Racism, sexism, and other forms of injustice are more than just bad attitudes; after all, such injustice involves unfair distributions of goods and resources. But attitudes play a role. How central is that role? Tommie Shelby, among others, argues that racism is an ideology and takes a cognitivist approach suggesting that ideologies consist in false beliefs that arise out of and serve pernicious social conditions. In this paper I argue that racism is better understood as a set (...) of practices, attitudes, social meanings, and material conditions, that systematically reinforce one another. Attitudes play a role, but even the cognitive/affective component of ideologies should include culturally shared habits of mind and action. These habits of mind distort, obscure, and occlude important facts about subordinated groups and result in a failure to recognize their interests. How do we disrupt such practices to achieve greater justice? I argue that this is sometimes, but not always, best achieved by argument or challenging false beliefs, so social movements legitimately seek other means. (shrink)

In this discussion, I engage the politics of intention to explore how structural racism structures the production of meaning and the practice of reason. Building on María Lugones's analysis of intention formation as a form of practical reasoning, I explore the reasoning at work during the 2011 Stand Your Ground (SYG) hearing of black survivor of domestic violence, Marissa Alexander, to contend that structural racism—in this case, both intimate personal violence and intimate state violence against black women—enacts race/gender (...) domination through projecting constructed intentions onto black women as a strategy to rationalize punishing black women. I also discuss two key black feminist critiques of reason—Patricia Hill Collins’ discussion of “controlling images” (2000) and Michelle Cliff's concept of the “mythic mind” (1982)—to propose controlling intentions as a framework to theorize how structural racism produces fictive intentions used to rationalize the criminal punishment of survival and justify that outcome as common sense. (shrink)

In this paper, I engage with the debate between John Rawls and Charles Mills. In the first part, relevant works by Rawls and Mills are mainly examined. To this end, I first begin by examining Rawls’s ideal theory of justice and its relevance to the issue of racism. I then consider Mills’s non-ideal critique of Rawls and supplement it with the help of the notion of social norms. Whereas Rawls’s view can deal with racial injustice as discrimination, in my (...) view, I argue that Mills’s theory is mostly concerned with racist injustice as oppression. Between racial injustice as discrimination and racist injustice as oppression, however, there are varying degrees of race-related wrongs, which can be elucidated by harmful social norms. As a result, I conclude that Mills’s point can be shown without supposing that the Rawlsian basic structure is inherently racist. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to engage in a critical review of Roberto Esposito’s biopolitical account by including a thoroughgoing interrogation of racism and white supremacy through the lens of Black affect studies. It is argued that both white supremacy studies and Esposito’s framework could work side-by-side in ways that are productive for affirmative educational biopolitics. In particular, the analysis highlights two insights: first, engagement with white supremacy as a biopolitical category—in particular, white supremacy as an affective embodiment—is (...) essential for the ability of education to interrogate the racialization of Black bodies; and, second, attentiveness to Black affect in biopolitical accounts is crucial for the decentering of white supremacy in education. These insights broaden the conceptual parameters of educational biopolitics by foregrounding the affective biopower of racism and white supremacy as central to affirmative educational biopolitics. (shrink)

In conspiracy theory philosophy the primary debate has been epistemic, but the concern is now also shifting to the ethical and political implications of taking conspiracy theories seriously. This shift is epitomized in the work of Quassim Cassam, whose focus has moved away from the epistemic faults of the theories and theorists to the political function of conspiracy theories. This function, he argues, is to ‘express and promote an ideology’, specifically, racist, antisemitic, and extremist ideology. In this essay, I will (...) challenge two of Cassam’s assumptions. First, I will disagree with his claim that racist conspiracy theories ought to be treated dismissively as a class. This is due in part to the difficulties in defining racist conspiracy theories and due in part to what I call the Conspiracy Theory Location Problem, which is the challenge of identifying what constitutes ‘the theory’. In response, I suggest we need to be even more particularistic about ‘instances’ of a theory. Second, I disagree that the only function of conspiracy theories is to promote racist ideology. Instead, I argue that there exists a class of antiracist conspiracy theories that resist white supremacy by uncovering racist conspiracies and challenging racist institutions, systems, and ideologies. (shrink)

