Philosophy of Race

The ability of videos to serve as evidence of racial injustice is complex and contested. This essay argues that scrutiny of the Black body has come to play a key role in how videos of police violence are mined for evidence, following a long history of racialized surveillance and attributions of threat and superhuman powers to Black bodies. Using videos to combat injustice requires incorporating humanizing narratives and cultivating resistant modes of looking.

In response to recent controversies about racial transitioning, I provide an argument that deceptions about ancestry may sometimes constitute fraud. In order to arrive at this conclusion, I criticize the arguments from analogy made famous by Rebecca Tuvel and Christine Overall. My claim is that we should not think of racial transitioning as similar to gender transitioning, because different identity groups possess different kinds of obstacles to entry. I then provide historical surveys of American racial categories and the various types (...) of passing common in American history, in order to distinguish the potentially fraudulent from the relatively innocent styles of passing. (shrink)

While those who take a "structuralist" approach to racial justice issues are right to call attention to the importance of social practices, laws, etc., they sometimes go too far by suggesting that antiracist efforts ought to focus on changing unjust social systems rather than changing individuals’ minds. We argue that while the “either/or” thinking implied by this framing is intuitive and pervasive, it is misleading and self-undermining. We instead advocate for a “both/and” approach to antiracist moral education that explicitly teaches (...) how social structures influence ideas about race and how ideas about race shape, sustain, and transform social structures. Ideally, antiracist moral education will help people see how social change and moral progress depend on the symbiotic relations between individuals and structures. We articulate a conception of “structure-facing virtue” that exemplifies this hybrid approach to illuminate the pivotal role moral education plays in the fight for racial justice. (shrink)

L’article de Nathalie Heinrich sur les « petits malentendus transatlantiques, paru sur Telos le 9 février, soulève quelques questions qui méritent réflexion. Si les « cultural studies » ont leurs défauts, il faut prendre au sérieux leur réflexion sur le naturel, le construit et l’arbitraire, qui bouscule différentes traditions, d’Aristote à Marx et ouvre sur de nouvelles exigences de justice.

Objective Analyze racial differences in comfort with medical research using an alternative to the traditional approach that treats white people as a raceless norm.Methods Quantitative analysis of survey responses (n = 1,570) from Black and white residents of the US to identify relationships between perceptions of research as a right or a risk, and comfort participating in medical research.Results A lower proportion of white respondents reported that medical experimentation occurred without patient consent (p < 0.001) and a higher proportion of (...) white respondents reported that it should be their right to participate in medical research (p = 0.02). Belief in one’s right to participate was significantly predictive of comfort (b = 0.37, p < 0.001). Belief in experimentation without consent was significantly predictive of comfort for white respondents but not for Black respondents in multivariable analysis.Conclusions A rights-based orientation and less concern about the risks of medical research among white respondents demonstrate comparative advantage. Efforts to diversify medical research may perpetuate structural racism if they do not (1) critically engage with whiteness and its role in comfort with participation, and (2) identify and respond specifically to the needs of Black patients. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

I examine how James Baldwin explored white ignorance—as conceived by Charles Mills—in his work. I argue that Baldwin helps us understand Mills’s account of white ignorance more deeply, showing that while only mentioned briefly by Mills, Baldwin provides fruitful insights into the phenomenon. I also consider the resources Baldwin provides to find a way out of white ignorance. My aim is to link these thinkers in ways that have been largely ignored.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Equity was—and is—central in the US policy response to COVID-19, given its disproportionate impact on disadvantaged communities of colour. In an unprecedented turn, the majority of US states used place-based disadvantage indices to promote equity in vaccine allocation (eg, through larger vaccine shares for more disadvantaged areas and people of colour). We conducted a nationally representative survey experiment (n=2003) in April 2021 (before all US residents had become vaccine eligible), that examined respondents’ perceptions of the acceptability of disadvantage indices relative (...) to two ways of prioritising racial and ethnic groups more directly, and assessed the role of framing and expert anchors in shaping perceptions. A majority of respondents supported the use of disadvantage indices, and one-fifth opposed any of the three equity-promoting plans. Differences in support and opposition were identified by respondents’ political party affiliation. Providing a numerical anchor (that indicated expert recommendations and states’ actual practices in reserving a proportion of allocations for prioritised groups) led respondents to prefer a lower distribution of reserved vaccine allocations compared with the randomised condition without this anchor, and the effect of the anchor differed across the frames. Our findings support ongoing uses of disadvantage indices in vaccine allocation, and, by extension, in allocating tests, masks or treatments, especially when supply cannot meet demand. The findings can also inform US allocation frameworks in future pandemic planning, and could provide lessons on how to promote equity in clinical and public health outside of the pandemic setting. (shrink)

