This paper aims to contribute toward coalitionbuilding by showing that, even if we try tobuild coalition around what might look like ourmost obvious common concern – reducing racism –the dominant discourse of racial politics inthe United States inhibits an understanding ofhow racism operates vis-à-vis Latino/as andAsian Americans, and thus proves more of anobstacle to coalition building than an aid. Theblack/white paradigm, which operates to governracial classifications and racial politics inthe U.S., takes race in the U.S. to consist ofonly two (...) racial groups, Black and White,with others understood in relation to one ofthese categories.I summarize and discuss the strongestcriticisms of the paradigm and then develop twofurther arguments. Together these argumentsshow that continuing to theorize race in theU.S. as operating exclusively through theblack/white paradigm is actuallydisadvantageous for all people of color in theU.S., and in many respects for whites as well(or at least for white union households and thewhite poor). (shrink)

Xenophobia is conceptually distinct from racism. Xenophobia is also distinct from nativism. Furthermore, theories of racism are largely ensconced in nationalized narratives of racism, often influenced by the black-white binary, which obscures xenophobia and shelters it from normative critiques. This paper addresses these claims, arguing for the first and last, and outlining the second. Just as philosophers have recently analyzed the concept of racism, clarifying it and pinpointing why it’s immoral and the extent of its moral harm, (...) so we will analyze xenophobia and offer a pluralist account of xenophobia, with important implications for racism. This analysis is guided by the discussion of racism in recent moral philosophy, social ontology, and research in the psychology of racism and implicit attitudes. (shrink)

As a theologian coming from Europe, a ‘postcolonial import’ into South Africa, it is my white privilege in particular that continues to queer my understanding of a social revolution on which our future, as a people, may depend. In this article, I seek to turn my personal experience of grappling with my whiteness into the source of my reflection. Drawing inspiration from fallism – a recent student movement that inscribes itself into a larger decolonial ‘struggle against the globalised system (...) of racist capitalism’ – I ponder what it could mean, in the South African context, for whiteness to fall upward (Rohr). Here, the metaphor of ‘falling upward’ as a kenosis of whiteness is considered specifically with regard to a white theologian’s (my own) attempt to open spaces that could be filled with blackness. Contribution: This auto-ethnographic essay inscribes itself into a transdisciplinary study of theology and race from both socio-cultural and religiospiritual perspectives. The author’s personal reflections, inspired by his own engagement with the fallist narratives and his ever-evolving attitude towards the blackness–whiteness binary, as experienced in the South African social and academic contexts, are shared as a means to crack open the societal and theological (notably Christian) imagination, both of which appear to suffer from a serious crisis. (shrink)

It speaks to the illogic of our public life that the slogan “All Lives Matter” has come to stand directly against “Black Lives Matter” within contemporary discourse on race. Carol Wayne White’s Black Lives and Sacred Humanity, among its other achievements, confirms the absurdity of such an opposition. White shows how historic efforts to defend and define the humanity of African Americans offer a vision in which all human lives do not simply matter but are in (...) fact sacred within nature. White’s effort to marshal elements within the black tradition to develop her notion of sacred humanity succeeds; in fact, the entailments of her arguments go further still. In addition to undermining the binary of black lives/all... (shrink)

The binary between the figure of the child and the fully human being is invoked with regularity in analyses of race, yet its centrality to the conception of race has never been fully explored. For most commentators, the figure of the child operates as a metaphoric or rhetorical trope, a non-essential strategic tool in the perpetuation of White supremacy. As I show in the following, the child/human binary does not present a contingent or merely rhetorical construction but, (...) rather, a central feature of racialization. Where Black peoples are situated as objects of violence it is often precisely because Blackness has been identified with childhood and childhood is historically identified as the archetypal site of naturalized violence and servitude. I proceed by offering a historical account of how Black peoples came to inherit the subordination and dehumanization of European childhood and how White youth were subsequently spared through their partial categorization as adults. (shrink)

