Making Blackness, Making Policy The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Geller, Peter. 2012. Making Blackness, Making Policy. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:9548618 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA © 2012 – Peter Geller All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Jennifer Hochschild Peter Geller Making Blackness, Making Policy Abstract Too often the acknowledgment that race is a social construction ignores exactly how this construction occurs. By illuminating the way in which the category of blackness and black individuals are made, we can better see how race matters in America. Antidiscrimination policy, social science research, and the state's support of its citizens can all be improved by an accurate and concrete definition of blackness. Making Blackness, Making Policy argues that blackness and black people are literally made rather than discovered. The social construction of blackness involves the naming of individuals as black, and the subsequent interaction between this naming and racial projects. The process of naming involves an intersubjective dialogue in which racial self-identification and ascription by others lead to a consensus on an individual's race. These third parties include an individual's community, the media, and, crucially, the state. Following Ian Hacking, this process is most properly termed the dynamic nominalism of blackness. My dissertation uses analytic philosophy, qualitative and quantitative research, and historical analysis to defend this conception. The dynamic nominalist process is illustrated through the media's contribution to the making of Barack Obama's blackness, and the state's creation and maintenance of racial categories through law, policy, and enumeration. I then argue that the state's dominant role in creating blackness, and the vital role that a iii black identity plays in millions' sense of self, requires the United States Government to support a politics of recognition. The state's antidiscrimination efforts would also improve through the adoption of a dynamic nominalism of blackness. Replacing the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission's inconsistent and contradictory definitions of race with the dynamic nominalism of blackness would clarify when and how racial discrimination occurs. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project would have been impossible without the help of so many people. There are no words to describe my appreciation, but these will have to do. I am fortunate enough to have had a dissertation committee full of brilliant and caring professors. Jennifer Hochschild, in particular, asked the perfect questions of my work, and always pushed me to do better. Tommie Shelby's calming influence was as crucial as his wonderful insights. And Claudine Gay generously offered up both a friendly smile and a political scientist's eye. I owe each one a debt. My parents, Mark and Barbara Geller, are a bottomless source of love, support, and inspiration. Their unwavering belief in me, however misguided, has provided the confidence I've needed in graduate school and throughout my life. I hope to one day have just some of my mother's strength and my father's sense of right. And thank you to the friends who have helped me through this. Jennifer Nash is the type of person and scholar we should all hope to be. I feel so lucky we met. Patrick Carr could not be a better friend. He patiently listened to all of the half-baked ideas that eventually became this dissertation. Ashley Farmer and I have shared countless laughs and grilled cheese sandwiches. This process would have been much less fun without her. And in moments when it seemed I would never finish, Biju Parekkadan refused to let me consider it. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Making Blackness Across Disciplines 1 Chapter One: The Dynamic Nominalism of Blackness 8 Chapter Two: Barack Obama and the Making of Black People 35 Chapter Three: The State and the Centrality of Black Identity 75 Chapter Four: Definitions of Race and Antidiscrimination Policy 121 Conclusion: Making Use of Making Blackness 159 Bibliography 163 vi INTRODUCTION: MAKING BLACKNESS ACROSS DISCIPLINES Black people in America are not born. They are made. Blackness and black Americans are not out there to be discovered. Instead, they are literally created through a social process involving an intersubjective dialogue, racial naming, and the triggering of racialized effects. While there is general agreement that race is a social construction, it matters exactly how race is constructed. This dissertation is a conceptual and critical project meant to illuminate the way in which blackness is (re)created in the United States, and comes to matter to both black people and the state. It offers a new, and hopefully compelling, account of American blackness, most properly termed the dynamic nominalism of blackness. If accepted, this account would significantly impact social science research, the state's antidiscrimination efforts, and the level to which government is normatively responsible for recognizing blackness. To make the case for dynamic nominalism and its relevance to public policy and social science research, the project takes full advantage of African American Studies' interdisciplinary nature. Methods, evidence, and arguments are culled from analytic philosophy, black history, quantitative and qualitative social science research, political theory, and even black literature. The complementary use of philosophy and social science research has previously been put to strong effect by philosophers incorporating social science data and quantitative political scientists heavily engaging with political theory. But the philosophy of race has been largely disconnected from the study of race in American politics. Philosophers defining blackness make 1 little more than passing reference to social science data, referring instead to anecdotes and thought experiments. And quantitative social scientists studying race rarely consider what it is that makes an individual black. At the very least, the wall between social scientific and theoretical treatments of race is rarely climbed. The combined disciplines allow me insight into blackness and race-related policy not possible through traditional philosophy or political science alone. I begin this project with the use philosophical argument, clarified through African American memoir and literature, to defend my theory of blackness against competing conceptions of race. I then use historical evidence and available quantitative social science data, as well as a new empirical study, to illuminate, defend, and refine the philosophical conception. While philosophers of race provide many (contested) definitions, several of which could provide greater insight into certain race-centric phenomena, I argue that my conception better comports with the reality of how race is socially constructed. The dynamic nominalism of blackness – consisting primarily of an intersubjective dialogue that names individuals as black and subsequently makes this blackness matter – is both the most accurate and the most effective way to describe the way in which race and raced individuals are created in the United States. And the use of history and social science data allows me to show the philosophical conception in action. The interdisciplinary project continues, as I combine my philosophical conception of blackness with original and available social science data, and a unique reading of the state's role in creating blackness. I argue that this role, when seen alongside the centrality of black identity, should cause the United States to engage in a “politics of recognition.” While most similar argument do little more than assert and demonstrate philosophically that various identities are 2 necessary to a sense of self, I collect available empirical evidence that blackness serves as a hypergood anchoring identity. This leads into a discussion of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission and its many conflicting definitions of race. The argument is meant to illuminate and critique public policy by incorporating the process by which blackness and black people are made into an analysis of antidiscrimination policy. While the dissertation first addresses philosophers of race, both social scientists and policymakers would greatly benefit from a more concise and correct definition of blackness. Much social science research on race is built on inaccurate conceptions of what blackness is. Black people are treated as the paradigmatic minority, with blackness seen as one of a variable number of races. Race is often conflated with ethnicity, either purposefully or due to conceptual slippage. Political science research on race typically focuses on the impact that race has rather than on what it is, ignoring – at the same time it takes for granted – the meaning of blackness. The number and “type” of black people, for example, are taken as a given, with self- identification or available demographic data simply accepted. Quantitative political scientists instead tend to treat blackness as an empty variable, attempting to isolate the effects of race, often through regression analysis.