Experiences whether personal or collective, sometimes evoke a psychological satisfaction of being superior to others. This could be due to inappropriate perception or some prejudice. When misperception takes a systematic and permanent form, it becomes an illusion. Several scientific works imply possible racial cognitive illusions. In this work, I treat honorary whiteness as a diminutive way of referring to some categories of human beings. Honorary whiteness is an ideology based on the belief of being superior to others on the basis (...) of colour. It is the practice of acting white or like European in order to gain some benefits or for some interests. This attitude pervades the political, economic, legal and social life of human beings. Hence, this research initiates the urgency to revisit the discourse on racial superiority and how it informs some cognitive misrepresentations of human biological givens. I examine the above theme with the aim of explaining honorary whiteness, racial cognitive illusion and finally, explore the psychological perspectives in view of proffering innovative solutions on racial cognitive illusion. (shrink)

As a country with a history of settler-colonialism, the land question in South Africa remains one of the critical issues of redress that is highly contested. Furthermore, opinions on the land question tend to be divided along racial lines. This paper uses white ignorance as a theoretical framework to explain these polarised views on the land question in South Africa post-1994. The paper also uses the concept of honorary whiteness/brownness to explain how differences among ‘people of colour’ serve to sustain (...) a hierarchical racial order in which whites remain the ultimate beneficiaries. While research on white ignorance mainly focuses on the socio-psychological and material benefits of white ignorance for whites, this paper argues that those classified as honorary white or ‘brown’ also benefit, albeit minimally, from endorsing willful white ignorance of past and present racial atrocities. (shrink)

RésuméCet article soutient que les noirs devraient rejeter l'intégration pour des raisons d'autoprotection et de solidarité. Il distingue deux aspects de la dévalorisation des noirs : un aspect de « stigmatisation » qui a à voir avec le fait que les noirs sont soumis à diverses formes de discrimination, et un aspect esthétique (« dévalorisation phénotypique ») qui concerne la dévalorisation esthétique de traits phénotypiques typiquement noirs. Il identifie quatre préjudices à l'estime de soi que l'intégration peut infliger et suggère (...) que ceux-ci peuvent l'emporter sur les avantages de l'intégration. En outre, il soutient que si le processus d'intégration peut réduire la stigmatisation, il y a moins de raisons de penser que ce processus puisse faire de même pour la dévalorisation phénotypique. (shrink)

The fifteen essays collected here set out to demonstrate why the critical philosophy of race needs to take a historical turn. Genealogies of the concepts of both race and racism are deployed to clarify why some of the dominant strategies for combatting racism tend either miss the target altogether or give it only a glancing blow. For example, relying on biology to reject the concept of race as a way of disarming racism misses the fact that racism precedes the biology (...) of race. It also ignores the prevalence of forms of racism, such as cultural racism that do not take their starting point in biology. Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon, the late Sartre, and Michel Foucault, Robert Bernasconi argues for a holistic approach that integrates the concrete experience of racism faced by individuals into the study of institutional, structural, and systemic racism. Studying the interventions of such Black philosophers as Ottobah Cugoano, Anténor Firmin, and W. E. B. Du Bois, shows the value of allowing them to set the terms of the debate, instead of trying to fit them into debates shaped by other areas of philosophy. If race is indeed a social construct, then it is necessary to uncover the different forces, material as well as intellectual, that at different times shaped the various forms the concept of race has taken and the value then placed on preserving racial purity. Critical philosophy of race has a role to play in rendering both the material and psychological effects of slavery and segregation more intelligible as forms of systemic racism. When critical philosophers of race ignore the history of racism, they are in danger of being complicit with that part of society that seeks to erase that history. (shrink)

O presente artigo objetiva demonstrar como o feminismo universal foi incapaz de contemplar as demandas sociais da mulher negra. Através de análises de autoras e avaliação de índices socioeconômicos verifica-se o impacto gerado pela invisibilização das exclusões enfrentadas por mulheres na abordagem Feminista Universal.

