Racial Realities: Social Constructs and the Stuff of Which They Are Made

Eric C. Thompson is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore.

How can we deny the reality of race? It is a truth so many hold to be self-evident. Travel around the world, from Asia to Africa to Europe to South America: people look different in different places. Travel about in major global cities—Singapore, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, London—and physical diversity is close at hand. It would seem absurd to argue that the visible differences so apparent to our sight are socially constructed. Physiological differences—skin tone, eye shape, hair texture and the like—are not the outcome of our human imagination. The material reality of physiological differences grounds racial categorising. It is used as a point of reference and point of realisation to assert rhetorically the undeniable truth of any given scheme of racial categorisation.

The purpose of this article is to emphasise the error of such assertions. I aim also to point out the weakness of arguments for the “social construction” of race, which too often undermine their own case by denying the material reality of visible difference. I outline instead a way to incorporate the material reality of biological difference into an understanding of race as a social construct. My argument is simply this: biological difference is the material out of which our concepts of race are fashioned. These concepts are as many and varied as the diverse cultures of human societies around the world. In the case of race and other identities—such as ethnicity, gender and class—our social constructs are not fashioned out of thin air but out of material conditions. This said, the material conditions do not determine what we make of them—what we construct socially—any more than wood determines the myriad things a woodworker or craftsman might make out of a piece of timber.

In the first section of this article, I want to emphasise the socially constructed nature of “race”, “ethnicity” and similar concepts. The idea that race is a sensible way to talk about the material reality of biologically inherited diversity continues to reappear in new forms despite our best efforts to teach students and colleagues about its socially constructed nature. The attempt to depoliticise such concepts, to make them function as objective categories in the service of science or medicine, is a fraught undertaking. Race and ethnicity are deeply political categories, as many investigations into the historical circumstances of their social construction demonstrate. I will discuss this history in general ways in the case of the United States and in some greater detail in the internationally less well-known case of Malaysia, with the development of the concepts of bangsa in Malay and minzu in Chinese, which map varyingly and imperfectly onto the English terms “nation”, “race” and “ethnic group”. The imperfection of translation across Malay, Chinese and English itself demonstrates the tenuous relationship between these signifiers of types of peoples and the various extra-linguistic referents—of biology and culture—through which attempts are made to ground and reify such concepts as “race” and “ethnicity”.

But I also wish to move beyond this by now well-worn understanding of the social construction of “race”, “ethnicity” and similar concepts. The problem with social constructionist arguments, usually raised to try to dismiss racial, ethnic and other identities as ephemeral, is that they generally have no answer to the naive—though by no means foolish—realist reference to the difference and diversity of physical features, thought and behaviour which seem so true and apparent. There are people who look different from one another in patterns we map onto “racial” difference and who act differently in ways we attribute to cultural or ethnic difference. In response, I want to provide a means by which to take this sensible reality (i.e., a reality apparent to our senses) into account, to bring it into our understanding of the social construction of race, ethnicity and the like, while still maintaining the argument that biology and culture by no means determine such categories. Rather, biology and culture merely provide the raw materials from which we socially construct ideas of difference and community. As with raw materials out of which we fashion buildings or clothing, the materials we rely on have some bearing on the structures we build or the fashions we weave out of them, but they do not determine the form of the final products, let alone the uses to which we put them. 

Race by Any Other Name? 

English-speakers may think that the idea of race is univocally understood everywhere. This is not the case in two respects: first, in different contexts, the English word “race” has different connotations; second, words in other languages which may at times be translated as “race” (or used to translate “race” from English into other languages) generally have histories of their own. These other histories mean that the connotations differ from the connotations of “race” in English. The idea of race is not quite the same everywhere, and race by other names—such as bangsa in Malay or chat in Thai—does not carry the same meaning everywhere.

Race is deeply biological in the United States. In American history, the idea of biologically inherited racial difference was used to create categories of “free” and “slave”. These latter categories are clearly political, not biological. But biology was used to ground the political reality of slavery in a set of beliefs about biology. One of these was that black Africans and white Europeans represented dichotomous groups. The reality that persons of African and European descent could have children together was policed though anti-miscegenation laws.

