Precis: Race and/as Technology

“ Race as technology reveals how race functions as the “as”, how it facilitates comparisons between entities classes as similar or dissimilar. This comparison of race and technology also displaces claims of race as either purely biological or purely cultural because technological mediation, which has been used to define humankind as such (“man” as a “tool-using” animal), is already already a mix of science, art, and culture.” (Kyong Chun, 8)

In her critical essay “Race and/as Technology” Wendy Hui Kyong Chun makes the argument that race is not a simply biological or cultural, but rather that race itself is a technology, or a series of tools used to negotiate and establish malleable definitions of both biology and culture. One major crux on which her argument rests is the idea of technology itself innately being a mix of science, art and culture; and that human beings have always been defined by their ability to perceive the world around themselves through technologies they create. This means that if race itself is a technology, it is not possible for race to simply be either biological or cultural alone. If race is technology, that means that race points to neither a biologically innate set of truths, nor a culturally codified set of signifiers.

Instead, race points to the ways in which human beings have been made to evolve alongside one another, using technologies to mediate their understandings of themselves and the world around them. Rather than thinking of ourselves as human beings with a racial identity, we must think of ourselves as human beings which have been trained to use the technique of race on all other bodies as well as ourselves. She defines this act of using race in her opening paragraph as “...a technique that one uses, even as one is used by it-a carefully crafted, historically inflected system of tools, mediation, or enframing that builds history and identity.” (Kyong Chun, 7). By representing race as a technique that human beings use, and by drawing ties to the different ways in which race has been conceptualized over history, Kyong Chun makes a compelling argument that all humans have used and have been used by race as a technological creation.

Kyong Chun draws on different historical narratives to illustrate the ways in which race has been, and is still used as a technological tool. She brings up histories of racist theories, eugenics, and other forms of scientific racism to point to the origins of the ideas of race, which map our present day understanding of broadly accepted racial categories. She points to the key task of race, which she defines as “making the visible innate. “ Race in these circumstances was wielded-and is still wielded- as an invisible mapping tool, a means by which origins and boundaries are simultaneously traced and constructed and through which the visible traces of the body are tied to allegedly innate invisible characteristics.” (Kyong Chun, 10). She points to the ways in which race was at first conceptualized as a way of noting people of common ancestry or descent, and then in the 15th and 16th centuries, became a way of mapping geophysical groups of people connected by physical characteristics. Later on, in the 18th century, it became a more direct tool of colonialism, used to designate “subspecies” of Homosapiens, this time not only connecting the physical characteristics to geophysical regions, but also to cultural and social elements as well. In this way, she points to the ways in which the technological use of race has shifted slightly over human history, as there were different technological needs for something like race as global and political awareness shifted. In the 15th century there was an “English race” because there was a more limited scope of understanding of bodies on other continents, in other global regions. That soon would evolve into an “anglo-saxon” race, and then finally more broadly into a “white” race. By defining the ways in which racial categories themselves have epistemologically shifted over time, Kyung Chun makes the point that we are constantly re-defining the boundaries of racial categories because our technological need for those categories shifts over time. As a technology, it is malleable, because it has to evolve with us and with our understanding of ourselves in relation to the rest of the world. Race is not a culturally or biologically innate category; it is a responsive technological innovation that changes as those who use it change within a world in constant flux. Even if we are to conceptualize of race as something biological, we can note that race serves its function primarily as a sign, a way to define and categorize, a technology of social organization, which can be seen in parallel to the social technology of something like gender.

Kyung Chun also makes a point to tackle the concept of race being a culturally innate category. She notes “Race, either conceived as biology or culture, organizes social relationships and turns the body into a signifier.” (Kyong Chun, 14) She relates the idea of race as culture as being a similarly flexible technology to race as biology. They both seek to do the same work of making the invisible visible, of bridging the gap between what the body “says” and what the body “means”. In a certain way, she combines these two technologies with the understanding that both biological and cultural definitions of race exist to negotiate and establish race in a more general sense. It is not purely biological, cultural, social, or scientific; we cannot conceptually separate race distinctly as though it belongs in a singular category, because as a form of technology it is actually all of these things at once. One interesting distinction she does make, however, is the way in which race has actually moved from being a biological concept to a cultural concept. “...because science-to paraphrase a number of contemporary social scientists-no longer separated the phenomena of the body from those of the mind, both hereditarians and environmentalists tended to assume that racial mental differences were related to racial physical differences”. In this way, the shifting scientific understanding of what science itself was in the 18th and 19th centuries, changed our classification of race as purely biological to both biological and cultural. She also makes an interesting example of the “one-drop” rule as an attempt to map a visual signifier on increasingly difficult to read mixed-race bodies. The “one-drop” formulation, and other racial segregation laws that made up US racial technology rely on creating start racial, social and cultural differences where none might have necessarily existed. Segregation can thus be seen as a racial technology created by whites to halt black social success, as the one-drop rule can be seen as a racial technology to create a stark social distinction where no stark physical signifiers might have existed.

By defining race as a technology, Kyung Chun moves race away from biology and genetics and towards a sort of broader question of what agency we have over this technology. “Race as technology thus problematizes the usual modes of visualization and revelation, while at the same time making possible new modes of agency and causality...it displaces ontological questions of race-debates over what race really is and is not, focused on discerning the difference between ideology and truth-with ethical ones: what relations does race set up?” By constructing an argument that draws on the origins and the history of race, which compares and explains the ways in which race moves through different categories (namely the biological and the cultural), Kyung Chun allows for a renewed understanding of what race is, how we use it, and in turn how we are used by it.