The following essay examines visual representations of hurricane Katrina in popular media in order to show how photography continues to be enlisted in the production of the racial spectacle, the transformation of the plight of people of color into entertainment. The essay also analyzes how such a use of the visual serves to solidify the understanding of people of color by way of a black-white binary that does not do justice to current U.S. demographics. The essay provides (...) a glimpse into the intertwining between the visual and racial thinking. (shrink)

The article considers regional issues of the Kazakh transtoposystem. There are a number of problematic issues related to cross-border Kazakh toponymy. The article analyzes only one aspect – the status of binary names in the cross-border toposystem. The goal is to study how obvious the binary opposition is there, considering the etymology of toponyms based on semantic opposition. The toposystem of the Northern and Western regions bordering Russia was used as the empirical material for the study. According to (...) the border administrative-regional division, a number of districts of such regions of the country as North Kazakhstan, Pavlodar, Kostanay, Western Kazakhstan, Aktobe, and Atyrau border with Russia. In the article, a series of binary names along the toponyms of this cross-border zone is formed. In particular, Úlken-Kіshі (Big-Small), Aq-Qara (Black-White), Qara-Sary (Black-Yellow), Jaqsy-Jaman (Good-Bad), Jyly-Sýyq (Warm-Cold), and Ashy-Tushy (Bitter-Fresh) are analyzed. The difference between toponymic binary names and lexical antonyms is considered. We discuss the fact that the contradiction in lexical antonyms is clearly expressed, but in binary opposition along toponyms, the contradiction may not be complete. It is reported that the contradiction of toponyms is recognized only in the toponymic context, and sometimes it is even possible to form a related pair, rather than a semantic contradiction. (shrink)

Black beauty shame emerges within the Black/white binary because of the beauty values sedimented in our structure of feeling since African enslavement. This article does not start from white beauty as the ideal, but focuses on the performativity of Black beauty shame as it transforms or intensifies the meanings of parts of the body in Jamaica and its UK diaspora. Using extracts from interviews with UK Jamaican heritage women, the discussion illustrates how Black (...) beauty shame produces such intensification. First, where white beauty is iconic and reproduces the Black other as ‘ugly’, and second, where the Black ‘mixed race’ body is constructed as ‘other’ because of Black Nationalist discourses on beauty. The women’s critique of the shaming event shows that shame is undone through dis-identification as speakers draw on alternative beauty discourses to produce new beauty subjectivities. Dis-identification illustrates the transformational potential of shame as new Black beauty positionings emerge within the diaspora, drawing on beauty ideologies and models from Jamaica and thus destabilising the Black/white binary. (shrink)

Black-white, male-female — these and other markers, applied maliciously or not, enable the social dominance of one group.

2) Philosophy in an important sense has no special subject-matter which stands to it as other subject-matters stand to other special disciplines…. What is characteristic of philosophy is not a special subject-matter, but the aim of knowing one’s way around with respect to the subject-matters of all the special disciplines. [370] [BB: It is not clear how this sits with the distinction between being a researcher (in a special discipline) and being an intellectual (caring about how it all fits together). (...) For, surely, not all intellectuals are philosophers, nor vice versa. One possibility is that he thinks that our research specialty is being intellectuals. But this is not plausible: sociologists, historians, journalist-pundits, culture critics, and so on have an equal claim to that distinction. WS might be thinking of philosophers as exclusively concerned with the cognitive enterprise, allowing intellectuals more generally to worry about, e.g., politics. But this is a pre- Hegelian way of thinking about things that is very implausible. I have my own take on this (cf. “Reason, Expression, and the Philosophic Enterprise”, Ch. 4 of RiP).]. (shrink)

