Beyond the pale: A pragmatist approach to whiteness studies
Philosophy and Social Criticism 31 (3):267-292 (2005)
| Abstract | The recent growth of whiteness studies has brought whiteness under increasing scrutiny as a racial category that is both constructed and morally problematic. Two approaches dominate this relatively new discourse on the proper approach to whiteness. The first approach is eliminativism , which starts from the insight that the discursive categories of race, including whiteness, lack the biological ground that Enlightenment era theorists thought they had, and therefore calls for the elimination of the idea of race. The other, more heterogeneous, approach is that of the critical conservationists who agree with the general spirit of the eliminativists (namely that the idea of whiteness lacks a biological referent) but for various reasons do not think that racial categories should be eliminated. This article suggests an alternative to these two models of whiteness studies. The alternative is grounded in the pragmatism of W. E. B. Du Bois and John Dewey. It reconciles the two dominant approaches by showing how white folk can develop a determinate, historical critique of whiteness. The pragmatist method advocated here fragments whiteness into more authentic and liberatory cultural categories that recognize the unwarranted privileges associated with whiteness and takes action to relinquish them. Key Words: critical conservationism • John Dewey • W. E. B. Du Bois • eliminativism • Terrance MacMullan • pragmatism • race • whiteness • Naomi Zack. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,705 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesLucius T. Outlaw Jr (2004). Rehabilitate Racial Whiteness? In George Yancy (ed.), What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. Routledge.
I. I. I. McClendon (2004). On the Nature of Whiteness and the Ontology of Race: Toward a Dialectical Materialist Analysis. In George Yancy (ed.), What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. Routledge.
Amanda E. Lewis (2004). What Group?" Studying Whites and Whiteness in the Era of "Color-Blindness. Sociological Theory 22 (4):623-646.
Alison Bailey & Jacquelyn N. Zita (2007). The Reproduction of Whiteness: Race and the Regulation of the Gendered Body. Hypatia 22 (2):vii-xv.
Clevis Headley (2004). Deligitimizing the Normativity of "Whiteness": A Critical Africana Philosophical Study of the Metaphoricity of "Whiteness". In George Yancy (ed.), What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. Routledge.
David S. Owen (2007). Towards a Critical Theory of Whiteness. Philosophy and Social Criticism 33 (2):203-222.
Jami L. Anderson (2002). The White Closet. Social Philosophy Today 18:97-107.
Shannon Sullivan (2008). Whiteness as Wise Provincialism: Royce and the Rehabilitation of a Racial Category. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 44 (2):pp. 236-262.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads18 ( #67,622 of 549,533 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,397 of 549,533 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
