What resources does Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body schema offer to the Fanonian one? First I show that Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body schema is already a theory of affect: one that does not oppose affects to intentionality, positioning them not only as sense but as force, cultivating affective agencies rather than constituting static sense content. Then I argue that by foregrounding the role of affect in both thinkers, we can understand the way in which the historical-racial (...) schema innovates, anticipating and influencing feminist theories of the affective turn – especially Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective economies. The historical-racial schema posits the constitution of affective agencies on a sociogenic scale, and these affective economies in turn account for the possibility of the collapse of the body schema into a racial epidermal schema, a disjunction of affective intentionality Fanon calls “affective tetanization.” Quelles ressources l’analyse du schéma corporel faite par Merleau-Ponty fournit-elle au schéma historico-racial proposé par Fanon? En premier lieu, je vise à montrer que la théorie du schéma corporel de Merleau-Ponty est déjà une théorie de l’affect : une théorie qui n’oppose pas les affects à l’intentionnalité, qui ne les considère pas seulement comme un sens, mais comme une force, en cultivant des agentivités affectives plutôt qu’en constituant des contenus de sens statiques. Ensuite, j’affirmerai qu’en mettant en premier plan le rôle de l’affect chez ces deux penseurs, nous pouvons comprendre les innovations qu’apporte le schéma historico-racial, en anticipant et en influençant les théories féministes du tournant affectif – surtout la théorie de Sara Ahmed au sujet des économies affectives. Le schéma historico-racial établit la constitution d’agentivités affectives sur une échelle sociogénique, et ces économies affectives expliquent à leur tour la possibilité d’une dégradation du schéma corporel en schéma épidermique racial, une disjonction de l’intentionnalité affective que Fanon appelle « tétanisation affective ».Quali risorse può offrire la nozione merleau-pontiana di schema corporeo a quella di Fanon? In primo luogo, mi propongo di mostrare che la teoria dello schema corporeo elaborata da Merleau-Ponty è allo stesso tempo una teoria dell’affetto: una teoria che non oppone la dimensione degli affetti all’intenzionalità, poiché li considera non solo come senso ma come forze, in quanto implicano delle agentività affettive piuttosto che costituire meri contenuti statici di senso. Intendo quindi sostenere che mettendo in evidenza il ruolo dell’affetto in questi due autori sia possibile comprendere il portato innovativo dello schema storico-razziale, che anticipa e influenza le teorie femministe legate all’affective turn – e in particolare la teoria delle economie affettive elaborata da Sara Ahmed. Lo schema storico-razziale afferma la costituzione di agentività affettive a un livello sociogenetico, mentre le economie affettive rendono conto della possibilità del collasso dello schema corporeo in uno schema razziale epidermico, una disgiunzione dell’intenzionalità affettiva che Fanon definisce “tetanizzazione affettiva”. (shrink)

This article approaches Judith Butler as herself a theorist of race and racism by exploring her unacknowledged and often problematic reading of Frantz Fanon and his concept of the historico-racial schema. It first traces Butler's uses of Fanon's thinking across her work, outlining the different ways that she draws on Fanon in theorizing race and racism. The article then shows how that theorizing stems from Butler's reading of the historico-racial schema, focusing on her insertion of words (...) that do not appear in either the translation she cites or in the original French text into a key quotation. This article argues that this systematic misreading of the historico-racial schema in Black Skin, White Masks problematically restricts Butler's understanding of the lasting effects and ethical consequences of racism and colonialism as they appear in her readings of that text and of The Wretched of the Earth. (shrink)

This commentary explores the potential consequence of latent racial formation in emergent climate finance data projects and draws from ethnographic research on climate finance governance conducted in Fiji. Climate finance data projects emerging in the Pacific aim to ease the flow of finance from the Global North to the South. These emergent data projects, such as renewable energy resource availability and investment mapping, are imbedded in the climate finance organizations that fund, develop, and use them. Thus, the commentary explores (...) climate finance organizations through the lens of Ray’s theory of racial organizations, highlighting the ways in which important climate-related resources are mediated through racial and colonial schemas. The racial mediation of two key resources are spotlighted in this discussion: the finance itself and knowledge. Given that the Pacific region is at the coalface of climate change’s existential effects, the just allocation of resources is imperative. In interrogating the ways in which emergent data projects may deny these resources based on hidden racial schemas, the paper cautions against new and old forms of colonization that may be mobilized through even well-meaning techno-benevolent fixes. (shrink)

