Filosofía Crítica de La Raza (Enciclopedia de Filosofía de Stanford)

9/9/22, 02:20 Filosofía crítica de la raza (Enciclopedia de filosofía de Stanford)
Enciclopedia de Filosofía de Stanford

Filosofía Crítica de la Raza
Publicado por primera vez el miércoles 15 de septiembre de 2021
El campo que se conoce como Filosofía crítica de la raza es una amalgama de trabajos filosóficos sobre la
raza que surgió en gran medida a fines del siglo XX, aunque se basa en trabajos anteriores. Se aparta de los
enfoques anteriores sobre la cuestión de la raza que dominaron el período moderno hasta la era de los
derechos civiles. En lugar de centrarse en la legitimidad del concepto de raza como una forma de caracterizar
las diferencias humanas, la Filosofía crítica de la raza aborda el concepto con una conciencia histórica sobre
su función en la legitimación de la dominación y el colonialismo, generando un enfoque crítico de la raza y
de ahí el nombre de raza. el subcampo. La Filosofía Crítica de la Raza también se ha apartado de enfoques
ampliamente liberales que han reducido el racismo a formas individuales e intencionales.
Así, la Filosofía Crítica de la Raza ofrece un análisis crítico del concepto así como de ciertas problemáticas
filosóficas en torno a la raza. En este enfoque, se inspira en los Estudios Legales Críticos y la erudición
interdisciplinaria en la Teoría Crítica de la Raza, los cuales exploran las formas en que las ideologías sociales
operan de manera encubierta en las formulaciones dominantes de conceptos aparentemente neutrales, como
el mérito o la libertad. Si bien toma prestado de estos enfoques, la Filosofía crítica de la raza tiene una
metodología filosófica distintiva que se basa principalmente en la teoría crítica, el marxismo, el
pragmatismo, la fenomenología, el posestructuralismo, el psicoanálisis y la hermenéutica.
Los principales problemas abordados por la Filosofía Crítica de la Raza se refieren a la construcción social e
histórica de las razas, la naturaleza estructural y sistémica de las culturas racistas, la relevancia de la raza
para las formaciones del yo, la constitución mutua de raza y clase, así como otras categorías de identidad, y
la cuestión de cómo evaluar el canon existente de la filosofía moderna.
1. Introducción:
1.1 Estudios jurídicos críticos
1.2 Teoría crítica de la carrera
1.3 Influencias filosóficas en la RCP
2. Fenomenologías de raza y racismo
2.1 Múltiples racismos
2.2 Revisiones de fenomenología
3. La construcción de las identidades raciales
3.1 Raza y el yo
3.2 La construcción social de la raza
3.3 La construcción histórica de la raza
3.4 La construcción cultural de la raza
3.5 Identidades raciales y blanquitud
3.6 Direcciones futuras
4. La cuestión de las causas: capitalismo o cultura
4.1 Race and Class
4.2 Racist Cultures
4.3 Racist Social Sciences
4.4 Racist Constructions of Women of Color
5. Reconstituting the History of Philosophy
5.1. Doing Philosophy Differently
5.2 The Revelations of Contextualization
5.3 Questioning ‘modernity’ itself
Bibliography
Works cited
Other Important Works
Academic Tools
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-phil-race/ 1/28
Other Internet Resources

Related Entries
1. Introduction:
Modern European philosophers played a key role in the development of
the concept of race as a way to
characterize, and rank, differences
among human groups (Bernasconi 2018; Valls 2005; Ward and Lott 2002;
Bernasconi and Lott 2000). Philosophers in the modern era (roughly from
1600 to 1900) often disagreed on
the nature of race, the source of
racial differences, and the correlations between race and non-physical
characteristics. Kant, Rousseau and Mill, for example, disagreed over
the critical issue of whether racial
differences were mutable (Kant
2012; Elden and Mendieta 2011; Boxill 2005). Defining race in terms of
underlying biological features emerged well after the language of race
had become familiar. The biology of
race continues to elicit
controversy over whether it has explanatory value (Kitcher 2007;
Spencer 2015, ;
Glasgow et al. 2019).
The Critical Philosophy of Race (CPR) developed in large part as a

critique of modern ideas and approaches
to both race and proffered
solutions to racism. In this, CPR was influenced by the late 20th
century
developments of Critical Legal Studies (CLS) and Critical Race
Theory (CRT) (Unger 2015; Delgado 1995;
Delgado and Stefancic 1997;
Essed and Goldberg 2002). CLS and CRT were motivated to go beyond
questions of formal equality and de jure discrimination to
consider the subtle and broad reach of racist ideas
and practices
throughout social life and institutions, arguing, for example, that
norms of neutrality in legal
interpretation or reasoning often
concealed structural racism.
While borrowing from CLS and CRT, CPR’s distinctive

philosophical interests concern the role racialization
plays in
embodiment, subjectivity, identity formation as well as formations of
power and the establishment of
meaning. In order to reach beyond
Eurocentric philosophical resources CPR has drawn from anti-colonial
writings as well as critical work in sociology, history, psychology and
other fields that have addressed the
topic of race and racism more
thoroughly than philosophy (e.g. Mallon and Kelly 2012; Steele 2011;
Feagin
2013; Horne 2020).
1.1 Critical Legal Studies

The influential field of Critical Legal Studies, or CLS, that
emerged in the 1970s played an important role in
developing new
approaches to the study of how the law affects and is affected by
social domination.
Influenced by some strands in continental
philosophy, CLS scholars showed how legal arguments and
concepts could
covertly support existing power relations (Douzinas 2000). Early CLS
scholars such as
Duncan Kennedy (2008) and Roberto Magabeira Unger
(2015) argued that the pattern of social effects
produced by legal
decisions indicates that the law is not an impartial arbiter but
largely an arm of existing
hierarchies.
To see this required new methods of legal analysis that could

discern patterns of implicit assumptions
operating across the major
paradigms of legal reasoning, whether intentionalist, textualist, or
originalist. One
such assumption is the centrality and legitimacy of
stare decisis or judicial precedent. CLS argued for setting
precedent aside in order to judge decisions in relation to their often
disparate impact on different groups.
They argued that these
differential impacts were often the result of unexamined assumptions
structuring legal
argumentation, such as the assumption that
responsibility must track conscious intent, or that male power
over
women is natural, or that equality claims must be based on
sameness.
CLS scholars argued that conventions of legal analysis promulgated

mystifying ideologies that obscured the
law’s social embeddedness
and political function. They argued that we need to take a new look at
the
concepts of liberalism such as rights, neutrality, and freedom to
see whether these concepts were as
universally applicable as some
claimed. Laws and policies based on liberal ideas, such as meritocracy,
exacerbated class and racial inequality and injustice. Liberal
approaches led to these outcomes because they
downplayed differences of
history and embodiment and assumed the fungibility of roles such as
citizen or
rights-holder (Mills 2017).
The emergence of classical liberalism coincided with the development

