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i

W H AT I S R A C E ?
ii
iii

WHAT IS RACE?
Four Philosophical Views

Joshua Glasgow

Sally Haslanger

Chike Jeffers

Quayshawn Spencer

1
iv

1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press


198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in


a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form


and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data


Names: Glasgow, Joshua, author. | Haslanger, Sally Anne, author. |
Jeffers, Chike, 1982– author.
Title: What is race? : four philosophical views / Joshua Glasgow, Sally Haslanger,
Chike Jeffers, Quayshawn Spencer/
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018053834 (print) | LCCN 2019007102 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190610210 (Online content) | ISBN 9780190610197 (updf ) |
ISBN 9780190610203 (epub) | ISBN 9780190610173 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780190610180 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Race--Philosophy. | Race relations--Philosophy. |
BISAC: PHILOSOPHY / Political. | PHILOSOPHY / Metaphysics. |
PHILOSOPHY / Movements / General.
Classification: LCC HT1523 (ebook) | LCC HT1523 .G643 2019 (print) |
DDC 305.8001—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018053834

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Paperback printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America


Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
v

To our children,
Samantha Rose Glasgow-​Shulman, Aminata Lilla Jeffers, Ayo Jelani
Jeffers, Aza Katherine Ida Jeffers, Julian Buo-​Hon Spencer, Quentin
Buo-​Yi Spencer, Isaac Amazu Haslanger Yablo, and Zina Siyasa
Haslanger Yablo,
in the hope that their generations will find a more just world.
vi
vi

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1
1. Tracing the Sociopolitical Reality of Race—​S ally Haslanger 4
2. Cultural Constructionism—​C hike Jeffers 38
3. How to Be a Biological Racial Realist—​Q uayshawn Spencer 73
4. Is Race an Illusion or a (Very) Basic Reality?—​J oshua Glasgow 111
5. Haslanger’s Reply to Glasgow, Jeffers, and Spencer 150
6. Jeffers’s Reply to Glasgow, Haslanger, and Spencer 176
7. Spencer’s Reply to Glasgow, Haslanger, and Jeffers 203
8. Glasgow’s Reply to Haslanger, Jeffers, and Spencer 245

Index 275
vi
ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The theories presented in this book are derived from articles and books
that we have previously published. Numerous people helped us as we devel-
oped those earlier publications. We would like to reaffirm our gratitude for
their help.
With respect to the present work, we gratefully acknowledge the
following:
Sally Haslanger would like especially to thank the other authors of the
book, Joshua Glasgow, Chike Jeffers, and Quayshawn Spencer, for their on-
going work, helpful conversations, and friendly collaboration in putting this
book together. In addition, she would like to thank Lawrence Blum, Jorge
Garcia, Adam Hosein, Karen Jones, Lionel McPherson, Megan Mitchell,
José Jorge Mendoza, Deborah Mühlebach, David Plunkett, Laura Schroeter,
Francois Schroeter, Greg Restall, Tommie Shelby, Isaac Yablo, Stephen Yablo,
and Zina Yablo for ongoing conversations on the topics discussed.
Chike Jeffers would like to thank Linda Martín Alcoff, Veromi Arsiradam,
Tiffany Gordon, Tyler Hildebrand, David Ludwig, Tina Roberts-​Jeffers,
Katie Stockdale, and his coauthors Sally Haslanger, Quayshawn Spencer, and
Joshua Glasgow for their feedback on drafts of his chapters in this book. He
also presented versions of Chapter 2 at the University of Memphis and at
Northwestern University. He is thankful to all who were present and espe-
cially to those who provided feedback on those occasions.
Quayshawn Spencer is thankful for feedback from Mariana Achugar,
Linda Alcoff, Elizabeth Anderson, Luvell Anderson, Robert Brandon, Liam
Bright, Mazviita Chirimuuta, Haixin Dang, Michael Devitt, Brian Epstein,
Patrick Forber, Justin Garson, Joshua Glasgow, Michael Hardimon, Sally
Haslanger, Jay Garfield, Chike Jeffers, Saul Kripke, Meena Krishnamurthy,
Edouard Machery, Lionel McPherson, Charles Mills, Sandra Mitchell,
Jennifer Morton, Albert Mosley, Wayne Norman, Sumeet Patwardhan,
George Smith, and Daniel Wodak. He would also like to thank the faculty
x