Frantz Fanon offers a lucid account of his entrance into the white world where the weightiness of the ‘white gaze’ nearly crushed him. In chapter five of Black Skins, White Masks, he develops his historico-racial and epidermal racial schemata as correctives to Merleau-Ponty’s overly inclusive corporeal schema. Experientially aware of the reality of socially constructed (racialized) subjectivities, Fanon uses his schemata to explain the creation, maintenance, and eventual rigidification of white-scripted ‘blackness’. Through a re-telling of his own (...) experiences of racism, Fanon is able to show how a black person in a racialized context eventually internalizes the ‘white gaze’. In this essay I bring Fanon’s insights into conversation with Foucault’s discussion of panoptic surveillance. Although the internalization of the white narrative creates a situation in which external constraints are no longer needed, Fanon highlights both the historical contingency of ‘blackness’ and the ways in which the oppressed can re-narrate their subjectivities. Lastly, I discuss Fanon’s historically attuned ‘new humanism’, once again engaging Fanon and Foucault as dialogue partners. (shrink)

I argue that there is an affective injustice in gendered and racialized oppression. To account for this, we must deny the opposition of affect and intentionality often assumed in the philosophy of emotion and the affective turn: while affect and intentionality are not opposed in principle, affective intentionality may be refused uptake in oppressive practices. In section 1, I read Merleau‐Ponty’s theory of the body schema as a theory of affect that accommodates my account of affective injustice and aligns (...) with accounts of affect transmission and circulation in feminist philosophies of the affective turn. This is crucial for understanding Fanon’s contribution to the theory of the body schema, in which it is susceptible to historical‐racial “affective disorders.” In sections 2–4, I distinguish three types of affective injustice: affective marginalization, exploitation, and violence. In section 2 I develop an intersectional feminist account of this distinction drawing on Lorde and Lugones and raise questions about the limits of framing the issue of affective injustice in terms of intentionality as opposed to a more psychoanalytic conceptual vocabulary that accommodates the displacement of affective force. In sections 3 and 4, I explore these affective injustices through an analysis of Fanonian concepts, showing how the theory of the body schema can accommodate not only affective intentionality but also the oppressive disjunction of affect and intentionality, as well as forms of affective injustice that exceed the oppressive disabling of sense‐making and involve the exploitative and violent displacement of affective force. (shrink)

In response to Zack’s “White Privilege​ and Black Rights”, I consider her account of the hunting schema in light of police violence against black women. I argue that although Zack provides us with a compelling account of racial profiling and police brutality, the emotional aspect she attributes to the hunting schema is too charitable. I then claim that Zack’s hunting schema fails to account for state violence against black women and in doing so she only tells (...) a partial story of comparative injustice as it relates to police brutality of blacks. (shrink)

This article is concerned with some of the ramifications of the affective dimension of Fanon’s writing. In their latest book, Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri take Fanon’s attempt to transcend European universality through the struggle for a ‘new universality’ as an exemplary schema that informs their politics of alter-modernity. In the article, I show that the affective dimension of Fanon’s search for a new universality is far more anti- than alter-European, albeit in an ambivalent way. I analyse how (...) this difference between an affective ‘anti’ and an intellectual ‘alter’ arises in Fanon’s analysis and experience of racism. I refer to this particular experience as mis-interpellation and analyse the equally particular affect it generates. More generally, I show that if one is to make use of Fanon’s work today one cannot separate the intellectual and the affective that are so intertwined in his analytical work as Hardt and Negri do. To do so is to abstract from the serious political ramifications that the presence of this affective dimension entails. (shrink)

