A philosophical investigation of racial embodiment.

Race, the categorization of people based on characteristics perceived indicative of a

common ancestry1, plays a important role in how we perceive ourselves and others and its one the
first things we notice when we first meet others people.2 Race categorization influences people
attitudes and behaviours towards others even if those people aren't aware of those
categorizations. The philosophical question here is not whether or not race play an important part
in our lives, as this is not a factor that we can control it is a part of our lives whether we like it or
not, but the question is whether or not it should be an important part of our interactions between
each other. If race turns out to just be a social construct which has came around due to the
ignorant beliefs of society then we an ability as rational beings to identify how and why it has
become to be an important factor in our social lives. If we can do this then we can try and eliminate
race as an social construct the future generations who to not have to be subjected to the living in a
world when people cannot conceive of themselves without thinking of themselves as an Other.
In chapter 7 of Linda Martin Alcoff's 'Visible Identities, Race, Gender, and the Self' she
offers several reasons why race has become such a important, yet confusing, aspect of our lives.
One of the the reasons she gives is the scientific tradition of categorising based of differences
which grew out of the Western society, when the Western society were colonising the rest of the
world. The categorization of different race to help people try and conceptualise how vast and
populated the earth actually was.'3 As society grew people began to use these categorizations to
ostracise and other people who weren't in the same group as them, which led to political sciences
and the law to tell us that these categorizations are meaningless or trivial. Due to these
contradictory ways of thinking of race, race has become a difficult topic to discuss.
'But the resultant juxtaposition between universalist legitimation narratives that deny or trivialize difference
(political science and the law) and the detailed taxonomies of physical, moral, and intellectual human
difference (anthropology and genetics) is one of the greatest antinomies of modernism' 4
She claims that recent contemporary race theory falls into three different distinct positions;
nominalism, essentialism and contextualism. Nominalism is the view that race is not a actually
really, it doesn't actually refer to anything in reality. Recent scientific breakthroughs have even
made the biological categories of race mealiness and nominalism holds the belief that it was the
biological categories that led to racism, and do not hold any ethical or cultural weight, and they
should not be used to be more metaphysically accurate and to stop racism. Alcoff thinks that the
problem with nominalism is the fact that it doesn't grasp the different meanings that race applied to
and wrongly assumes that race only refer to biological concepts. Nominalism for Alcoff fails to see
that just the cessation of the use of racial terms is not enough to solve the huge problem of the
racializing identities. Essentialism is the view that race is an element category of identity which has
exploratory powers,a certain race is this view is a category of people who have the same
characteristics, political interests and history. Racism is this view comes about when people add
the wrong content to these categories and not because of the method of categorization.
Essentialism for Alcoff doesn't account for the fluidity of racial terms and falsely assumes that racial
identities are easily identified and all racial grouping are homogeneous, she also believes it relies
on a mistaken view f how cultures are formed. Contextualism is the view that '..race is socially
constructed, historically malleable, culturally contextual, and reproduced through learned perceptual
practices.'5 The use of racial concepts and the impact they have, either negative or positive, will
depend entirely on the context of how it is used. Alcoff believes that contextualism is the best
option for a political and metaphysical description, as it realising the reality of racial concepts which
exist in today’s world but allows for these concepts to change and possibly fade away.

