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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... oppression in a way that African thought de- veloping on the home continent in the precolonial period was not . African- Americans , as such writers as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison have always pointed out , are also African ...
... oppression , by forced intercourse with the world , it is not going to occur to you that doubt about your oppressor's existence could in any way be a serious or pressing philo- sophical problem ; this idea will simply seem frivolous , a ...
... oppression —and endorsing a web of lies is an epitome of bad faith - but the nature of the lies one endorses as the racialized person who is their object will im- pede one's freedom as an agent . " 25 Thus for her , the discovery that ...
... oppression , it is a practical and politically oriented philosophy that , long before 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 ...
... oppression subordinate groups suffer , their potentially universal character , and their differential experience . Let us begin with oppression . This term is broader than exploitation ( in the technical Marxist sense ) and , as such ...
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 |