Spaces of Geographical Thought examines key ideas – like space and place - which inform the geographic imagination. The text: discusses the core conceptual vocabulary of human geography: agency: structure; state: society; culture: economy; space: place; black: white; man: woman; nature: culture; local: global; and time: space; explains the significance of these binaries in the constitution of geographic thought; and shows how many of these binaries have been interrogated and re-imagined in more recent geographical thinking. A consideration of (...) these binaries will define the concepts and situate students in the most current geographical arguments and debates. The text will be required reading for all modules on the philosophy of geography and on geographical theory. (shrink)

Drawing on contemporary epistemologies of ignorance, I analyze the American ideology of color blindness as a recalcitrant form of active ignorance that operates at a meta-level. I contend that the meta-ignorance involved in color blindness operates through distorting second-order attitudes about one's cognitive and affective attitudes, resulting in cognitive and affective numbness with respect to racial matters: ignorance of one's racial ignorance and insensitivity to one's racial insensitivity. I contend that the black/white binary that has dominated the (...) American racial imagination has contributed tremendously to establish and maintain meta-blindness about racial differences. I suggest that overcoming the black/white binary demands that we expand current conceptions of racial lucidity and that we go beyond the notions of double consciousness that critical race theorists have defended since Du Bois and Fanon. According to a more expansive social pluralism, lucidity with respect to racial differences requires a kaleidoscopic consciousness that does not reinscribe the black/white binary in one's racial imagination. (shrink)

Race in the United States is most often talked about in terms of black and white, sometimes as a spectrum running from whiteness to blackness. Such a conception does not map onto actual racial structures in the United States and excludes Native Americans. This article will criticize this binary, detailing a theory of race in which colonialism and racism are prior to racial formation, following Patrick Wolfe and Michael Omi and Howard Winant. In assembling this theory, this (...) article attempts to bridge philosophical critical race studies and Native American and Indigenous Peoples studies. It argues that to be a member of a race is to be in a relationship of dominance and resistance with settler colonialism. It discusses the implications of a political mode of Native race in greater detail, including how it can be differentiated from ethnicity and tribal identity, and how it might be politically useful in anti-domination solidarity. Finally, the article examines the similarities and differences between Native race as construed here and concepts of being Indigenous, suggesting that what Indigenous is at the global level, Native race may be at the local. (shrink)

In this paper, questions regarding the cultural understanding of mixed race are explored, which have the ability to complicate the accepted portrayal of race in society as a black/white binary system. Thus, the acknowledgement of something other than this binary system offers new ways of theorizing about race, particularly concerning the sociopolitical implications of mixed-race designation. This paper argues that the visually mixed-race person has a certain direct ability to challenge the binary and its racist (...) logic. Furthermore, this paper goes on to offer a unique interpretation of where power for working against a racially oppressive system lies within critical mixed-race theory. (shrink)

Over the last twenty-five years, philosophers have offered increasingly more sophisticated accounts of the nature and wrongness of racism. But very little in this literature discusses what is distinctive to anti-Asian racism. This gap exists partly because philosophy, like much of U.S. culture, has been influenced by civic narratives that center anti-black racism in ways that leave vague anti-Asian racism. We discuss this conceptual gap and its effects on understanding anti-Asian racism. In response to this problem, we offer an (...) account of anti-Asian racism not beholden to the black-white binary. In our view, xenophobia, as a form of civic ostracism, plays a distinctive role in anti-Asian racism and admits of a complexity that is worth philosophical study. We also begin an exploration of a correlated phenomenon, namely xenophilia. It has a peculiar, often pernicious, presence in anti-Asian racism and sexism, but it is morally more complex than xenophobia. (shrink)