x • Acknowledgments

and students in the philosophy departments at the following universities for


allowing him to receive feedback on drafts of his chapters at a colloquium
talk: Carnegie Mellon University, College of the Holy Cross, CUNY Graduate
Center, Drexel University, Duke University, the University of Michigan at
Ann Arbor, Smith College, Temple University, Tufts University, University
of Maryland in Baltimore County, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Also,
Spencer would like to thank the participants of the University of Pittsburgh’s
Summer Program in Philosophy of Science for Underrepresented Groups in
2017 for all of their useful feedback on Chapter 3, and he’d like to thank the
Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh for providing
two opportunities to present and receive feedback on Chapter 3. Finally, he’d
like to thank the participants at the 2015 Metaphysics of Social Categories
Workshop at the University of Colorado at Boulder for offering helpful feed-
back on work that would become part of Chapter 3, and the participants at
the ninth annual Ida B. Wells conference at the University of Memphis for
offering helpful feedback on work that would become part of Chapter 7.
Josh Glasgow is thankful for the help of Shani Long Abdallah, Paul
Bloomfield, Matt Ingram, Robert Ingram, Esa Díaz León, Dan López de Sa,
and audiences at the University of Barcelona and University of Geneva. He
is also grateful to Sally Haslanger, Chike Jeffers, and Quayshawn Spencer for
both their collaboration on this project and their ongoing work. Finally, he’d
like to thank Rani Bagai for conversation about Vaishno Das Bagai, Kala
Bagai Chandra, and events surrounding the Thind decision.
1

INTRODUCTION

Historically, efforts to make sense of human diversity led to classi-


fying humans by where they live, by culture or custom (including
language or religion), by family or ancestry, by appearance, by per-
sonality type or temperament, by physical and intellectual capac-
ities, and, of course, by race. But what, if anything, is distinctive
of racial groups? A race is not just a group of people linked by a
common ancestry. While this may account for the idea of the
human race, since all living humans share a common ancestor (so-​
called Mitochondrial Eve, who lived about 200,000 years ago), it
also would make any group of people who are biological siblings a
race, which is not how anyone talks about race. Nor is a race just
a group of people linked by a common geographic origin. If that
were true, then African Americans and Afro-​Caribbeans would be
American, instead of Black, because both of these groups of people
originated in the Americas, not Africa. And it is difficult to unpack
race in terms of shared skin color, since people of different races
can share the same skin color and people of the same race can have
different skin colors.
So, how should we understand what a race is supposed to be?
This is the question we address in the chapters that follow.
One might think that the best way to answer the question is
to consult current biology. However, whether race is essentially a
biological thing is controversial, as this book demonstrates. For
that matter, there is not even agreement among biologists. In one
recent survey, 45.5% of American biology professors believed that
“[r]‌ace is biological,” 50% believed that “[r]ace is not biological,”
and the remaining 4.5% were uncommitted (Morning 2011, 111).
Moreover, the term ‘race’ has been used in multiple ways over the
centuries, and in some uses, it clearly does not function as a biolog-
ical term (Herzog 1998, Ch. 7; Stevens 1999, Ch. 4). Don Herzog
(1998) characterizes the problem:
2

2 • Introduction

Take Coleridge: “Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the com-
pany of vulgar people; because they have a power of looking at such
persons as objects of amusement, of another race altogether.” A race of
vulgar or stupid people: is that a genuine or merely metaphoric race?
Does a concept as nefarious and slippery as that of race admit of a gen-
uine or innocent or primary usage and then parasitic and metaphoric
usages? Or are there no clear core cases to which it applies? If there is
a clear core, does it have to do with something revolving around blood
or genetics? Or, as Coleridge seems to suggest, around hierarchy and
contempt? (290)

