Facecraft: Race Reification in Psychological Research With Faces.

Abstract

Faces are socially important surfaces of the body on which various meanings are attached. The widespread physiognomic belief that faces inherently contain socially predictive value is why they make a generative stimulus for perception research. However, critical problems arise in studies that simultaneously investigate faces and race. Researchers studying race and racism inadvertently engage in various research practices that transform faces with specific phenotypes into straightforward representatives of their presumed race category, thereby taking race and its phenotypic associations for granted. I argue that research practices that map race categories onto faces using bioessentialist ideas of racial phenotypes constitute a form of racecraft ideology, the dubious reasoning of which presupposes the reality of race and mystifies the causal relation between race and racism. In considering how to study racism without reifying race in face studies, this article places these practices in context, describes how they reproduce racecraft ideology and impair theoretical inferences, and then suggests counterpractices for minimizing this problem.