of brutal forms of capitalism, a
decrease in women’s property
rights, and race-based slavery, colonization, and genocide. Was
liberalism
simply negligent, or did its central concepts play a role in
sanctioning social oppression? Progressives like
John Stuart Mill tied
the right of self-determination to cultural advance, thus justifying
colonial
administrations. John Locke’s labor theory of value
helped to legitimate the expropriation of indigenous
lands on the
grounds that many groups relied more on hunting than labor-intensive
agriculture. Reading the
central arguments of liberalism in light of
their diverse impact on different groups raised new questions about
liberalism’s relationship to domination.
The work of legal theorist Derrick Bell was key in bringing a CLS
approach to the topic of race. Bell
developed a series of interpretive
arguments focused on the reforms won by civil rights cases to show that
the successes were generally contained to those that did not threaten
white entitlement (Bell 1987).
Corporate elites used the mandate for
diversity, for example, as a means to create a diverse managerial class
more effective at controlling the broad multi-racial low-paid
workforce. When establishing racism required
evidence of intentional
attitudes or conscious conspiracies, it was all but impossible to
redress cross
generational wealth disparities based on race or the
structural forms of anti-black racism so deeply embedded
in such
institutions as education, the justice system, health care, housing,
and the local, state and national
organizations intended to serve
democratic representation. Thus, civil rights reforms left racism
“firmly
entrenched,” as Bell put it (1987, 4). Forced to
work with liberal concepts, progressive civil rights legislation
ended
up providing cover for the continuation of racial divides in housing,
wage scales, and education while
the criminal justice system has become
even more lethal to Black and Brown populations.
1.2 Critical Race Theory

CPR also draws from Critical Race Theory, or CRT. Like CLS, CRT
scholars have been concerned to
critique liberalism as the hegemonic
ideology of the West, but they pursue a more interdisciplinary
approach.
CRT scholars argued that solutions that stay within the
bounds of liberalism are insufficient because
“racialized
power” is embedded “in practices and values which have been
shorn of any explicit, formal
manifestations of racism” (Delgado
1995, xxix). Moreover, liberals often argue that any form of “race
consciousness” is racist, with the result that anti-racist
reforms, such as affirmative action or housing
subsidies, must prove
allegiance to the doctrines of abstract individualism and present
race-conscious
reforms as temporary deviations from the normative
ideals of neutrality. Liberal ideals that imagine
individuals
abstractly outside of their historical and social context thwart
efforts to address the effects of
historical legacies on current social
relations, property distributions, group welfare and security, and the
determination of merit.
In an influential article, CRT scholar Richard Delgado shows that

the academic scholarship that pursues anti-
racist ends is hobbled by an
incapacity in effective self-reflection. In 1984 Delgado set out to
find the top
twenty law review articles on civil rights—those
most often cited, those published in the most well-
established
journals—and found that all were written by white men. There was an
“elaborate minuet” of
exclusively internal engagement
within this grouping over the best means to move forward on racial
justice
(1995, 47). Their arguments were strong, but how could it be,
Delgado wondered, that even an idea such as
having a “withered
self-concept” would be best represented in the work of white
authors citing other white
authors rather than the important work by
people of color on the phenomenal effect of racist societies? When
he
asked the author of one article on this topic why theorists such as W.
E. B. Du Bois, Kenneth Clark,
Frantz Fanon or others were not cited,
the author explained that he preferred the source he cited because it
was “so elegant.” Criticism directed at the origin of
intellectual work continues to be considered a suspect
species of ad
hominem argument, making concerns about the politics of citation appear
illegitimate. Yet can
white writing achieve sufficiency in a matter
such as self-esteem that involves first person experience? The
problem
here, from Delgado’s perspective, was that ruling out
considerations of social identity in the
development of intellectual
work diminished the quality of that intellectual work, but in a way
that liberal
premises could never reveal.
Connected to this has been the ongoing problem of the

conceptualization of “merit.” If normal hiring or
publications decisions are viewed as generic, without considerations of
the social identity of the candidate,
then preferential hiring is a
deviation from the norm and must meet a high bar to establish even
temporary
legitimacy. But both CLS and CRT have endeavored to show that
merit-based decisions often promulgate
implicit racism. Judging which

are the top articles by the number of their citations may look to be a
neutral
standard, but it in fact perpetuates injustice while concealing
that injustice.
1.3 Philosophical Influences on CPR

Critical Philosophy of Race, then, has followed in this critical
tradition of considering the varied and subtle
forms in which race
operates in the development, debate, and assessment of philosophical
ideas and
arguments. Although many make use of Anglo-American and
analytic philosophical approaches, what
distinguishes the work in CPR
from the general work in philosophy of race is its use of figures and
traditions
of philosophy in what is sometimes called the
“continental” sphere. For example, as will be discussed
below,
David Theo Goldberg (1993) and Cornel West (1982) have both made
productive and creative use of Michel
Foucault’s analysis of
power and power/knowledge; Lewis Gordon (1995a; 1995b, 2000) and George
Yancy
(2008) developed new phenomenological approaches to the study of
racism by drawing from and building
upon the work of Jean-Paul Sartre
and Frantz Fanon; and others have found resources in Jacques Derrida,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Friedrich Nietzsche, Herbert
Marcuse, Jurgen Habermas,
Martin Heidegger, and Sigmund Freud. To be
sure, each of these European continental philosophers
exhibited some of
the same patterns of racial ignorance rife in the general canon of
Western philosophy and
have come under critical debate themselves
within CPR. Yet the continental tradition paid productive
attention to
embodiment, socially variable rather than universal modes of
perception, the link between power
and concept formation, and thus
contributed new ways to think about the covert background structures
that
affect democracy.
Continental philosophy has also begun to critique its own

artificially narrow canon and to include more
prominently the writings
of Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edward Said, Kwame
Nkrumah, Gayatri Spivak, and others who were more centrally concerned
with, and acutely perceptive about,
issues of race.
In a recent innovative move to approach the history of philosophy

differently, some CPR scholars are
“creolizing” canonical
figures to foreground their reception in the colonized world (Gordon
and Roberts
2015; Monahan 2017). Rousseau for example had a major
influence on Caribbean thought, and reading
Rousseau through Fanon,
C.L.R. James, and others has produced new interpretive insights as well
as new
critical dialogues. These “illicit blendings” can
bring questions of slavery, colonialism and race into the
forefront of
discussions that continue to engage the European modern tradition but
in new ways (Bernabé et
al. 1990). By expanding the sphere of
interlocutors in debates over freedom or human dignity, we can also
come to engage a wider plurality of philosophical concepts and, in
effect, creolize the canon.
To suggest that CPR has a singular methodology would be a mistake:

discourse analysis, psychoanalysis, and
phenomenology have conducted a
famous war against one another, and do not share a methodology. And yet
what one finds on this side of the ledger of philosophical discussions
of race are a notable body of
differences in the topics of analysis;
for example, unlike in analytic philosophy of race, there is little
attention to the question of whether the category of race is
scientifically viable, whether we should eliminate
the racial terms,
and perhaps regrettably, there is little attention to the debates over
concrete policies to
redress racism, such as affirmative action or
reparations.
In general, Critical Philosophers of Race focus on how race operates