Each of the four authors included in this book proposes a different account of
race. Quayshawn Spencer (Chapter 3) is a naturalist about race and believes
that there are racial groups distinguished by biological features (e.g., shared
genomic ancestry), but that the biological features in question do not jus-
tify any social hierarchy among the races. Chike Jeffers (Chapter 2) and
Sally Haslanger (Chapter 1) argue in different ways that races are socially
constructed groups. Jeffers holds that the cultural aspect of racial difference—​
that is, the ways in which races are groups differentiated by distinctive ways
of life—​is underappreciated in its importance to the past and present and is
the centrally important feature when thinking about how we might continue
to construct races in the future, past the end of racism. Haslanger, by con-
trast, argues that races are first and foremost sociopolitical groups, marked
by bodily features, that function within a dominance hierarchy. In the case
of the current social structure in the United States, the dominance hierarchy
is White supremacy, but races are formed within different hierarchies that
aren’t organized around Whiteness. Joshua Glasgow (Chapter 4) maintains
that the concept of race includes, as a necessary condition, that there be a set
of visible features that are disproportionately held by each race. If this condi-
tion is strongly interpreted to require that visible-​trait groups are supposed
to be legitimized by biology, then, Glasgow argues, there are no races (ra-
cial anti-​realism); but if, instead, this condition is weakly interpreted to mean
simply that there are differences between humans, then race is arguably real in
a non-​biological and non-​social way (basic racial realism).
After laying out the fundamentals of our views in the first four chapters,
we each reply to our coauthors in Chapters 5 (Haslanger), 6 ( Jeffers), 7
(Spencer), and 8 (Glasgow).
We don’t consider our four views to exhaust all of the plausible metaphys-
ical views one can have about what race is and whether it’s real, nor do we think
3

Introduction • 3

that our particular ways of defending the metaphysical views represented are
the only ways to defend these views. For instance, the arguments over whether
race is biological cover a wider terrain than we survey here. And it’s possible
that race is, essentially, a social grouping of people without necessarily being
a cultural grouping of people (à la Jeffers) or a political grouping of people (à
la Haslanger). For example, Ron Mallon and Daniel Kelly (2012) have argued
that race is a socio-​psychological grouping of people.
These limitations notwithstanding, we aim for this book to highlight
some central themes and compelling arguments in a difficult and contested
debate. The history of sorting out the nature of race has been fraught, impli-
cated both in oppression and in efforts to liberate from that very oppression.
Our hope is that by focusing on some promising lines of argument, analysis,
and inquiry, we can facilitate understanding and progress.

References
Herzog, Don. 1998. Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Mallon, R., and D. Kelly. 2012. “Making Race Out of Nothing.” In Harold Kincaid
(ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science. New York: Oxford
University Press, pp. 507–​532.
Morning, Ann. 2011. The Nature of Race. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Stevens, Jacqueline. 1999. Reproducing the State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
4

1 TRACING THE SOCIOPOLITICAL REALITY


OF RACE

Sally Haslanger

1.1. Methodological Preliminaries
The question before us is: What is race? When we pose questions of
the form “What is X?” there are a variety of ways we might go about
answering them. For example, if, pointing to a small wiggly thing in
the corner, I ask, “What is that?” I will probably want someone to
help me figure out the species of insect it belongs to, as determined by
entomology. If you tell me it is a silverfish, I might also pose a question
about the kind of thing (e.g., “What is a silverfish?”). Plausibly I am
asking how silverfish, as a group, are classified: what features some-
thing must have to count as a silverfish, what to expect of silverfish,
and how they are related to other sorts of creepy crawly things.
These sorts of questions seem to presuppose that we have a
well-​developed science that will provide us with empirically based
answers. However, sometimes our “What is it?” questions take us
beyond what science has figured out. For example, if in the sev-
enteenth century someone pointed at a burning log and asked,
“What is that?” a straightforward answer would be “Fire.” But if
the speaker already knew that and proceeded, “But what is fire?”
the question is probably attempting to probe features of fire that
aren’t apparent from our ordinary familiarity with it; and it would
(and did) take substantial empirical research and future scientific
theory to reach any answers.
In the sorts of contexts just considered, it would be, at the very
least, odd to answer the questions by consulting our linguistic
intuitions.1 Our judgments about when to use the term ‘silverfish’

