Toni Morrison On The Relevance Of Race [Not]

Eugene Volokh quotes a comment by the well known writer Toni Morrison on the relevance of race, a quote with some relevance to the debate over California’s racial privacy initiative:

Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It’s real information, but tells you next to nothing.

Some Googling reveals that this quote is taken from a cover article about Morrison in the January 19, 1998, issue of Time magazine. (Access to the full text requires a fee, but the cover picture is available here.)

But wait! There’s more! Time Online hosted an online chat with Ms. Morrison on January 21, 1998. The transcript of that session is no longer available free on the Time site, but it is available here. Here is a very interesting exchange that amplifies the above quote:

Timehost presents question from Paul_gray: You were quoted in the TIME cover story as saying, “Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It’s real information, but it tells you next to nothing.” Could you elaborate on this intriguing comment?

Toni_Morrison says, “Oh, yes. I’ll be happy to. There are racial differences among us. Exaggerated and exploited for political and economic purposes. And we have a great deal of baggage, personal feelings about other races because the society has been constructed along racial division. But in fact, when we meet another person one on one, and we know or recognize their race, we pull from that large suitcase of stereotypical information, of learned responses, of habitual reaction, which is the easiest and the laziest way to evaluate other people. The difficult thing and the important thing is to know people as individuals. So knowing that an individual is Asian or white or black is knowing next to nothing. It’s knowing some cultural information which one can assume, but one must [might?] be wrong. But one must know much more than simply a racial marker. Knowing another person’s race is like knowing their height or some other almost irrelevant piece of biological information.