Racism as an independent topic of investigation in philosophy has considerably developed since the 1990s, when it appeared as part of growing debates that, on the one hand, investigated the political meaning of race and, on the other, its ontology and whether it existed at all. Likewise, with the idea of racism, its broadly normative meaning is critiqued by some philosophers, while others ask how best to conceive of it and identify its immorality. There were a few early and significant (...) forays in philosophy about the nature of racism, of which three works stand out because of the way they set the terms of the debate: David Theo Goldberg's Racist Culture, Charles W. Mills’ The Racial Contract, and Jorge L.A. Garcia's “The Heart of Racism.”1 This collection reacts to the latter fork in the discussion but does so in ways that significantly touch on the former.The collection begins with Jorge L. Garcia's “Virtue Ethics in Social Theory: Defending a Volitional Analysis of Racism from Tommie Shelby's Challenges.” It is a clarification and defense of his influential volitional analysis of racism (VAR) from three prominent objections: that VAR inadequately accounts for the immorality of racism because it relies on the assumed wrongness of racism built into ordinary usage of the term ‘racist;’ that it mistakenly separates intention from belief; and that it does not fully account for the racism of some troubling mental states that cannot be traced back to a racist ill-will. Garcia's account of racism as fundamentally rooted in racist ill-will, along with Lawrence Blum's, is representative of agent-centered theories of racism. Not only do they attempt to explain individual or personal racism, but they also hold that racism in institutions, structures, or systems traces back to the racism of persons.Current accounts of structural racism, however, claim that it exists and operates independently of infection from intentionally racist persons, that the focus on racist persons cannot adequately account for how racism works in society, and that, instead, we should concentrate on structures and ideologies. Amelia Wirts sharply defends this view in her, “What does it mean to say ‘The Criminal Justice System is Racist’?” She explains how structural racism applies to America's criminal justice system and other “intermediate” (between individual and societal level) structures. Wirts argues that personal accounts of racism, and in particular Garcia's VAR, do not adequately account for the patterns of racial disparity in the criminal justice system or its disproportionate harm to black people. She advocates, instead, for a patterned view of structural racism, the patterns of which operate “as if it were designed to disproportionately harm” some racialized group. Additionally, Wirts adds that such patterns are particularly racist when they fuel racist ideological symbols, as the criminal justice system does in relation to the idea of the black criminal.Structural analyses of racism are powerfully instructive, and Alisa Bierria, in “Structural Racism Within Reason,” offers an account that takes an epistemic turn that advances our understanding of their meaning. More than the idea that personal and structural racism beget each other in continuous looping effects, and more than the view that racism is best understood as an ideology that provides the content to racist attitudes or policy proscriptions, she argues that structural racism structures reason. Drawing on the 2012 case of Marissa Alexander, who unsuccessfully tried to use Florida's Stand Your Ground Law to justify her firing a warning shot at her estranged, abusive husband to protect herself from his murderous threat, Bierra argues that structural racism extends constructed and controlling intentions onto its targets, and, as in the case she discusses, it uses those constructed and fictional intentions to justify their punishment and depriving them of equal justice.Structural analyses of racism are essential additions to the philosophical understanding of racism that have appropriately challenged the centrality of agent-centered accounts. The increasing academic focus on structural explanations, however, along with the current overuse of “systemic racism” in popular discourse, threatens to eclipse the value of accounts of agent-centered accounts. In “Is Racism Essentially Systemic?” Michael Hardimon counsels against this trend. He reminds us that racism is not essentially systemic, and that the dominance of structural explanations could obscure its other forms and even the proper understanding of structural racism. Indeed, structures once constructed might operate independently of human intention, but they are designed, initiated, and often operated by persons.After considering the direction of the current philosophical discussion about the meaning of racism and its immorality, the next set of articles expands the discussion into matters of class, xenophobia, and white nationalism. Lawrence Blum's “Race and Class Together” starts it off. Blum builds class into his analysis of racism and critiques its absence in anti-racist theory. He argues that paying attention to class is required to secure justice for the victims of racism because pursuing justice is often a matter of both. Blum contends that race and class are “normatively distinct axes of injustice” and that, depending on the question, racial injustice needs to be addressed separately. However, there are aspects of racial injustice that can only be dealt with through a class analysis and require class or combined class–race focused policies. Pointing to the fact that many of the members of groups targeted by racism (he considers blacks, Indigenous peoples, and Latinxs) share cross-class interests, which includes shared interests with some whites, which they do not share with more economically privileged members of their own groups, Blum argues that these interests should be addressed through “class-focused policies,” in a manner that will secure justice for disadvantaged racial groups.Shifting from the class-race analysis, José Jorge Mendoza, in “‘Go Back to Where You Came From!’ Racism, Xenophobia, and White Nationalism,” turns our attention toward white nationalism to examine whether it is best understood as an expression of racism or xenophobia. Although he recognizes the importance of xenophobia in white nationalism, Mendoza does not neglect its connections with racist ideas. However, he acknowledges that emphasizing the role of race in condemnations of white nationalism risks overextending the concept of race, i.e., in regards to pan-racial groups, because some members of those groups are racially identified as white. Thus, the charge of racism against white nationalism in such cases may not clearly apply. To deal with those cases, Mendoza cleverly decouples the ideas of “radicalization” and “racial formation,” and he puts forward a new concept, “racial disintegration,” to account for the operation and shifting targets of white nationalism.In the final piece, David H. Kim and I discuss xenophobia and racism in the case of “Anti-Asian Racism.” We move from general theories of racism to inquire about what is at the base of anti-Asian racism. Little is said in contemporary accounts of racism about anti-Asian racism. This is due, in part, to the high level of abstraction in those discussions but also because much of the literature takes anti-blackness as the model of racism. Our piece addresses this lacuna in a manner not beholden to the black-white binary. We discuss how the idea of anti-Asian racism is a conceptual problem in the American context dominated by that binary. We then argue that xenophobia as a form of civic ostracism, and to some extent xenophilia, play a particular role in how anti-Asian racism functions and its immorality.The pieces in this collection resonate with current events and controversies involving racism and illustrate the potential of the debate to relate to and speak those events, not just to the specialized interests of a cloistered academic conversation. Each piece demonstrates the potential for extending vital lines of debate and discussion that touches the raw nerve of the public discussion of racism. (shrink)