1. Some parts of this section are repeated and developed more fully in Haslanger
(forthcoming).
5

Tracing the Sociopolitical Reality of Race • 5

don’t tell us what a silverfish is. However, there are a variety of “What is X?”
questions that many philosophers seem to think can be answered by discov-
ering the meaning of the term(s) substituted for X, as determined by our
disposition to apply the term(s) in question (e.g., ‘knowledge,’ ‘moral worth,’
‘justice,’ ‘a person,’ ‘causation’). In some of these cases, one might think that
this a priori methodology is warranted because the boundaries of these kinds
depend in some way on us and our practices. Perhaps moral worth, justice,
personhood, and the like, don’t exist independently of our judgments of what
counts as moral worth, justice, and personhood. So, of course, we should at
least begin by investigating our judgments and putting them in order. (This is
more plausible in some cases than in others; e.g., the answer would have to be
more complicated in cases such as ‘causation’ or ‘intrinsic property.’)
But the idea that (some) philosophical kinds somehow “depend on us” is
not entirely clear; nor is it clear why our a priori (linguistic) reflections should
be sufficient to provide an adequate theory of them—​for example, “What is a
sheriff ?” Even if you are a competent user of the term ‘sheriff,’ you may not be
able to tell me what a sheriff is. A full answer would presumably require infor-
mation about the jurisdiction of sheriffs, what their responsibilities are, how
they are chosen, etc. as determined by law. We might need to consult experts
in civics to get answers (and the answers will depend on what country we are
in). We can’t just depend on common sense or linguistic intuitions. But surely
what counts as a sheriff depends on us—​there are no sheriffs outside of a hu-
manly constructed system of government.
In the case of ‘sheriff,’ there will be a well-​defined role specified by statute,
and someone who knows the relevant statutes will know the answers to
our questions. But there are also social phenomena that in some sense “de-
pend on us” but are not stipulated or planned by us. Such social phenomena
range from macro-​scale economic depressions, globalization, urbanization,
and gentrification, to more local social practices and relations (e.g., within a
town, religious congregation, or family). These phenomena call for explana-
tion, and the social sciences (broadly construed) endeavor to provide theories
that enable us to understand them, usually identifying kinds of institutions,
economic relations, cultural traditions, social meanings, and psychological
predispositions, to do so. The kinds in question are social kinds, in the sense
that they are kinds of things that exist in the social world (and so, in some
sense, depend on us). But we discover these kinds through empirical inquiry,
just as we discover chemical kinds through empirical inquiry.
For example, accounts of gentrification often make reference to the “urban
pioneer,” sometimes characterized as artists and “bohemians” who take
6

6 • W h a t I s  R a c e ?

advantage of low rents in poor neighborhoods. When single people who share
rent enter a neighborhood, businesses (such as cafés and pubs) take interest,
and landlords see opportunities to raise rents, which drives out the locals.
Urban pioneers are a functional kind that identifies a particular role in an
evolving real estate market. The term ‘pioneer’ is chosen due to the perceived
parallel with pioneers who “settled” the western United States, displacing the
local population. If someone were to object to the term ‘pioneer’—​perhaps
thinking that it carried an overly positive connotation—​this would not un-
dermine the explanatory claims.2 The adequacy of explaining gentrification
by reference to singles moving into an urban neighborhood does not depend
on our linguistic intuitions about applying the term ‘pioneer’ to them. The
choice of terminology was intended to illuminate a parallel; if the termino-
logical choice doesn’t work, then another term could be used as a substitute.
However, insofar as philosophical kinds such as justice and personhood
“depend on us,” it is not in the sense that we stipulate what they are (like
sheriff), or in the sense that they serve in explanations of social phenomena
(like urban pioneers). Rather, it is something along these lines: the adequacy
of our theory is not to be judged simply by reference to “the facts,” but also
by its responsiveness to our prior understandings. In the case of sheriff, you
might think that there aren’t any independent facts we’re trying to accommo-
date. Oversimplifying, we simply create sheriffs and then talk about them. In
the case of urban pioneer, the prior understandings of ‘pioneer’ are not crucial
to the explanation provided by the theory. But in the case of justice, there is
something we are aiming to understand that is not simply constituted by what
we say, but at the same time, our conclusions cannot float completely free of
the discursive tradition in which we are aiming to understand it.
How might we explain this? Note that in the philosophical cases, we are
not situated as anthropologists trying to understand the social life of the
“natives.” Nor are we legislators specifying new practices. We are seeking an
understanding of practices in which we are currently engaged as participants.
The practices are not fully understood, however. And they are open-​ended,
revisable, possibly self-​defeating. In making sense of them, we are making
judgments about how to better understand what we are doing, and how then
to go on. This is not primarily a linguistic exercise: we aren’t just deciding how