Racism is a pervasive issue in patient care and a key social determinant of health. Clinical ethicists, like others involved in patient care, have a duty to recognize and respond to racism on both individual and systems-wide levels to improve patient care. Doing so can be challenging and, like other skills in ethics consultation, may benefit from specialized training, standardized tools and approaches, and practice. Learning from existing frameworks and tools, as well as building new ones, can help (...) guide clinical ethicists to systematically approach racism as it affects clinical cases. Here, we propose an expansion of the commonly used four-box method to clinical ethics consultation, where racism is considered as a potential factor in each of the four boxes. We apply this method to two clinical cases to highlight ethically salient information that might be missed using the standard formulation of the four boxes but captured with the expanded version. We argue that this expansion of an existing clinical ethics consultation tool is ethically justified insofar as it (a) creates a more just approach, (b) supports individual consultants and services, and (c) facilitates communication in contexts where racism impinges on effecting good patient care. (shrink)

This article defends an account of racism as centrally an ideology, a system of illusory ideas. It argues that the relevant ideology has the effect of oppressing people of some racial identities, an idea it explains and explores. It defines ‘racialism’ as a kind of essentialism about racial identities and argues that it is false. Both racialism and the vice of racism, which consists of having morally impermissible attitudes to people in virtue of their racial identities, are among (...) the consequences of racial ideology. On this view, not all differential treatment on the basis of racial identity is racist. (shrink)

The individual officers of a social institution may not be racist and consequently not blameworthy for racism. On the other hand, the individual officers of such an institution may be racist and deserve blame for their racism. This chapter focuses on the special, idealized case of pure institutional racism in which all the individual office holders who participate in E-like institutions are free of racism. The attitude-independent model of institutional racism on which racist institutions can (...) promote racial inequality in the absence of personal racism on the part of office holders, does not absolve individuals of all responsibility. The chapter discusses the specific form of institutional racism with respect to which the no-individual-is-to-blame thesis is most plausible, namely attitude-independent racism, and has just touched upon a way in which the thesis needs to be revised. (shrink)

In the United States there have been brilliant examples of anti-racist struggle-black soldiers in the Civil War, coal miners of Alabama, and especially the anti-racist working-class struggles led by the Communist Party. Yet racism persists: Jim Crow replaced racial slavery, and mass incarceration has replaced Jim Crow. Why? Paul Gomberg argues that racism is functional for capitalism, supplying low-wage, vulnerable labor and driving down conditions for all workers. How can anti-racists put an end to racist society? Gomberg argues (...) for race-centered Marxism: anti-racism must lead working-class struggle, but racism will end only in a communist society that creates opportunity for all. (shrink)

Recent Canadian and international events have sparked dialogue and action to address racism within the nursing discipline. While the urgency to seek and implement antiracist solutions demands the attention of nurses, we contend that a contemporary analysis of the mechanisms that continue to perpetuate racism within nursing's theoretical foundation is required first. This study reconsiders the perceived functions of racism within the current state of nursing concepts and theories. In particular, we expose the role that covert (...) class='Hi'>racism plays by inadvertently sustaining racism through nursing's theoretical foundation, and how this process strengthens white supremacy. We argue that, in the absence of exposing these covert mechanisms, the development of solutions will be futile in dismantling racism. By making visible the covert mechanisms of racism within nursing's theoretical foundation, we attempt to establish an opportunity for the nursing discipline to dismantle its racist foundation and engage in sustained antiracist action. Lastly, this study demonstrates the need to equip the discipline with a moral commitment to antiracism in an effort to emancipate nursing from its racist legacies. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to provide a philosophical conceptual framework to understand the theoretical roots and political implications of the interpretations of Plato’s work in Jaeger’s Third Humanism and Krieck’s völkisch-racist pedagogy and anthropology. This article will seek to characterize, as figures of localitas, their conceptions of the individual, community, corporeality, identity, and the State that both authors developed departing from Platonic political philosophy. My main hypothesis is that Jaeger’s and Krieck’s interpretations of Platonic paideía shared several core-elements (...) based on a modern conception of State sovereignty and human will, whose fundamental ground is the subjectivist-technical metaphysics. The “production” of a human type (spiritual and/or racial) and a unitary State political community appears in both authors mediated by a theory of political education, that I define as «State typohumanism», that sought its sustenance in Plato’s political philosophy, mainly by means of a distorted understanding of the notions of týpos and ē̂thos, and that, I argue, played a key role in the intellectual legitimization of völkisch-racism. This would be broadly translated into a programmatic and literal understanding of the Platonic Republic which assumes that the inherent function of any State is to produce subjectivities based on national identities grounded on homogeneous characteristics. In these varied characterizations similar appropriations of humanitas have been expressed both in Jaeger and in Krieck. (shrink)