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex has been heralded as a canonical text of feminist theory. The book focuses on providing an account of the lived experience of woman that generates a condition of otherness. However, I contend that it falls short of being able to account for the multidimensionality of identity insofar as Beauvoir's argument rests upon the comparison between racial and gendered oppression that is understood through the black–white binary. The result of this framework is (...) the imperceptibility of identities at the crossroads between categories of race and gender. Hence, the goal of this article is to explore the margins of Beauvoir's work in order to decenter the “other” of The Second Sex and make known what is made imperceptible by its architecture, using Latina identity as an interventional guide. I conclude that given the prominence of The Second Sex in feminist theory, this shortcoming must be addressed if feminist theorists are to use it responsibly. (shrink)

Apparently, Latinos are “taking over.” 1 With news that Latinos have become the largest minority group in the United States, the public airwaves are filled with concerned voices about the impact that a non-English dominant, Catholic, non-white, largely poor population will have on “American” identity. Aside from the hysteria, Latino identity poses some authentically new questions for the standard way in which minority identities are conceptualized. Are Latinos a race, an ethnicity, or some combination? What does it mean to (...) have hybridity as the foundation of an identity, as is the case for mestizos and most Latinos? The term “Latino” signifies people from an entire continent, sub-continent, and several large islands, with diverse racial, national, ethnic, religious, and linguistic aspects to their identity. Given all this internal diversity, is “Latino” a meaningful identity at all? Latino identity is, with few exceptions, a visible identity, for all its variability, and I will argue that unless we pay close attention to the way in which Latino identity operates as a visible identity in public, social spaces, our analyses of its social meanings and political effects will be compromised. In the following three chapters, I will address three issues that Latino identity raises, issues that have political ramifications but that also require us to think about the philosophical assumptions at work behind common ideas about race and ethnicity. First, what is the relationship between Latino identity and racial categories? Second, how do Latinos fit into, and challenge, the black/white binary thinking about race that has long dominated public discourse in the U.S.? And third, what does it mean to have a mixed identity, for Latinos or for other mixed race groups? Throughout, we will have to pay close attention to the especially significant heterogeneity of this particular population. Does such diversity threaten identity or does it reveal that identity has never presumed uniformity? Only recently has the concept of pan-Latino, or generic Hispanic, identity overtaken the older identity monikers of “Cuban,” “Mexican,” “Puerto Rican,” etc. in significant national discourses across the United States.. (shrink)

