagination.” The play on words of the definition is meant as a double entendre, both to
debunk baseless biological pretensions and to focus attention on the social, legal, and
political construction of categories meant to put people “in their place” in hierarchies of
power and privilege. “Race” is a social status, not a zoological one; a product of history,
not of nature; a contextual variable, not a given. It is a historically contingent, relational,
intersubjective phenomenon—yet it is typically misbegotten as a natural, fixed marker of
phenotypic difference inherent in human bodies, independent of human will or intention.
What is called “race” is largely the sociopolitical accretion of past intergroup contacts
and struggles, which establish the boundaries and thus the identities of victors and
vanquished, of dominant and subordinate groups, of “us” and “them,” with their attendant
conceits of superiority and inferiority and invidious taxonomies of social worthor stigma.
As such “race” is an ideological construct linking supposedly innate traits of individuals
to their rank and fate in the social order. Racial statuses and categories (and the putative
differences that they connote) are imposed and infused with stereotypical moral meaning,
all the more when they become master statuses affecting all aspects of social life. The
dominant “racial frame” (Feagin 2006) that evolved in what became the United States,
during the long colonial and national era of slavery and after it, was that of white
supremacy. Benjamin Franklin’s words in the epigraph above are illustrative; they were
written in 1751, a quarter of a century before he signed the Declaration of Independence
with no hint of irony, back when not even Germans were imagined to be “white,” mixing
nativism and racism in what would become a familiar, habitual American blend.