On Biologising Racism

British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (forthcoming)
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Abstract

To biologise racism is to treat racism as a neurological phenomenon susceptible to biochemical intervention. In 'Race on the Brain: What Implicit Bias Gets Wrong About the Struggle for Racial Injustice', Kahn (2018) critiques cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists for framing racism in a way that tends to biologise racism, which he argues draws attention and resources away from non-individualistic solutions to racial inequality. In this paper I argue the psychological sciences can accommodate several of Kahn’s criticisms by adopting a situated approach to cognition, where we take environmental features as integral to the cognitive processes that manifest racial bias.

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Raamy Majeed
University of Manchester

References found in this work

Scaffoldings of the affective mind.Giovanna Colombetti & Joel Krueger - 2015 - Philosophical Psychology 28 (8):1157-1176.
How to situate cognition: Letting nature take its course.Robert A. Wilson & Andy Clark - 2009 - In Murat Aydede & P. Robbins (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 55--77.

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