A computer-based age estimation is a technique that predicts an individual's age based on visual traits derived by analyzing a 2D picture of the individual's face. Age estimation is critical for access control, e-government, and effective human–computer interaction. The other-race effect has the potential to cause techniques designed for white faces to underperform when used in a region with black faces. The outcome is the consequence of intermittent training with faces of the same race and the encoding structure (...) of the trained face images, which is based on the feature extraction technique used. This study contributes to a constructive comparison of three feature-extraction techniques, namely, local binary pattern, Gabor Wavelet, and wavelet transformation, used in the development of a genetic algorithm -artificial neural network -based age estimation system. The feature extraction techniques used are proven to produce a wealth of shape and textural information. The GA-ANN constitutes the age classifier module. The correct classification rate was chosen as the performance metrics in this study. The results demonstrated that the LBP is a more robust representation of the black face than the GW and Wavelet transformations, as evidenced by its accuracy rate of 91.76 compared to 89.41 and 84.71 achieved with the GW and Wavelet transformation age estimation systems, respectively. (shrink)

In South Africa, race has been subverted by the fall of official apartheid. Specifically, the “invisibilization” of black others is overturned and white-black relationality problematized, thereby deeply troubling whiteness. However, the logic of race continues to reverberate through social relations against a global backdrop in which this category proves remarkably adaptable as purveyor of inequality. The end of official apartheid is not the end of the power effects of the apartheid discourse. The postapartheid field is a site (...) of contestation over previously normalized hierarchies, including over gender and class. Applying a discourse analysis to texts generated in research interviews with respondents who self-identified as women, white, Afrikaans-speaking, and middle class, this study finds attempts at re-securing race. First, the strategy of “elision and misattribution” seeks to recuperate apartheid's racial binaries to bolster present-day whiteness. Second, “intersectional shifting” of social markers aims at ameliorating the secondary status of femininity through the wielding of whiteness and middle classness. These strategies are complicated by affective practices. Particularly the social emotion shame holds transformative potential, but with a caveat. Shame brings self into relation with the other and the social and can usher white subjects into an expanded conception of being human, but only if acknowledged. (shrink)

Considers the effects of the browning of America on philosophical debates over race, racism, and social justice.

Spaces of Geographical Thought examines key ideas like space and place - which inform the geographic imagination. The text: discusses the core conceptual vocabulary of human geography: agency: structure; state: society; culture: economy; space: place; black: white; man: woman; nature: culture; local: global; and time: space; explains the significance of these binaries in the constitution of geographic thought; and shows how many of these binaries have been interrogated and re-imagined in more recent geographical thinking. A consideration of these (...) binaries will define the concepts and situate students in the most current geographical arguments and debates. The text will be required reading for all modules on the philosophy of geography and on geographical theory. (shrink)

