The Ontology of Race in the Brain: Neuroscience, Cognition, and the Sociological Debate on Race

• In Event: Neuroscience, Cognition, and Sociology

Abstract

Debates over the ontology of race remain central to sociological theory. Critical race scholars argue that race, though not biologically real, is a foundational axis of social organization and inequality, while revisionist critics caution that treating race as a stable analytical category risks reifying fluid processes of classification and group-making. This paper argues that neuroscience provides a bridge between these positions by clarifying how racialization becomes experientially real at the micro level. Drawing on research in cognitive, affective, and cultural neuroscience, I show that race operates simultaneously as a cognitive category and as a moralized sense of group position. Studies of face perception, salience detection, and implicit bias demonstrate how socially learned racial cues become embedded in neural systems involved in categorization and affective evaluation. These processes reflect neural plasticity rather than innate racial divisions: the brain adapts to stratified environments in which phenotypical difference is repeatedly paired with hierarchy. Research on moral judgment, empathy, and coalition detection further illustrates how racial hierarchies become emotionally charged and normatively structured, shaping perceptions of threat, deservingness, and belonging. Situating these mechanisms within the global history of colonialism and slavery, I argue that race is neither biological essence nor mere discursive fiction. It is a socially constructed system that becomes neurally embodied through exposure to institutionalized inequality. Integrating sociology and neuroscience, the paper advances an interdisciplinary ontology of race as historically contingent, socially real, and cognitively encoded.

Author

• Rengin Bahar Firat, Antioch University