Almost everyone in the philosophical literature, no matter their account of racism, adopts one of two views about the immorality of racist conduct. They either take it to be a function of the attitudes that issue in it or of the societally-imposed harms that result from it. This article seeks to show that neither view captures the complete picture. To properly account for the full range of cases, it helps to invoke a distinction between two senses of “immoral”: impermissible (...) and blameworthy. Doing so allows us to appreciate that racism is necessarily immoral, just not always in the same way. (shrink)

An analysis of 'racism' in terms of disrespect. This article argues against the views that racism should be understood in reductive ways as, variously, an attitude of ill-will (Jorge Garcia), a cognitive object such as ideology (Tommie Shelby), a behavior (Michael Philips), or some disjunctive hybrid (Lawrence Blum). In fact, it argues that racism should be conceptually released from having any one location. The disrespect analysis favored here can accommodate a variety of important desiderata for a theory (...) of racism. (shrink)

We bear witness to a sweeping social movement for change—fostered and driven by a powerful group of Black nurses and nursing students determined to call out and dismantle anti‐Black racism and discrimination within the profession of nursing. The Black Nurses Task Force, launched by the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario (RNAO) in July 2020, is building momentum for long‐standing change in the profession by critically examining the racist and discriminatory history of nursing, listening to and learning from the lived (...) experiences of the Black nursing community, and shaping concrete, actionable steps to confront anti‐Black racism and discrimination in academic settings, workplaces, and nursing organizations. The Black Nurses Task Force and the RNAO are standing up and speaking out in acknowledgment of the magnitude of anti‐Black racism and discrimination that exist in our profession, health system, justice system, and economic system. This social movement is demonstrating, in actions, how individuals and a collective act as change agents to drive meaningful and widespread change for our present and future Black nurses. We also acknowledge the Black nurses who have gone before us. (shrink)

What is at stake in identifying some actions or speech acts as racist as opposed to regarding them as “merely” xenophobic? If we understand racism as a system, how does this impact the way we address the distinction between the terms racism and xenophobia? My attempt to address these questions is guided by two observations drawn from the genealogy of the term racism. First, in the English language, the word was initially a synonym for Nazi anti-Semitism. The (...) strategies to combat racism developed by UNESCO under the influence of Ashley Montagu and other followers of Franz Boas were set by the idea that what had to be opposed was primarily a biologically based racial ideology. However, the attempt to apply this model to the United States was problematized by Oliver Cromwell Cox already in the early 1940s, just as the application of this model to colonialism was opposed by Sartre and Fanon. Secondly, whereas race prejudice had at one time been thought of as natural, as xenophobia still tends to be today, what is called racism in English was from the outset thought of as acquired and blameworthy. As a result of this and other differences, the strategies needed to address racism and xenophobia are fundamentally different. (shrink)

Medical academics are increasingly bringing critical race theory (CRT) or its corollaries to their discourse, to their curricula, and to their analyses of health and medical treatment disparities. The author argues that this is an error. The author considers the history of CRT, its claims, and its current presence in the medical literature. He contends that CRT is inimical to usual academic modes of inquiry and has obscured rather than aided the analysis of social and medical treatment disparities. Remedies for (...) racism suggested by CRT advocates will not work and some of them will make things worse. Academic medicine should avoid the embrace of CRT and should maintain an allegiance to rigorous empirical inquiry and to treating patients not as essentialized ethnic group members but as individual human beings in need of care. (shrink)

