Shannon Sullivan

This chapter argues that given affect and emotion’s importance both to the operation of unconscious habit and to a non-reductive, psychologically complex account of human physiology, feminist philosophy and critical philosophy of race need an account of affect and emotion as thoroughly somatic, not something “mental” or extra-biological, layered on top of the body. They also need an account of human physiology that appreciates how emotion and affect are interpersonal, social, and can be transactionally transmitted between people. Developing that account, Chapter 1 takes the hips and pelvis as a case study, using an example of tight pelvic and hamstring muscles to argue for the transactional physiology of affect and emotion. Setting the stage for subsequent chapters, “The Hips” draws on William James to develop an account of the affective body as the psychosomatic substrate from which biologically unconscious habits develop.

Beginning with the experience of a white woman's stomach seizing up in fear of a black man, this essay examines some of the ethical and epistemological issues connected to white ignorance. In conversation with Charles Mills on the epistemology of ignorance, I argue that white ignorance primarily operates physiologically, not cognitively. Drawing critically from psychology, neurocardiology, and other medical sciences, I examine some of the biological effects of racism on white people's stomachs and hearts. I argue for a nonideal medical theory focused on improving wellness in a society that systematically has damaged the health of people of color. The essay concludes that to be fully successful, critical philosophy of race must examine not just the financial, legal, political, and other forms of racism, but also its biological and physiological operations

This chapter examines the human enteric nervous system to discern some of the physiological effects of sexism, sexual abuse, and male privilege. It argues that to understand the gut, we must appreciate the affective relationship of the entire digestive tract with both itself and the pelvic floor. Examining the body’s digestive tube from the throat to the cloaca—the phylogenetic common origin of the pelvic floor’s separate urinary, genital, and anal tracts—Chapter 2 develops cloacal thinking, which treats the gut and pelvic floor as psychosomatically integrated. Cloacal thinking blurs without erasing boundaries between the function and substance of the digestive tract’s “parts,” refusing to consider them as isolated from either each other or from the “outside” world. It also can help us appreciate gut functioning as transgenerational. The gut’s particular relationship with the world can result in a person’s physiologically passing the harmful effects of sexism and sexual abuse to her offspring.

This chapter examines non-genetic, psychophysiological inheritance across generational lines in the context of white domination. Focusing on the effects of racism in black bodies, this chapter draws on the field of epigenetics to show how people of color can biologically inherit the deleterious effects of racism. Examining disparities in preterm birth rates between African American and white women, Chapter 3 details how transgenerational racial health disparities are in fact racist health disparities that can be manifest physiologically, helping constitute the chemicals, hormones, cells, and fibers of the human body. Epigenetics helps demonstrate how racism can have durable effects on the biological constitution of human beings that are not limited to the specific person who is the target of racism, but instead extend to that person’s children and grandchildren. In this way, the field of epigenetics can help philosophers and others understand the transgenerational biological impact of social forces such as racism.

"[A] lucid discussion of race that does not sell out the black experience." —Tommy Lott, author of The Invention of Race Revealing Whiteness explores how white privilege operates as an unseen, invisible, and unquestioned norm in society today. In this personal and selfsearching book, Shannon Sullivan interrogates her own whiteness and how being white has affected her. By looking closely at the subtleties of white domination, she issues a call for other white people to own up to their unspoken privilege and confront environments that condone or perpetuate it. Sullivan’s theorizing about race and privilege draws on American pragmatism, psychology, race theory, and feminist thought. As it articulates a way to live beyond the barriers that white privilege has created, this book offers readers a clear and honest confrontation with a trenchant and vexing concern

: In my response to the comments of Vincent Colapietro, Charlene Seigfried, and Gail Weiss on Living Across and Through Skins (Sullivan 2001), I explain pragmatist feminism as an ecological ontology that understands bodies and environments as dynamically co-constitutive. I then discuss the relationship of pragmatist feminism to phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Nietzschean genealogy, and Darwinian evolutionary theory. Some of the specific concepts I examine include the anonymous body, the bodying organism, truth as transactional flourishing, and the preservation of racial and ethnic categories

This chapter introduces the book by arguing that feminist and critical philosophy of race need to engage more robustly with the medical and biological sciences. It explains physiological habits as transactional, that is, as co-constituted in a dynamic relationship with the social-political world. It also argues that both race and sex/gender are biological, but not in the pre-critical sense of static, essential categories. Rather, they are biological in the critical, dynamic way in which they become biological through the embodiment of racial inequalities. As the book demonstrates, sexism and racism have put down some of their toughest roots in the physiological habits of human bodies, and thus it is there that feminist philosophy and critical philosophy of race also must work.

