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 39
... status of women . " But in Western philosophy there is no ratio- nale for black subordination in particular ( as against arguments for slavery in general ) that can compare in detail and in theoretical centrality to the ra- tionale for ...
... status , personal / racial identity , epistemic reliabil- ity , existential plight , political inclusion , social metaphysics , sexual rela- tions , aesthetic worth . What is a ( racial ) " subperson " ? ( The term , of course , is a ...
... status was tugged in different directions by the dehumanizing requirements of slavery on the one hand and the ( grudging and sporadic ) white recogni- tion of the objective properties blacks possessed on the other , generating an ...
... status . So it will be a sum that is metaphysical not in the Cartesian sense but in the sense of challenging a social ontology ; not the consequent of a proof but the beginning of an affirmation of one's self - worth , one's reality as ...
... status of human beings . " 20 And the reaction to this dilemma , the characteristic moves , will neces- sarily be different . One famous solution is associated with the French colo- nial negritude movement : " I feel , therefore I am ...
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 |