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Technically speaking these are the phenotypical features into which the old race science subclassified the human species. With categories such as “Negroid,” “Australoid,” “Mongoloid,” and “Caucasoid,”³²¹ human races, so called, could be ordered into a hierarchy of intelligence and civilizability.

Race, in the terms we are developing in this grammar, is an abstraction, a social construction, a bodily reality drenched in meaning, but by convention alone. Signs of emotion, like crying or laughing, point to an embodied meaning.^§AS1.4.3b Race points to a meaning that is nothing but socially scripted, written onto the color of skin, an excess of the ideal over the material.^§MS3.1

Bride’s sometime boyfriend explains black skin:

“It’s just a color,” Booker had said. “A genetic trait – not a flaw, not a curse, not a blessing nor a sin.” “But,” she countered, “other people think racial – ” Booker cut her off. “Scientifically there’s no such thing as race, Bride, so racism without race is a choice. Taught, of course, by those who need it, but still a choice. Folks who practice it would be nothing without it.”³²²

Here is the science of race, such as it can be: on biological measures of difference, there is greater inherited biological variation within phenotypically marked populations than the average variation between populations. Reviewing a burst of biometric research in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, Yudell and his geneticist colleagues conclude, “commonly defined racial groups are genetically heterogeneous and lack clear-cut genetic boundaries,” and “phylogenetic and population genetic methods do not support a priori classifications of race, as expected for an interbreeding species like Homo Sapiens. … [R]acial classifications do not make sense in terms of genetics.”³²³ A wide variety of skin colors is to be found in Africa, concludes another group of geneticists, and also the genetic basis for all variations that occur subsequently in the natural history of the human body.³²⁴

Not that the science needs to be terribly new for the point to be made – W.E.B. Du Bois^§AS1.4.6b had said as much, and as early as 1906: “The human species so shade and mingle with each other that not only indeed is it impossible to draw a color line between black and other races, but in all physical characteristics the Negro race cannot be set off by itself as absolutely different.”³²⁵

Bride’s boyfriend Booker is black, but he nevertheless

… suspected most of the real answers concerning slavery, lynching, forced labor, sharecropping, racism, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, prison labor, migration, civil rights and black revolution movements were all about money. Money withheld, money stolen, money as power, as war. … White folks’ hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running. So as a graduate student he turned to economics – its history, its theories – to learn how money shaped every single oppression in the world.³²⁶

Only as the handmaiden of racism does race mean anything. It means slavery, imperialism, and grossly unequal educational and economic outcomes. This is how race, the appearance of body, works as abstraction. If racism is an excess of the ideal over the material, the effects of its meanings are material. If race is unreal, racism is as real as real can be, though it can only be experienced and felt as social convention and its embodied extensions in the forms of racist violence and incarceration.³²⁷

Or, it just feels awkward. Bride recalls,

I remember one date in particular, a medical student who persuaded me to join him on a visit to his parents’ house up north. As soon as he introduced me it was clear I was there to terrorize his family, a means of threat to this nice old white couple.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” he kept repeating. “Look at her, Mother? Dad?” His eyes were gleaming with malice.

But they outclassed him with their warmth – however faked – and charm. His disappointment was obvious, his anger thinly repressed. His parents even drove me to the train stop, probably so I wouldn’t have to put up with his failed racist joke on them.³²⁸

Racism’s meanings are rarely straightforward, doubling back on themselves as soon as their worst excesses seem to have been mitigated. Parsing its iniquities is a laborious process, its target deep and meanings ever-shifting.

Nor can skin color be isolated from other aspects of appearance. Bodily appearances come as a whole. Jeri counsels Bride to wear white because she is black.

Walter Benjamin:^§MS0b “Every fashion couples the living body to the inorganic world … Every fashion is to some extent a bitter satire on love; in every fashion, perversities are suggested by the most ruthless means.”³²⁹ Clothing is a second skin, hiding skin then revealing skin by its hiding. Its functions: likeness, in costume or uniform; directedness, to body part, environmental function, and activity; and abstraction, in style or fashion.

Jeri, advising me, said, “Listen, Bride baby. If you must have a drop of color limit it to shoes and purses, but I’d keep both black when white simply won’t do. And don’t forget: no makeup. Not even lipstick or eyeliner. None.”

I asked him about jewelry. Gold? Some diamonds? An emerald brooch? “No. No.” He threw his hands up. “No jewelry at all. Pearl dot earrings, maybe. No. Not even that. Just you, girl. All sable and ice. A panther in snow. And with your body? And those wolverine eyes? Please!”

I took his advice and it worked. Everywhere I went I got double takes but not like the faintly disgusted ones I used to get as a kid. These were adoring looks, stunned but hungry. Plus, unbeknownst to him, Jeri had given me the name for a product line. YOU, GIRL.³³⁰

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³²⁰ Toni Morrison, 2015, God Help the Child, New York: Knopf Doubleday, pp. 33, 3.

³²¹ Robert Bennett Bean, 1932, The Races of Man: Differentiation and Dispersal of Man, New York: The University Society.

³²² Toni Morrison, 2015, God Help the Child, New York: Knopf Doubleday, p. 143.

³²³ Michael Yudell, Dorothy Roberts, Rob DeSalle, and Sarah Tishkoff, 2016, “Taking Race out of Human Genetics: Engaging a Century-Long Debate About the Role of Race in Science,” Science 351(6273):564–65, p. 565; Michael Yudell, 2014, Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century, New York: Columbia University Press.

³²⁴ Brian McEvoy, Sandra Beleza, and Mark D. Shriver, 2006, “The Genetic Architecture of Normal Variation in Human Pigmentation: An Evolutionary Perspective and Model,” Human Molecular Genetics 15(2):R176–81; Nicholas G. Crawford, et al. 2017, “Loci Associated with Skin Pigmentation Identified in African Populations,” Science 235(8433):1–14; Sandra Beleza, et al. 2012, “The Timing of Pigmentation Lightening in Europeans,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 30(1):24–35; Rasmus Nielsen, Joshua M. Akey, Mattias Jakobsson, Jonathan K. Pritchard, Sarah Tishkoff, and Eske Willerslev, 2017, “Tracing the Peopling of the World through Genomics,” Nature 541:302–10.

³²⁵ W.E.B. Du Bois, 1906, The Health and Physique of the Negro American: Report of a Social Study Made under the Direction of Atlanta University, Atlanta, GA: Atlanta University Press, p. 16.

³²⁶ Toni Morrison, 2015, God Help the Child, New York: Knopf Doubleday, pp. 110–11.

³²⁷ Robert Miles, 1989, Racism, London: Routledge; Dorothy Roberts, 2011, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century, New York: Free Press.

³²⁸ Toni Morrison, 2015, God Help the Child, New York: Knopf Doubleday, p. 37.

³²⁹ Walter Benjamin, 1999b, The Arcades Project, translated by H. Eidland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 79.

³³⁰ Toni Morrison, 2015, God Help the Child, New York: Knopf Doubleday, p. 34.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 129–131. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Toni Morrison’s “Black” §AS1.4.3c