Implicit bias training (IBT) is now frequently provided by employers, in order to raise awareness of the problems related to implicit biases, and of how to safeguard against discrimination that may result. However, as Atewologun et al (2018) have noted, there is very little systematicity in IBT, and there are many unknowns about what constitutes good IBT. One important issue concerns the tone of information provided regarding implicit bias. This paper engages this question, focusing in particular on the observation that (...) much bias training is delivered in exculpatory tone, emphasising that individuals are not to blame for possessing implicit biases. Normative guidance around IBT exhorts practitioners to adopt this strategy (Moss-Racusin et al 2014). However, existing evidence about the effects of moralized feedback about implicit bias is equivocal (Legault et al 2011; Czopp et al 2006). Through a series of studies, culminating in an experiment with a pre-registered analysis plan, we develop a paradigm for evaluating the impact of moralized feedback on participants’ implicit racial bias scores. We also conducted exploratory analyses of the impact on their moods, and behavioural intentions. Our results indicated that an exculpatory tone, rather than a blaming or neutral tone, did not make participants less resistant to changing their attitudes and behaviours. In fact, participants in the blame condition had significantly stronger explicit intentions to change future behaviour than those in the ‘no feedback’ condition (see experiment 3). These results indicate that considerations of efficacy do not support the need for implicit bias feedback to be exculpatory. We tease out the implications of these findings, and directions for future research. (shrink)

Peter Linebaugh, an acclaimed expert on eighteenth-century England, is unflinching in his ambitions for Red Round Globe Hot Burning: “This book in its quest for Edward and Catherine Despard, and in...

In recent years, postgenomic research, and the fields of epigenetics and microbiome science in particular, have described novel ways in which social processes of racialization can become embodied and result in physiological and health-related racial difference. This new conception of biosocial race has important implications for philosophical debates on the ontology of race. We argue that postgenomic research on race exhibits two key biases in the way that racial schemas are deployed. Firstly, although the ‘new biosocial race’ has been characterized (...) as social race entering into biological processes, it is only particular aspects of social race that are taken to cross the biosocial boundary, resulting in a distorted view of the social component of biosocial race. Secondly, racial categories are assumed to be stable across time and space. This assumption is epistemically limiting, as well as indicating a reliance on a fixed racial ontology. However, the causal pathways for the embodiment of social race, and the different possible modes of embodiment, that postgenomic science is uncovering themselves present a challenge for fixed or static racial ontologies. Given these tensions, we argue that the emerging picture of a shifting landscape of entanglement between the social and the biological requires us to increase the complexity of our ontologies of race, or even embrace a deflationary metaphysics of race. (shrink)

This article reviews four recently published books which help to deepen one’s understanding of the various ways white Christians (mostly in America) have often unknowingly propagated a form of Christianity that is built on a foundation of ‘whiteness’. While each book is aimed at different audiences, they collectively offer a substantive introduction to the nature of theological discourse around race and the challenges of confronting a racialised Christian mindset. Whether it is Willie Jennings’s unmasking of the white male values of (...) self-sufficiency and mastery in higher education, Miguel De La Torre’s scathing appraisal of the ways white Christians contributed to the spectacle that was the Trump presidency, Esau McCaulley’s demonstration of the valuable insights gained when the biblical text is interpreted by non-whites, or the diverse scholars gathered by Love L. Sechrest, Johnny Ramírez-Johnson and Amos Yong, it is clear that churches (and the theologians who serve them) will need to reckon with what it means to fulfil their calling in a way that faithfully attends to the concerns addressed by people from non-white backgrounds. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

