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Ladelle McWhorter

philoSOPHIA, Volume 2, Number 2, Summer 2012, pp. 216-223 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/phi.2012.0014

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Response to Chlo Taylor

Ladelle McWhorter

As Chlo Taylor notes, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America puts

forth a genealogy of race and racism. It also contains fragments of genealogies
of intelligence, disability, family values, and a few other concepts and practices
that were hugely influential in the twentieth century and have been since. In
addition, it presents a certain conception and experience of abnormality and of
sexuality in relation to all of the above. But the book does not present a theory
of racism or of sexual oppression or of both together. There are important
differences between theorizing and the practice of genealogy, at least in the
way that I understand the two, and that difference makes a difference in the
books structure and aims.
When I began my graduate education in the early 1980s, feminists were
producing compelling critiques of regimes of knowledge and techniques of
knowledge production that claimed legitimacy through detachment, dispassionate observation, and objectivity. 1 Theory was a not infrequent target of
those feminist critiques. Theory (from the Greek theoria, as Heidegger reminds
us) is about seeing (not, for example, touching or feeling), and theorizing
is typically about representing with accuracy and thoroughness what nontheorists see only incompletely, if at all. Theory, therefore, seeks to correct
distortions as it captures reality under concepts. 2 Theory also aims to be unitary
and exclusive. And theories compete with each other; no matter how many
theories there are, only one can possibly be true.
By contrast, genealogy is not detached or dispassionate; on the contrary,
one takes up genealogy precisely because one feels a need to change somethingincluding something in or about oneself. One takes up genealogy,
Michel Foucault maintains, in order to free thought from what it silently

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thinks, to enable it to think differently,3 to get free of oneself as one has

been constituted in a certain milieu. Genealogy is concerned with accuracy of
representation, therefore, to the extent that detail, facts, and logical plausibility
make a narrative more compelling, more moving, more potentto that extent,
and no further; it does not employ scholarly observation and insight to get at
the truth. A good genealogy constructs a new way of seeing and experiencing
that may well disturb a given regime of truth and may make possible the
generation of new truths or perhaps new habits of thought and action, but it
does not purport to be final or exclusive. It problematizes habitual practices
and ways of seeing and, thus, it opens toward indefinite possibilities. My book
is genealogical; it promotes no theories. I emphasize this, because I want to
insist on the books hospitability to the extension of its analyses beyond its
covers and to its own (self-)overcoming.
Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America presents some genealogies,
then, but it is not only a collection of genealogies. It is explicitly framed by a set
of contemporary political and ethical contingencies, some of which it identifies
as problems, and it considers what to do in response to them. Its genealogies are
undertaken and constructed in the context of grappling with those questions,
a featured one of which is this: Can we find enough common ground to make
common cause between antiracism and anti-heterosexism activists?
In the course of tracing a genealogy of twentieth-century racism, I found
quite a bit of common ground between racial minorities and nonheterosexual people in the United States. So, in addition to my genealogies, I
offered some (admittedly perhaps heavy-handed) advice to antiracism and
anti-heterosexism activists, namely: Not only is there ground for common
cause, but you ignore this ground at your peril, because there is not a lot of
other ground for you to stand on; if you do not acknowledge this common
history and the strong connections among the forces that oppress your group
and those that oppress these other groups, you will have to deny much of
your own history and obscure many of the sources of your own oppression.
Idid not issue the same advice to disability activists or environmentalists,
although they might do well to consider it too. I singled out antiracism
anti-heterosexism activists because of the political context in which I did my
work. The political context in which the study was undertaken was that of
collapsing coalitions between African American groups and predominantly
white LGBT organizations through the 1990s. In addition to Foucault
scholars, those were the audiences I sought to address. My genealogy is
selective and strategicnot totalizing, as theories tend to bewith those
audiences foremost in mind.
My genealogy of twentieth-century racism uncovers common ground for
the experiences and struggles of racial and sexual minorities as well as people
deemed physically, intellectually, and morally abnormal. (Perhaps it would be

