Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy

440 Book Reviews Pragmatism and the Problem of Race Bill E. Lawson and Donald F. Koch, editors Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004 239 pp. Pragmatism, from its very beginning, has made important contributions to our understanding of race and racism. Arguments against metaphysical absolutism, social groups as ontologically objective entities, and value bigotry were present in the formative works of William James, John Dewey, Jane Addams and Alain L. Locke. Locke's 1915-16 lectures on race, Race Contacts, promoting the radical thesis that race was a social construction and not a defensible biological category nor a social category that invariably caused special racial behavior, was matched in its radical character for the times only by Hull House's promotion of anti-lynching crusades. It was Ida B. WellsBarnett that printed anti-lynching articles at Jane Addams' Hull House in Chicago when black women and men could not vote. Pragmatists offered antiracist arguments and lived experiences against others in a society that was saturated by racism. In addition, competing views regarding the nature of values often distinguished approaches among pragmatists about race and racism. Whether it was Dewey's discussion of racism as misguided taste or Addams' and WellsBarnett 's focus on power and stereotypes, what values were important distinguishes competing approaches within pragmatism. Locke's doctoral dissertation, for example, written under the direction of Ralph B. Perry, William James' first major biographer, argued for a pragmatist theory of value, explicitly different from the value theory promoted by Dewey, Perry, Santayana and others, favoring a conception of valuation that held values are utterly underdetermined and incapable of being captured by the logical schemes early pragmatists often promoted. For Locke, the underdetermined character of race was analogous to the underdetermined character of valuation. These were, at the formative stages of pragmatism's development, a few of the differences between pragmatists and others as well as among pragmatists about the nature of race and racism. Pragmatism and the Problem of Race offers eleven original interpretive articles primarily on W.E.B. Du Bois's and John Dewey's great contributions to controversial conceptions of race and racism, several offering original approaches, and an Afterword by Cornel West. The book is structured as a response to Cornel West's proposed solution to complacency in the face of racism, namely, as the editors note quoting West, offer a "prophetic pragmatism [which] purports to be not only an oppositional cultural criticism but also a material force for individuality and Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society Spring, 2005, Vol. XLI, No. 2 Book Reviews 441 democracy... ." "Part One," "Pragmatism as a General Approach to the Problem of Race," offers articles on the general contours of pragmatism as a philosophy and its conceptual relationship to race and racism. Michael Eldridge, Gregory F. Pappas, Donald F. Koch, John R. Shook, D. Micah Hester and Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. author provocative ways of interpreting Dewey's approach to race and racism. Pappas's article, "Distance Abstraction, and the Role of the Philosopher in the Pragmatic Approach to Racism," notes that Dewey often focused on the methods by which we approach the problem of racism and avoids offering 'the solution.' Pappas believes that his approach is compatible with Dewey's view on the relationship between a "general theory of inquiry (logic) and particular inquiry." He contends that "We must continue to defend the importance of contextsensitive inquiry while engaging in the very general inquiry about racism." Koch, recommending that we abandon the debate on whether or not racism is permanent in America, then considers what might explain competing definitions of the problem, rather than a generic moral solution, Following Dewey, he suggests that we look at the problems faced by African Americans in securing a good education. From the standpoint of such problematic situations, consider generic elements, we can then work out future conduct. Shook, in a similar application of Dewey, contends that Dewey's "social philosophy is highly relevant for understanding the possible use of the democratic principle of 'equal opportunity' as an argument for reconstructing our nation's public education system." This section ends with Glaude's uncovering in Dewey a tragic sensibility, namely, that there...