Racial Theory, Science, and Fantasy

Modern concepts of race were formulated as a “widely shared theory of biologically determined, physical, intellectual and moral differences between human groups.”35 Hannah Augstein identifies three key elements in nineteenth century race-thinking: that humanity can be divided into races “whose characteristics are fixed and defy the modifying influences of external circumstances;” that these racial groupings have different “intellectual and moral capacities;” and “that mental endowments are bound up with certain physiognomical specifications [… which] reveal the inward nature of the individual or population in question.”36 Race was variously taken to be both marked and determined by blood, skin colour, and language use. Racial logics thus link physical traits with the non-physical, and understand both as biologically heritable. The first chapter in this book offers an account of those specific features of race theory which most profoundlyinfluence Fantasy’s habits of Whiteness – philology, Anglo-Saxonism, evolution and polygenesis – linking the writings of foundational authors, Robert E. Howard and J. R. R. Tolkien, to those constructs.

[...]

A decade and a half later at the time of writing for this book, genetic science has demonstrated conclusively that the notion of biological race, developed throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, has no scientific basis. Science, having made race in modern terms, has disowned its creation. The American Anthropological Association, for example, stated in 1998 that “human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups” as had once been thought, and that “physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them.”39 Races, to use Jacobson’s terms, “are invented categories” the boundaries of which shift according to socio-cultural context.40 Race has never been a purely scientific or value-neutral concept.

[...]

Human bodies may no longer constitute race scientifically, but they serve as markers of difference in ways which cannot be disentangled from its history. Thus, although science and medicine have declared that race is social and not scientific, accounts of race-as-biology retain a great deal of currency.46 Fields as diverse as censuses, the law and biomedical science invoke biologies of race in processes and practices of social governance.47 The denunciation of race as a science-based fact has collapsed the foundations on which centuries’ worth of race-based systemic discrimination stood. The legacies of that discrimination, however, remain and are the subject of contestation in almost every facet of twenty-first-century western societies, from politics, to the law, medicine, and the arts. Society, as Tony Bennett has recently argued, can and should not be separated from culture;48 this book recognises the connections between social and cultural productions of race in the modern world.

Race is written both through the body’s phenotypical features and on it by the social assignation of associations – meanings – to its outward, visible, phenotypical features. It is thus both written and read, a discursive construct. Race that it written on the body in socio-cultural context is also a matter of lived experience and of identity for individuals. Members of minority groups tend to be more aware that their bodies are read as “raced” by majority society because they are understood as “different” where White is normative; that normativity leads Whites to be largely unconscious of the fact that they too are “raced.”