Anti-racist debate today remains polarised between ‘class reductionist’ (any attempt to address racial disparities reinforces capitalist class relations) and ‘liberal identity’ (disparities in racial representation can be resolved without questioning class inequality) politics. Both positions share a common perspective – racial oppression and class exploitation are the products of distinctive social dynamics whose relationship is historically contingent. This essay is an initial step toward characterising a structurally necessary relationship between capitalism and racial oppression. The essay draws upon Anwar Shaikh and (...) Howard Botwinick’s elaboration of Marx’s political economy, and Ellen Wood’s analysis of the specificity of capitalist imperialism. (shrink)

This paper argues that contemporary diasporic identities provide a strong basis from which to oppose contemporary expressions of racism. Immigrant and mobile populations have been able to construct images of identity that are based neither on an assimilationist model, nor defensive strategies against assimilationism. Rather, the older, internal relation between racism and diasporization has been broken by the ability of groups to claim a diasporic status on the basis of a public and not private articulation of self-identity.

Racist beliefs express value judgments. According to an influential view, value judgments are subjective, and not amenable to rational adjudication. In contrast, we argue that the value judgments expressed in, for example, racist beliefs, are false and objectively so. Our account combines a naturalized, philosophical account of meaning inspired by Donald Davidson, with a prominent social-psychological theory of values pioneered by the social-psychologist Milton Rokeach. We use this interdisciplinary approach to show that, just as with beliefs expressing descriptive judgments, beliefs (...) expressing value judgments have empirical content, or can be inferentially linked to beliefs that do; the truth or falsity of that content can be objectively assigned; and that assignment is amenable to rational assessment. While versions of this objective view of value judgments have been defended by moral realists of various metaphysical stripes, our argument has the virtue of appealing, instead, to accounts that are as naturalistically informed as possible. And, unlike the influential subjective view of value judgments, and racist beliefs more particularly, our arguments are better able to account for instances where rational, persuasive strategies have been effective in reducing the ubiquity of racism in American culture. (shrink)

In the United States today, much interpersonal racism is driven by corrupt forms of self-preservation. Drawing from Jean- Jacques Rousseau, I refer to this as self-love racism. The byproduct of socially-induced racial anxieties and perceived threats to one’s physical or social wellbeing, self-love racism is the protective attachment to the racialized dimensions of one’s social status, wealth, privilege, and/or identity. Examples include police officer related shootings of unarmed Black Americans, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the resurgence of unabashed white (...) supremacy. This form of racism is defined less by the introduction of racism into the world and more on the perpetuation of racially unjust socioeconomic and political structures. My theory, therefore, works at the intersection of the interpersonal and structural by offering an account of moral complacency in racist social structures. My goal is to reorient the directionality of philosophical work on racism by questioning the sense of innocence at the core of white ways-of-being. (shrink)

First, in the section ‘Telling Lies’, this article attempts to illustrate recent everyday racism. Racism has a history and takes many different forms. I describe a particular practice of racism (found in Britain, circa 1970), which relied, for its doctrine, on supposedly scientific assumptions about biology and breeding—and received a confirming fillip through the celebration of monarchy, empire and rose-tinted history. Second, in ‘Telling Tales’, the story of Zacchaeus is taken as exemplifying a form of moral repair (...) in which telling and doing the truth are intimately related. Third, in ‘Telling and Doing the Truth’, I contend that telling and doing the truth in relation to racism requires not only a clear naming of racism’s lies but also the making of reparations, for the reason that the lies of racism subtended manifold injustices, of which Atlantic slavery and the exploitation of colonies are notable instances. I take the history of the West Indies as providing a clear case where moral repair is (over)due, and I consider the form that reparations might take. (shrink)

Russell’s “Meeting the Moment: Bioethics in the Time of Black Lives Matter” expertly identifies how race and racism are matters of bioethical concern that ought to be addressed via an indivi...

