Naomi Zack

After World War II, American and continental philosophers addressed race in progressive ways that avoided modern science. W.E.B. Du Bois pioneered a methodology of looking for social causes of social circumstances, such as conditions of African Americans living in slums. Alain Locke and William T. Fontaine followed a more theoretical pragmatic tradition. Cornel West, whose idea of prophecy is not prediction, but criticism, has furthered Du Bois’s sense of black destiny. The analysis of experience in Husserl’s phenomenology was developed as existentialism in Franz Fanon’s focus on white supremacy and Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of French anti-Semites. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic continues to motivate analyses of racism. Black theological existentialism is egalitarian in a spiritual dimension.

A philosophical understanding of race begins with the canon. In the Republic, Socrates proposed telling youth that they are born with traits of leaders, soldiers, or workers. Aristotle accepted slavery as natural and described enslaved Asians as lacking in spirit. Saint Paul and Saint Aquinas accepted slavery in this world. John Locke reserved slavery for captives taken in a just war. Hume said that nonwhites, especially Africans, are inferior to whites. Kant posited racial essences as determining moral worth and intellectual capabilities. Hegel posited geography as determining human difference and called Africa “the land of childhood.” Nietzsche assumed racial hierarchy and proposed a new blonde ruling race. John Stuart Mill reserved liberty for mature individuals and societies advanced in civilization.

Vulnerable groups, from contemporary homeless people to IVF embryos may fall between the cracks of otherwise good social values, such as government welfare programs and individual autonomy. These present and slow disasters are in principle no different from more immediate catastrophes resulting from natural events or wars that harm civilians. The failure to respond with indignation and demands for change constitutes apathy, which is also an absence of deontology. We begin with concrete examples of social apathy, in Part 1. Our examples are homelessness and IVF, neither of which are usually considered disasters but both of which are in fact ongoing disasters within normal society. Part 2. is a discussion of theoretical and practical deontology that is lacking in these examples.

Racial essentialism or the idea of unchanging racial substances that support human social hierarchy, was introduced into philosophy by David Hume and expanded upon by Immanuel Kant. These strong influences continued into W. E. B. Du Bois’ moral and spiritual idea of a black race, as a destiny to be fulfilled past a world of racism and inequality. In the twenty-first century, »the race debates« between »eliminativists« and »retentionists« swirl around the lack of independent biological scientific foundation for physical human races and the ongoing importance of race as a social ordering principle and source of identity. Analyses of the idea of race are of philosophical concern for historical and conceptual reasons, as well as ongoing issues of contemporary identity and social injustice.

Written in an engaging narrative style these philosophical investigations undermine racist hierarchies along with false natualistic conceptions of the meanings of race and universalistic understandings of gender, by considering whiteness as it shapes and is infused by gender, class, sexuality, and culture. Central to this project are questions about how it is that culture and the state create such a wide range of different people who understand themselves as white. The essays collected here discuss how one learns to be a good white Southern woman, what it means to pass as white, and whether there really is a dilemma that accompanies white privilege.

I describe dynamic teaching to adult, mainly immigrant students, who are new to philosophy and often are college “firsts.” Adult students have family, financial, and work obligations, whereas standard students are leisured outside of class and approach philosophy as consumers. I teach from assigned texts, dismissing as a conceit of philosophers that philosophical questions arise from real life experience. My students are intensely focused on their grades, frugal with their expenditure of academic effort, and prone to submit all of their coursework at the end of the semester. A syllabus requiring weekly assignments with citations curtails that. For immigrant students, who value their college degree as entry to the American dream, the hard work usually ascribed to them is, here, academic work. Learning to do philosophy in this way can result in enduring meta-skills of time management, focused reading, thinking, and group participation that carry over to other subjects and real life.

Philosophy of Race: An Introduction provides plainly written access to a new subfield that has been in the background of philosophy since Plato and Aristotle. The second edition is updated to include contemporary developments such as digital racisms, metaphysical othering and metaphysical racism, and the rise of populist movements. Its focus has also been expanded to address non-white racial groups in the Americas, Europe, and beyond, such as the Roma and Uighur people. Part I provides an overview of ideas of race and ethnicity in the philosophical canon, egalitarian traditions, race in biology, and race in American and Continental Philosophy. Part II addresses race as it operates in life through colonialism and development, social constructions and institutions, racism, political philosophy, gender, and populist movements. This book constructs an outline that will serve as a resource for students, nonspecialists, and general readers in thinking, talking, and writing about philosophy of race.

