Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child's Construction of Human Kinds (Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change) [Paperback]

Lawrence A. Hirschfeld (Author)

Book Description

Series: Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change | Publication Date: July 31, 1998

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Hirschfeld's book represents cognitive sceince at its best... insightful, provocative, and very relevant." -- DouglasMedin, Professor of Psychology, Northwestern University

"[S]tartling, subtle and challenging.... Hirschfeld's book has thegreat merit of suggesting a beginning for a real discipline that mightreplace 5,000 years of futile platitudes about why it is that We hateThem." David Berreby , The Sciences

About the Author

Lawrence A. Hirschfeld is Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Psychology at the University of Michigan.

Product Details

• Paperback: 248 pages
• Publisher: A Bradford Book (July 31, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262581728
• ISBN-13: 978-0262581721
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,088,782 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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14 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Empirically useful, conceptually silly, June 9, 2001

By 

Steve Sailer (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child's Construction of Human Kinds (Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change) (Paperback)

The common claim that young children have to be taught to distinguish races is simply not true. It has been studied extensively in controlled experiments. In Race in the Making, the liberal U. of Michigan anthropology professor Lawrence A. Hirschfeld sums up the findings: "As comforting as this view may be, children, I will show in this book, are more than aware of diversity; they are driven by endogenous curiosity to uncover it. Children, I will also show, do not believe race to be a superficial quality of the world. Multicultural curricula aside, few people believe that race is only skin deep. Certainly few 3-year-olds do. They believe that race is an intrinsic, immutable, and essential aspect of a person's identity. Moreover, they seem to come to this conclusion on their own. They do not need to be taught that race is a deep property, they know it themselves already."

For example, if you show preschoolers drawings of people and ask them to match the children with their parents, they will consistently tell you that the skinny white child is the child of the fat white parent, while the fat black child belongs to the skinny black parent (or vice-versa).

It seems obvious to me why little kids pay close attention to race. It's crucial for them to understand who is related to whom, and racial traits provide a more reliable guide than even body shape. (In technical terms, racial traits tend to be have higher narrow heritability coefficient than other traits like body shape.) The reason racial traits tend to be highly heritable and thus highly useful in multiracial situations for identifying family members is because race is family: a racial group is merely an extremely extended family that inbreeds to some degree.

Unfortunately, Hirschfeld gets himself tangled up in his own underwear trying to explain his findings. Being a good modern liberal, he believes that Race Does Not Exist. He never really gets himself untangled on this subject.He seems completely unaware of the fact that racial groups are just big extended families. In contrast, Occam's razor suggests that the reason we pay attention to racial resemblances is the same reason we pay attention to family resemblances.

Steve Sailer