Towards a historical ontology of racial knowledge - the epistemic space of race

This paper outlines an epistemic space in which race is neither a biological fact nor a social construct. At stake is a tractable analysis of race across public discourse, science, and law which doesn’t reduce to the essentialism of biology or society.Drawing on Michel Foucault’s archaeology, biopolitics, and dispositif, and reading them alongside Kant’s Anthropology, I argue that race persists not because it is true or false, but because it is realised “within the true” - that is, within epistemic norms and institutional apparatuses that produce what Steven Pinker calls common knowledge, Michael Hardimon calls enlightened commonsense. Racial thinking is exemplified in Aaron Panofsky’s observation that “one can believe that genes cause racial behavioural differences and also that science cannot substantiate that belief”. Race, I argue, is a useful logical fiction.