In Malaysia and Singapore, “race” (or ras in Malay) is used to mean something which is both biological and cultural. Both countries have a scheme of racial classification inherited from the British colonial period. All Malaysians and Singaporeans carry identity cards which include their race. In functional terms, race is now a patrilineal inheritance in both countries. When children are born, their race is recorded on their birth certificate following that of their father. So, for example, if a Chinese man marries an Indian woman, their children will officially be Chinese. If their son marries another Indian woman the grandchildren are Chinese. If the same pattern is repeated over several generations, although the great-grandchildren on down would have very little “Chinese” inheritance biologically, they will be officially Chinese under the state’s logic. The social reality is, of course, far more complicated. Individuals and families do not always operate according to the state’s logic, but they are subject to that logic administratively.¹

Social constructs of race, or race-type categories of social identity, are always embedded in histories. They are constructed over time through social and political discourse. Take any sort of category like race, in any language, and one can always trace a history which reveals the shifting instability of the category as well as the moments when it becomes fixed and attached to certain material conditions used ex-post-facto to verify its supposed pre-cultural, pre-discursive reality. In the case of Malay and Chinese constructs of race-like or ethnic-like categories, because of their political importance in both Malaysia and Singapore, a great deal of research has been done to uncover these histories, particularly as relating to the first half of the twentieth century, when senses of community were forged around issues of nation, nationalism and indigeneity.² 

Bangsa, Minzu and Racial Constructs in Malaysia 

In an exceptionally valuable working paper, Malaysian historian Tan Liok Ee traced the parallel development of the Malay term bangsa and the Chinese minzu in early twentieth-century Malaysia.³ Both bangsa and minzu signify a “people” in senses similar to “race”, “nation” or “ethnic group” in English, yet at the same time they do not map easily onto any of those words in English. To complicate matters further, Malaysia, along with Singapore, was formerly a British colony. In the wake of British colonialism, the term “race” or ras in Malay became a fundamental social and political concept. In Malaysia, political parties became defined by ras or bangsa. In Singapore, while race was rejected as a basis for party political organisation by the ruling People’s Action Party, it became entrenched in the national ideology of multiracialism—i.e., Singapore as a nation composed of “Chinese, Malays, Indians and Others”. It was also entrenched practically as the conduit for social-welfare programmes which the state chose to channel through communal (racial, ethnic, religious) organisations rather than administer directly. While the detailed social and political history of “race”, bangsa, minzu and other terms is far too complex to address here, I point to these terms to demonstrate the flexibility, fluidity and variability of the manner in which such concepts of group identity are socially constructed.

Bangsa is a word of Sanskrit origin with a history of use in the Malay language stretching back many centuries. Tan demonstrates how, in the early twentieth century, bangsa was used in a discursive struggle over political identities. Two variants—bangsa and kebangsaan—developed in Malay discourse, primarily through print media, to signify two related though distinct concepts (the ke——an form in Malay turns the root word into a more abstract noun, similar to ——tion or ——ness in English). In its earlier, Sanskrit-derived use, bangsa had meant something akin to “lineage”, particularly noble lineage. Thus, in the era of Malay sultans and rajas, bangsa Melayu implied lineage or descent from Malay nobility. However, Tan argues that in early texts a broader sense of bangsa Melayu as “Malay people” can also be found. In the early twentieth century, the idea of bangsa as a descent group became more clearly articulated, in conjunction with English notions both of “race” as a biologically grounded concept and “nation” as a group of people with some claim to self-determination.

Tan describes how these developments played out in complex and varied ways—all of them deeply political. Struggles over definitions of the Malay bangsa pitted several sorts of people and concepts against one another. One dimension of this struggle related to Muslims of Arab descent, who by dint of education and ties to urban institutions were among the most prominent intellectuals writing in Malay print media. Their concept of a Malay bangsa centred on Islam as a central, defining feature and contrasted the Malay bangsa to the foreign bangsa (bangsa asing) of British colonialists and Chinese and Hindu Indian immigrants. Others, however, who traced their lineages locally rather than to the Arab world, rejected the claims of the Arab-descended intellectuals and argued that the Malay bangsa should distinguish “true Malays” (Melayu jati) from other—especially Arab and Indian—Muslims. Moreover, this alternative concept, tied to ideas of local provenance, made room for non-Muslim Malays in ways that the ideas of the Arab-descended intellectuals did not.

