Research Project

In prescribing racial reality, there is a pervasive belief linking phenotypic associations to genetic reality. Although widely accepted, this approach, referred to as biological realism, fails to provide a framework for clear and distinguishable racial categories. Competing approaches within biological realism suggest that any conclusion derived from such data is merely heuristic, and thus should not be regarded as a wholly, if at all, accurate means of racialization. This thus posits race must necessarily be a social construction. Drawing from existing literature, I dissect two views on racial construction, the first being Sally Haslanger’s work on socio-political hierarchy, and later Chike Jeffers’ theory regarding the cultural construction of racial categories. Ultimately, I find that while both philosophers make significant contributions to diagnosing the formation of racial categories, as they are conceived in the United States, their ideas may be falsified by linguistic shifts and the unintended creation of a racial binary, thus rendering their theories irrelevant to the modern racial landscape. My research aims to clarify issues presented within these theories of social construction, and address the frequently untouched considerations of the Asian racial category and the model minority. Given the size of the Asian continent, localized ethnic populations, and nonconformity in their migration to the United States, different ethnic groups are often picked out by their ethnicity under the broader umbrella of race; the same is less frequently the case with other racial categories. This work seeks to resolve such issues in expanding upon the constructions put forth by Haslanger and Jeffers and putting forth criterion for any plausible constructionist view of race.