2. Metaphors and analogies can play an important and even ineliminable role in theorizing and
can aid in explanation. My claim here is only that the choice of terminology for the functional
kinds in the proposed mechanisms of gentrification (specifically the influx of singles) is not es-
sential to the success of the model for some purposes (though it may be for others).
7

Tracing the Sociopolitical Reality of Race • 7

to use existing terminology, but how to collectively orient ourselves toward


the world and toward each other. Language provides tools to achieve this.
But language is a practice within practices and is itself a proper target of phil-
osophical inquiry: meanings are not simply constituted by what we believe,
yet we are situated within a tradition of linguistic practices that have already
shaped our meanings and our world; so ignoring those practices would be a
mistake. We are situated inquirers, and the question is how we should go on,
given where we have been, where we are now, and where we are trying to go
(Lear 1986).

1.2. What Is the Question?


The question arises, then, what sort of question is at issue when we ask, “What
is race?” Is it an empirical question that we should answer using the methods
of biology? Or should we use the methods of empirical sociology or history?
Is it a question about what ‘race’ means? And how might one determine the
meaning of ‘race’? Do we get to stipulate the meaning? Are we seeking a phil-
osophical tool for explanatory purposes? Or is the question best understood
as arising for us as participants in racializing practices?
I don’t think there is one right way to pose the question, “What is race?”
In fact, I think it is useful to ask different versions of the question in order
to understand the phenomenon, and different forms of the question, raised
in different contexts, will call for different answers.3 In my own work (e.g.,
Haslanger 2012, Ch. 7), I have explored the question as a critical theorist.
There are multiple ways of characterizing critical theory, but for our purposes
here, I will draw on Tommie Shelby’s characterization of a social critic:

There is also the discourse of the social critic, which is identical with
neither everyday discourse nor scientific discourse. Social critics don’t
merely systematize common sense or popularize scientific findings.
Social critics seek to inform, and possibly shape, public opinion with
clear and careful thinking, well-​established facts, and moral insight.
They will of course draw on and engage both common sense and

3. I embrace an “eretetic” approach to explanation that takes explanations, and theories more
generally, to be answers to questions. So the first task of any theoretical project is to clarify
the question being asked. Apparent disagreements can sometimes be resolved by noting that
the parties to the disagreement are answering different questions (see Garfinkel 1981; Risjord
2000; Anderson 1995).
8

8 • W h a t I s  R a c e ?

scientific thought, but they do so without taking a slavish attitude to-


ward either . . . [In the context of debates over race and racism,] the
principal role of the philosophical social critic, as here conceived, is to
shed light on the most fundamental conceptual and normative issues
that race-​related questions raise. (Shelby 2014, 63)

Plausibly, all inquiry is situated. Inquiry begins with questions, and all
questions have presuppositions. And any serious effort to answer a question
relies on a method that is taken to have at least some epistemic credentials. I’ve
been suggesting that certain forms of philosophical inquiry are situated in an
additional sense; that is, the project is not simply a descriptive or explanatory
project, but aims to shape or guide our thinking and acting. Social critics take
this even a step further: we are situated as critics of ordinary social practices and
offer tools and understandings that are designed to improve them (Fraser 1989;
Marx 1843). The social critic embraces the normative dimension of philosoph-
ical theorizing, and also relies crucially on empirical research. The idea of race is
already embedded in our customs, practices, and institutions, and facts about
its role in our lives are crucial to the critical project. Such empirical information
and normative concerns are also important, on some accounts, for adjudicating
linguistic meaning, and so, in particular, for understanding what ‘race’ means.