In the same era that the struggle over definitions of the Malay bangsa was being played out, a parallel struggle was taking place over a politics centred on bangsa versus kebangsaan. The kebangsaan concept developed to mean something more like “nation”, while bangsa was developing to mean something more like “race” or “ethnic group”. This struggle over the basis for a post-colonial national sovereignty pitted those who favoured a more inclusive Malayan (kebangsaan) identity—in particular, to include the large Chinese immigrant population, making up nearly half of British colonial Malaya—against those who favoured a more exclusive Malay (bangsa) identity. While the champions of a bangsa Malaysia were ultimately more successful in the forging of Malaysia and secured a constitution and political system marked by Malay dominance and privilege, the struggle over these ideals of the kebangsaan and bangsa nations remains contested and deeply divisive into the present.

In her working paper, Tan also recounts how the concept of minzu was developing in Chinese language and thought during the same period of the early twentieth century. Minzu entered Chinese from the Japanese neologism minzuko of the Meiji era (late nineteenth century), itself coined to translate German ideas of nationalism. Tan emphasises that the term minzu as well as minzuko, while referring to “a people”, focused on shared culture, language and history rather than on the biological connotations of “race”. At the same time, a variety of terms based on the word guo (country or polity) came to signify nation and citizenry in relationship to China’s emergence as a modern nation-state. While the guojia (nation) was held together by the political force of the state, a minzu was conceived of as a more natural community of belonging. In Malaysia, for overseas Chinese, the idea of minzu, in contrast to guojia, became a focus of belonging and identity. From China, an idea of equality of minzu—China’s ethnic minorities along with Han Chinese—made its way into Chinese discourse in Malaysia and into efforts to forge a plural, multiracial society within the guojia of Malaysia.

Shifting ideas around bangsa and minzu during the first half of the twentieth century—as well as before and since—match in complexity the shifting meanings of “race”, “ethnicity” and “nation” in English and other European languages. In early eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European thought, ideas of race and nation (e.g., a German people, German race, German nation) were closely related. Races in Blumenbach’s early seminal work, which divided humanity into five races, were not simply biologically grounded but included cultural traits, attitudes and emotional characteristics as well. It was only over the following centuries that race became conceptualised as more exclusively biological. The idea of ethnicity came to signify cultural rather than biological difference—in anthropology, if not always in popular discourse, where it often remains used as a synonym for biologically conceived notions of race. And “nation” or “nationality” over the same period came to mean politically defined citizenship, largely (though not always wholly) devoid of biological connotations. 

The Stuff That Race Is Made Of 

Given our knowledge of these many and varied shifting histories of concepts such as “race”, “nation”, “ethnicity”, or for that matter bangsa and minzu, anthropologists, other social scientists and theorists have come to think of race as socially and culturally constructed, which it is. The mistake we have made in proposing the social and cultural construction of race is to disassociate it completely from the stuff out of which we construct it. The ways in which “nature versus nurture” and “biology versus culture” debates have been framed are deeply misleading. First, they lead us to reduce one to the other and to see the two—biology and culture—as either causally related or completely unconnected, preventing us from exploring a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between race as cultural categorisation and the biological evidence—the stuff—upon which we socially construct that category. Entering these debates places unnecessary burdens on the social-constructionist case. People can see biological difference—the very visibility of phenotypic difference between descendants of people from Asia, Europe, Africa and so on. A social-constructionist case built on an absolute denial of biological diversity (“race has nothing to do with biology”) always encounters resistance from the evidence of our visual senses.

A different way to think about social and cultural construction is this: social and cultural constructs are built out of something—at least in the case of race, ethnicity, gender, class and other identities. Humanity uses a variety of raw materials to build its cultural constructions of identity, just as architects or engineers build out of wood, concrete or steel. The raw material is not entirely irrelevant to the process of social construction. Some things which one builds out of wood simply cannot be reproduced in steel or concrete. Likewise, some steel structures cannot be made out of wood. Or, if there is an attempt to reproduce, for instance, a steel skyscraper in wood, a great deal of modification must go into the design to make the wood mimic a structure that relies on the qualities of steel. Similarly, we use different raw materials to construct race, ethnicity, nationality, gender and so on, and this variety of materials accounts for some important differences in these classificatory identity-constructs. It would be absurd to argue that the raw material in any simple way “determines” the sort of structure an architect or engineer might construct out of wood or concrete or steel. Yet, this is precisely what we do when we try to reduce a concept like “race” to some determining, underlying biological reality.

