Race in the Making - Cognition, Culture, and the Child′s Construction of Human Kinds

In Race in the Making, Hirschfeld argues that knowledge of race is notderived from observations of physical difference, nor does it develop in the sameway as knowledge of other social categories. Instead, his central claim is thatracial thinking is the product of a special-purpose cognitive competence forunderstanding and representing human kinds. He also challenges the conventionalwisdom that race is purely a social construction by demonstrating that a common setof abstract principles underlies all systems of racial thinking, whatever otherhistorical and cultural specificities may be associated with them.After surveyingthe literature on the development of a cultural psychology of race, Hirschfeldpresents original studies that examine children's (and occasionally adults')representations of race. He sketches how a jointly cultural and psychologicalapproach to race might proceed, showing how this approach yields new insights intothe emergence and elaboration of racial thinking.