On Political and Psychological Essentialisms

Abstract

A comment on Larry Hirschfeld's "The Conceptual Politics of Race: Lessons from Our Children" (1997 [see abstract 9803531]) seeks to find common ground with his conception of race as a matter preeminently of mind & secondarily of power. Though he will be misread, Hirschfeld is not proposing that racial categories of power are determined by categories of mind, but that humans have a propensity to classify human kinds in essentialist ways that support racial thinking. Given this intention, agreement is registered with Hirschfeld's proposal that racial thinking builds on a common set of principles about the relationship between the appearance & inner essence of race. But disagreement is registered over whether those principles are intrinsic to the way the human mind is mapped or whether they gain significance within a particular social system. Research on colonial social policy contradicts Hirschfeld's assertion that racial thinking comes naturally. 6 References. D. M. Smith