As the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács noted, class has both an objective and a subjective quality: workers are reified as alienated commodities while at the same time they perceive their interests as qualitatively different from those of the capitalist who purchases their labour-power. This essay will argue that one of the most complex theorisations of the material production of working-class subjectivity emerges from Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, a second-person collective narrative of the African-American Great Migration. Wright locates African-American (...) subjectivity in the contradiction of its formation, at once trapped in the neo-feudal relations of the Jim Crow South, and brutally thrust into the matrix of Northern racialised and ghettoised industrial production. This produces for Wright acute misery, but also a proletarian revision of Du Bois’s Hegelian concept of ‘double consciousness’, as Black workers have a unique insight into the totality of the capitalist world-system. (shrink)

This essay situates the major works of W.E.B. Du Bois and some of his minor work between the 1880s and 1940 in the historical context of black people's writing about race since the eighteenth century. In offering examples of the evolution of black thinking and writing on this topic, it views Du Bois's work in the context of Moral and Ethical Philosophy (rather than the more obvious History, Sociology, and Political Economics) in order to reveal his efforts as a disruption, (...) deliberately designed to shift the discussions of race and race relations from defense to offense, which he did most explicitly and profoundly in Dusk of Dawn (1940) but had been doing much more subtly throughout his scholarly career. (shrink)

How can there be so much apparent disagreement about what race is, when there is so much agreement on the facts surrounding race? In this paper, I develop this puzzle and consider several interpretations of work in the philosophy of race to try to answer it, several ways of understanding what the metaphysics of race is doing. I consider and reject the possibility that apparent disagreement is metaphysically substantive, and I also consider and reject the view that apparent disagreement primarily (...) reflects semantic disagreements. Instead, I suggest that apparent first-order disagreement over the existence and character of race is a part of a broader, metalinguistic negotiation or conversation about how racial terms can or ought to be used, and I note a range of considerations—including semantic, pragmatic, epistemic, and ethical—that properly play a role in this discussion. (shrink)

An Artificial Intelligence algorithm trained on data that reflect racial biases may yield racially biased outputs, even if the algorithm on its own is unbiased. For example, algorithms used to schedule medical appointments in the USA predict that Black patients are at a higher risk of no-show than non-Black patients, though technically accurate given existing data that prediction results in Black patients being overwhelmingly scheduled in appointment slots that cause longer wait times than non-Black patients. This perpetuates racial inequity, in (...) this case lesser access to medical care. This gives rise to one type of Accuracy-Fairness trade-off: preserve the efficiency offered by using AI to schedule appointments or discard that efficiency in order to avoid perpetuating ethno-racial disparities. Similar trade-offs arise in a range of AI applications including others in medicine, as well as in education, judicial systems, and public security, among others. This article presents a framework for addressing such trade-offs where Machine Learning and Optimization components of the algorithm are decoupled. Applied to medical appointment scheduling, our framework articulates four approaches intervening in different ways on different components of the algorithm. Each yields specific results, in one case preserving accuracy comparable to the current state-of-the-art while eliminating the disparity. (shrink)

This article is about the potential justification for deploying some form of affirmative action (AA) in the context of healthcare, and in particular in relation to the pandemic. We call this Affirmative Action in healthcare Resource Allocation (AARA). Specifically, we aim to investigate whether the rationale and justifications for using prioritization policies based on race in education and employment apply in a healthcare setting, and in particular to the COVID-19 pandemic. We concentrate in this article on vaccines and ventilators because (...) these are both highly scarce resources in the pandemic, and there has been a need to develop policies for allocating them. However, as will become clear, the ethical considerations relating to them may diverge. We first set out two rationales for AAs and what they might entail in a healthcare setting. We then consider some disanalogies between AA and AARA, as well as the different implications of AARA for allocating ventilators as opposed to vaccines. Finally, we consider some of the practical ways in which AARA could be implemented, and conclude by responding to some key objections. (shrink)