in societies, the effects of race at both
the structural and
phenomenological levels, and the ways in which some forms of resistance
to racial systems
can be recuperated into sustaining the status quo.
Race as a category is subject not so much to biological
debate as
genealogical analysis, which makes it possible to see how, as Falguni
Sheth argues, the central
issue is not the fact of the division of
human beings into diverse groups, but the identification of racialized
peoples as unruly or a priori threats to the body politic
(Sheth 2009, 35). Just as Muslims are assumed to be
terrorists until
proven otherwise, so all non-white groups must prove their right to
inclusion, their right to
have rights. This suggests a different
problematic than a decontextualized approach to the reference of racial
concepts.
2. Phenomenologies of Race and Racism
Phenomenology was one of the first philosophical resources that CPR

began to use to explore racial effects
on experience, subjectivity, and
social relations. Although Existentialism and Phenomenology are
philosophical approaches founded by European philosophers who tended to
ignore race, the questions that
these traditions focused on from the
beginning, concerning anguish and responsibility, freedom, temporality,
and a prefigured social imaginary, have been of profound concern to the
development of the Critical
Philosophy of Race (Gordon 1995a, 1997; Lee
2014, 2019; Yancy 2008; Ngo 2017).
Edmund Husserl initially developed the phenomenological method as a

way to foreground and critique what
he called “the natural
attitude”: the unexamined background that helps constitute how we
experience the
world (Husserl 1939 [1973]). The phenomenological method as
Husserl imagined it would put this natural
attitude in brackets,
allowing for the possibility of a greater self-awareness through a
transformed mode of
interacting with the world. Contemporary
phenomenologists are increasingly concerned with the social
structures
that produce and reinforce natural attitudes as well as with habits of
understanding that can render
our worlds comforting and predictable
(see e.g. Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon 2019). There is also an
increased
focus on working through the specificity of differently embodied
perspectives, or natural attitudes
that are correlated to specific
group identities. For example, recent work in the phenomenology of race
has
developed an analysis of the formation of specific first-person
experiences within racist societies, such as an
experience of fear that
feels natural but is caused by racist projections.
In the mid-20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de

Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, and Richard Wright began to
consider the ways
in which perception, embodiment, relations with others, experiences of
one’s temporal
existence, as well as the way one conceptualizes
the natural and social worlds could all be substantively
affected by
racial identities, even if this was latent and unarticulated (Sartre
1946 [1948]; Beauvoir 1954
[1999]; Fanon 1952; Wright 1940). Fanon took up the
question of black embodiment in anti-black societies,
in which
one’s actions would be interpreted by others against the backdrop
of racist cultural images,
curtailing agency and foreclosing
individualism as well as the recognition of one as a meaning-making
subject. An anticipation of anti-black responses suffuses one’s
everyday life. Sartre considered the ways in
which colonization had
created a situation in which the structural violence of colonizers was
obscured and
the resistance of the colonized was perceived as
irrational. Beauvoir reflected on how her white identity
restricted the
possibilities of relations with others, reframing the meanings of her
intended actions in ways
that would reinforce racism. And throughout
his novels Wright explored the changed possibilities for self-
making
that were beginning to emerge for black people with the demise of legal
segregation.
Inspired by this work, new existential categories were developed by

Lewis Gordon (1995a, 1997), Paget
Henry (2000), Robert Birt (1997),
Jonathan Judaken (2008), Gertrude James Gonzalez (1997) and others to
provide more precise accounts of Black existence in anti-black worlds.
For example, there is both invisibility
and hyper-visibility: the
invisibility of black pain and suffering, now documented in medical
research,
against the hyper-visibility of black bodies in spaces
assumed to be rightfully dominated by whites, which
include higher
education, government, and institutional leadership of all sorts, now
documented by
sociologists and social psychologists (Gallagher 1994;
Gordon 1995a; Williams 1997). Gordon developed an
account of the
invisibility of black subjectivity, in which black people become
mirrors or empty hulls, mere
projections of white needs and desires.
White affection for black people is similar to their affection for
their
pets, he argued, based on the fact that pets do not judge their
masters. Black people who go against these
expectations to assert their
subjectivity and capacity to judge are subject to violence and erasure.
Gordon
used a phenomenological approach not only to reveal white
supremacist attitudes, but also to analyze various
black responses to
anti-black racism, such as the use of the n-word as a means to deflate
its power and divert
its original meaning.
2.1 Multiple Racisms

Phenomenological approaches to race also helped to disaggregate the
experiences of diverse racial identities
as well as expose the diverse
forms of racism. Liberalism generally defines racism as the result of
an
illegitimate racial consciousness or racial awareness, in which the
race of an individual is noted and taken to
be significant, setting
aside the question of who is noting who or how the significance is
understood. By
decontextualizing racism in this way it is rendered a
uniform practice that could be philosophically treated in
the abstract,
with generic solutions. By contrast, phenomenological approaches have
suggested that white
practices of racial consciousness, among others,
need a distinct analysis (Sullivan 2006). White racial
consciousness
often involves self-attributions of innocence, wilful ignorance about
race-related social
realities, and a sense of spatial entitlement that
Sullivan names “ontological expansiveness.”
While there are some similarities in racist habits—such as forms

of group-based antipathy, denigration, and
essentialism—there are
also differences important in understanding our experiences. The very
term “anti-
black racism” Gordon developed indicated that
his analysis was not meant to be generic but specific,
attending to the
manifestations of racism that emerge from the specific histories of
slavery, Jim Crow, and the
ongoing colonization of Africa. Emily Lee
and David Haekwon Kim have used phenomenonological
approaches to
explore the particularities of anti-Asian racism, Asian American
assimilation and the idea of
Asian-Americans as “model
minorities,” in which the natural attitude of whites directs a
different set of
expectations and normative judgements toward Asians
but ones that continue to curtail both individual and
collective agency
(Kim 2014; Lee 2020).
Even when racism involves a negative projection, there is also

always a positive ideal against which the
negative projection is
identifiable. The criminal black person is contrasted with the
compliant black, the lazy
Mexican is contrasted with the hard-working
Mexican, and so on. For Asian Americans, Kim argues, the
natural
attitude of whites expects passivity, with the result that nonpassive
Asians appear to be seeking
dominance, even if their non-passivity is
merely sticking “to an unpopular proposal in a committee
meeting”
(Kim 2020, 297). Asian assertiveness disrupts some
people’s comfort and reveals their commitment to the
idea that
Asians are “socially passive” (ibid). Such attitudes are
not caused exclusively by cognitive
commitments but operate as
affective states that play a formative role in desire as well as
understanding,
such as the desirability of Asian passivity.
Martin Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, or “being

there,” understands temporal and spatial location to be
constitutive of subjectivity. This has provided a helpful elucidation
of immigrant, bilingual, multilingual, and
transnational experiences of
identity, such as many Latinx people experience, among others.
Dasein’s
experience of being at home in the world and being with
others in a comfortably collective “we” state is
disrupted
by angst when the ease of this connectedness is broken by migration and
racism. Mariana Ortega
makes use of Heidegger’s approach to develop
a phenomenology of migrant life, a life in which the
experience of
at-homeness is never more than fleeting. This experience disrupts the
solidity of the natural
attitude and can lead to a critical
consciousness. European male existentialists sometimes portrayed the
self
as normally unreflective, with the secure ease of practical
functionality within their worlds, until a crisis,
such as the Nazi
occupation of France, forces reflexivity and a new awareness of what
had been taken for
granted. Ortega argues that the mestiza and the
migrant live in an everyday world of ambiguities,
uncertainties of
meaning, and contradictory norms of practice, resulting in a
discontinuous and multiplicitous
self that requires a new
phenomenological analysis (Ortega 2016, 50; see also Schutte 2000).
2.2 Revisions of Phenomenology

