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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... person- hood uncontested , insofar as their culture and cognitions are unhesitat- ingly respected , insofar as their moral prescriptions take for granted an al- ready achieved full citizenship and a history of freedom - insofar , that ...
... personhood , " or the lack of it , could provide an ingress to this universe , and that I would work with the concept of a " subperson " as my central organizing notion . This strategy arguably captures the defining feature of the ...
... personhood for granted and thus excludes the differential experience of those who have ceaselessly had to fight to have their personhood recognized in the first place . Without even recognizing that it is doing so , Western philosophy ...
... personhood , a personhood that could generally be taken for granted by whites , so that blacks have had to see these theories from a location outside their purview . Simply proceeding as before , but now with the formalistic 14 ...
... personhood " and " respect " as crucial moral concepts.29 I paired this excerpt with Mark Twain's famous exchange between Tom Sawyer's Aunt Sally and Huckleberry Finn ( whom she mistakes for Tom ) . When she asks whether anybody was ...
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 |