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helpful here to note that the nineteenth century saw the emergence of moral
idiocy, which persisted as a diagnostic category into the twentieth century and
resulted in the indefinite institutionalization of a variety of people, including
a large number of unwed mothers and prostitutes. For several decades in many
parts of the United States, simply behaving contrary to the moral standards of
ones community could result in incarceration for life.) I did not map out the
entirety of that ground or identify all groups who might share it, but I welcome
the further delineation of that territory and a multiplicity of self-professed
occupants.
I undertook, executed, and published this project with a great deal of
t repidation. My biggest worry as I researched and wrote was not whether
Iwould include everyone who should be included, but whether I was emphasizing commonalities at the expense of attending to differences. I believe
Imanaged to strike a balance and to highlight similarities in ways that do not
deny the existence, importance, and value of differences. I was aware throughout
the process, however, that I was walking a very fine line. I went forward with the
project, because it seemed to me that the differences were solidifying, pushing
political allies farther and farther apart and precluding new coalitions, and that
action was needed to counter that tendency. This book is the action that I took.
A number of people have asked me why the two apparent isms in the title
are not parallel; why did I not call it Racism and Sexism in Anglo-America or
Racism and Heterosexism in Anglo-America? The main reason is that the book
is not about two parallel forms of discrimination or oppression. Its double
claim is that modern racism in the United States is, among other things,
sexually oppressive and that sexual oppression in the twentieth (and twentyfirst) century, whether it appears on the surface to be racist or not, is racially
conditioned and charged. (I restricted my analysis to the United States for
logistical reasons, but I suspect that similar claims could be substantiated
about racism in many other predominantly white nation-states.) Nineteenth
and twentieth-century projects of racial purification and evolutionary advance
required, among other things, that the sexual activities of nonwhite people
be severely restricted, which involved limiting their mobilitysometimes by
imprisoning them in institutions, sometimes by curtailing their access to institutions (schools, hospitals, churches, and public and commercial buildings),
and often by keeping them in poverty to prevent escape from the ghetto or the
reservation or the land that they sharecropped. Those same projectsracial
purification and evolutionary advancealso required that the sexual activities
of white people be carefully managed so that normal white men and women
would produce and raise normal white babies (whether they wanted babies or
not) and abnormal white men and womenthose who were disabled, poor, or
of dubious characterwould not produce babies at all. Obviously, the management techniques deployed had differential impacts on people depending on
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their sex and sexual orientation, but for many whites as well as people of color
this racial and racist project was horribly sexually oppressive. The words in the
title are not names of two types of oppression; they are names of intimately
related effects of the same configurations of power.
For similar reasons, I do not address sexism, ableism, and classism in the
book, although I do have a great deal to say about heterosexual women, people
with various kinds of disabilities, and people living in poverty. I avoided the
isms (including, for the most part, heterosexism) because my analysis
is not an explication of attitudes, nor does it focus on questions of juridical
discrimination or distributive justice. Instead, it is an analysis of shifting
networks of power and knowledge which construct shifting categories of
peopleperverts, psychopaths, paupers, moral imbeciles, Negroes,
and so on and on; it describes how these categories articulated with legal and
educational systems, with the practice of medicine and psychiatry, and with
historical events such as mobilization for world war. Racism is examined
primarily as a concept, a name invented in the 1930s as a way of circumscribing
one small set of beliefs and practices in order to shield from critique a much
larger (and I would argue far more dangerous) set of regimes of knowledge and
power that oppressed people of color throughout the twentieth century, as well
as their white allies and anyone else deemed a threat to the purity, vitality, and
evolution of the Human Race.
Now, to what extent is speciesismwhich I take to be the belief in and
the institutionalization of the superiority of Homo sapiens over other species
bound up with the normalizing discourses, practices, and institutions that
constitute twentieth-century racism? Homo sapiens as a species is, of course,
constituted during the time frame in which I locate the emergence of race
and racism; the meaning of Homo sapiens and other species categories and
the concept of species itself all underwent tremendous change from the
seventeenth through the twentieth centuries (and beyond). Species was first
a taxonomic categorystatic, tabular, and morphological. Like race, it was
reworked as a biological category in the nineteenth century but was seriously
destabilized in the wake of Darwins theory of natural selection. Attempts
were made to restabilize it in the 1930s with reference to the stability of gene
pools. Nevertheless, despite what we all learned in high school, there is no
single, agreed-upon biological definition of the term species, nor has there been
for more than a century. 4 Along with shifts in species concepts, particular
species definitions, Homo sapiens included, have undergone repeated revision.
With Darwin, Homo sapiens lost its status as a discrete, tabular class name
and, by the 1940s, had become the name of a set of overlapping breeding
populations or gene pools. While these changes were occurring within the
discipline of biology, new population management techniques emerged in the
social sciences, sundry social institutions, and governmental policy. Eventually,