CPR scholars have thus effectively used phenomenology to displace
the concept of the normative subject.
But to do this, they have also
had to critique the early phenomenologists attachment to universalizing
human
experience. For example, they have shown how particular social
conditions, rather than universal ones,
create and sustain the
possibility of an unreflective consciousness that phenomenologists once
took to be the
universal default. Non-dominant identities rarely have
the privilege of a relaxed absence of self-
consciousness. In contrast,
dominant groups have not needed to thematize their identity as, for
example,
white or male (Ngo 2017).
As early as 1944, Sartre began to apply his concept of “bad

faith” to anti-Semitism (Sartre 1946 [1948]; Vogt
2003). “Bad
faith” is the term Sartre used to describe how one lies to
oneself about the constitutive elements
of the human condition—most
notably, the inevitability of death and the responsibility we must bear
for our
choices, even those choices constrained by social
conditions—as a way to avoid the existential angst this
condition
produces. “We have here a basic fear of oneself and truth”
(Sartre 1946 [1948, 18]). Anti-Semitism
works similarly, Sartre argued, by
attempting to avoid the necessity of self-creation. The status of the
Gentile
as constitutionally superior is rendered solid and impermeable
no matter what one does because of its
contrast with the Jew: every
decision the Gentile makes is legitimate, while every decision the Jew
makes is
corrupt. Anti-Semites are intentionally antagonistic to facts
or reasoning that would challenge their view;
hence Sartre calls it a
form of faith. Gordon took up this idea as the basis for understanding
anti-black
racism, which is motivated by the desire to maintain the

moral goodness and intellectual superiority of
whiteness despite any
contrary evidence.
The use of the concept of bad faith in this way challenges

Husserl’s hopeful view about our ability to critique
the natural
attitude, given the power of bad faith’s temptations and its
intransigence to reason. But in this
way, the phenomenological approach
to race and racism has helped to reveal racism’s persistence.
The phenomenological approach has also taken up the way in which

racial identities and racisms refigure the
temporal dimensions of human
existence. In line with Ortega, both Edouard Glissant (1989) and
Octavio Paz
(1950 [1961]) argued that in colonized spaces there can be a
plural sense of temporality that takes a distinct
form: an experience
of the temporality of progress and development put forward by the
dominant
mainstream alongside a sensation of the static, petrified
conditions of the marginalized periphery, creating a
fractured sense of
one’s temporal context that can lead to ennui. Alia Al-Saji has
argued that understanding
these diverse temporalities is key to seeing
how self-other relations can be short-circuited when the dominant
perceive the marginal as existing in a distinct time-space that is
“behind” (2013, 2014). This justifies
replacing dialogue
with pedagogy: explaining to the other how they can advance. The
diverse temporalities
instituted by colonization, and the subsequent
politics of memory they engender and sometimes enforce, is a
central
theme of decolonial philosophy today, making use of phenomenological
work from Fanon,
Emmanuel Levinas, and other victims of racism and
anti-Semitism to assess the aspects of our natural
attitudes still
hidden to ourselves. Further, despite the permanence of existential
temptations toward
rendering oneself as solid and thus secure, in
truth, we are always in a state of becoming, with possibilities of
playfulness and imaginative self-creation that can lend hope for the
battle against racism.
3. The Construction of Racial Identities

In general, Critical Race Philosophers have started with the view,
following Alain Locke, that race, even
though it is signified by
physical attributes, is basically a social kind rather than a natural
kind (Harris 1989).
Locke wrote: “The best consensus of opinion
then seems to be that race is a fact in the social or ethnic sense,
that it has been very erroneously associated with race in the physical
sense…that it has a vital and significant
relation to social
culture, and that it must be explained in terms of social and
historical causes…” (Locke
1916 [1992, 192]). Locke also
alluded to a contradiction still very much relevant to the debate over
eliminativism, which is how racial consciousness can be both desirable
and dangerous: desirable in that it
recognizes social and historical
realities, but dangerous in its potential to sanction prejudice and
overplay
division (Harris 1989, 203).
3.1 Race and the Self

A central issue in the work of the Critical Philosophy of Race has
been how socially instituted categories of
race are related to the
self. As Charles W. Mills has put it, the assignment of racial identity
“influences the
socialization one receives, the life-world in
which one moves, the experiences one has, the worldview one
develops—in short…one’s being and
consciousness.” (1998, xv; emphasis in original) Given this,
abstract
notions of the self that pare away particularities of our
identities such as race risk producing theories and
norms that tacitly
assume whiteness, especially given the white predominance in the
philosophical
profession.
How, then, should we understand the interaction between social

identities and the self? Is it deterministic
from the top or more
dialectical? In truth, the meanings of race have been influenced by
those victimized by
racism who collectively organize for resistance and
survival in racist regimes. Both individuals and social
movements have
articulated new ways to think about what it means to have a racial
identity (Marcano 2003;
Gooding-Williams 1998; Omi and Winant 1986;
Taylor 2004, 2016). Any theory of social construction, then,
needs to
understand this as a complex process with multiple players.
3.2 The Social Construction of Race
Race itself is a historically and culturally specific aspect of

human experience (Gossett 1965; Hannaford
1996; Augstein 1996).
Although there are precursors in earlier periods, most believe that the
main way the
concept of race has been defined in the modern era—as
signifying inherited, stable dispositions and
capacities linked to
physical characteristics—emerged within Europe during its era of
global empire. The
idea of ranked, permanent human differences
motivated or rationalized state policies governing a variety of
social
protections, inclusions and exclusions, from suffrage to immigration to
property rights.
This history may make race appear to be something imposed on the

self. The idea that race has been socially
constructed is sometimes
presented in this way: that external forces have constructed social
identities as a
way to divide and rank and ultimately exploit and
oppress. On this view, while the individual has been
categorized and
grouped by political systems, with a subsequently curtailed (or
magnified) agency, we are
still essentially individuals free to engage
in self-making.
On this version of social construction, two important ideas follow.