Through the analysis of an 18-month ethnography at an exotic dance club located in the Northeastern United States, I uncover how Latina exotic dancers manage their participation in exotic dance by deploying constructions of Latinidad as embodied cues. I focus on Playpen’s weekly event, “Latina Night,” to demonstrate how racialized, sexualized, and gendered constructs relative to Latinidad are produced and regulated in this exotic dance setting. Study participants draw on embodied markers to negotiate how their bodies are read. Those markers (...) include nationality-based appeals, time elapsed since migration, and the ability to express constructions of Latinidad through dance performance. I draw on intersectionality as a conceptual tool, filtered through a sensibility to Latina/o/x lives and experiences, to analyze the nuances of racialization as experienced by Latinas. This approach destabilizes the U.S. black–white racial binary and opens intersectionality to a more nuanced understanding of the production of Latinidad. By approaching racialization as an embodied phenomenon, I elucidate how bodily markers, beyond skin color, become imbued with racialized meaning and condition racialized erotic capital. No less important is how participants draw on racialized, gendered, and sexualized tropes to benefit racialized erotic capital. (shrink)

Sean Meighoo opens up the debate with the observation that recent radical antiracist and anticolonial discourses tend to focus solely on interrogating the privilege of dominant discursive terms within these discourses, like “black-white,” “colonizer-colonized.” Hereby, they fail to adequately dismantle or deconstruct the binary opposition that informs these terms. Meighoo stakes the claim that the conceptual order of race and colonialism should be dismantled or deconstructed by questioning the binary opposition of the aforementioned terms. In engaging (...) his position, Tracey Nicholls endorses that our individual messy, complex, and entangled narratives be introduced into the analytic academic space so that its dichotomies can be sundered through the narratives of other experience. Grant Silva argues that different accounts about colonization that account for the variegated axes of oppression through which the coloniality of knowledge is manifested be developed. Finally, Ernesto Rosen Velásquez directs attention to the ubiquity of coloniality in a world marked by euro-modern colonialism. In his reply, Meighoo reiterates his position that those who seek to make critical interventions in antiracist and anticolonial debates should critically engage with their own complicity with power. (shrink)

Veronica Mars offers something typically lacking in mainstream television. It confronts race, whereas similar shows have actively avoided the topic. The constant friction between classes and racial groups provides both the compelling drama and a narrative that the author, an African American, is familiar with. Veronica's description of Neptune's economic class structure introduces us to the binary or dual nature of its society. The traditional three economic classes—upper, middle, and lower—have been replaced by the “haves” and “have‐nots.” Binary (...) opposition is a common way of creating social categories or labels. All too often, however, one of the opposites is assigned a higher value and is regarded as the default, dominant, or privileged category, superior to its opposite. Neptune's racial binary is similar to that of the United States in general, but there the site of the conflict is typically white versus Hispanic rather than white versus black. (shrink)

South African philosopher Mabogo Percy More has devoted more than four decades of his work to the problem of “being-black-in-an-antiblack-world.” This article interrogates the extent to which More homogenizes the contingencies of black2 existence and black embodiment, as I feel black existentialists do; or subsumes the phenomenology of the lived experience of blackness under a “black universalist” account that does not give an adequate account of the gendered embodied experiences with antiblack racism. By “contingency” I mean (...) More’s concept of the contingency of existence, where he claims that human existence is without necessity, nor is it justified; and so people resort to attempting to justify their existence and to find meaning by trying to assume the status of God or superiority in relation to others. More argues that contingency is the source of antiblack racism, as white people attempt to justify their existence by dehumanizing black people. I claim that contingency does not only play out in the interracial domain, but is also one of the sources of intraracial sexism within the black community. My interrogation aims to extend the reach of More’s work by giving an existential-phenomenological account of “being-black-and-female-in-an-antiblack-antifemale-world.” To this end, I focus on two contingencies—the contingencies of biological sex and the contingency of physical strength—that More discusses in his sole article on intraracial sexism, “Black Attitudes: A Call for Personhood” (1981). I argue that within the black intraracial domain, these two contingencies are ascribed meaning that creates a binary, which elevates black men to superior status, while reducing black women to the inferior. (shrink)

