Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race"This is an important collection. Its organizing theme is that by analyzing the metaphysics of race-creating we can understand the importance of political analyses of the racial state. This claim is vital not only for understanding of contemporary racial problems, but also for enriching our understanding of philosophical anthropology." Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience. Ralph Ellison's metaphor of black invisibility has special relevance to philosophy, whose demographic and conceptual "whiteness" has long been a source of wonder and complaint to racial minorities. Mills points out the absence of any philosophical narrative theorizing and detailing race's centrality to the recent history of the West, such as feminists have articulated for gender domination. European expansionism in its various forms, Mills contends, generates a social ontology of race that warrants philosophical attention. Through expropriation, settlement, slavery, and colonialism, race comes into existence as simultaneously real and unreal: ontological without being biological, metaphysical without being physical, existential without being essential, shaping one's being without being in one's shape. His essays explore the contrasting sums of a white and black modernity, examine standpoint epistemology and the metaphysics of racial identity, look at black-Jewish relations and racial conspiracy theories, map the workings of a white-supremacist polity and the contours of a racist moral consciousness, and analyze the presuppositions of Frederick Douglass's famous July 4 prognosis for black political inclusion. Collectively they demonstrate what exciting new philosophical terrain can be opened up once the color line in western philosophy is made visible and addressed. |
From inside the book
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... Jewish relations in the city. The lecture I gave there, “Dark Ontologies,” introduces the idea of white supremacy as a system both local and global. I argue that this idea should play in critical race theory the same role that class ...
... Jews , and White Supremacy , 67 Revisionist Ontologies : Theorizing White Supremacy , 97 The Racial Polity , 119 5 6 7 White Right : The Idea of a Herrenvolk Ethics , 139 8 Whose Fourth of July ? Frederick Douglass and " Original Intent ...
... Jews, and White Supremacy” first appeared as a chapter in Autonomy and Community: Readings in Contemporary Kantian Social Philosophy, edited by Jane Kneller and Sidney Axinn (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998). “Revisionist Ontologies ...
... Jewish relations in the city . The lecture I gave there , " Dark Ontologies , " introduces the idea of white supremacy as a system both local and global . I argue that this idea should play in critical race theory the same role that ...
... Jews , and White Su- premacy " was given as a public lecture . My appreciation to Frank Cunning- ham and Wayne Sumner , in particular . Brian Meeks , Folke Lindahl , and Ru- pert Lewis were the main forces behind the political theory ...
Contents
| xi | |
| 21 | |
But What Are You Really? The Metaphysics of Race | 41 |
Blacks Jews and White Supremacy | 67 |
Theorizing White Supremacy | 97 |
The Racial Polity | 119 |
The Idea of a Herrenvolk Ethics | 139 |
Whose Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass | 167 |
Notes | 201 |
Index | 235 |