1.3. The Semantic Strategy


Quine (1953) has taught us that if we are engaged in an ontological debate
about the existence of some kind of thing, say, races, we should semantically
ascend. In other words, instead of asking directly whether races exist, we
should ask whether the term ‘race’ picks anything out in the world, and if so,
what. This is an especially helpful move if parties to the debate don’t agree on
what the term ‘race’ means, for if, say, a racial realist and a racial anti-​realist
have different understandings about what ‘race’ means, then the conflict be-
tween them may be only apparent.4 It may be true, for example, both that
biological races don’t exist and social races do exist.

4. I assume for the purposes of this discussion that a racial realist believes that at least some
statements involving the term ‘race’ are both truth-​apt and true. Anti-​realists disagree. Anti-​
realists may hold that all statements involving the term ‘race’ are not truth-​apt (they are “non-​
cognitivists” about race talk), or they may hold that race talk is truth-​apt, but false (they are
“error theorists” about race). In this book, Spencer, Jeffers, and I are all realists (though we
disagree about what makes race talk true); Glasgow is either an anti-​realist error theorist or
a “basic” realist that allows ‘race’ to refer, but to uninteresting groups. (Other anti-​realists in-
clude Appiah [1996] and Zack [2002]; Blum [2002]; Hochman [2017].)
9

Tracing the Sociopolitical Reality of Race • 9

Ron Mallon (2006, 527) considers this “semantic strategy,” widespread


in the race debate, and argues, however, that it is not helpful. The problem
is that different parties to the debate seem to adhere to different theories of
meaning. So the controversy is just pushed up a level. For example, the realist
and anti-​realist, it would seem, don’t agree on how we might determine the
meaning of the term ‘race.’ When the realist claims that ‘race’ refers to a so-
cial kind, and the anti-​realist says that ‘race’ does not refer to anything, they
haven’t established a basis for debate because they are committed to different
theories of meaning or reference. As a result, there is a risk that the race debate
just collapses into a debate in the philosophy of language. Given the unlike-
lihood that we will be able to settle on a theory of reference any time soon, it
looks like the race debate is left hanging.
However, Mallon suggests that there are important questions that should
be asked and whose answers shouldn’t depend on a metaphysical or semantic
theory. His proposal is that we take up a normative approach to race. The im-
portant question isn’t the metaphysical one (i.e., whether races exist or not)
or the semantic one (i.e., what ‘race’ means, if anything). Rather, the question
is normative: how we should think and talk when it comes to matters of race.

While there is (or should be) a wide basis of metaphysical agreement on


the expanded ontological consensus, there is profound disagreement
over the practical and moral import of ‘race’ talk. Resolving this dis-
agreement requires a complex assessment of many factors, including,
the epistemic value of ‘race’ talk in various domains, the benefits and
costs of racial identification and of the social enforcement of such
identification, the value of racialized identities and communities fos-
tered by ‘race’ talk, the role of ‘race’ talk in promoting or undermining
racism, the benefits or costs of ‘race’ talk in a process of rectification for
past injustice, the cognitive or aesthetic value of ‘race’ talk, and the de-
gree of entrenchment of ‘race’ talk in everyday discourse. The point is
that it is on the basis of these and similar considerations that the issue
of what to do with ‘race’ talk will be decided, not putative metaphys-
ical or actual semantic disagreements. (Mallon 2006, 550)

I am sympathetic with Mallon’s (2006) suggestion that resolving the issue


depends on normative and empirical considerations.5 However, as he frames

5. For a parallel argument concerning gender terms such as ‘woman,’ and ‘man,’ see Saul (2012)
and Kapusta (2016).
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LUKIJALLE.

