Race in the making - Lawrence A. Hirschfeld

Race in the Making provides a new understanding of
how people conceptualize social categories and shows why this knowledge is so
readily recruited to create and maintain systems of unequal
power.

Hirschfeld argues that knowledge of race is not derived
from observations of physical difference nor does it develop in the same way as
knowledge of other social categories. Instead, his central claim is that racial
thinking is the product of a special-purpose cognitive competence for understanding
and representing human kinds. The book also challenges the conventional wisdom that
race is purely a social construction by demonstrating that a common set of abstract
principles underlies all systems of racial thinking, whatever other historical and
cultural specificities may be associated with them.

Starting from
the commonplace observation that race is a category of both power and the mind,
Race in the Making directly tackles this issue. Through a
sustained exploration of continuity and change in the child's notion of race and
across historical variations in the race concept, Hirschfeld shows that a singular
commonsense theory about human kinds constrains the way racial thinking changes,
whether in historical time or during childhood.

After surveying
the literature on the development of a cultural psychology of race, Hirschfeld
presents original studies that examine children's (and occasionally adults')
representations of race. He sketches how a jointly cultural and psychological
approach to race might proceed, showing how this approach yields new insights into
the emergence and elaboration of racial thinking.