The words ‘racist’ and ‘racism’ have become so overused that they nowconstitute obstacles to understanding and interracial dialogue about racial matters. Insteadof the current practice of referring to virtually anything that goes wrong or amiss withrespect to race as ‘racism,’ we should recognize a much broader moral vocabulary forcharacterizing racial ills – racial insensitivity, racial ignorance, racial injustice, racialdiscomfort, racial exclusion. At the same time, we should fix on a definition of ‘racism’ thatis continuous with its historical (...) usage, and avoids conceptual inflation. I suggest two basic,and distinct, forms of racism that meet this condition – antipathy racism and inferiorizingracism. We should also recognize that not all racially objectionable actions are done froma racist motive, and that not all racial stereotypes are racist. (shrink)

If racism is a matter of possessing racist beliefs, then it would seem that its cure involves purging one’s mind of all racist beliefs. But the truth is more complicated, and does not permit such a straightforward strategy. Racist beliefs are resistant to subjective repudiation, and even those that are so repudiated are resistant to lasting expulsion from one’s belief system. Moreover, those that remain available for use in cognition can shape thought and behavior even in the event that (...) one has recognized their falsehood. Yet if one is intent upon combating the racism within one’s mind, one is not without effective cognitive countermeasures that can render one’s racist beliefs ineffectual. (shrink)

Since its 2007 publication, Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice has sparked a vigorous conversation in analytic philosophy about how social power corrodes individual’s epistemic capacities and distorts collective meaning-making in unjust ways. Yet for all its normative insights into social silencing, I argue that Fricker’s theorization of epistemic dysfunction remains too individualized, cognitivist, and dematerialized to account for racialized imaginaries. Rather than view racisms as normal and normative in racist cultures, Fricker frames identity-driven prejudice as a troubling aberration from otherwise unblemished (...) epistemic and moral norms. This leads her into adopting an overly voluntarist and idealist theory of social change that centres training better knowers rather than unmaking racialized worlds. Ultimately, I contend that we should return to a materialist theory of ideology, following the work of Stuart Hall. Doing so jettisons the narrow focus on individual epistemic failures and instead problematizes how certain social ideas consolidate and reproduce racial hierarchies. (shrink)

In “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments,” Ray and Cooper (2024) initiate needed discourse on environmental justice and the...

We care not only about how people treat us, but also what they believe of us. If I believe that you’re a bad tipper given your race, I’ve wronged you. But, what if you are a bad tipper? It is commonly argued that the way racist beliefs wrong is that the racist believer either misrepresents reality, organizes facts in a misleading way that distorts the truth, or engages in fallacious reasoning. In this paper, I present a case that challenges this (...) orthodoxy: the case of the supposedly rational racist. We live in a world that has been, and continues to be, structured by racist attitudes and institutions. As a result, the evidence might be stacked in favour of racist beliefs. But, if there are racist beliefs that reflect reality and are rationally justified, what could be wrong with them? Moreover, how do I wrong you by believing what I epistemically ought believe given the evidence? To address this challenge, we must recognize that there are not only epistemic norms governing belief, but moral ones as well. This view, however, is at odds with the assumption that moral obligation requires a kind of voluntary control that we lack with regard to our beliefs. This background assumption motivates many philosophers to try to explain away the appearance that beliefs can wrong by locating the wrong elsewhere, e.g., in an agent’s actions. Further, even accounts that accept the thesis that racist beliefs can wrong restrict the class of beliefs that wrong to beliefs that are either false or the result of hot irrationality, e.g., the racist belief is a result of ill-will. In this paper I argue that although the these accounts will capture many of the wrongs associated with racist beliefs, they will be only partial explanations because they cannot explain the wrong committed by the supposedly rational racist. The challenge posed by the supposedly rational racist concerns our epistemic practices in a non-ideal world. The world is an unjust place, and there may be many morally objectionable beliefs it justifies. To address this challenge, we must seriously consider the thesis people wrong others in virtue of what they believe about them, and not just in virtue of what they do. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant viewed himself as the first person to have properly defined the concept of a human ‘race’. He distinguished four human ‘races’ and ranked the.