The first is that philosophical treatments
of the self, moral agency,
personal identity, linguistic capacity, normative practices of
cognition and so on
can be pursued separately from, or prior to, an
engagement with questions of social categories of identity
such as
race. And this accords with standard philosophical practices currently
in place. The second
implication is that the most liberating approach
to race will be to deflate its significance and eliminate it from
social life. If it is only contingently related to our identity, and
has been used to legitimate discrimination, we
should strive to reduce
the power of race (Haslanger 2011; Glasgow et al. 2019). Some states,
such as
France, use such arguments to disallow the gathering of
statistics that involve racial as well as ethnic and
religious
identity.
Theories that take a social constructionist approach to race often

understandably focus on the nefarious ways
race has been constructed.
Yet, by unseating the biological determinist view of race, social
constructionist
approaches can also instigate reflection on the varied
functions of racial terms--to signal collectivity, for
example--as well
as their open-ended future. Philosophers of race as well as other
theorists have put a lot of
work into showing how the concept was built
on the colonizing ideologies and practices that served
economic as well
as other ends (Harris 1999; Mills 1997, 2017). But eliminativists about
race have to do
more than reveal the problematic genealogy of the
concept: they also must show that the meaning of race is
uniform and
eliminating the concept is both possible and desirable.
Critical Philosophers of Race have generally argued that the

elimination of race terms will encroach on our
ability to retain an
effective historical consciousness, which hermeneuticists such as
Hans-Georg Gadamer
described as central to the capacity to reason well
(Gadamer 1975 [2004]). On the hermeneutic view,
individuals engage in the work
of judgment and interpretation while embedded within particular
traditions,
but eliminativism could disable the self-reflection this
calls for. And for phenomenologists such as Sartre, at
least in his
later works, the self is the product of a dialectical interaction
between the particulars of one’s
social situation and the choices
one makes as an individual. As Donna-Dale Marcano explains,
Sartre’s
approach “enables us to explain how and why
members of an oppressed group positively assume and create
an identity
for ourselves” grounded in that group experience: in order to
acknowledge the importance of this
shared history as well as the forms
of resistance that have had a hand in shaping our current social
identities
(Marcano 2003, 25). The desirability of forgetting this
history may vary across groups, since some might
wish to forget
atrocities that played a role in their family enrichment, while others
wish the world to
remember the lessons of the past as well as the
history of group resistance and survival. If our selves are
indeed the
product of dialectical engagement, a philosophical treatment of
identity and the self will need to
incorporate the situated and
relational elements that play a significant role in constituting us,
and this will
include our racialized identities. This approach is not
antithetical to a social constructionist theory but one
form it can
take.
The history of race reveals its fundamentally social origin and many
nefarious uses, but not the reach of its
dynamism. Although race is an
important element in our histories, this does not mean there are no
similarities across racial groups, no significant differences within
groups, or that racial meanings will remain
stable. Yet, still, as
Mills emphasizes, race has such a significant impact on our lives it
cannot but affect what
we know, how we know, and how we understand
ourselves in relation to our worlds (Mills 1998).
3.3 The Historical Construction of Race

The social constructionist approach can sometimes lend itself to the
idea that societies can bring races into
existence simply by the formal
use of the category in, for example, official legal documents. This
view in
turn can give rise to the belief that races can be
deconstructed by reversing this process. The historical
approach to
racial identities offers a different, though not entirely distinct
approach. Racial groups exist
within history and are formed by
historical forces, but these include not only top-down machinations of
states but also the collective agency of those so designated. It is not
just state policies that construct
identities, but social movements,
both progressive and reactionary. Through historical periods and
collective
group action, the meanings of race can change as well as
their political valence (Glasgow et al. 2019; Omi
and Winant 1986; Alcoff
2015).
W.E.B. Du Bois took a Hegelian approach that understood African

peoples in the post-slavery diaspora as
engaged in a dialectic process
of self-formation in light of their racialized treatment. Slaves had
been
violently dispossessed of their languages, ethnic cultures and
religions as a means of domination and control.
Yet, rather than simply
assimilating to the Anglo-European culture of North America, black
people even
under slavery were creatively producing new forms of
cultural expression and communal forms of life that
gave voice to the
sensibilities of their unique and shared historical experience (Du Bois
1903 [1997]).
Historical forces had shaped the conditions in which blackness
became a feature of the self, albeit a dynamic
and variable one.
Similarly, in the southern part of the Western hemisphere, theorists

such as José Vasconcelos and José Carlos
Mariátegui were articulating specifically racialized forms of
social identity with political implications
(Vasconcelos 1925 [1997];
Mariátegui 1928 [1993]; Von Vacano 2011). For Vasconcelos, racial
identities are
the product of both biological and social forces, but
racial rankings are simply tools of “imperialistic policy”
to generate self-justification (Vasconcelos 1925 [1997, 33]). Vasconcelos was
concerned to defend racial
mixing, which was a practice widespread in
Latin America and also the target of criticism by European
intellectuals who justified their own superior ranking on the basis of
claims to purity and unified cultural
essences. Vasconcelos held that
such claims ignore the fact that all races are in a constant process of
interaction and mutual influence. Diversification improves humanity, he
believed, and will eventually
produce a more unified or cosmic race
stronger than any “pure” race. Yet, while advocating in
this way for
mestizahe, or the mixing of races and cultures,
Vasconcelos reproduced a new form of racial ranking in
which
“pure” blacks and Indians were ranked lower than mixed race
peoples, or mestizos.
In contrast, Mariátegui criticized the way in which mestizo

and criollo elites defined the “problem of the
Indian” as a
problem of resistance to assimilation. As a forerunner of societies
that define themselves today
as “plurinational,”
Mariátegui argued that political systems needed to recognize the
legitimacy of Indian
identities and land claims. Indigenous groups in
Peru had distinct ideas and practices about how to
communally navigate
land stewardship, how to practice religion, and how to express
aesthetic values, and
these practices had produced flourishing
communities prior to the Conquest. Indian survival was not
predicated
on assimilation but on land.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, theorists tended to hold that

the Conquest and transatlantic slavery
altered and realigned but did
not erase prior values, practices, or beliefs (Henry 2000). New group
identities
carried vestiges of earlier practices and cultural ideas.
Liberation from colonialism and emancipation from
slavery created new
political constituencies who had shared aspirations for new forms of
society in which
they could chart their own futures. These new
constituencies manifested some continuities with the pre-
Conquest,
pre-slavery past but were also dynamic responses to new conditions and
possibilities. For
example, while diverse indigenous groups were
forcibly realigned by territorial annexations, they responded
by
developing new group identities that included pan-indigenous identity
while maintaining a historical
consciousness of their distinct lineage
(Jimeno 2014; de la Cadena 2015).
The contrast between political philosophy in Latin American versus

Europe is instructive here. The project
of Latin American political
philosophers such José Martí, Simon Bolivar and
Mariátegui was never to create
ideal political institutions for
any given collection of abstract individuals, but to create workable
institutions
that could overcome the devastations wrought by
colonialism, cultural imperialism, and slavery. This
required
addressing group differences and group histories. For
Mariátegui, the Indians of Peru deserved land
rights not as
individuals but as specific historical peoples whose land had been
stolen. The political
philosophy of a nation such as Peru could not
then follow liberal theoretical traditions that treated individual
citizens as essentially fungible with uniform rights and duties.
This is what fueled Martí’s concern that the