In recent years, postgenomic research, and the fields of epigenetics and microbiome science in particular, have described novel ways in which social processes of racialization can become embodied and result in physiological and health-related racial difference. This new conception of biosocial race has important implications for philosophical debates on the ontology of race. We argue that postgenomic research on race exhibits two key biases in the way that racial schemas are deployed. Firstly, although the ‘new biosocial race’ has (...) been characterized as social race entering into biological processes, it is only particular aspects of social race that are taken to cross the biosocial boundary, resulting in a distorted view of the social component of biosocial race. Secondly, racial categories are assumed to be stable across time and space. This assumption is epistemically limiting, as well as indicating a reliance on a fixed racial ontology. However, the causal pathways for the embodiment of social race, and the different possible modes of embodiment, that postgenomic science is uncovering themselves present a challenge for fixed or static racial ontologies. Given these tensions, we argue that the emerging picture of a shifting landscape of entanglement between the social and the biological requires us to increase the complexity of our ontologies of race, or even embrace a deflationary metaphysics of race. (shrink)

Using Octavia Butler’s Kindred as both ground and frame, this paper develops a notion of mangrove time as a way to think through how blackness is lived in the violent temporality of anti-blackness. Specifically, I want to suggest that, through the frame of mangrove time, an errant relationship between lived blackness and its black past inserts temporal possibility in and beyond the inertia of white supremacy’s violently anti-black temporality. In other words, contrary to Fanon’s proclamation that only black abjection is (...) to be found in a return to the past of lived blackness, I show that, out of a mangroved conception of temporality, linkages to a black past becomes more than the ontological weight at the core of Fanon’s notion of a historico-racial schema. In foregrounding his own linkage to the past, Fanon’s historico-racial schema determines the past as fixed under the weight of an anti-black time. However, mangrove time recalls what is perhaps hastily forgotten under this schema, which is that, even as lived blackness arrives on the scene of an anti-black imaginary “too late”, it is still able to ‘time travel’ – to zigzag between present and past in a way that rescues lived blackness from the structural determination of its past. As mangroved, this temporality is still one of pain, amputation and fragmentation. But it is also one that opens up this temporality to “imaginative variability”. (shrink)

Au moyen de dossiers traités par les tribunaux ecclésiastiques de Lima et Quito, cet article cherche à débusquer les ruses employées pour contourner les règles non écrites de la hiérarchisation socio-raciale de la colonie. Il montre aussi les systèmes de défense des personnes citées à comparaître. Au-delà de schémas somme toute assez répandus dans bien des situations coloniales, on voit apparaître dans la pratique une certaine flexibilité quant à ces règles, les plaignants plaidant souvent la tromperie alors qu’ils semblent bien (...) n’avoir été nullement dupes de l’engagement qu’ils avaient pris avec des personnes situées plus bas qu’eux dans la palette ethnique. (shrink)

This paper critiques philosophical efforts to biologize race as racial projects (Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States). The paper argues that the deeply social phenomenon of race defies the analytic schema employed by biologizing philosophers. The very (social) act of theorizing race is already in an involuted relationship with its target concept: analyzing race must be seen as a racial project, in that it simultaneously helps to manage how race is represented in society (...) and helps organize society’s resources along particular racial lines. Such biologizing projects are rife with moral and political dimensions and have a depoliticizing effect that has the potential to camouflage, defuse, or explain away the social-structural reproduction of white power/privilege. The paper begins by considering two recent philosophic-scientific biologizations of race, showing how they conform to the analytic schema, reviewing received critical points, and offering several novel ones. (shrink)

Chronological typologies of racial ideologies have always been somewhat controversial, but in contemporary academe, a general consensus has emerged, one that integrates the theories of Ladelle McWhorter, on the one hand, and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, on the other hand. In this schema, the invention of racism in the early modern period was defined by morphological racism or, in McWhorter’s words, “physical appearance,”1 followed by the creation of a biological or scientific racism that can be roughly dated to the Industrial (...) Revolution. After the various social movements for racial justice in the mid-twentieth century, and the turn to “political correctness,” many theorists such as Carr and Bonilla-Silva have argued... (shrink)