We need instead to keep two important facts in mind when examining race—and other identities, such as gender, class, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. First, the raw material is important, insofar as it provides the material basis—hence my term “raw material”—out of which identities are socially and culturally constructed. This raw material can be thought of as pre-cultural and pre-social; in a sense, not yet processed. The raw material of identities will influence if not determine how enduring such identities are—both across different times and different cultures. The raw material will also enable certain possibilities and limit others in terms of what sort of identities can be constructed out of that material. One reason why race, ethnicity, gender and class, for example, do not all operate the same way as kinds of identities is that they are constructed out of different materials (e.g., out of biological, cultural, sexual, and economic differences).

While attending to the importance of the raw materials of identities, the second fact to keep in mind is that an extraordinary, and for all practical purposes infinite, variety of identity systems can be built out of any given material. Identity systems built out of different raw materials will have important, irreconcilable differences between them; for example, a gender system built from the raw material of sex differences will differ fundamentally from a race system built on biological evolution or an ethnic system built on cultural difference. At the same time, the number of different possible gender, race and ethnic identity systems will be vast, and no given gender, race, ethnic or other identity system is reducible to the raw material out of which it is forged. To understand any such identity system, we must turn our attention to how that raw material is being used within society and within culture. The material itself can tell us very little—perhaps something, but not much—about the systems we construct out of it.

One way this approach to thinking about race and other identity constructs may be useful is in comparing different sorts of identity constructs based on the raw materials out of which they are forged. In doing so, we would need to disassociate our analytical categories from the socially embedded categories in which we are interested. The analytical categories would need to clarify the relationship between different ideal-type categories and the various raw materials out of which they are constructed. At the same time, we should be aware that in their everyday, social construction, various identity constructs draw on complex combinations of materials which we transform into signs and markers of difference.

Take, for example, the ideas of “race”, “ethnicity” and “nation”. We could make an analytical distinction between them, stating that for our purposes “race” refers to differences forged from inherited physical characteristics (excluding sexual ones, as sex-linked characteristics are used to forge gender and sexual identities). “Ethnicity”, analytically, refers to markers of difference drawing on the raw material of cultural diversity—learned beliefs and practices rather than physiology. And “nation” or “nationality” designates differences based on political affiliation (e.g., citizenship). This approach is fraught with difficulties, though it may have some heuristic value. It also may help to demonstrate the ways in which ideas like “race”, although travelling under the same name in global English, nevertheless can mean substantively different things in different places. 

Biology or Culture? 

Returning to the cases of Malaysia, Singapore and the United States, in all of these places “race” is an important, socially embedded category (and in all three places English is a primary language or lingua franca). The social construction of race in the United States builds upon biology to a greater degree, whereas in Malaysia and Singapore it is more a matter of culture. In Malaysia, for instance, there are many women, particularly of an older generation today, who were born to Chinese parents but were adopted and raised by Malay families. These girls and women were raised to be Malay-Muslims. They went on to marry Malay men and have children who are considered Malay. I draw here on the example of a male friend whose mother was such an adoptee. The mother looks extremely, stereotypically, “Chinese” (fairer East Asia skin-tone, narrower eyes, straight hair) as opposed to “Malay” (darker skin-tone, rounder eyes, curlier hair). Most of her children follow her in their looks. Thus, my friend also looks very stereotypically “Chinese”. People recognise this—they are not blind. But this matters very little. He was raised a Malay-Muslim, dresses in Malay fashion. He speaks Malay and not Chinese. He prays and attends the mosque regularly. He, his mother and his siblings are all accepted and identified as Malay without question. His physical “Chinese” features and the details of his biological descent are of little or no consequence in determining his placement in the social construction of “racial” identity in Malaysia. In other words, in the analytical scheme I have outlined, the idea of “race” in Malaysia maps on to ethnicity (as cultural difference) rather than race (as biological difference).