Eurocentric universities of Latin America offered no “analysis of
elements peculiar to the peoples of America” (Martí 1999,
114). As a result of their European or U.S. based
curriculum,
“the young go out into the world wearing Yankee or French
spectacles, hoping to govern a
people they do not know” (ibid).
Marti despised the concept of race, held that racism was a sin against
humanity, and sought to undo the racism that the Spaniards
institutionalized in the colonial era (Schutte
2011). But he also held
that new societies must come to understand and address the fact that
different groups
had distinct histories with their own “vital and
individual characteristics of thought and habit…”
(Martí, 119)
Eurocentric curricula are not universal, but
particular, and may have only partial relevance outside Europe.
Writing
some decades later, the philosopher Leopoldo Zea echoed
Martí’s warning and argued that
philosophical approaches
need to address human and cultural specificity (Zea 1986).
In many post-liberation, post-slavery writings, racial identity

began to signify differently than it had for the
colonizers: it came to
mean group identities and forms of life that had been forged by
historical processes
involving not only colonialism but also the forms
of resistance devised by the colonized. Generic terms like
“Black” would change their meanings to signify new group
formations whose content or unifying elements
referred both to the
enforced diaspora as well as new forms of collectivity and resistance.
The generic term
“Indian” itself denoted a widely diverse
set of communities, initially united only in that it was used by
settler
societies to project negative attributes on all indigenous
peoples. In this sense the term had elements very
similar to other
racial terms. Yet it began to signify something more substantive as
well as more positive: a
difference of historical experience, values,
and practices that cut across many particular differences between
indigenous groups. There is ongoing debate today about the validity of
such a broad term, but there is
agreement that the term
“Indian” signifies not only what was done to the
peoples it signifies, but broadly
shared forms of religiosity,
community, and relationality (Teuton 2008; Pratt 2002; Burkhart
2019).
3.4 The Cultural Construction of Race

How should we understand the connection between racialized
identities and the production of cultures?
“Civilizations and
peoples are not…coterminous with races,” as Leonard Harris
reminds us (Harris 1999,
445). Yet there are links. For Alain Locke, as
Harris explains, socially created races can be defined in
relation to
“beliefs, habits, customs, and informal institutional
regulations,” but these are the products of
group agency rather
than innate: it is civilizations and peoples that decide what traits to
encourage given
particular historical circumstances (Harris 1999,
444–5). While it is a mistake to see races as causes of
cultural formations, it is also a mistake to assume that racialized
group histories play no role in the “beliefs,
habits,
customs” that play a role in surviving adversity, or, on the
other hand, in conquering.
Perhaps the most philosophically rich discussion and debate over

race and culture came out of the anti-
colonial movement that put
forward the concept of Negritude in the midst of anti-colonial
struggles in Africa
and the French Caribbean. Negritude was the name
given for the concept of “black culture.” For some
theorists, such as Léopold Sédor Senghor, biologically
caused racial identities have cultural products that,
because of their
biological origin, have limited transformational potential. But for
other theorists, the
production of black culture is essentially to be
understood within the history of colonialism (Mosley 1999,
75).
For both Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Negritude was the

cultural fruit of the historical process of intellectual
cross-fertilization known as métissage. Within this
dynamic history, new cultural forms developed that could
offer
intellectual nourishment to the developing social movements striving
for self-determination (Denean
Sharpley-Whiting 2003, 117). “For
us, the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat
the
past, but to go beyond…It is a new society that we must
create, with the help of all our brother slaves, a
society rich with
all the productive power of modern times, with all the fraternity of
olden days” (Césaire
1955 [1972, 31]). Thus, Negritude articulated
a new set of norms and values that aimed to depart from
Europe’s
barbarism. Rejecting colonialism involved turning toward rather than
away from the historical tie to
indigenous African cultures. This would
prove to be a productive relation, since these cultures were neither
modern nor liberal by Europe’s lights but communal, cooperative,
and anti-capitalist, with their own forms of
democracy (Césaire
1955 [1972, 23]). Decolonization required not simply nation-building but a
reassessment
and realignment of cultural forms and related social ideas
about human possibilities (Getachew 2019).
Negritude was the name given
to this endeavor.
To be sure, Negritude has sustained decades of critical debate

concerning the dangers of cultural
homogenization (Sealey 2018; Appiah 1992; Wilder 2015; Mosley 1999). Another line of debate concerned
the
championing of emotion, intuition and myth in indigenous cultures, and
whether this only played into the
hands of white supremacists. Senghor

responded that the point is to redefine the sphere of emotion and the
importance of myth as a feature of every society. Du Bois (1903 [1997]) also
expressed and affirmed the idea
of a specific form of spirituality,
inspired in part by Hegel. Eventually these ideas would find resonance
in
the idea of “soul” as the cultural form of a people,
another conception with an indelible racial connotation.
Negritude was motivated by the project Aime Césaire called

“disalienation”: to overcome the denigration of
Africa and
the forced assimilation into the culture of the colonizer
(Táíwò 1999). Yet to be clear,
disalienation for
Césaire did not require a denial of métissage.
His own writings were influenced by the
French poetry and literature he
had imbibed as a student, but Césaire insisted that his project
was to “create a
new language, one capable of communicating the
African heritage” (Césaire 1955 [1972, 67]). In the
colonial
context of Martinique, the use of French did not need to stop but what
was most important was to
develop “a new means of
expression” that would be “Antillean French, a black French
that, while still being
French, had a black character” (ibid.).
Negritude aimed to allow the expression of a full range of memory,
affect, orientation, and sensibilities across the domain of many
diverse ethnic, religious, and language
communities from which the
slaves were kidnapped.
The emphasis on the historical construction of cultural differences

and social identities led to diverse
conclusions by different
theorists. Sartre came to defend the concept of Negritude against its
detractors, but
his defense portrayed it as a transitional stage in a
Hegelian dialectical moment that would lead to a future
without racial
differences. (Sartre 1948 [1988]; Bernasconi 1995, 2006) Such a future may be
one that many
anti-racists, people of color among them, aspire to
(Williams 1997). But the problem, as Fanon put it, was
that Sartre was
wielding a universal historical teleology in which sacrifices of
collective identification and
historical memory were disproportionately
distributed (Fanon 1959 [1967]). It is the Black man who must
“renounce
the pride of his color…[accept] the twilight of his
negritude…in order to find the dawn of the
universal”
(Sartre 1948 [1988, 329]). This formulation maintained the conception of
universal humanism
held by the French colonizers. Fanon rejected the
idea that negritude was simply a stage, and retorted that “It
is
the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the Negro who creates
negritude” (Fanon 1959 [1967, 47]).
Edouard Glissant took the concept of metissage and applied

it to the way in which we approach historical
understanding to argue
that the danger with historical approaches lies with the assumption of
a singular
history that unifies us all (Sealey 2020). “One of the
most disturbing consequences of colonization could
well be this notion
of a single History…The struggle against a single History for
the cross-fertilization of
histories means repossessing both a true
sense of one’s time and identity…” (Glissant 1989,
93).
As Kris Sealey argues, homogenized teleologies such as Sartre

presumes puts a stranglehold on the political
imagination. Yet Fanon
and Amilcar Cabral both worried that in some forms Negritude itself
downplayed
dynamism, internal conflicts, and the heterogeneity of the
diasporic experience. Both suggested that the
imaginary projections of
homogeneous cultural identities based on shared racialization were the
product of
alienated middle classes seeking an authenticity they had
lost. While recognizing that the group specificity of
cultural
formations and ideas remained vital, they, together with Kwame Nkrumah,
held that we need to
retain a capacity to develop historically informed
critiques of anti-racist philosophies (Nkrumah 1964; Cabral
1973).
3.5 Racial Identities and Whiteness

