Welcome back from the summer break. Owing to unexpected circumstances I could not get the blog out last night, so apologies fr the delay. From next Tuesday blogs will again be sent out weekly on Tuesday evenings.
Race and Sex – a Category Confusion.
‘Race’ has been an important topic for discussion and concern for well over half a century, and intensively so for the past few years. Inevitably that has led at times to careless, sloppy and routine thinking. One example of such mindlessness is the too easy carry over from American experience to British experience (see Blog 35, ‘Not the USA’). A similar area of confused thinking that need challenging is the conflation of race and sex as similar sorts of topics that can be treated in parallel; the more so as racism, sexism, ageism, along with homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia all become lumped together as evils that right-thinking people will be careful to avoid, and which are now legally joined together as ‘protected characteristics’. This is not to minimize the harm that can be done by all those prejudices; it is to warn against them all being seen as intrinsically similar.
At heart is the question of how far our identities are socially constructed and how far scientifically based, and whilst racism and sexism sound similar they play out differently with regard to what forms them.
This is particularly so in seeing ‘race’ and ‘sex’ as being similar categories for distinguishing between different types of human being, such that it made sense to group them together in the work of the ‘Equalities Commission’, which did not happen without controversy and where it is widely held it was that ‘race’ that received diminished attention. This blog, then, explores the ways in which they differ, and the errors that come when such distinctions are overlooked.
Biblical.
‘So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them: male and female he created them (Gen 1:27). That humans are from their origins dimorphic is central to the bible’s understanding of humanity and taken for granted throughout the scriptures.
By contrast the erroneous and damaging concept of races as physically distinct and forming classifiable sub-sections of humanity never appears in scripture. There are very occasional and incidental references to people having dark coloured skin, with no significance ascribed, but the main category of division is between nations or peoples, firstly with the distinction between Israel and the Gentile nations, and then with distinctions between those nations, beginning with their listing in Genesis 10. The bible’s distinctions are always national and cultural, thus the well-known categories of Revelation 7:9 of nations, peoples, tribes and languages. Further such distinctions are impermanent. Most of the peoples listed in scripture don’t exist in coherent forms today (Egypt and Persia/Elam/Iran being obvious exceptions). Nor do most of the nations/ethnicities/races existing today have any identity in scripture, written when the English didn’t exist in any known form – and even less Americans. Jesus’ call to ‘make disciples of all nations’ (Matt 28:19 was given at a time when most of today’s nations didn’t exist. Attempts to project back present identities onto the biblical landscape, as do British Israelites or Mormonism in different ways, are rightly dismissed as deluded.
Paul’s words in Acts 17:26 ‘From one ancestor he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live’, speaks of the ebb and flow of human history as nations rise, migrate, mingle and disappear.
It is sometimes suggested that this diversity of ethnicities in our world shows God’s love of the richness that diversity expresses. In many respects this is true. Genesis 1 bubbles with delight in variety: ‘plants yielding sees, and fruit trees of every kind’; ‘swarms of living creatures’; ‘great see monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind . . . . . and every winged bird of every kind’; ‘wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the earth of every kind’ (Gen 1:11, 20, 21, 25). But this rich diversity contrasts strongly with the unity of the male and female he created (1:27).
National or ethnic diversity is not part of God’s created order. It emerges over time. Nor is it particularly celebrated. The Table of the Nations in Genesis 10 is followed by God’s judgement on human hubris at the Tower of Babel with the centrifugal scattering of different language groups. Thereafter the trajectory of scripture is centripetal – towards how the ‘families of the earth’ may share a common blessing through Abraham (Genesis 12:2,3), and draw together to worship the one true God with a common and transcending identity that relativises ethnicity.
In Scripture, then, sexual difference is basic and binary; ‘racial’ or ethnic differences are contingent and provisional. They have emerged historically as humans began to organise their lives together and can be a source of both pain and destruction, delight and creativity, but will ultimately be drawn together in heavenly worship, carrying into eternity characteristics of the peoples who have emerged along the winding, complex route of human history. But there is a fundamental difference between God creating us male and female, and those people developing over time into Incas and Jutes, Argentinians and Danes.