One of the narratives of anger as a pandemic emotion is not diagnostic, but celebratory: anger at racial injustice made a social and political breakthrough during the pandemic. What this breakthrough narrative celebrates is that people who had previously been moved only to alarmed scrutiny of the anger itself and the project of quelling it began instead, not merely to approve of this anger, but to to be oriented and instructed by it, permitting the anti-racist anger of others to (...) sensitize them to the insults and injuries that provoked it. The breakthrough narrative implies that anger is a moral sentiment that can be instructive, not only for the angry person herself, but also for others. This suggests a phenomenonological puzzle: under what description of affective intentionality and its interpersonal and social triangulation would the breakthrough be possible? I draw on Marilyn Frye’s account of anger uptake and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body schema to give an account of the conditions of possibility for the breakthrough narrative. Along the way, I offer an account of uniquely affective hermeneutical injustices, the uniquely affective variety of power at stake in them, and the reparative gesture required to remedy them. (shrink)

Many well-meaning “white” people adopt an antiracist agenda because we believe it provides the antidote to pernicious racialized inequity in the United States. Ironically, this schema maintains racism, strengthens whiteness as the measure of humanity, and inoculates us against imagining any alternative to racism’s logic. I argue that we can break the fetters of racism by framing whiteness as a principality and power. Perceived as a demonic force rather than an “identity,” we can perceive the goals of whiteness as (...) well as the spirituality that fuels it—and cast it out. We are then freed to “reinvent the future,” emancipated from racialized politics and its violence. (shrink)

This article argues that political injustices can arise from the distribution and character of our sexual desires and that we can be held responsible for correcting these injustices. It draws on a conception of structural injustice to diagnose unjust patterns of sexual attraction, which are taken to arise when socio-structural processes shaping the formation of sexual desire compound systemic domination and capacity-deprivation for the occupants of a social position. Individualistic and structural solutions to the problem of unjust patterns of sexual (...) attraction are assessed in the context of racialised sexual aversion, racial fetishism, and the desexualisation of people with disabilities. While both forms of intervention can help in principle, some of the advantages of structural approaches are laid out. A schema for assigning political responsibilities for addressing this injustice is proposed, with some limits identified to the kinds of state and social responses that are justified. Finally, the status of the merely aesthetically unappealing is considered, with a relational egalitarian approach concluding that they are subject to structurally unjust patterns of sexual desire only when exposed to oppression or second-class citizenship as a result. (shrink)

This essay examines Arendt’s descriptions of “Hottentots” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, especially the comparisons and contrasts she frequently draws between Hottentots and other peoples. In particular, Arendt highlights dehumanization of presumptively “civilized” people in comparing them to African “savages.” Close reading of such analogies demands that we look beyond the racial explanations that other scholars have offered and focus instead on how Arendt’s conception of humanity is bound up with a specific sense of culture that is antiprimitivist—exclusive of (...) peoples without history, primitives. Analysis of her moral anthropology uncovers the Cape Colony discourses and postenlightenment German philosophical supports that inform her antiprimitivism. However, Arendt’s antiprimitivism may not remain confined to Origins. In later essays, Arendt analyzes the various aspects of culture in instructive ways.Yet she also synthesizes culture concepts into a schema that introduces problems for her. (shrink)

The literature on race/racism and modern Euro-American philosophy obscures a category of continental African thinkers who not only embraced modernity and its core tenets but used them as the metric for judging their societies and self-making. Their embrace of modernity led them to share certain assumptions about their societies’ past like those that ground the racism of modern Euro-American philosophy. The literature has not attended to their ideas. The obscuring arises from racializing the discourse of philosophy and race/racism within a (...) black-white/white-nonwhite schema. We, instead, historicize the discourse and show how, in embracing modernity, Africans managed, simultaneously, to repudiate modern philosophy’s racism. African thinkers never saw modernity as white or quintessentially European: it is the latest iteration of the human march to a better life for the species; they historicized it. The paper concludes with an exegesis of one such thinker from nineteenth century West Africa, James Africanus Beale Horton. (shrink)

