Race: The Concept of “Race”

The concept of “race” has received considerable attention in recent years, both as a conceptual category and in its historical development. In both these respects, difficulties arise that might lead to some surprising connections between “race” and psychoanalysis.

As a concept, “race” designates an obscure and contested domain, seeming to refer to both natural and cultural aspects of human identity. In certain contexts, the term “race” has a strictly biological sense (and one can endorse or denounce such usage), but it can also designate a group identity that is based on a common cultural and historical inheritance. Although some writers simply take one of these senses for granted, ignoring or dismissing the other, many accounts of “race” employ the word in all its ambiguity, without distinguishing these two registers of meaning. In such cases, the term “race” is used to designate a cultural inheritance, while also referring to features that are not entirely social and that cannot be acquired by education and upbringing, such as skin color and “ancestry” in a biological sense. Discussions of the term “race” often lead back to this ambiguity, and thus to a single, decisive question concerning its status as a biological or social category.

In recent years (indeed for the last century, as Carl Degler has shown), appeals to “race” as a biological concept have been subject to strenuous criticism, not only because of the history that has bound scientific definitions of “race” to eugenics, colonialism, and the holocaust, but also because the biological definitions of “race” have not been sustained even on purely scientific grounds. The most popular and common markers of racial difference (skin color, hair, and facial features) are also the most superficial from an evolutionary point of view, in the sense that they are “surface” phenomena, which lead to classifications that do not correspond to the divisions of the human population produced by the international genetic maps w