Nursing as a profession seems to avoid considering the problem of racism. There is, however, a need to address this topic and to evaluate its implications for nursing practice. This article attempts to establish a rationale for nursing to address racism and introduce it into academic discourse. The results of a small-scale study by the author are analysed and the implications for ethical-moral reasoning in nursing practice are discussed in relation to professional codes of conduct developed by nurses’ (...) professional organizations in the UK and elsewhere. (shrink)

This paper seeks to make “racism” strange, by exploring its invocation in the sociolinguistic context of LGBTQI+ activism in Greece, where it is used in ways that may be jarring to anglophone readers. In my ongoing research on the conceptualisation of interwoven oppressions in Greek social movement contexts, I have been interested in understanding how the widespread use of the term “racism” as a superordinate category to reference forms of oppression not only based on “race,” “ethnicity,” and “citizenship” (...) (e.g., racism, nationalism, xenophobia) but also those based on gender, gender identity, and sexuality (e.g., sexism, transphobia, and homophobia) relates to the increased adoption of “intersectionality” in movement discourses. In ordinary parlance, this commonplace usage of “racism” as an “umbrella term” nevertheless retains its etymological link to “race,” while its scope is extended to other regimes of superiority/inferiority or privilege/oppression. If intersectionality presupposes that oppressions are ontologically multiple and analytically separable, the use of “racism” as an umbrella concept seems to point in the other direction, implying that all forms of oppression originate from a common source, have a similar ontological basis, or generate privilege for the same social agents, who deploy similar tactics vis-à-vis oppressed groups. My research examines how intersectionality—widely understood as a multi-axial theory of oppression, which contends that power relations are multiple, distinct, and irreducible to one another, yet converge simultaneously in the experiences of multiply oppressed social groups—relates to the use of “racism” as a struggle concept in Greek, but also in other languages commonly used in Greece, such as Albanian (racizmi) and Arabic (eunsuria). In this paper, I examine how these two vocabularies—of racism and intersectionality—are operative in movement discourses, but also how they shape, and are shaped by activists’ perceptions, analyses, and theories of oppression. (shrink)

The research aims to explore the changes of national identity among Chinese international students in the odd social context of the global pandemic. By conducting semi-structured interviews with 10 Chinese undergraduate and postgraduate students in a prestigious university located in London, UK, the study provides evidence of Western neo-racism against Chinese students and the rise of Chinese nationalism. More significantly, it is found that Western neo-racism and Chinese nationalism have a push and pull effect on the national identity (...) enhancement of Chinese international students. The participants revealed that bottom-up popular nationalism is more than a shadow of top-down state nationalism in China, and is more influential on students’ national identity formation. The research also discusses the implications of these findings, limitations and future research directions. (shrink)

Racism and Its Presuppositions: Towards a Pragmatic Ethics of Social Change Racism has been described as a litmus test or a barium meal which reveals other disorders and injustices within the body politic. It presupposes the legitimacy of racial classifications and the metaphysical reality of races and therefore provides a vital area of scrutiny for philosophical traditions. This paper examines racism and its anti-social effects both on the individual and the society at large. It argues that (...) class='Hi'>racism is generally driven by fear and hatred hence all forms of racism are dangerous, socially harmful and morally wrong in practice. The paper recommends ways of overcoming the evil of racism by emphasizing social intelligence and self-realization as moral ideals drawing on John Dewey's pragmatism in ethics. It concludes by stressing Dewey's moral pragmatism as a potent instrument of social change. (shrink)

This article wrestles with how white domination is reproduced in research methods, questions and priorities in the neoliberal university. Reflecting on the stuck and lonely places in my doctoral project, I consider the challenges of doing research on racism in institutions largely hostile to such inquiries. I also trace the pivotal insights that helped me to get unstuck and less lonely. This involved refusing to allow white audiences and white investments to determine the direction and priorities of anti-racist scholarship. (...) The academy constantly returns us to the authority of these gatekeepers and this needs to be displaced and replaced with forms of accountability that do not consolidate white authority about matters pertaining to racism. The question of how to engage responsibly with the harm of racial violence became a central one as the concerns, priorities and desires of Black and racialised women rerouted questions of audience and accountability in this research project. Instead of being faithful to academic forms and conventions, I follow the insights of Black, Indigenous and women of colour feminisms to argue for a practice of careful and ethical engagement with one another. (shrink)