Dans une première partie, nous citerons les écrits qui racontent les « premiers contacts » entre Français et Polynésiens (1768, 1787). On y voit de fortes contradictions entre les conclusions généralisantes publiées, portant sur la liberté sexuelle pré maritale, dans un culte constant de l’amour pratiqué en public, et certains faits pourtant évoqués dans les journaux de bord : des présentations sexuelles forcées de très jeunes filles apeurées. Dans la deuxième partie, nous tenterons de comprendre cet aveuglement : il est (...) dû à la vision européenne masculine d’alors sur la nature des femmes, et à un schéma racial déjà installé qui octroya par avance aux Polynésiennes la beauté de femmes « presque blanches ». (shrink)

This essay examines Arendt's descriptions of "Hottentots" in The Origins of Totalitarianism, especially the comparisons and contrasts she frequently draws between Hottentots and other peoples. In particular, Arendt highlights dehumanization of presumptively "civilized" people in comparing them to Africa "savages." Close reading of such analogies demands that we look beyond the racial explanations that other scholars have offered and focus instead on how Arendt's conception of humanity is bound up with a specific sense of culture that is antiprimitivist—exclusive of (...) peoples without history, primitives. Analysis of her moral anthropology uncovers the Cape Colony discourses and postenlightenment German philosophical supports that inform her antiprimitivism. However, Arendt's antiprimitivism may not remain confined to Origins. In later essays,Arendt analyzes the various aspects of culture in instructive ways. Yet she also synthesizes culture concepts into a schema that introduces problems for her. (shrink)

This book explores the epistemic side of racial and sexual oppression. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from listening to each other.

Liberalism is the political philosophy of equal persons, yet liberalism has denied equality to those it saw as black sub-persons. In Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, political philosopher Charles Mills challenges mainstream accounts that ignore this history and its current legacy in the United States today.

This book explores the epistemic side of racial and sexual oppression. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from listening to each other.

This book approaches the problems and circumstances confronting blacks in the context of black values, the black community, and the role of government. ^BContents:: The Black Community's Values as a Basis for Action; The Community as Agent of Change; and The Government's Role in Meeting New Challenges.

According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory , the Source-Path-Goal schema constitutes a central concept in cognition. Apart from literally structuring “movement“, SPG also shapes our understanding of “purposive activity“, including questing and story-telling. A problem in CMT, however, is that the existence of image schemas is almost exclusively postulated on the basis of verbal expressions. To examine the claim that people recruit image schemas such as SPG to make sense of life, it is essential to examine non-verbal modalities. Animation has (...) highly medium-specific opportunities to exploit SPG by its emphasis on “manner of movement“ and “balance“. Three animation films exemplifying MOVEMENT, QUEST, and STORY are analyzed in terms of SPG to chart how they exploit this schema. We end the paper by positioning our findings with respect to recent discussions about image schemas in Hampe and by suggesting avenues for further research. (shrink)

The three target articles constitute a powerful and persuasive call for actively anti-racist bioethics and biomedicine. All three articles reject race as a biological category. Nevertheless, they share a common commitment to racial classification. At one point, Ruqaiijah Yearby writes that “social race, like biological race, is an illusion created to establish racial hierarchy,” but mostly she writes about “races” as though they were not an illusion, but a reality. In this commentary I critique the racial realism (...) of the target articles. I argue that the biomedical fight against racism is best served by a form of anti-realist reconstructionism about race, which says that there are no races, only racialized groups—groups misunderstood to be races. Note that I do not defend the color blindness that Clarence H. Braddock (2020) persuasively rejects. Because of the role of skin color in racialization and racism, color blindness is a misguided goal. One can reject color blindness, though, without accepting racial realism... (shrink)

