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

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.

Table of Contents:
Representing race - universal and comparative perspectives; mining history for psychological wisdom - rethinking racial thinking; domain specificity and the study of race; do children have a theory of race?; race, language, and collect-ive inference; the appearance of race - perception in the construction of racial categories; the cultural biology of race.

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