The Reality of Race
Moises Velasquez-Manoff explores the controversy around “Proper Cloth,” an on-line company that customizes shirts to body type. The problem “Proper Cloth” faced was that its customers were unreliable reporters of their body types and sizes. In search of the perfect fit, the company began experimenting with different questions that could be connected by algorithm with the given measurements to yield a properly fitting shirt. What the company found is that by asking their customer’s race and ethnicity, it could dramatically improve the fit. While racial stereotypes are by definition overly generalized and simplified, they turn out to work usefully in conjunction with measurements to help fit custom shirts over the internet. The question, as Velasquez-Manoff writes, is whether the decision to incorporate racial stereotypes into an online tailoring site is courageously realistic or unjustly prejudicial. “I bet you have two warring opinions of this web site’s “ethnicity” question. One is that we humans have a long history of buying clothes without explicitly considering our ancestry, so this innovation sounds, if not racist, at least racially inappropriate. The other is that, well, maybe our body types do differ by race — and just accepting this reality frees us from having to wrestle with the Caucasian body proportions that dominate most clothing design. So here’s my question: With the “ethnicity” question, is this entrepreneur courageously addressing the proposition that we’re different according to our ancestry, and propelling us toward a post-racial future? Or is he pretending to be scientific as a marketing gimmick, while actually enforcing false, outdated and possibly dangerous ideas about race?” In exploring this question Velasquez-Manoff reaches into fascinating territories, none more so than the U.S. Army Anthropometry Survey, which measures the height, weight and BMI of all army recruits dating back to the civil war. “This series of measurements, comprising thousands of recruits, is known as ANSUR — the Army Anthropometry Survey. And it includes race. When I asked, anthropologists tended to pooh-pooh the dataset. Among other objections, they noted that military recruits were not a random sample of Americans. But I encountered a different opinion among industrial designers. Matthew Reed, a researcher in anthropometry at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, flat out called ANSUR the “best-gathered anthro data in the world.” Not only was the dataset accurate and reliable, in his view, it could save lives. Imagine body armor that doesn’t completely cover your vital organs, or is too long or too short, making it horribly uncomfortable to wear, so you take it off. Imagine if you found yourself in a nerve gas attack and your mask doesn’t fit properly because it was designed for a different kind of face. (One study found that American-made gas masks fit poorly on “Chinese” faces.) The differences in body type according to race could be striking. Reed sent me a graphic, based on data from the 1988 iteration of ANSUR, illustrating seated height versus standing height for Caucasian and African American men. Most African Americans had a shorter seated height compared to Caucasians of the same overall stature, meaning longer leg bones and shorter torsos. Asians, meanwhile, skewed slightly in the other direction, with taller sitting heights and longer torsos than both Caucasians and African-Americans. The army doesn’t use this information to individually fit uniforms and gear, Reed explained, but to plan and manage costs. If the army knows that 15 percent of recruits are African American, when it orders, say, 20,000 bullet-proof vests, it will ensure that 15 percent conform to what it believes is their relatively shorter proportions. “That’s really important for the army,” Reed told me. “If you do that wrong, you end up with stuff that you need to store. And you don’t have enough of what you do need.””
When Velasquez-Manoff spoke with anthropologists and others, they rejected the claim by the industrial designers and by “Proper Cloth” that race should matter in design. Alan Goodman represents a widespread view when he says: ““Calling groups white or black is a pre-Darwinian view of biology that does not fit the facts of human variation.” Other anthropologists I spoke to also roundly denounced the question. Race, they say, is a social construct.” No doubt they are right, race is a social construct. But social constructs exist and matter in the world. The problem is not that race exists, but that it is misused. What Velasquez-Manoff’s story shows is that past abuses of racial social constructs have made us afraid of race and caused us to flee from one important part of our common social world. For Hannah Arendt, there is an important difference between race thinking and racism. Racism is an ideology of supremacy and inferiority. Race thinking is based upon prejudice. Prejudices are of course simplifications of a complex reality. But no one can live without some prejudices, which are pre-judgments that help structure our world. The point is not to eliminate prejudices (though we should eliminate racism), but to work to prevent unjust prejudices. To do that, we have to have the kinds of honest conversations about race that Velasquez-Manoff does in his essay. These are the difficult questions the Arendt Center is seeking to ask at our upcoming conference, “Real Talk: Difficult Questions About Race, Sex, and Religion on Campus.”
Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, Bard College