Social psychologists often describe “implicit” racial biases as entirely unconscious, and as mere associations between groups and traits, which lack intentional content, e.g., we associate “black” and “athletic” in much the same way we associate “salt” and “pepper.” However, recent empirical evidence consistently suggests that individuals are aware of their implicit biases, albeit in partial, inarticulate, or even distorted ways. Moreover, evidence suggests that implicit biases are not “dumb” semantic associations, but instead reflect our skillful, norm-sensitive, and embodied engagement (...) with social reality. This essay draws on phenomenological and hermeneutic methods and concepts to better understand what social-psychological research has begun to reveal about the conscious access individuals have to their own racial attitudes, as well as the intentional contents of the attitudes themselves. -/- First, I argue that implicit racial biases form part of the “background” of social experience. That is, while they exert a pervasive influence on our perceptions, judgments, and actions, they are frequently felt but not noticed, or noticed but misinterpreted. Second, I argue that our unreflective racial attitudes are neither mere associations nor fully articulated, propositionally structured beliefs or emotions. Their intentional contents are fundamentally indeterminate. For example, when a white person experiences a “gut feeling” of discomfort during an interaction with a black person, there is a question about the meaning or nature of that discomfort. Is it a fear of black people? Is it anxiety about appearing racist? There is, I argue, no general, determinate answer to such questions. The contents of our unreflective racial attitudes are fundamentally vague and open-ended, although I explain how they nevertheless take on particular shapes and implications—that is, their content can become determinate—depending on context, social meaning, and structural power relations. (If, for example, a perceived authority figure, such as a politician, parent, or scientist, encourages you to believe that your uncomfortable gut feeling is a justified fear of other social groups, then that is what your gut feeling is likely to become.). (shrink)

A regulative norm for permissible defense distinguishes the conditions under which we will hold defenders to be innocent of any wrongdoing from those in which we hold them responsible for assault or manslaughter. The norm must strike a fair balance between defenders' security, on the one hand, and other agents’ legitimate claim to live without fear of suffering mistaken defensive harm, on the other. Since agents must make defensive decisions under high pressure and on only partial information, they will sometimes (...) make mistakes. We have reason to want a norm that considers a mistake permissible when it was highly likely on the evidence that defense was proportionate and necessary to avert a threat. However, adopting an evidentialist norm under non-ideal conditions is treacherous business. I briefly survey empirical data suggesting that the type and extent of bias prevalent in the US renders a straightforward evidentialist norm unjust, and thus since the legal practice in the US relies on such a norm, we must explore avenues for reform. Preferably this will take the form of adopting a modified evidential norm, and I explore some promising options. If this proves impossible, however, then we have to accept a strict regulative norm (which does not consider any mistakes permissible), as the sole just alternative. (shrink)

In our recent article, together with more than 60 of our colleagues, we outlined a proposal for drug policy reform consisting of four specific yet interrelated strategies: (1) de jure decriminalization of all psychoactive substances currently deemed illicit for personal use or possession (so-called “recreational” drugs), accompanied by harm reduction policies and initiatives akin to the Portugal model; (2) expunging criminal convictions for nonviolent offenses pertaining to the use or possession of small quantities of such drugs (and releasing those serving (...) time for these offenses), while delivering retroactive ameliorative relief; (3) the ultimate legalization and careful regulation of currently illicit drugs; and (4) the delivery of a new “Marshall Plan” focused on community-building initiatives, expanded harm reduction programs, and social and health care support efforts (Earp et al. 2021). We were gratified to see so many thoughtful commentaries on our proposal, and we respond to them in part in this reply. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Analyzing racial concepts has become an important task in the philosophy of race. Aside from any inherent interest that might be found in the meanings of racial terms, these meanings also can spell the doom or deliverance of competing ontological and normative theories about race. One of the most pressing questions about race at present is the normative question of whether race should be eliminated from, or conserved in, public discourse and practice. This normative question is often answered (...) in part by appealing to the ontological status of race: if race is an illusion, then it should be eliminated, and if it is real, then it can be conserved. 1 Thus, for.. (shrink)

In _The World Computer_ Jonathan Beller forcefully demonstrates that the history of commodification generates information itself. Out of the omnipresent calculus imposed by commodification, information emerges historically as a new money form. Investigating its subsequent financialization of daily life and colonization of semiotics, Beller situates the development of myriad systems for quantifying the value of people, objects, and affects as endemic to racial capitalism and computation. Built on oppression and genocide, capital and its technical result as computation manifest as (...) racial formations, as do the machines and software of social mediation that feed racial capitalism and run on social difference. Algorithms, derived from for-profit management strategies, conscript all forms of expression—language, image, music, communication—into the calculus of capital such that even protest may turn a profit. Computational media function for the purpose of extraction rather than ameliorating global crises, and financialize every expressive act, converting each utterance into a wager. Repairing this ecology of exploitation, Beller contends, requires decolonizing information and money, and the scripting of futures wagered by the cultural legacies and claims of those in struggle. (shrink)

