Race as Technology

Philadelphia, 18 March 2008, http://www.barackobama .com/tv/ Summary of Argument For the sake of decency, I call for a perversion of common standards or at least a productive distortion of such. I ask the reader to consider race as technology. This proposition moves race away from the biological and genetic systems that have historically dominated its definition toward questions of technological agency. Technological agency speaks to the ways by which external devices help us navigate the terrain in which we live. For example, the hunter throwing a rock kills a tiger from a safer distance than if he had engaged in direct combat. The rock is the external device in this case. When the hunter leaves a sign behind, scratched into the stone or dirt, it indicates a good place for hunting; the hunter uses an external marker to communicate with distant parts of the tribe. In the elds of anthropology and philosophy, technology is often de ned as an intrinsically human extension of the self.1 We are by nature tool-making and sign-making creatures who cannot be separated from our urge for technology. I argue in this essay that technology’s embedded function of self-extension may be exploited to liberate race from an inherited position of abjection toward a greater expression of agency. In this case, agency indicates presence, will, and movement — the abilRace as Technology