In memoriam and ongoing engagement, I begin with my earlier critical interpretation and a reinterpretation that shows how Mills was prescient, given the recrudescence of white supremacy now daily evident in the United States. This leads to an historical analysis of the racial contract as the racist contract and of the racist contract as the racist compact. The racist compact endures in society, outside of government, but protected by democracy. This creates backlash and obstruction to progress that progressives often fail to predict. Influenced by Mills and through a shift in his emphases, I propose humanitarianism. Global ideas of humanitarianism bypass nonwhite racial identities are more general than them, and they bypass the white supremacist racial conceptual scheme of hierarchical races.

George Yancy’s existential analyses of Black life in anti‐Black and anti‐intellectual US society have been evocative and magisterial. The different parts of his Across Black Spaces both reprise his earlier work and take it further with new notes of concern. I suggest that COVID‐19 is metaphysical, that Yancy’s work is uniquely important for studies of race in the United States and as an intervention in our collective intellectuality. However, I suggest that we might move discussions of race ahead by considering the intransigent nature of White racial status. (I begin and end this symposial review with discussion of my own existential situation.)

I use Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man to consider the requirements of existentialism to be relevant to racialized experience. Black existentialism is distinguished from white existentialism by its focus on anti-black racism. However, black existentialism is similar to white existentialism in its moral requirement that agents take responsibility so as to be in good faith. Ralph Ellison's invisible man displays good faith at the end of the novel by assuming responsibility for his particular situation. The idiosyncratic development of the novel can be interpreted as an example of the ways in which existentialist values ought to be instantiated through unique individual experience. However, blackness, or any racial identity, is not itself an existential structure because it is not universal. Rather, existentialist requirements for good faith can be applied to racialized situations by both whites and blacks.

Philosophy of Race: An Introduction provides plainly written access to a new subfield that has been in the background of philosophy since Plato and Aristotle. Part I provides an overview of ideas of race and ethnicity in the philosophical canon, egalitarian traditions, race in biology, and race in American and Continental Philosophy. Part II addresses race as it operates in life through colonialism and development, social constructions and institutions, racism, political philosophy, and gender. This book constructs an outline that will serve as a resource for students, nonspecialists, and general readers in thinking, talking, and writing about philosophy of race.

Many are already familiar with the idea of intersectionality. Intersection Theory can be conceived as encompassing other progressive theories, such as Philosophy of Race and Feminism. In Philosophy of Race, the ultimate explanatory concept is race; in Feminism, the ultimate explanatory term is gender. This discrepancy has given rise to Black Feminism. Intersection Theory can also be contextualized and expanded to include more detailed intersections when there is inequality within intersected groups. But, intersectionality does yet address unpredictable violence, either against blacks or normally advantaged groups, such as United States Jews. For such cases, it is useful to posit a new intersectional factor of regressive violence, to account for counter-revolutionary response to decades of progress for minorities. Overall, the flexibility of Intersection Theory allows for creative analysis. However, not all intersections yield politically viable identities and those that would might require governmental recognition of group rights.

Injustice theory better serves the oppressed than theories of justice or ideal theory. Humanitarian injustice, political injustice, and legal injustice are distinguished by the rules they violate. Not all who claim political injustice have valid historical grounds, which include past oppression and its legacy. Social class, including culture as well as money, helps explain competing claims of political injustice better than racial identities. Claims of political injustice by the White Mass Recently Politicized (WMRP) are not valid given the history of race relations in the United States. The WMRP’s substitution of white racial identity for class identity may obstruct their opportunities for upward socioeconomic mobility. Their current billionaire leaders are not organic leaders and they stoke racism because it is emotionally useful for getting votes. But too much emphasis on racist history by nonwhites can result in a collective Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that also obstructs progress. The problems of the WMRP may be their own responsibility, in ways still unexplored.

Political philosophers have traditionally focused on justice and regarded equality as an ideal despite its lack of factual support; normative universal human equality is a new, twentieth-century regulative moral construct. The theoretical focus on justice overlooks what most people care about in reality—injustice. In modern democratic society, formal or legal equality now co-exists with real inequality. One reason is that justice is not applied to all groups in society and applicative justice––applying justice to those who don’t now receive it––is a remedy. But injustice theory also includes other forms of injustice such as legal, humanitarian, and injustice without blame or responsibility.

Disaster has a triple violence: the literal event; inequality in rescue efforts; deprivation and coercion prior to physical disaster. Globally, the poor are the most vulnerable in disaster, but there are different degrees of poverty. Although Chile suffered a far more severe earthquake than Haiti, in 2010, the developed infrastructure of Chile allowed for greater resilience. The extreme poverty of Haiti impeded the implementation of humanitarian assistance pledged in the billions. In New Orleans, the exiled poor left behind usable real estate that represented an opportunity for disaster capitalists. The exploitation of the poor in this case is less classic exploitation than depredation. The prevention of depredation will require study, laws prohibiting disaster capitalism, and further emphasis on disaster preparation.