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these various techniques and concepts came together, and Homo sapiens and
its subpopulations came to be, fundamentally I think, correlates of biopower.
All of that is to say that, yes, species is as much a part of the genealogy of
racism as race is. And the ways in which its genealogy interweaves with race
and sexuality deserve to be studied in detail. Such a project would be exciting
and no doubt very rewarding. But I want to resist the ideaif indeed Taylor
meant to suggest thisthat speciesism preexists and somehow makes possible
racism and other such isms. Surely it is not the case that people were only able
to become racist because they were already speciesist or that people learned how
to be cruel to human animals only because they were already adept at being
cruel to nonhuman ones.
Racism is logically possible in the absence of speciesism. (I myself have met
white racists who love animals and would never harm one.) Twentieth-century
racism is intimately bound up with the notion of biological development, the
idea being that some subgroups of Homo sapiens are arrested in their development and thus inferior to other subgroups. Post-Lamarck, very few people
believe that all species are moving along the same developmental track, such
that it makes sense to say that chimpanzees are less developed than humans.
Chimpanzees develop as chimpanzees; they will never evolve into humans, so it
makes no sense to fault them for failing to do so. In other words, developmental
norms are usually understood to be species specific. Therefore, it is perfectly
possible to judge all species, each with its own set of developmental norms,
to be of equal value, and still judge some members of a given species to be
developmentally inferior to others. It is perfectly possible to judge Negroes
or Asiatics to be developmentally inferior to Caucasians but to think the
canine winner of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is as deserving of
moral consideration as the noblest human being alive.
In fact, many eugenicists cared very much about species other than Homo
sapiens; they f igure prominently in the early conservation and environmental movements. Many were plant and animal breeders who believed
their efforts benefited the species they altered. They wanted to treat Homo
sapiens just as they treated Equus caballus and Cynara scolymus; they wanted
to make it stronger, healthier, and better adapted. The problem, from a
classically moral point of view, is that they valued species more than they
valued individuals, not that they valued humans more than horses or artichokes, although the fact is that many, of course, did. My point, however,
is that, whatever important genealogical relations might exist between
them, modern racism cannot be reduced to speciesism. Their relationship
is far more complicated than that and needs to be studied in empirical and
historical detail.
Those grandiose eugenics projects collapsed in the 1930s and 1940s for
a wide variety of reasons, some of which I discuss in the book, including
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the ascendance and demise of Nazism. As that collapse occurred, perhaps

c oincidentally, there also occurred a number of important developments
within the biological sciences, in particular what is known as the Biological
Synthesis, Theodosius Dobzhanskys and Ernst Mayers reworking of the
concept of species and the integration of genetics and evolutionary theory.
The Biological Synthesis brought to the fore some genetic discoveries and
some statistical concepts that had already been in play for two or three
decades but that had not been assimilated to the core of the discipline of
biology. Statistics became absolutely central to the biological sciences during
this time, and along with statistics came a shift in the signif icance and
meaning of population. By 1950, population had just about replaced organisms and species as the basic unit of biological analysis. At the same time,
the social sciences were reeling from recognition of their contributions to
fascism, and practitioners were working hard to shed the concept of race in
favor of that of ethnic group. In that process, ethnic group was increasingly
statisticalized, to coin a term. Also at the same time, demography became
a profession; the first professional association of demographers was founded
in 1928. 5 University demography departments and advanced degrees came
into being just in time for the Great Depression and the U.S. governments
sudden need to hire their students in droves. The recently reworked social
scientific concept of population, linked to genetics and the beginnings of
ecology, moved into government, where it had a direct impact on policy. Soon,
what population managers were managing became not so much the species
that early eugenicists were trying to improve genetically, but the populations
that the new demographers described statistically. That opened the door for
the acceptance (however half-hearted it may have been) for exceptional
Negroes, Jews, and others; such exceptions were to be expected, and, some
progressives argued, fairness demanded that they be allowed entrance into
organizations, professions, and institutions from which they had previously
been categorically barred.
Under the leadership of Frederick Osborn, the American Eugenics Society
internalized these shifts from 1939 forward. Osborn recruited Dobzhansky and,
in part with the credibility that the latters scientific stature lent, revamped
eugenics as a movement for the evolutionary advancement of human breeding
populations.6 This is why Osborn insisted that the primary eugenic concern
was not with races but with families and why family structure, familial sex
roles, and family genetic counseling became the focus of eugenics organizations through the 1960s. As I argue in the book, these organizations influence
on groups not directly tied to eugenics should not be underestimated; many
eugenics organizations had enormous financial resources, and their values were
not so far from the mainstream that they could not resurface after World War
II with minimal rhetorical repackaging.

