Race

The definition names a purpose rather than a referent, which is the whole of the argument. Race is constructed in order to impose power relations, so the classification exists because ranking is wanted rather than the ranking following from a classification that was already there. Arbitrary is doing specific work too. The historical list Marsh gives is deliberately heterogeneous, since sex, economic class, real or imagined heredity and colourism have nothing in common except that each has been used as a line to sort people along, and their variety is her evidence that the particular criterion does not matter. The same structural point runs through gender and class in the framework, both of which she also defines as social constructs and endoreality created to impose power relations, with the axis of sorting differing and the machinery identical. The recent expansion she records, primarily in the United States, to include ideological belief, ancestral language and self identification, is observed rather than endorsed, and follows the same logic, since a category built to sort will accept whatever criterion is available. Her prescription is consistent with her treatment of every other identity term. Group affiliation is never necessary to call out discrimination, since courts try people for actions rather than affiliations, and being judged for nouns rather than for anything done is what she identifies as the root of racism, nationalism, ageism and sexism alike.

That race is socially constructed rather than biologically grounded is the consensus position in anthropology and genetics, with the American Anthropological Association's statement and the human genome findings both cited to that effect, and historians including Barbara Fields and Nell Irvin Painter have traced its construction in specific contexts. Critical race theory studies how the construct operates in law and institutions. Where Marsh diverges is on the remedy. Much of the field holds that a constructed category with real effects must still be named and addressed as a category, and her framework treats any organizing around the category as reproducing the machinery, which puts her at odds with most anti-racist practice.