During an April 12, 1860, Senate debate, Senator Jefferson Davis spoke against a bill to fund Black education in Washington, D.C. Davis argued that the United States government was founded “by white men for white men” and “not for negroes.” According to Davis, the inequality of the white and black races was “stamped from the beginning.”Davis’s phrase forms the basis of Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 National Book Award–winning study, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. (...) Kendi currently serves as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and as the founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. Stamped from the Beginning has won a large... (shrink)

This article utilises the concept of ‘race trouble’ as an overarching framework for examining an interview between Ms Vanessa Nakate and a South African news broadcaster. The interview describes an incident involving Ms Nakate’s attendance at a global climate change conference and her exclusion from a media report about a press briefing that she held along with four other youth activists at the conference. The analysis focuses on the collaborative and interactional production of Ms Nakate’s claim that her exclusion was (...) racially motivated and the discursive mechanisms by which race is mobilised as a common-sense explanation for the incident that occurred. My analysis demonstrates the sanctionability of producing an accusation of racism and identifies the rhetorical functions of stake and facticity in its production, and concludes with a discussion of the relevance of these findings in the context of studies on race and racism in interaction. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that it can be fruitful for philosophers interested in the nature and moral significance of racism to pay more attention to psychology. We do this by showing that psychology provides new arguments against Garcia's views about the nature and moral significance of racism. We contend that some scientific studies of racial cognition undermine Garcia's moral and psychological monism about racism: Garcia disregards (1) the rich affective texture of racism and (2) the (...) diversity of what makes racial ills morally wrong. Key Words: racism • emotions • implicit bias • psychology • racial ills • pluralism. (shrink)

This is a short reply to Dan Demetriou's "Ashes of Our Fathers: Racist Monuments and the Tribal Right." Both are included in Oxford University Press's Ethics, Left and Right: The Moral Issues That Divide Us.

In recent decades, with development of scientific and philosophical knowledge, the transdisciplinary approach has become relevant, as it aims at comprehensive study of complex natural and social phenomena. Racism belongs among such phenomena, and it it is usually studied in sociology and historical science. The article presents a transdisciplinary study of racism, involving a complex appeal to philosophy, history, sociology, and other disciplines. Special attention is paid to the philosophical conceptualization of racism and the relationship of (...) class='Hi'>racism with the category of race. The article follows the evolution of the concept of race in philosophy, science and social and political practices from its origins to the 20th and 21st centuries, when this concept is declared to be artificially constructed and is gradually ousted from philosophical and scientific discourse. Bioanthropologists criticize the concept of race as inaccurate, while intellectuals see racial classifications as a sign of racism. The difficulty of the conceptualization is associated not only with the variability of the concept of race but also with the change in its historical types, from traditional to contemporary ones. Traditional (classical, biological) racism is based on the use of the category of race and the idea of insurmountable biological differences between representatives of different races. The aritcle concludes that present-day racism exists in two forms: class (institutional) racism and cultural (differential or “subtle”) racism. Class racism is associated with social and political practices of implicit segregation in employment and, accordingly, with unequal distribution of income. Cultural racism shifts the focus from biology to culture and emphasizes the insurmountability of cultural differences. (shrink)

While much has been said about what ought to be done about the statues and monuments of racist, colonial, and oppressive figures, a significantly undertheorised aspect of the debate is the aesthetics of commemorations. I believe that this philosophical oversight is rather unfortunate. I contend that taking the aesthetic value of commemorations seriously can help us a) better understand how and the extent to which objectionable commemorations are objectionable, b) properly formulate responses to aesthetic defences of objectionable commemorations, and c) (...) help us explore aesthetic solutions—for example, artistic interventions as counterspeech—to objectionable commemorations. Here, I propose that the aesthetic value of objectionable commemorations can amplify the force of the objectionable messages conveyed, and the moral disvalue of objectionable commemorations can hinder our appreciation of their aesthetic value. These two considerations shall help us answer the practical question of what to do about objectionable commemorations of apparently good aesthetic value. Both, I shall argue, give us further reason to remove, replace, recontextualise, or even vandalise objectionable commemorations. Sometimes we need to save the art from its own immorality to best respect its aesthetic value. (shrink)