The concluding chapter explores how the unjust physiological effects of racism and sexism might be countered as part of feminist and critical race movements for social justice. Social-political change can result in physiological transformation, and this change can take place in a number of ways. Most important are institutional changes. In addition, however, physiological changes can take place on a personal, individual level, and those transformations can range from greater to lesser involvement of conscious awareness of physiological states. In particular, this chapter focuses on transformative methods on the individual level that work directly with biologically unconscious habits, rather than detouring through conscious thought. Developing the notion of a physiological therapy that does not prioritize bringing unconscious habits to conscious awareness, the book’s conclusion proposes a double-barreled approach of working for institutional change and transforming biologically unconscious habits as a response to the physiological effects of racism and sexism.

While Sigmund Freud and Maurice Merleau‐Ponty both acknowledge the role that spatiality plays in human life, neither pays any explicit attention to the intersections of race and space. It is Franz Fanon who uses psychoanalysis and phenomenology to provide an account of how the psychical and lived bodily existence of black people is racially constituted by a racist world. More precisely, as I argue in this paper, Fanon's work demonstrates how psychical and bodily spatiality cannot be adequately understood apart from the environing space of the social world. For Fanon, body, psyche, and world mutually influence and constitute each other. In a raced and racist world, therefore, the lived bodily experience and the unconscious of human beings will be racially and racist‐ly constituted as well. This will show you how in psychoanalysis we take spatial ways of looking at things seriously. Sigmund Freud1 Sigmund Freud, “The Question of Lay Analysis,” in volume 20 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1959), 195. Everything throws us back on to the organic relations between subject and space, to that gearing of the subject onto his world which is the origin of space. Maurice Merleau‐Ponty2 Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 1962), 251. Hence we are driven from the individual back to the social structure. If there is a [neurotic] taint, it lies not in the “soul” of the individual but rather in that of the environment. Franz Fanon3 Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 213.

In my response to the comments of Vincent Colapietro, Charlene Seigfried, and Gail Weiss on Living Across and Through Skins , I explain pragmatist feminism as an ecological ontology that understands bodies and environments as dynamically co-constitutive. I then discuss the relationship of pragmatist feminism to phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Nietzschean genealogy, and Darwinian evolutionary theory. Some of the specific concepts I examine include the anonymous body, the bodying organism, truth as transactional flourishing, and the preservation of racial and ethnic categories

In the twenty-first century, 70.6 percent of Americans self-identify as Christians,1 58 percent of them still segregate themselves by race on Sunday mornings, and white Protestants make up the majority of this 58 percent.2 These facts belie the claim, popularized after Barack Obama's 2008 presidential election, that America is living in a postracial society3 And yet, the role played by religion in white people's lived experiences of race, racism, and white class privilege in the United States tends to be neglected by philosophers and religious studies scholars, except perhaps when considering white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.4 Contemporary philosophy is secular in a way that generally excludes and...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On the Need for a New Ethos of White AntiracismShannon SullivanWhite people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.—James Baldwin, The Fire Next TimeIn his classic manifesto on race, The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin passionately urges black people not to retaliate against white people by attempting to debase or dominate them in return. The reason is that doing so would harm black people most of all. As Baldwin (1963, 113) assures his readers,I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. I think I know—we see it around us every day—the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads.... I would not like to see Negroes ever arrive at so wretched a condition.Likewise, when Martin Luther King Jr., urged his black church members to love their white enemies rather than return their racial hate, he did so because he believed that “hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the [End Page 21] individual who hates” (King 1957). While Baldwin was an avowed atheist and King a Christian minister, both warned of the devastating effects of white racism on “the souls of white folk,” and they pleaded and preached that black people should not stoop to white people’s debased level.1 Out of all the damage that white racism has done to African Americans and other people of color, the most damaging of all would be for it to turn them into the debilitated, deplorable people that white folk generally are.We might say that on Baldwin’s (and perhaps also King’s) view, white people are the truly “wretched of the earth” (Fanon 1965). It has been argued that white racism has cost white people their capability for intimacy, their affective lives, their authenticity, their sense of connection to other people, and their spiritual selves (Segrest 2001, 65). These claims are not an attempt to trump or erase the enormous physical, psychological, economic, spiritual, and other types of pain that white people have caused people of color around the world. They instead are a recognition that white people’s attempts to gain material riches and political power through the domination of people of color have impoverished and depleted their own souls. White people qua white are ill in that their racial habits largely have been built out of greed, hatred, jealousy, fear, and cruelty. Their psychosomatic health has suffered and continues to suffer because of their toxic racial identities.So much the worse for white people, we might think. But although understandable, this response would be misguided since white people’s psychosomatic depletion has implications for the well-being of others. Put succinctly, white people’s unhealthiness helps fuel their abuse and domination of people of color. It thus matters to struggles for racial justice whether white people are psychosomatically healthy and strong. It matters which affects, emotions, and passions fund white people’s actions in general, and their work for racial justice in particular. In this paper, I will draw from Friedrich Nietzsche, Teresa Brennan, and other scholars to explain the ontological and power-full aspects of affect, touching briefly on the toxicity of white guilt and shame and focusing especially on the healthiness of what Nietzsche calls a bestowing self-love. I will argue that in the context of white people’s contributions to racial justice movements, a positive effect of their bestowing self-love is that white people will be more likely and better able to clean up their own house...