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. |
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... Marx was born , sought to interpret the world correctly so as better to change it . As Fred Hord and Jonathan Lee have suggested , " phi- losophy is here called upon to evaluate and counter the dehumanization to which people and ideas ...
... Marx . In this interpretation , Marx's appearance / reality dichotomy in Capital is a statement of the an- tipositivist , realist insistence on the necessity for distinguishing between naively spontaneous and methodologically adequate ...
... Marx gives is of an ostensibly ab- stract , nongendered , and nonracialized capitalism , so that his theoretical focus is on class - related illusions . But feminists and black nationalists can argue that actually existing sexist and ...
... Marx - based epistemological argument ... collapses into trivial pluralism . " 22 The mere fact of oppression , then , though possibly producing an open- ness to alternate views , is not enough . One must look at universality . In Marx's ...
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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 |