Oyeyemi's critique of racism in the United States focuses on the visual binary between whiteness and blackness, which she shows working in multiple ways to warp and distort relationships. In the Whitman family, children are valued (or not valued) according to how their skin color registers on a scale determined by white superiority. Oyeyemi's approach to racism takes the circuitous route of retelling the fairy tale of “Little Snow White,” thus calling into her own narrative a foundational (...) text of Western cultural aesthetics which links beauty to whiteness. (Snow White, whose skin is “white as snow,” is “fairest in the land.”) Rather than narrate a new version of the fairy tale, Oyeyemi separates out its elements – magic mirror, evil stepmother, and beautiful white stepdaughter – and develops each into a new thematic configuration. My analysis focuses on the subtle ways that Oyeyemi's reshaping of mirror, evil stepmother, and innocent beautiful young girl exposes the harms to children inflicted by allegiance to a (false) structure of visible difference between white skin and black skin. (shrink)

A draft White Paper associated with Fulbright Specialist Program lectures at the University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia, in March-April 2015, concerning neo-liberal capitalist exploitation of academic research and publications.

This paper examines Quine’s web of belief metaphor and its role in his various responses to conventionalism. Distinguishing between two versions of conventionalism, one based on the under-determination of theory, the other associated with a linguistic account of necessary truth, I show how Quine plays the two versions of conventionalism against each other. Some of Quine’s reservations about conventionalism are traced back to his 1934 lectures on Carnap. Although these lectures appear to endorse Carnap’s conventionalism, in exposing Carnap’s failure to (...) provide an explanatory account of analytic truth, they in fact anticipate Quine’s later critique of conventionalism. I further argue that Quine eventually deconstructs both his own metaphor and the thesis of under-determination it serves to illustrate. This enables him to hold onto under-determination, but at the cost of depleting it of any real epistemic significance. Lastly, I explore the implications of this deconstruction for Quine’s indeterminacy of translation thesis. (shrink)

Personal identity is critical to provider–patient interactions. Patients and doctors tend to self-select, ideally forming therapeutic units that maximise the patients' benefit. Recently, however, ‘reality’ has changed. The internet and virtual worlds such as Second Life allow models of identity and provider–patient interactions that go beyond the limits of mainstream personal identity. In this paper some of the ethical implications of virtual patient–provider interactions, especially those that have to do with personal identity, are explored.

Japanese constructions of whiteness have been shaped by mainstream media and popular culture, which both reproduces and localizes the western discourse of whiteness. At the same time, the growth of the internet, social media, and online culture have exposed Japan to contentious debates in the United States (and elsewhere) concerning racial representation, race-switching, and diversity, as well as providing a platform for Japanese to reexamine contemporary Japanese racial attitudes. This chapter explores the impact that the discourse of representation and diversity (...) in the United States, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and demographic changes, particularly the growth of diasporic African communities in Japan since the 1980s, have had on Japanese perceptions of “whiteness,” “blackness,” and “Japaneseness.”. (shrink)

"Life must be something more than dilettante speculation. And religion a great deal more than mere gratification of the instinct for worship linked with the straight-teaching of irreproachable credos. Religion must be life made true, and life is action, growth, development—begun now and ending never."In September 2016, a first-year student at East Tennessee State University interrupted a Black Lives Matter protest on campus, parading in a gorilla mask. Clad in overalls and barefoot, the young man offered bananas to the (...) protesting students, heckling them.2 When set within a wider historical context, this student's actions evoke a legacy of intimidation in which perceived differences... (shrink)

Over the course of the twentieth century, nationalistic approaches to the obstacles of racism in the United States have increasingly come to be seen as the more revolutionary of the various forms of anti-racist struggle. This paper explores several historical instances of Black Nationalism and seeks to demonstrate that, despite the many points on which they might diverge, they share in common a tendency to naturalize and embrace the category of race as a basis for political struggle, and that (...) they therefore constitute an ideologically accommodating and hence essentially regressive approach to the questions of race and racism. It is suggested that a critique of the modern category of race and a political practice aimed at its denaturalization will be a necessary aspect of any attempt to overcome racial oppression and inequality. (shrink)