Tämän näytelmän syntysanat lausuttiin jo kaksitoista vuotta sitten.


Eräässä pienemmässä kirjallisessa seurassa keskusteltiin Suomen
itsenäisyysmahdollisuuksista. Olisi ryhdyttävä ajamaan propagandaa
itsenäisyysaatteen puolesta ja siinä mielessä kehoitti minua eräs
seuran jäsenistä kirjoittamaan tälle aatteelle pohjautuvan
historiallisen näytelmän. Asiasta innostuneena syvennyinkin heti
tutkimaan Juhana herttuan aikaa. Löysin ennen pitkää Pietari
Särkilahden sisarenpojan, Niilo Skalmin, joka Suomen
herttuakunnan kukistuttua yhdessä Klaus Vestgöthen ja muutamien
muiden innokkaimpien Juhanan kannattajien kanssa mestattiin
Tukholmassa, ja hänen persoonansa ympärille hahmottui silloin
tämä nyt ilmestyvä näytelmä. Kirjoittelin sitä silloin tällöin, mutta
erinäiset seikat viivyttivät viivyttämistään sen valmistumista.
Joutuessani itsenäisyysliikkeemme takia keväällä 1916 vankilaan
päätin viimeinkin toteuttaa tuon lähtemättömänä mielessäni
kangastelevan aiheen. Pyysin ja sain kotoa Oulun lääninvankilaan
kaikki näytelmää koskevat ainekset sekä ryhdyin innolla työhön —
nythän eivät ainakaan taloudelliset seikat olleet työtäni
häiritsemässä. Pietariin Shpalernaja-vankilaan siirrettynä jatkoin
työtä — valmistuneen alkuosan sekä ainekset olin kuitenkin onneksi
palauttanut Oulusta kotiin — ja sainkin näytelmän kesän kuluessa
valmiiksi. Kun valmiit käsikirjoitukset vietiin aina muiden liikatavarain
joukkoon vankilan varastohuoneeseen, joka vapautuspäivänä
jostakin syystä oli sytytetty palamaan, hävisi näytelmä, samoinkuin
laajan romaanin käsikirjoitus, sille tielleen. Kotiin päästyä selostin
hävinneen näytelmäni teatterinjohtaja Jalmari Lahdensuolle, joka
lämpimästi kehoiiti minua kirjoittamaan sen uudestaan ja jolle
hyväntahtoisesta opastuksesta lausun tässä kiitokseni. Mutta jälleen
olivat muut seikat — vapaussota valmisteluineen y.m. — työtä
viivästyttämässä, niin että tämä itsenäisyysasiaa edesauttamaan
tarkoitettu näytelmä tulee julkisuuteen vasta nyt, siis tavallaan post
festum.

Kuriositeetin vuoksi tulkoon vielä mainituksi, että tämä


itsenäisyysnäytelmä oli vähällä toisenkin kerran joutua venäläisen
tulen uhriksi. Ollessani kesällä 1919 mukana Aunuksen retkellä, oli
keskeneräinen näytelmä aineksineen matkassani. Lähtiessäni
juhannuksen edellä Vitelestä retkikunnan asioille Helsinkiin ja
Pohjanmaalle ja sulloessani majapaikassani laukkuun matkalle
tarvitsemiani kapineita, punnitsin näytelmäpapereita hetkisen
kädessäni ja mietin, ottaisinko ne mukaani vai jättäisinkö toisten
kapineiden joukkoon majapaikkaani. Solahutin lopuksi paperit
laukkuun ja niin ne tällä kertaa pelastuivat, sillä matkalla ollessani
tapahtui tuo tunnettu Vitelen katastroofi, jolloin muun ohella
majapaikkani sinne jääneine kapineineni paloi poroksi. Ja uskonpa
lujasti, ettei varsinaista itsenäisyyttämmekään venäläisyyden
kurimus ole enää nielevä, niin herttaisen mielellään kuin se sen
muutoin tekisikin.

Lapualla, helmikuussa 1922.

Tekijä.
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