Background: The experience of racism in healthcare is particularly challenging to address due to misunderstandings of the definition, the complex interplay of other potential discriminations and, at some level, the denial that it occurs. Limited studies have reported racism as an aspect of workplace violence toward nurses and nursing students from both patients and staff. Research aims: To understand nursing students’ experience of unethical behaviour, including racism during clinical placement, the perpetrators, impacts, advocating and reporting. Research design: (...) An interpretive, qualitative design was used, and 15 nursing students were interviewed using semi-structured interview guides. The interview recordings were transcribed and thematically analysed. Participants and research context: Nursing students voluntarily participated and completed the interviews for this study from one undergraduate nursing student cohort in metropolitan South Australia. Ethical considerations: This study received ethical approval from the University Social and Behavioural Research Ethics Committee. Findings/results: The two major themes with subthemes of the findings include (1) The multi-faceted student nurse experience of racism: sub themes – racism from patients to nurses, from nurses to nursing students’ and racism towards patients. (2) The pervasive influence and limited reporting of racism by nursing students: sub themes-feeling disempowered, and barriers to reporting racism. Conclusions: The findings of this study highlight the registered nurse students’ experience of racism in various forms within the clinical environment and the significant negative impact it has on RNS during placements. This evidence calls for systemic changes to create a more inclusive and supportive environment for all RNS. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What is Racism? Why is Racism Morally Wrong? What Constitutes Racism and When is it Morally Wrong? Must We Believe in the “Permanence of Racism?”.

As a young scholar, Eric Voegelin wanted to prove whether the ‘race idea’ could function as a means of political integration. He published two books on race that, after his flight to the USA, were eventually passed off as an early critique of racism. This is a complete misinterpretation and inversion of his endeavor. In his tracts, Voegelin only criticized a certain direction of race thinking that he identified as a materialistic biological approach to the problem. At the same (...) time, he advocated another spiritual and metaphysical attempt, represented by the examples of Carl Gustav Carus, Othmar Spann, and Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß. Both versions of race thinking were abundant in different types of fascism and also in Nazi Germany. That is why Voegelin could publish his books in Germany—and one of them even at the recommendation of a Nazi philosopher, with a publisher close to völkisch and fascist ideology. The revaluation of his racist texts was only possible on the basis of their affirmative or superficial and uncritical reading against the backdrop of the development of a one-dimensional conception of racism. (shrink)

Interrogating received knowledge is constitutive to any critical project, and recently there has been a wave of scholarship which argues for locating the origin of racist-thinking prior to modern Europe—even prior to the Common Era—without any real consideration of the potential dangers accompanying such a seismic redefinition. By expanding “racism” to include potentially any pre-modern xenophobic or ethnicist atrocity, even well-meaning scholarship dilutes the peculiar injustice of modern Europe’s most successful epistemological weapon. As a result, we lose any criteria (...) to distinguish ubiquitous oppressive projects from specifically racist-projects of hegemony and domination. However laudable its intent, such scholarship falls prey to methodological, epistemological, and practical errors that hamstring the ameliorative impact of contemporary anti-racist work while ironically diminishing racism’s impact. For if every conflict is racist, then contemporary colorblindness is correct: if white supremacy isn’t particularly white, then racism is a distinction without a difference. (shrink)

A symbol might have racist connotations in the sense that a substantial portion of the relevant population associates it with racist values or institutions. A governmental symbol display might therefore carry racist connotations that the government doesn’t intend, including connotations that haven’t always been attached to the symbol. So I claimed recently in the pages of this journal (Alter 2000b). I also explained how those claims create problems for some of George Schedler’s (1998) main views about governmental displays of the (...) Confederate battle flag. In his response, Schedler rejects my claims, arguing that they lead to absurdities when applied to various examples. He adds that one of his examples brings into question my “political savvy” (Schedler 2000, p. 5). Be that as it may, his arguments against my claims are entirely without force, and serve to confirm the weakness of his initial position. So I’ll argue. I’ll also identify a problematic assumption in our dispute, which is not uncommon in discussions of symbolic meaning and racist speech. (shrink)