Talhah Mustafa

This dissertation will be divided into three papers that in some way considers the concept of racial powers. The concept of racial power is under-researched and presupposed in the Philosophy of Race literature. Many arguments in this field seem premature without a general understanding of racial powers. The first paper fills that gap by introducing and defending the view that racial powers are possessed in virtue of one’s race or perceived race.In the second paper, I consider Chike Jeffers’ cultural constructionist account of race. The nature of race is complex, requiring nuanced consideration. Chike Jeffers’ cultural constructionist may seem intuitive but, as I will show, it faces three critical issues: (1) it unnecessarily splits races, (2) it has a demarcation problem, and (3) it creates outliers who may become race-less or culture-less. I argue that cultural constructionism must be considered alongside sociopolitical constructionism to avoid these issues.In the third and final paper of the dissertation, I consider the key role hierarchies play in racial categories. Social constructionists argue that race would not exist without hierarchical arrangement. However, there is another hierarchy that is often overlooked. This paper examines the other hierarchy and explores whether race could disappear if all racial categories were hierarchically equal on all hierarchies.Advisor: Jennifer McKitrick.

The nature of race is a complicated discipline. There is a plethora of nuanced details that must be considered and should those nuanced details not be considered, the account being advanced might not hold. Chike Jeffers’s cultural constructionist account may seem attractive on the surface due to its intuitive nature, but as this article argues, does not hold when we begin to unpack it. The main issue with Jeffers’s cultural constructionist account of race is that it is not clear what he means by “culture.” There is a problem of ambiguity being smuggled in and Jeffers needs to address it. This article shows where that ambiguity problem is and how it specifically affects his account. It is argued that it is not clear what guiding features demarcate cultural groups.