If social identities are contextual in relation to social,
historical and cultural elements, this extends to what it
means to be
white. Whiteness across the Americas and Europe varies, since not all
began as settler states,
and yet the unconscious habits and frameworks
inculcated by white or light-skinned persons positioned as
superior to
all other groups can have some commonalities. No matter one’s
individual political and moral
commitments, a person from the dominant
group will have common experiences across most of their
contexts in
light of this feature of their social identity.
In his essay, “The Souls of White Folks,” Du Bois

considered the effects of a perpetually reinforced idea of
natural
superiority and dominance on white subjectivity (Du Bois 1940
[1986c]). His concern was the
“conditioned reflexes” and
“long followed habits” built into customs and folkways (Du
Bois 1940 [1986c],
679). The fact that the white poor and white
workers were promised well more than they ever received had a
profound
effect on their resentments as well as their illusions. Du Bois was
also interested in how a generic
self-regard could be attached to such
an insignificant fact as white skin color: what does it do to a man,
he
asks, to believe that his skin entitles him to ownership of the

world? Du Bois claimed an epistemic advantage
as a non-white person
who can discern the pathological identity complex that afflicts
whites. He describes
himself as a non-foreigner who lives among them
and can view them from an “unusual vantage” so that, as
he
put it, “I see in and through them.” (Du Bois 1910 [1986b,
923]). This knowledge is terrifying for white
people and animates their
antipathy: no Emperor wants to share table with those who know he is
naked. The
habitual practices that ensure white self-regard are
largely unconscious, Du Bois suggested, and whites often
vigorously
resist being made conscious of them.
More recently Charles W. Mills used the concept of the

“epistemology of ignorance” to describe habits of
knowing
that the dominant consciously pursue in order to ensure that they can
retain moral self-regard (Mills
1997). Ignorance of the reality of
racial domination, and of its illegitimacy, certainly requires more
concerted
effort in the recent period. One must consciously avoid
certain books, courses, films, television shows,
newspaper articles,
and so on, but one must also attach oneself to certain ideas about
objectivity, the
irrelevance of genealogy in assessing a claim, and the
absoluteness of truth claims that obviate the need for
self-reflection.
José Medina (2012) has developed this idea further to explore
how self-knowledge has been
curiously circumscribed in mainstream
traditions of epistemology to exclude knowledge of others or
knowledge
of one’s society. If we are what we are always in relation to
others, he argues, then knowledge of
others, and of the social
conditions we must all inhabit, is a necessary condition of
self-knowledge.
Shannon Sullivan (2006) has explored the idea of unconscious habits

of whiteness more broadly. Her work
has developed some aspects of
psychoanalytic theory and pragmatism to explore the common elements of
white racial identity formation. This proves a fruitful way to consider
how racism can be effectively passed
down across generations without
conscious intent. Bodily posture toward a person of color who comes to
one’s door can convey a whole array of ideas to children without
needing to be stated. Sullivan elaborates a
host of sometimes
unconscious assumptions in white ways of being, involving entitlement,
fear, guilt, and
other affective states. Sullivan has looked
particularly at “lived spatiality”: the way in which
diverse groups
live their spatiality and understand themselves in
relation to specific spaces. Given the “ownership” idea
attached to whiteness, and the historical practices of forming
settlements in foreign lands, a
phenomenological approach to the
racialization of lived spatiality can reveal sediments of assumed white
privilege that can affect such current issues as gentrification and the
reemergence of white nationalism. Some
of these habitual practices
common to white subjectivity may be formulated as epistemically
praiseworthy
(for example, aspiring to colorblindness, ignoring
history, or the motivation to “discover” unknown lands and
make one’s mark upon the world).
3.6 Future Directions

The analysis of race and the self, then, includes unconscious habits
as well as subjective features produced
by collective experience. Yet
an important theme of CPR has been an attentiveness to
métissage, as well as a
defense of mestizahe
and the productive creolizations of cultures that have been too little
acknowledged.
Although clearly marked cultural borders and pure lines
of racial descent are praised and pursued by racist
social systems,
they have never been achieved in reality. Our plural lineages and
influences mean that, to
some extent, we all operate within what are
called pluritopic hermeneutic frameworks, rather than
monotopic,
homogenous, or coherent hermeneutic frameworks (Mignolo 2012). This
fact does not imply that
we can go back to taking a universal
“we” as a starting point, or some form of abstract
individualism.
Perhaps we are all pluritopic today, but racialized
subjectivity is formed differently vis-à-vis power.
Alain Locke insisted on the fact that “most cultures”

have been found to be “highly composite”: “the
resultant of the meeting and reciprocal influence of several culture
strains, several ethnic contributions. Such
facts nullify two of the
most prevalent popular and scientific fallacies, the ascription of a
total culture to any
one ethnic strain, and the interpretation of
culture in terms of intrinsic rather than the fusion values of its
various constituent elements” (Locke 1924 [1989, 195]). Locke took this
feature of cultures to provide a
definitive rejoinder to supremacist
claims, since the cultural achievements of societies marked by white
supremacy bear the influences of subordinated groups.
It remains true, however, that as we saw with Vasconcelos, ideas of

mixing can and have co-existed
alongside and even supported racism
(Bernasconi 2010). The slipperiness of racial meanings and the
flexibility of racism requires philosophers to continually assess the
contextual conditions within which any
given philosophical claim is
operating.
4. The Question of Causes: Capitalism or Culture

A central issue of debate in the Critical Philosophy of Race has been
how to understand the causes of racism
in relation to economic
motivations and the system of capitalism as well as cultural forces
and social
ideology. Orthodox Marxists often sidelined issues of
racism, diminishing the struggle against racism as a
struggle for
bourgeois rights within a legal system that would remain structurally
unjust under capitalism.
Some thought the focus on racism would divide
the working class and weaken solidarity. Despite the
weakness of these
arguments, it remains true that some anti-racist agendas sideline
economic issues and
focus on representational equity at the top of the
pyramid. This has led to an ongoing debate about how to
relate the
issue of race with the issue of class (Grosfoguel 2016).
4.1 Race and Class

