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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... abstract welfare ; the cognitive possibility that one is actually a brain in a vat being electronically fed a false picture of one's history and reality . And one gets a template , ac- cordingly , of what the proper concerns of ...
... abstract and all - encompassing categories . For feminists , this line of argument is familiar . In the case of gender , it has famously come to be identified as the “ just add women and stir " ap- proach . The assumption is that it is ...
... abstract away from history and social process to get at ostensibly necessary and universal truths about people qua people , the deep eternali- ties of the human condition . On the other hand , in circles sympathetic to the notion of a ...
... abstract persons investigating and prescribing for the world . For insofar as these persons are conceived of as having their person- hood uncontested , insofar as their culture and cognitions are unhesitat- ingly respected , insofar as ...
... abstracts away from what has been the central feature of the lives of Africans transported against their will to the Americas : the denial of black humanity and the reactive , defiant asser- tion of it . Secure in the uncontested sum of ...
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 |