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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... slavery , colonialism , settlement - brings race into existence as a global social reality , with the single most important conceptual division historically being that between " whites " and " nonwhites . " Those termed white have ...
... slavery in general ) that can compare in detail and in theoretical centrality to the ra- tionale for female ... slavery in Western cul- ture : " [ N ] o protest against the traditional theory [ of slavery ] emerged from the great ...
... slavery , which linked biological phenotype to social subordination , and which is chronologically located in the modern epoch , ironically coincident with the emergence of liberalism's proclamation of universal human equality — are not ...
... slavery and its aftermath barely appear.11 The only slavery Rawls mentions is that of antiquity , while Nozick's thoughts on the possible need for rectificatory reparations occupy a few sentences and an endnote reference . So the focus ...
... slavery and its aftermath ) : that white racism so structured the world as to have negative ramifications for every sphere of black life— juridical standing , moral status , personal / racial identity , epistemic reliabil- ity ...
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 |