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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... of my thinking . " Non - Cartesian Sums " is a reflection on my experience in teaching my first course in African - American philosophy and having to work out the distinc- tive features of such a philosophy . By drawing a Preface xv.
... course in African - American philosophy . In a sense , that course led to the present book , of which this is , appropriately , the first chapter . The course forced me to think more systematically about the issue of philosophy and race ...
... course describing the logic of di- fferent moral ideals , for example , without ever mentioning that all of them were systematically violated for blacks . So it is not merely that the ideal was not always attained but that , more ...
... course and the problem of finding an organizing principle for it . Obviously , African - American philosophy comprises not just the philosophical writings of black people , because then any article — on the Gettier problem , on ...
... course , comes modern epistemology , with the standard moves we all know , the challenges of skepticism , the danger of degeneration into solipsism , the idea of being enclosed in our own possibly unreliable per- ceptions , the question ...
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 |