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In this context, both the Moynihan Report and Betty Friedans The Feminine
Mystique make tremendous sense. Both were liberal responses to crypto-eugenic
regimes of power/knowledge focused on The Family. The Moynihan Report
has outraged African Americans for nearly fifty years, because it in effect
labeled black families abnormal and based its call for governmental action on
that repugnant assessment. Although Moynihan was careful to say that not
all black families were abnormal, he maintained that many were and that they
were reproducing their abnormalities (primarily feminization of their male
children) with every generation and would continue to do so without firm
intervention. Friedans book expressed middle-class white womens frustration
with the roles they were expected to play to uphold and perpetuate The Family,
which by the 1950s was a eugenically reconstructed institution. Gay and lesbian
movements evolved in similar contexts.
The genealogy of racism and sexual oppression that my book presents
makes clear, I think, that racism and sexual oppression were intimately and
solidly linked by the first decades of the twentieth century, and that that link
persisted and in some ways was consolidated through the mid-century. This
does not mean that our experiences of sexual oppression and racism are the
same, regardless of what group(s) we belong to. Population management
techniques obviously affect different sectors of the population differently.
Normalization techniques obviously affect different ranges of the spectrum of
(ab)normality differently. But the biopolitical power/knowledge regimes that
oppressed people of color in the twentieth century are, to a great extent, the
same biopolitical power/knowledge regimes that oppressed people of all races
who were classified as sexually deviant. This analysis does not explain all the
suffering and injustice that occurred in the twentieth century, not even all that
might well be labeled racism or heterosexism. But it does suggest a starting
point for building coalitions across our differences to resist and dismantle the
regimes that hurt us all. I did not aim to do more than that.
University of Richmond
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.

See for example Code 2008.

See for example Stenstad 1989.
See Foucault 1990, 9.
For discussions of this history and various current definitions of the term species,
see Erechefsky 1992, and Wheeler and Meier 2000.
5. See Ramsden 2003, 547.
6. As evidence of their collaboration, see Dobzhanskys foreword to Osborn 1968.

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References
Code, L. 2008. Taking subjectivity into account. In The Feminist Philosophy Reader, ed.
Alison Bailey and Chris Cuomo, 71841. Boston: McGraw-Hill.
Erechefsky, M. 1992. The units of evolution: Essays on the nature of species. Cambridge:
MIT Press.
Foucault, M. 1990. The history of sexuality, volume 2: The use of pleasure. Trans. Robert
Hurley. New York: Pantheon.
Osborn, F. 1968. The future of human heredity: An introduction to eugenics in modern
society. New York: Weybright and Talley.
Ramsden, E. 2003. Social demography and eugenics in the interwar United States,
Population and Development Review 29, no. 4.
Stenstad, G. 1989. Anarchic thinking: Breaking the hold of monotheistic ideology
on feminist philosophy. In Women, knowledge, and reality: Explorations in feminist
philosophy, ed. Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall, 33139. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Wheeler, Q., and R. Meier, eds. 2000. Species concepts and phylogenetic theory: A debate.
New York: Columbia University Press.

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