Biological.
Despite the cultural and political storms that presently make it controversial for politicians to seek to describe what is a ‘woman’, or that it becomes thinkable to describe gender as something ‘assigned at birth’, as though by the arbitrary and fallible whim of a doctor, the science is implacable that men and women are of fundamental genetic and biological difference.
Accordingly, to see race as being akin to sex is surely by implication racist. The parallel suggests that there are genetic differences between races that are analogous to those between men and women. This, of course, is the case with hard-core racist attitudes, thus past attempts in South Africa or the USA to prevent ‘miscegenation’. In fact throughout history and especially today inter-racial partnerships have existed. There are no pure races. Increasing numbers of people belong to more than one racial, or more properly ethnic group. I think of a young man whose father came from Kenya with Chinese and Indian parents and his mother was mixed Jamaican/English. He now has a Turkish stepfather.
Significantly, in some areas such as music, fashion and even language specific ethnic labels are coming to be replaced by use of the term ‘urban’ to describe the melange of ethnic ingredients contributing to new cultural forms – potentially a new ethnicity.
Whilst in some respects the rise of ‘gender fluidity’ marks a similar process, and whilst due recognition should be given to people’s choice of self-expression there are basic, genetic fundamentals which are beyond choice or change. Thus in terms of national census data, whilst collecting ethnic statistics is a useful exercise it will become increasingly clumsy as the nine basic ethnic categories become unable to cope with the proliferation of people with complex ethnic heritages, as in the example above. But as regards sex it is important that a census reflects peoples the unchangeable biological female/male binary they were born with, however much an individual’s subsequent self-presentation may refuse to conform to that binary. For example, since different sexes have different health issues basing the information on people’s subjective preferences (as is being proposed for Scotland) would make the results unusable for medical research, for example indicating a number of ‘women’ having prostate cancer.
Behavioural.
This is an area where the role of social construction becomes most significant. The recognition that race is socially constructed, despite the rough and ready mapping of ethnic identities onto physical appearance, has been a vital progression from the belief that races had inbuilt, determined behavioural characteristics. ‘Essentialism’, the view that ethnic groups shared particular behavioural patterns that are of their essence, is rightly regarded with suspicion, even if it has some utility in identifying patterns that are here and now widely found in an ethnic group: Chinese people do tend to be hard-working, Caribbean people tend to be expressive; yet as Amy Chua has observed by the third generation in the USA Chinese young people tend to approximate towards ‘native’ patterns of behaviour. Over time ethnic behaviour patterns can be quite fluid. In the 17th century the English were widely seen as unruly regicides; by the late 19th century models of restrained decorum.
As regards sex also social construction shapes patterns of behaviour. Increasingly biblical studies have called into question models of what was seen as proper Christian behaviour. The ‘good wife’ of Proverbs 31 has an agency, resourcefulness and strength of her own, like energetic women in many parts of the world, and different from the more limiting expectations which have sometimes prevailed in the west. In Acts Prisca is portrayed as taking more of a leadership role than her husband Aquila.
Yet if men are not invariably from Mars and women from Venus, nonetheless there are patterns of behaviour that are formed by more than social expectation. The physical differences, alluded to in 1 Peter 3:7 of men paying considerate honour to women as the weaker sex, are formative. Bodies which were formed for child-bearing (hardly an arena of ‘weakness’) lead to the predominance of feminine traits. It is these biologically grounded differences that mean the Olympics have separate events on the basis of gender, but not on the basis of race.
Connecting someone’s physical make-up, either of sex or ‘race’, to other traits is always tricky. As regards someone’s ‘racial’ appearance, even if experience leads us to have certain initial expectations, they need to be readily modified or abandoned as we meet the real person. Such mis-readings happen with sex too, and it is positive if people break free of misleading expectations. Nonetheless there are irreducible physical realities and constraints built into our sexual bodies that can not be countermanded and which need formal recognition in a way that does not pertain to our racial or ethnic bodies.