Many scholars and activists seek to eliminate “race”—the word and the concept—from our vocabulary. Their claim is clear: because science has shown that racial essentialism is false and because the idea of race has proved virulent, we should do away with the concept entirely. Michael O. Hardimon criticizes this line of thinking, arguing that we must recognize the real ways in which race exists in order to revise our understanding of its significance. Rethinking Race provides a novel answer to the (...) question “What is race?” Pernicious, traditional racialism maintains that people can be judged and ranked according to innate racial features. Hardimon points out that those who would eliminate race make the mistake of associating the word only with this view. He agrees that this concept should be jettisoned, but draws a distinction with three alternative ideas: first, a stripped-down version of the ordinary concept of race that recognizes minimal physical differences between races but does not consider them significant; second, a scientific understanding of populations with shared lines of descent; and third, an acknowledgment of “socialrace” as a separate construction. Hardimon provides a language for understanding the ways in which races do and do not exist. His account is realistic in recognizing the physical features of races, as well as the existence of races in our social world. But it is deflationary in rejecting the concept of hierarchical or defining racial characteristics. Ultimately, Rethinking Race offers a philosophical basis for repudiating racism without blinding ourselves to reality. (shrink)

The ordinary concept of race is important and poorly understood. The present article seeks to address this problem by providing a general answer to the question: What is the concept of race?

This article challenges the orthodox view that there is and can be no scientifically valid concept of race applicable to human beings by presenting a candidate scientific concept of biological race. The populationist concept of race specifies that a “race” is a subdivision of Homo sapiens—a group of populations that exhibits a distinctive pattern of genetically transmitted phenotypic characters and that belongs to an endogamous biological lineage initiated by a geographically separated and reproductively isolated founding population. The viability of the (...) PRC is shown by demonstrating its capacity to withstand a wide range of objections. A common theme is that the objections turn on misconceptions of the idea of a scientific concept of race. The final section argues that the PRC will not foster racism. (shrink)

A shift in popular discourse over the last few years makes it makes it tempting to think that the answer to the question whether racism is essentially systemic is yes. My argument, however, is that there are forms of racism—things that are properly counted as instances of racism—that are distinct from and independent of systemic racism. These include ideational racism, ideological racism, racism as antipathy, and racism as prejudice and bigotry. Systemic racism does exist and is not reducible to these (...) other forms of racism. It is arguably the form of racism that should be of most concern to us, but it is not the only form that racism takes. (shrink)

I argue that culture is not essential to race by considering the strongest and most persuasive contemporary articulation of the view that culture is essential to race—that provided by Chike Jeffers I then argue for the possibility of conceiving of race without adverting to culture by presenting the minimalist conception of race I developed in Rethinking Race as an example of a conception of race that makes no reference to culture. I next show how the ancestry-related features of culture that (...) might be thought to be racial but fall outside of the minimalist race can be captured in a minimalist conception of ethnicity. I finally explain why we are better off conceiving of race in a way that does not advert to culture and conclude. (shrink)

Explication of the concept of socialrace: the concept variously refers to (1) a social group that is taken to be a racialist race, (2) the social position occupied by a particular social group that is a socialrace and (3) the system of social positions that are socialraces. Socialrace is distinguished from other more familiar forms of social construction. The sense in which socialrace counts as a race concept is explained. The advantages of the term ‘socialrace’ are discussed. The desiderata for (...) a conception of socialrace are articulated. The concept socialrace is contrasted with other similar concepts. (shrink)

The individual officers of a social institution may not be racist and consequently not blameworthy for racism. On the other hand, the individual officers of such an institution may be racist and deserve blame for their racism. This chapter focuses on the special, idealized case of pure institutional racism in which all the individual office holders who participate in E-like institutions are free of racism. The attitude-independent model of institutional racism on which racist institutions can promote racial inequality in the (...) absence of personal racism on the part of office holders, does not absolve individuals of all responsibility. The chapter discusses the specific form of institutional racism with respect to which the no-individual-is-to-blame thesis is most plausible, namely attitude-independent racism, and has just touched upon a way in which the thesis needs to be revised. (shrink)

Where exactly did Hegel go wrong on race? Moellendorf helpfully tells us that Hegel's treatment of race begins systematically in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and that he went wrong philosophically in the use of the biological category of race. This is basically correct but requires precisification. This article considers why Hegel's category of race is not unambiguously biological. Race's biological status can be problematized from the standpoint of contemporary biology and from the standpoint of Hegel's system. The textual placement (...) of Hegel's systematic discussion of race in the philosophy of spirit makes clear that Hegel conceived of race in spiritual terms. Hegel took race to be a biospiritual category. Hegel was clearly committed to the now-controversial proposition that there is such a thing as human biological race, that there is a plurality of biological human races. He regarded race as a robust natural kind. His preferred list of races includes Caucasians, Negros, Mongolian, Malaysians and Americans. One noteworthy feature of his understanding of race's physical aspect was his focus on the formation of the skull and the face. At the same time, he clearly held that there were other deeper physical differences that accounted for the spiritual differences of race. Hegel was perfectly clear that race has a spiritual as well as physical aspect. He held that that the members of racial groups essentially shared certain fundamental, heritable, moral, intellectual and cultural characteristics with one another that they did not share with members of any other race and that these differences were such as to support an objective ranking. This shows that Hegel took the category of race to be the sort of category we today would characterize as ‘racialist’. Hegel's concept of race was the racialist concept of race. (shrink)

This essay presents four ways of thinking about race. They consist of four related but distinct race concepts: the racialist concept of race, which is the traditional, pernicious, essentialist, and hierarchical concept of race; the concept of socialrace, which is the antiracist concept of race as a social construction; the minimalist concept of race, which is the deflationary concept of biological race that represents race as a matter of color, shape and geographical ancestry; and the populationist concept of race, the (...) race concept that represents races as populations, deriving from geographically separated and reproductive isolated founding populations. Taken together, the four concepts can help us better navigate our way through the murky conceptual domain of “race.”. (shrink)

The central aim of Hegel's' social philosophy (the Rechtsphilosophie) is to reconcile his contemporaries--the men and women of the nineteenth century--to the modern social world. By "the modem social world" I mean the central social institutions of that era: the family, civil society, and the state. Hegel seeks to enable his contemporaries to overcome their alienation from this world by providing them with a philosophical theory that will reveal its true nature (PR, Preface sec. 14). "The project of reconciliation" is (...) the name I have given to this enterprise. My aim in this article is to introduce Hegel's project. I shall neither attempt to present the project nor attempt to assess it. My aim is simply to explain what the project is. I begin by considering the problem the project addresses and the sort of solution it proposes, and devote the remainder of the article to an examination of the project's goal. (shrink)

Joshua Glasgow has written a wonderful book on race (Glasgow 2009). Thoughtful, clear, and provocative, it advances the discussion in significant ways. Space is limited so I hope I can be excused for restricting my comments to Glasgow’s assessment of my 2003 Journal of Philosophy analysis of the ordinary concept of race. The last thing I would want to suggest is that this exhausts the interest of his book; for that is certainly not the case. My remarks can be regarded (...) as testimony to just how stimulating his fine account is. (shrink)