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
Results 1-5 of 44
... one's wife and saving the brilliant cancer researcher , between a morality of personal commitment and a morality of abstract welfare ; the cognitive possibility that one is actually a brain in a vat being electronically fed a false ...
... one's liberal commitment to bringing about a color - blind soci- ety by acting as if it already exists , not seeing race at all , and congratulating oneself on one's lack of vision . The response must be , then , that if this foundation ...
... one's being without being in one's shape . But a discipline that conceives of itself as seeking out the most general truths about human beings may find it difficult to see any significance in is- sues centered on race . For philosophers ...
... one's being and consciousness . And this recognition , I suggest , enables us to answer the argument that the very abstractness of philosophy is proof of its immunity to cultural or racial bias , that philosophy could not possibly have ...
... slave , as an aborigine , as one of the colo- nized , one may actually have been ideologically fed a false picture of one's history and reality .... Blackness Visible can be seen as a companion volume to Preface xvii.
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 |