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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... problems faced by those categorized as persons and those categorized as subpersons will be radically different. One can no longer speak with quite such assurance of the problems of philosophy; rather, these are problems for particular ...
... problems posed by the fate of slaves could more readily be ignored , dealt with by not saying anything about them . As David Brion Davis observes in his book on slavery in Western cul- ture : " [ N ] o protest against the traditional ...
... problems ; or when it is about real problems , the emphases are in the wrong places ; or crucial facts are omitted , making the whole discussion pointless ; or the abstractness is really a sham for what we all know but are not allowed ...
... 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 counterfactuals , on ...
... problems that this individual faces ? Is the problem global doubt ? Not at all ; such a doubt would never be possible , because the whole point of subordinate black ex- perience , or the general experience of oppressed groups , is that ...
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 |