This essay explores the intersection of racism, racial embodiment theory and the recent hostility aimed at immigrants and foreigners in the United States, especially the targeting of people of Latin American descent and Latino/as. Anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner sentiment is racist. It is the embodiment of racial privilege for those who wield it and the materiality of racial difference for those it is used against. This manifestation of racial privilege and difference rests upon a redrawing of the (...) color line that is meant towards preserving exclusive categories of political membership. The charge of racism, however, is elided by the fact that this hostility takes the form of a specious embracement of law and lawfulness. “Illegal” in this sense not only captures the actions of those who enter the United States through clandestine or informal means, but, in light of the history of immigration and citizen- ship law, the term operates as a racial trope that designates non-white status, thus marginalizing and alienating certain immigrants from ongoing nation-formation processes. I explain the source for anti-immigrant hostility in the United States, which I take to be connected to the longevity of white normativity as the basis for American identity. I then critically assess how the idea of national belonging is crucial to the perpetuation of white-ways-of-being, especially when citizenship has historically been a venue for the embodiment of racial and even colonial privilege. I conclude by posing several questions about the nature of racial identities and racism that suggest new avenues for further research on racial embodiment in a “postracial” era. pp. 65–90. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Our contention is that while what may be termed woke capitalism is the result of real changes in both the material structure of capitalism and its ideological superstructure, those are not changes pulling in the same direction. The main material development is the consolidation of the shift from a quasi-deterministic to a more pronouncedly probabilistic nexus of class and race. But it is unclear that this makes much difference to the material prospects of the vast majority of people of color (...) or indeed of people in general. Indeed, the racial permeability of the upper classes is accompanied by an increased and inverse racial permeability of the underclass. Diversification is so elite-driven that it is unlikely to proceed beyond the cosmetic, and for that reason it seems that diversification does not necessarily correspond to any major structural changes in the relations between groups of people, whether we consider them as arranged by class, race, or the intersection of the two. It follows that the politics of representation should not be regarded as a vehicle for the agenda of the materialist left. We propose instead a responsive universalist approach—responsive to racism and all other forms of marginalization and different from the homogenizing universalism of class-only politics. (shrink)

This article argues against the view that affirmative action is wrong because it involves assigning group rights. First, affirmative action does not have to proceed by assigning rights at all. Second, there are, in fact, legitimate “group rights” both legal and moral; there are collective rights—which are exercised by groups—and membership rights—which are rights people have in virtue of group membership. Third, there are continuing harms that people suffer as blacks and claims to remediation for these harms can fairly treat (...) the (social) property of being black as tracking the victims of those harms. Affirmative action motivated in this way aims to respond to individual wrongs; wrongs that individuals suffer, as it happens, in virtue of their membership in groups. Finally, the main right we have when we are being considered for jobs and places at colleges is that we be treated according to procedures that are morally defensible. Morally acceptable procedures sometimes take account of the fact that a person is a member of a certain social group. (shrink)

Across the country, legal and health care professionals who understand that health outcomes are most influenced by social and environmental conditions have improved patient health by adopting the interdisciplinary MLP health care delivery model. However, the MLP field cannot advance population health, let alone long-term health equity, until it addresses the structural determinants of health inequity that are rooted in discrimination, segregation, and other forms of racial and ethnic subordination.

This article examines the tensions in the identities of men who belong to the Promise Keepers movement by uncovering the social conditions that lead men to rethink gender and racial ideologies. Using participant observation and in-depth interviews, the author draws on gender and social movement scholarship to reveal how contradictory gender and racial ideologies shape PKs' identities. Furthermore, the PKs' impact on gender and race relations is also contradictory. PK fosters men's growth on an interactional level, allowing men (...) to embrace a more expressive and caring masculinity that includes cross-racial bonding. Simultaneously, however, PK ignores, and indirectly reinforces, the structural conditions that underpin gender and racial privilege among white men. (shrink)

