Race in the Making

Abstract

Race in the Making provides a new understanding of how people conceptualize social categories and shows why this knowledge is so readily recruited to create and maintain systems of unequal power. Hirschfeld argues that knowledge of race is not derived from observations of physical difference nor does it develop in the same way as knowledge of other social categories. Instead, his central claim is that racial thinking is the product of a special-purpose cognitive competence for understanding and representing human kinds. The book also challenges the conventional wisdom that race is purely a social construction by demonstrating that a common set of abstract principles underlies all systems of racial thinking, whatever other historical and cultural specificities may be associated with them. Starting from the commonplace observation that race is a category of both power and the mind, Race in the Making directly tackles this issue. Through a sustained exploration of continuity and change in the child's notion of race and across historical variations in the race concept, Hirschfeld shows that a singular commonsense theory about human kinds constrains the way racial thinking changes, whether in historical time or during childhood. After surveying the literature on the development of a cultural psychology of race, Hirschfeld presents original studies that examine children's (and occasionally adults') representations of race. He sketches how a jointly cultural and psychological approach to race might proceed, showing how this approach yields new insights into the emergence and elaboration of racial thinking. Bradford Books imprint

Essentialism, Culture, and Power: Representations of Social Class

“…Essence is also thought to be the underlying causal mechanism for the properties that we see in any living beings. Current research on essentialism focuses on delineating the developmental changes in children's understanding of social categories such as race (Hirschfeld, 1996), caste (Mahalingam, 1998), and gender (Taylor, 1996).…”

“…Cognitive psychologists view essentialism as a cognitive bias that enables the creation of social categories (Hirschfeld, 1996). The ideological import of essentialism is rarely explored (Mahalingam, 1998).…”

“…The ideological import of essentialism is rarely explored (Mahalingam, 1998). Research on essentialism uses the following three paradigms to investigate a person's essentialist beliefs about social categories: (a) adoption paradigm (Gelman & Wellman, 1991; Hirschfeld, 1996), (b) transformation paradigm (Keil, 1989; Mahalingam, 1998), and (c) brain transplant paradigm (Johnson, 1990; Mahalingam, 2001). The adoption paradigm pits nature vs. nurture to examine beliefs about innate potential.…”

“…Such essentialist assumptions can become a means of preserving the status quo and abolishing programs that attempt to engineer social change (e.g., affirmative action). Most social constructivist accounts use dominant narratives, such as colonial government documents, to support their claim that essentialism and naturalization of hegemony go together (Hirschfeld, 1996).…”

“…Integrating the current research on psychological essentialism (Gelman & Wellman, 1991; Hirschfeld, 1996) and power (Fiske, 1993; Fuss, 1989; Grosz, 1994; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999; Stoler, 1995), I propose a theoretical synthesis, an essentialist theory of power that is sensitive to the interaction between social location (Crenshaw, 1995) and cognition. Using this perspective, I describe a study conducted in Tamilnadu, India that compared upper‐ and lowest caste members' beliefs about social class.…”