We are women, we are men. We are refugees, single mothers, people with disabilities, and queers. We belong to social categories and they frame our actions, self-understanding, and opportunities. But what are social categories? How are they created and sustained? How does one come to belong to them? Ásta approaches these questions through analytic feminist metaphysics. Her theory of social categories centers on an answer to the question: what is it for a feature of an individual to be socially meaningful? (...) In a careful, probing investigation, she reveals how social categories are created and sustained and demonstrates their tendency to oppress through examples from current events. To this end, she offers an account of just what social construction is and how it works in a range of examples that problematize the categories of sex, gender, and race in particular. The main idea is that social categories are conferred upon people. Ásta introduces a 'conferralist' framework in order to articulate a theory of social meaning, social construction, and most importantly, of the construction of sex, gender, race, disability, and other social categories. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyze two key claims offered by recruitment AI companies in relation to the development and deployment of AI-powered HR tools: (1) recruitment AI can objectively assess candidates by removing gender and race from their systems, and (2) this removal of gender and race will make recruitment fairer, help customers attain their DEI goals, and lay the foundations for a truly meritocratic culture to thrive within an organization. We argue that these claims are misleading for four reasons: (...) First, attempts to “strip” gender and race from AI systems often misunderstand what gender and race are, casting them as isolatable attributes rather than broader systems of power. Second, the attempted outsourcing of “diversity work” to AI-powered hiring tools may unintentionally entrench cultures of inequality and discrimination by failing to address the systemic problems within organizations. Third, AI hiring tools’ supposedly neutral assessment of candidates’ traits belie the power relationship between the observer and the observed. Specifically, the racialized history of character analysis and its associated processes of classification and categorization play into longer histories of taxonomical sorting and reflect the current demands and desires of the job market, even when not explicitly conducted along the lines of gender and race. Fourth, recruitment AI tools help produce the “ideal candidate” that they supposedly identify through by constructing associations between words and people’s bodies. From these four conclusions outlined above, we offer three key recommendations to AI HR firms, their customers, and policy makers going forward. (shrink)

Sustained reflection on multiple expressions of Asian American experience directs us to the coercive logic of racial identities. Noticing this logic is critical to identifying the limitations of several strategies to resist and transcend racial injustice, including the demand for racial recognition. Rereading the Parable of the Good Samaritan as one about the perils of racial identity and then taking cues from the nonviolent practice of truth force provide a blueprint that reimagines the liberative role racial identities can play.

This essay asks: How do the realities of embodied trauma inflicted by racism interface with virtue theory? This question illuminates two lacunae in virtue theory. The first is attention to race. We argue that the contemporary academic virtue literature performs largely as a White space, failing to address virtue theory’s role in the social construction of race, ignoring the rich and vibrant resources on virtue ethics alive within the Black theological tradition that long antedates Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, and segregating (...) the emerging literature on race and virtue from the broader discourse. The second is lack of attention to embodiment. More precisely, contemporary virtue theory, informed largely by Aristotle, Aquinas, and MacIntyre, has no conceptual space to theorize the body’s role acquiring and deploying virtue and vice. To explore this nexus, we draw on racial trauma therapist Resmaa Menakem, Katie Walker Grimes, and Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited to challenge contemporary virtue theory and open new possibilities for a robustly corporate, enfleshed theological virtue ethic. (shrink)

This article is a critical race theology analysis that asserts that Catholic social teaching established in documents such as the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Populorum progressio, Caritas in veritate, and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace’s Contribution to the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance justifies reparations for the state of oppression commonly called Jim Crow, or segregation society, from the US government because it denied African Americans “truly human conditions.”.

In a previous paper, I addressed the question: Will there be races in heaven? (Placencia, 2021 ). There I argued that the answer to that question depends on one’s view of heaven and one’s account of race. After sorting out these concepts, I defended the conclusion that racial identity, but not race, is compatible with the mainstream Christian account of the afterlife. However, I left open the question of whether deflationary realist races (what I will refer to as minimalist races (...) in this chapter) are compatible with the Christian view of the afterlife. Here, I revisit this question from an Eastern Christian perspective. This tradition has a robust theology of bodies in the afterlife that can guide us toward a more substantive answer -- namely, there will be (minimalist) races in heaven. (shrink)