Drawing on contemporary epistemologies of ignorance, I analyze the American ideology of color blindness as a recalcitrant form of active ignorance that operates at a meta-level. I contend that the meta-ignorance involved in color blindness operates through distorting second-order attitudes about one's cognitive and affective attitudes, resulting in cognitive and affective numbness with respect to racial matters: ignorance of one's racial ignorance and insensitivity to one's racial insensitivity. I contend that the black/white binary that has dominated the (...) American racial imagination has contributed tremendously to establish and maintain meta-blindness about racial differences. I suggest that overcoming the black/white binary demands that we expand current conceptions of racial lucidity and that we go beyond the notions of double consciousness that critical race theorists have defended since Du Bois and Fanon. According to a more expansive social pluralism, lucidity with respect to racial differences requires a kaleidoscopic consciousness that does not reinscribe the black/white binary in one's racial imagination. (shrink)

In public health research, tracking folk racial categories (in disease risk, etc.) is a double-edged tool. On the one hand, tracking folk racial categories is dangerous because it reinforces a problematic but fairly common belief in biological race essentialism. On the other hand, ignoring racial categories also runs the risk of ignoring very real biological phenomena in which marginalized communities, likely in virtue of their marginalization, are sicker and in need of improved resources. Much of the conversation (...) among epidemiologists and philosophers of medicine concerning the issue of tracking folk racial categories in public health research springs forth from largely black/white binarized health inequities. While health inequities between black and white Americans are certainly a very important topic, I am interested in investigating the complications to this conversation about the potential harms of tracking folk racial categories in public health research generated by the consideration of Indigenous identities in the US—groups whose health inequities are typically tracked based on the folk racial category of “Native American” or “American Indian,” but whose unique identity categories and community membership problematize the current spectrum of approaches to tracking folk racial categories in epidemiologic research. This paper will draw on scholarship by and about Indigenous people in the US context to address an undertheorized facet of the conversations concerning the potential harms of tracking folk racial categories in public health research, including the potential undermining of American Indian sovereignty and Indigenous epistemologies. I will end on some methodological considerations inspired by the inclusion of Indigenous identities in the US in the conversation about tracking folk racial categories in epidemiologic research. (shrink)

Preemption is a substantial threat to achieving racial equity. Since 2011, states have increasingly preempted local governments from enacting policies that can improve health and reduce racial inequities such as increasing minimum wage and requiring paid leave.

The research and publication practices by which scientists produce biomedical knowledge about race and ethnicity remain largely unexamined despite increasing interest in biological explanations for health disparities by race, as well as prominent critiques by social scientists highlighting the implications of conceptualizing race as a biological category. Although a growing number of studies on lab and research practices are helping to map meanings of race and ethnicity on notions of difference and health, we still have very little understanding of the (...) earlier funding application stage or of the resulting publications. We know that knowledge production can involve a range of different processes, including consensus building, strategic and instrumental decision making, as well as conscious and subconscious cognitive filtering, through which we direct analytic attention only to those aspects of a problem or topic that are defined as “relevant” and “important.” These processes also involve the “translation” of ideas such as race and ethnicity for different audiences, which occurs in broader contexts of cultural norms and institutional rules and practices. (shrink)

This article analyses the moral status of racial profiling from a consequentialist perspective and argues that, contrary to what proponents of racial profiling might assume, there is a prima facie case against racial profiling on consequentialist grounds. To do so it establishes general definitions of police practices and profiling, sketches out the costs and benefits involved in racial profiling in particular and presents three challenges. The foundation challenge suggests that the shifting of burdens onto marginalized minorities (...) may, even when profiling itself is justified, serve to prolong unjustified police practices. The valuation challenge argues that although both costs and benefits are difficult to establish, the benefits of racial profiling are afflicted with greater uncertainty than the costs, and must be comparatively discounted. Finally, the application challenge argues that using racial profiling in practice will be complicated by both cognitive and psychological biases, which together reduce the effectiveness of profiling while still incurring its costs. Jointly, it is concluded, these challenges establish a prima facie case against racial profiling, so that the real challenge consists in helping officers practice the art of the police and not see that which it is useless that they should see. (shrink)