Compare this to the United States. Barack Obama is widely considered to be America’s first “black” president. The default categorisation of racial identity in America, with Obama and others, is to classify individuals of “mixed” white and minority parentage as belonging to the minority category. In Singapore, by contrast, racial classification is a patrilineal inheritance: at birth, a child’s race is recorded as being that of the father. In the United States, President Obama is considered black or African American primarily on a biological, not a cultural, basis. But while physical appearance derived from biological inheritance may be the main touchstone of race in America, and cultural traits may be the main standard for race (or ethnicity) in Malaysia, in both countries these two race signifiers are also greatly conflated and combined. Obama, for instance, has been scrutinised for his language, mannerisms, sports preferences and, most prominently and perversely, his religious affiliations, all as a measure of how “black” or how “American” he is. Similarly, in Malaysia, although “Malay”, “Chinese” and other racial categories are associated more strongly with cultural traits, including language and religion, than with biological traits, the latter are frequently invoked when it suits a particular cause. For example, the former long-serving prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, known as a vocal proponent of the Malay community and head of the politically dominant United Malay National Organisation, was nevertheless alleged by some political opponents to be of paternal Indian biological lineage and therefore not to be a “real Malay”. 

Overlapping Concepts 

There is simply no unambiguous distinction in everyday social reality between race as biology, ethnicity as culture, or nation as political affiliation, even if we can distinguish between them analytically. As with the mutual reinforcement and amalgamation of biological and cultural elements described above, notions of nation or citizenship, even when explicitly to do with political affiliation and signalled by the passport or birth-certificate one holds, are often infused with ideas of cultural or even biological belonging. As Aihwa Ong has noted of the United States and Talal Asad of Europe, citizenship often extends beyond legal membership into notions of being “Caucasian” and “Christian”.⁴

In this respect, our understanding of socially constructed identities can gain from consideration of how multiple raw materials are spun into webs of significance which are especially strong and especially flexible—their strength in fact deriving from their flexibility. Because “race” in American English, bangsa in Malay or minzu in Chinese are socially embedded in multiple notions of biological features, cultural traits and political affiliations, they are not easily deconstructed or un-spun. The stuff that racial and other identities are made of may also account for different sensibilities in different contexts. A more deeply biological notion may equate with a more fixed sense of identity, whereas one associated with religious or political affiliation may be understood as less fixed and as adhering to the body of any particular subject. One can change one’s faith or political allegiance but not one’s skin (at least not until recently with modern cosmetic surgery).

By identifying the social construction of race and other identities and their relationship to the raw materials from which they are built, it is my hope that we can move beyond futile paradigms of nature versus nurture, imagination versus reality. Such oppositions have led to seemingly endless miscommunication between scientists and others committed to the empirical investigation of the natural world and those cultural theorists who attend to the production of meaning and webs of significance in human affairs. The raw stuffs from which our social constructions are made—biology, sex characteristics and behaviour, shared behaviours and beliefs—are all material realities, well worth consideration in their own right (for instance in the study of genetics). But what we socially construct from them cannot be reduced to those raw materials, as I have called them here, nor predicted from them, any more than we can predict what a wood carver might fashion from a block of wood. For that, we must understand and attend to the process of wood-carving itself, so to speak—the processes of the social construction of meaning—and in every instance the process of fashioning as it takes place in specific social and historical contexts.

Endnotes

1. Singapore’s policy in this regard was recently revised to allow parents of “mixed” children greater leeway in specifying the child’s race.

2. In the following discussion, I draw primarily on Tan Liok Ee, The Rhetoric of Bangsa and Minzu: Community and Nation in Tension, the Malay Peninsula, 1900–1955, working paper no. 52 (Melbourne: Centre for South-East Asian Studies, Monash University, 1988). See also Timothy Barnard, ed., Contesting Malayness: Malay Identity across Boundaries (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2004).

3. Malaysia did not gain that name until 1963, but I use it for convenience here as Tan’s work traces the development of the Malaysian nation-state. Her history is also of significance for Singapore, which was part of British Malaya and of independent Malaysia from 1963–5.

4. Aihwa Ong, “Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States”, Current Anthropology 37, no. 5 (December 1996), pp. 737–62; Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).