In the humanities and social sciences there continues to be trepidation about the place of Charles Darwin for discussing some basic questions about humanity. Is it possible to formulate a "return to" Darwin in the manner of Althusser's return to Marx and Lacan's to Freud? Freud posits sexual difference as the constitutive split of the human species, and Marx showed how capital organizes social formations around a class antagonism. Darwin could be seen as a key theorist of racial difference, of the way phenotypical variation is politicized. Natural selection is the struggle for life amongst a plethora of "races" which are sedimented through the mating choices of sexual selection. For a leftwing take on Darwin coming "after" Fanon and feminist/queer theory, evolutionary theory has to be carefully pried from its dominant ideological tendencies. Althusser can still help draw a distinction between science and ideology, while we can trace the obscure sexualizations of phenotype through Lacan.
What does a return actually do? Lacan and Althusser felt the need for rereading Freud and Marx in light of various humanist interpretations (respectively, ego-psychology and existentialist Marxism) which had removed the subversive sting of these inaugural thinkers of difference. But Darwin is no critical theorist, and his empirical scope far exceeds the human. The political and moral effects of his science have been overwhelmingly reactionary. From Spencer and Nazism to today's psychology, economics, and cybernetics, the adoption of evolutionary theory has largely been to render racism, capitalism, and patriarchy part of the natural order of things. And if pressed on their seeming acceptance of the inevitability of injustice, Darwinians tend to resort to the humanist cliché of an innate moral and rational propensity.
The onset of an era in which humans are increasingly likely to undermine not only their morality and rationality but their very survival -- the Anthropocene -- demands an antiracism far more demanding and precise than what humanism can provide. The unconscious side and politics of human phenotype cannot be thought separate from deep time, but evolution has itself been altered irrevocably by capitalism and colonialism. Read through Marxism, psychoanalysis, Fanon, and feminism, Darwin's work contains hints towards a radical antiracist science against both the proto-eugenics of dominant narratives and the vitalism of some of the Deleuze-inspired biophilosophy and new materialism.
The premise is therefore that evolutionary theory can and must urgently become politicized within a capitalist and racist Anthropocene. Retrieving the revolutionary potential of Darwin's work means demonstrating that the theory of natural and sexual selection, whatever his own Victorian views, precludes the reactionary politics his name is associated with. The antibiologism of Althusser, Lacan, and their followers like Badiou as well as the epistemological focus on Darwinism as discourse found in Wynter and others are therefore found to be inadequate for dealing with today's multiple racializing catastrophes.
The idea for this book has been brewing since my PhD days and I am finally getting to it. The following is straight out of a proposal from 2007, but it still mostly makes sense
The Political Phenotype: Antiracist Science After Man
The consensus in the humanities and social sciences has for decades been that race is a cultural not natural construction. What Hurricane Katrina reminded us, however, is that there must be more at work than only culture in the classification of different bodies. This project draws from biology and recent continental philosophy to rethink the differentiation of human populations. Uneven, gradual, and often unacknowledged, race is never about clear-cut “races” but always real and open to debate. Understanding how physical appearance, segregation, capitalism, behavior, and feelings interlock to maintain racial difference is indispensable for both geography and politics.
What is race?
Hurricane Katrina's destruction of New Orleans reinforced a paradox at the heart of U.S. society. On the one hand Americans learn that “under the skin, we’re all the same.” There is justice for all. National cohesion is derived automatically from being American. On the other hand the places where African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans live suffer disproportionately from poverty, crime, and pollution. To a small portion of the public there is no paradox since racial inequality is explained through inherited differences in mental and economic capabilities. Most others effectively deny systematic racial inequality and think racism is only a matter of individual prejudice. It was more than prejudice that destroyed New Orleans, however. Confusing statements such as “race does not exist” jar with television images of an obviously black underclass stuck in a flooded city. Katrina showed that the reality of race is not just psychological or semantic but institutional, ecological, and technological.
Racial inequality needs to be understood as somehow based on physical differences without following automatically from them. In addition we need a way of talking about those differences which can equally explain the existence of poor whites, a black middleclass, and the many in-between positions of Latino and other recent immigrants. Evidently race even in extreme events such as Katrina does not follow the impossibly neat ordering of the census. Is there a way to think race that is not about races? Addressing this question head-on would prepare the way for a completely different way of studying and combating racial inequality and environmental injustices.
The Political Phenotype: Antiracist Science After Man contends that antiracist politics and the social sciences have not properly understood the roles that the physical environment and real differences between human populations play in the wide range of processes called race. Because antiracism was keen to deny any physical justification for racial discrimination it needed to assume that race was nothing but a question of words, fantasy, and bigotry. This is why many consistently put the word race between inverted commas: for them, “race” does not exist “out there”, and pretending that it does is itself racist. Their aim is broadly humanist, to change the way we think of diversity and defend universal humanness. Though ethically valuable this perspective has made it difficult to talk about race as involving an irreducibly nonhuman dimension. Race consists of aggregates of physical bodies, with particular appearances and genetic make-ups, living in certain areas, experiencing complicated combinations of discrimination and privilege. More dialogue between the social and physical sciences is required to understand this paradoxical reality of race, and to build a more forceful universalism.
Antiracist science
The stakes are high. Since the Second World War international efforts have sought to unify the world and prevent another Holocaust. Most social scientists have since then agreed that there are no intrinsic correlations between cultural capacities and physical differences. There can be as many genetic differences between two individuals from, say, Iceland, as between an Icelander and a Zulu. Moreover, an Icelander raised in KwaZulu-Natal is culturally no different from the Zulus around him or her. These two facts about our species make the hierarchical typology of the “races of mankind” not only colonialist and potentially genocidal, but scientifically wrong.
Despite the earnest antiracism in this reasoning, thinking in terms of “races” has not disappeared. The United States has its one-drop rule: no matter how many genetic traces from Europe, a body is black if it has one known African ancestor. In Europe there is increasing tension between Muslim immigrants and white society. The war on terror, marketing, and biotechnology are bringing forth new regimes of racial profiling. Though often called “cultural racism” or “institutional racism” because it seems less about skin color than white supremacism, such discrimination still works through highlighting bodily differences like the older forms of racism did. Neither is racial conflict confined to the modern West. In dozens of poorer countries atrocities continue to be committed on the basis of visible differences. The flows of capital obviously favor some populations more than others, and the international impasse in combating climate change is bound to increase the vulnerability of countries which used to be Europe's colonies. Clearly calling race a myth and exposing the errors of racist science and prejudice has not ended institutional and environmental racism.
Instead of denying racial difference truly antiracist science analyzes how humans – bodies with particular genes, physical features, habits, feelings – become grouped together in certain places, and which groups benefit from this over time. What needs to be done for this is to rethink race as much more than a social construction. The social sciences tend to analyze the representations of bodily differences in law, film, literature, and advertising, instead of the differences between bodies themselves. The ecological embedding of race in housing, labor, health, crime, sexuality then tends to be overlooked. How exactly inequalities between human populations implicate physical and biological realities has never been adequately thought through. Against cultural relativism and social constructionism this project will insist racial difference always has an environmental and bodily basis to it, irreducible to the almost arbitrary lines traditionally drawn between “races”.