1.AAPA (1996). Statement on biological aspects of race. American Association of Physical Anthropologists,
101(4), 569–570.
2 Ito, T. A., & Urland, G. R. (2003). 'Race and gender on the brain: Electrocortical measures of attention to
the race and gender of multiply categorizable individuals.' Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
85(4), 616–626.
3 'The increased diversity of the world would be less daunting if neutralized through the formulation of an
ordering system.' Alcoff, L, A, 'The Phenomenology of Radical Embodiment' chapter 7, Visible Identities,
Race, Gender, and the Self, p179
4 Ibid, p179
5 Ibid, p179
Contextualism can be split into two separate form objective contextualism and subjective
contextualism. Objective contextualism tries to find a definition of race which can be applied to all
contexts while still holding the belief that it is the context which gives the racial concept its content.
Subjective contextualism however, tries to find out how racial concepts affect bodily experiences,
judgement, relationships with other people and how one sees oneself.
One on of the most famous writings on subjective contextualism and how race influences
the way in which perceive ourselves and others is Fratz Fanon's Black Skins, White Masks. In this
book Fanon writes about how the black man see himself as the Other, in reference to Sartre's the
One and The Other, in comparison to the white man and the only way he can categorize himself is
in the negations of the white man.
'In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema.
Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity.'6
He points out that the black man is seen as physical7, as biological which is problematic because
civilization has favoured the spirit, or mind, over the body. This makes it harder for a black man to
realise he is a being-for-itself and transcend his own facticity, due to the fact that the perceived
defining qualities are linked to the body something which he has no control over.
An important issue that Fanon points out is that this perception of himself as the Other only
happens in the 'white world' and in the company of others who are not white, 'he will have no
occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others.'8 This is due to the fact
that when a black man is in a white world, he stands out, he becomes visible. What is meant by the
'black man is visible' is to point out how people in the white world would look at, or at least how
people in a white world are perceived to look at, a black person in contrast to how they would look
at white person. A white person in a white world is seen as invisible as they are seen as the 'norm'
Many writers on racial embodiment talk about invisibility being the goal of an individual, by which
doesn't mean actually not been seen in the literal sense but it means looking like the normal and
therefore blend into the background of the society without standing out in some way. As Richard
Dyer writes in his book 'White' invisibility is a privileged position to be in, in a world which promotes
visibility as a source of knowledge. '… the ultimate position of power in a society that controls people in
part through their visibility is that of invisibility, the watcher.'9
An example of this need not to be visible been to so traumatic to an individual's frame of mind, that
surgeon to 'fix' the problem has been taken can be found in Sander Gilman's 'The Jew's Body'. He
gives the example of an twenty eight year old man going to an doctor in 1898 and describing how
his nose was the 'source of considerable annoyance' and wanted a rhinoplasty in order to reduce
the size of his nose. After doing so the doctor reported that the man depression had completely
gone and now the man felt 'cured'.
'The patient no longer felt himself marked by the form of his nose. He was cured of his ''disease'', which was
his visibility.''10
Now there could be an argument put forth that in modern civilized world racial concepts
made be still around but they do not carry qualities which would cause someone to see themselves
as objectified, but a recent psychological study by Groom, Bailenson and Nass, on the influence of
racial embodiment on racial bias in immersive virtual environments, shows how race still plays an
important part in how people think and act and its also suggests that actually seeing yourself
embody an other person changes how you act and think unlike simply imagining your embodiment
of an other.
'These findings generate preliminary support for Hypothesis 1 and indicate that the experience of embodying
another person is fundamentally different than imagining oneself as another person.'11
In their study they got some of the participants to answer questions as if they were the person that
the participant saw when they were in the immersive virtual environment (I.V.E), and gave some of
the other participants a two dimensional picture and to just imagine they were a person in that
6 Franz Fanon, 1986. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C. L. Markmann 1967, London, Pluto
Press. p109
7“Negro bought forth biology, penis, strong, athletic, potent, boxer, Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Senegalese
troops, savage, animal, devil, sin” Ibid p166
8 Ibid, p109
9 Richard Dyer, 'White' Penguin 1997 p44
10 Sander Gilman, 'The Jews Body', Routledge 1991
11 Victoria Groom, Jeremy N. Bailenson, and Clifford Nass, 'The influence of racial embodiment on racial
bias in immersive virtual environments', Social Influence,2009, iFirst Article, p14
picture and answer the same questions. The images, either inside the I.V.E or the 2-D picture,
were picked by separate participants who identified the people in the people as definitely white or
definitely African America. The study showed several things, firstly experiencing embodiment
changes people racial bias when just imagining embodiment didn't change anything, and they also
found that people embodied as black showed greater white preference then those who were
embodied as white12. This results can show us that two different things the first is that seeing
yourself as an other race effects how you act and think implicitly, and the second is that people
embodied as black showed more implicit radical bias towards whites then those embodied as
white.
It seems to me that race is a complex conception which cannot be simply got rid of like
nominalism wants, due to the fact that race plays an unquestionable part in our lives and as we
humans brought up in a society where racial groups play a part in most aspects of our lives,
consciously or not. It also isn't as simply identified as essentialism would lead us to believe, due to
the fact the world is getting more populated and cultures are becoming increasingly homogenised.
It is in fact socially constructed concept which in its current form still hinders those who are not
part of the dominant race, and those in the dominant race from realising their true potential, due to
the fact as humans beings who posses consciousness, we cannot be transcendence while we are
treating like-minded individuals as merely objects. The way we cannot stop this is by not simply
ceases to acknowledge race as real but instead realise that in only is relevant in certain situations
and hopefully one day those situations will cease to happen.

12 'Black embodied avatar participants demonstrated greater White preference than White embodied avatar
participants.' Ibid, p12
 Bibliography

AAPA (1996). Statement on biological aspects of race, American Association of Physical

Anthropologists, 101(4), 569–570.
Ito, T. A., & Urland, G. R. (2003). Race and gender on the brain: Electrocortical measures of
attention to the race and gender of multiply categorizable individuals. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 85(4), 616–626.
Alcoff, L, A, (2006) 'The Phenomenology of Radical Embodiment' chapter 7, Visible Identities,
Race, Gender, and the Self, p179
Fanon, F. (1986). Black skin, white masks, trans. C. L. Markmann 1967. London: Pluto Press.
Richard Dyer, 'White' Penguin 1997
Sander Gilman, 'The Jews Body', Routledge 1991
Groom V, Bailenson, J,N & Nass C, 'The influence of racial embodiment on racial bias in
immersive virtual environments', Social Influence,2009, iFirst Article,