Yosef Washington

This paper calls for the development of two conceptions of Anti-Blackness (Global Hegemonic Anti-Blackness and Provincial Anti-Blackness). Global Hegemonic Anti-Blackness (GHAB) refers to the global networks of social/political entities that facilitate and/or profit from the exploitation of Black or African-descendant peoples. Provincial Anti-Blackness (PAB) refers to activities of a specific set of social entities within a particular country that perpetuates harm and/or exploitation of Black people. I argue that when we attend to how these two conceptions of Anti-Blackness exist, we can see how “Blackness” can be an ontologically and politically distinctive grouping even if there are heterogeneous social standings within said grouping.

This essay introduces the special issue Contemporary Issues in Black Philosophy: Pluralism in Methodological Approaches and advances a metaphilosophical argument about method in Black philosophy. We distinguish the question of what makes philosophy Black from the question of what counts as philosophy, and argue that conflating these questions produces a misleading methodological monism. Attention to the difference between substance and method shows that methodological choice must be guided by the problems under investigation. We defend a disciplined pluralism according to which methods are justified by problem-fit rather than by allegiance to a single tradition. The essays in this collection are a demonstration, not a discussion, of methodological pluralism and its benefits to philosophy.

In this paper I argue that a Bio-Social conception of “race” is a socially salient conception within the United States. This conception is “socially salient” in the sense that is demonstrative of public understanding and public use of the race concept within context of the United States and its member institutions. This conception is “Bio-Social” in the sense that a set of biological and social properties form the necessary conditions for “race” and “racial group membership.” I explain that these biological and social properties are the social interpretation of ancestral relations to geographically and culturally specified groups.