Racism is very profitable. It can work to reduce compensation for
jobs designated “unskilled” or “low
skilled”
because the articulation of “skill” values mental over
manual labor and often misrepresents the
complex demands of the latter.
Racist prejudices incline some to accept the idea without examination
that the
labor done by racialized groups is unskilled. All manual
workers are disrespected and shut out of decision
making, but the
racial organization of the labor market makes this sector more
non-white than other sectors,
and in some locations, such as Latin
America or South Africa, almost entirely non-white. Racial divisions
among workers are regularly exploited by capitalists to diminish
solidarity. Neo-colonialism in the global
south continues to facilitate
the exploitation of labor in countries too desperately poor to
negotiate terms very
effectively. In truth, then, both national and
transnational markets in labor and goods have been racially
organized
since the Conquest of the Americas for the benefit of elites. Even when
the elite class is multi-
racial, they benefit from the racist system of
organizing and remunerating labor. This is the meaning of the
term
“racial capitalism” (Robinson 1983; Mills 1997).
Clearly, emerging capitalism made use of the racist ideologies

initiated in the early days of colonialism, such
as the idea that
Native peoples and African peoples exist in an earlier stage of human
development and are
thus legitimately subject to governance and control
by more advanced or developed human cultures
(Grosfoguel and
Cervantes-Rodríguez 2002; Quijano 2008). Capitalism also profits
from the denigration of
the value of indigenous cultures around the
world, especially when these thwart mining, logging, or other
types of
resource extraction and the transformation of environments upon which
groups depend for their
subsistence. On the other hand, some argue that
because capitalism has no intrinsic need to respect cultural
traditions, it often upends traditions involving racism and sexism when
these conflict with its labor needs: for
example, the profit motive
encourages hiring the best from any group for its
professional/managerial and
creative teams. One of the prime features
of capital markets is their tendency to disrupt existing social
conventions. These points have raised debate over whether capitalism is
necessarily committed to the
maintenance of racism. And
further debate has arisen over whether racist ideologies are intrinsic
to cultures
or to economies, or both.
Most critical theorists of race and ethnicity argue for an expansion

beyond economic analyses. Ella Shohat
and Robert Stam hold that
“While political economy is absolutely essential to any
substantive left critique, it
is also important to articulate culture
and economy together, to conceive of them as existing in and through
each other” (2016, 421). In this vein, the cultural theorist
Stuart Hall developed what he called a heterodox
Marxist approach to
race, emphasizing the role of culture in producing the hegemony
required to maintain
the racial organization of labor (Mills 2010,
186). Yet Hall rejected the idea that culture operates as a
sufficient
cause or is separable from material conditions (Hall 1980 [2002], 1997a, 1997;
Morley and Chen
1996). Hall’s approach to the importance of
culture in regard to racism was inspired by 20th century
Marxist
theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser and those
associated with the Frankfurt School, although
these theorists avoided
addressing race. Some did address anti-Semitism and the links between
the rise of
authoritarian societies and the forms of group hatred the
Nazi’s promoted, but they wrote little about racism
or
colonialism (Allen 2016; Farr 2018). Hall suggests however that
Gramsci’s origins in southern Italy
informed his understanding of
how regional ethnic identities could animate prejudice and play a
formative
role in the crafting of hegemony.
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony focused on the ways in which

broad majorities come to accept significant
income inequality and
diminished democracy, reducing the need for capitalist states to use
brute force.
Gramsci suggested we must reach beyond economic motives

to explain the success of hegemony. To avoid a
mono-causal approach to
racial domination, Hall adapted three concepts from Gramsci and
Althusser:
hegemony (the production of cross-class acceptance of
social injustice), relative autonomy (for cultural
forces that
sometimes operate autonomously from profit maximization), and
overdetermination (the
necessity “to grasp the multiplicity of
social determinations in play – and the fact that they work in
combination, as an articulation of different forces” [Hall 2017,
90]). For Hall, the significance of this overall
approach is to alert
us to potential misalignments between causative elements, so that the
power of social
determinism is understood to have some
instability. Further, we can see how non-economic motives can
drive
the choices of both workers and capitalists. One may be motivated to
maintain one’s social position in a
racial hierarchy, for
example, and to ensure that racial groups considered lesser are not
gaining social and
economic advantages, even if this compromises
one’s ability to fight capital.
However, if we assume that racial identities are epiphenomenal

illusions or imaginary in some sense, such
motives will fall under the
category of false consciousness, in which case race-based motivations
will not
challenge economic determinism. One’s “real”
interests as a worker will continue to lay in opposing racial
divisions. As discussed earlier in this entry, the idea that racial
concepts are illusory may seem to have good
evidentiary grounds. Yet
racial categories that operated within the emerging settler states,
such as the United
States and Australia, distributed significant
privileges and protections by race. These included both economic
and
political rights, including homestead rights, voting rights, and labor
rights. In this way, socially created
kinds such as racial identities
had a powerful social reality: even if some of the ideas about such
identities are
false, real historical events produced shared
experiences and shared sets of interests (Beltrán 2020).
The fact that racial groups are led to compete with one another for
economic advantages is itself socially
engineered rather than natural,
but it may have heterogeneous causes. The concept of overdetermination
allows us to expand the concept of what is in one’s rational
“interest” to include pride and self-regard, group
self-affirmation, relational advantage over other groups, the desire to
enact domination and to protect
longstanding special entitlements. Is
the imbrication of this complex array of motives such that we should
see the economic as the main determinant, operating behind what look to
be identity-protections? In other
words, are racist motives ultimately
caused by a choice structure crafted by capitalists?
4.2 Racist Cultures

Some argue that the structural racism of modern European societies
(and European-based societies such as
the United States) is deeply
embedded in their cultures and languages in ways that are concealed by
their
espousal of classical liberalism’s dominant concepts of
individualism, equality, and freedom (Goldberg 1993,
pp. 6–7; see also
Mills 2017). It is liberalism that espouses neutrality and
color-blindness as ideal norms for
social interaction, leading to an
unwillingness to engage with racial realities in social institutions
and
economic outcomes. David Theo Goldberg argues that liberal cultures
are racist in taking difference to be a
problem requiring assimilation,
integration, and “normalization” in Foucault’s sense
of a comparative
ranking that justifies forcible conformity. People of
color and non-European immigrants who reject the color-
blind ideal are
seen as not yet assimilated into advanced, modern ways of life, and
thus incapable of self-
governance. Every articulation of anti-racist
rage and rebellion can then be cast aside as based in ignorance.
If
these groups knew how to work within liberal democratic institutions
and educational systems, some
believe, they would be faring better with
no need to rebel. In a sense, then, the suffering of nonwhites is
viewed as self-caused by their inferior cultures, leading to a
hegemonic acceptance of social inequality. The
liberal view, as opposed
to the conservative view, is distinguished only in that it sees this
deficiency as
remediable with assimilation.
A key element of Goldberg’s approach is to highlight the

malleability of racial and racist discourses: just as
liberalism has
morphed into neo-liberalism, with its emphasis on self-maximizing
strategies, individual
responsibility, and punitive attitudes toward
those who cannot effectively monetize their talents, so old-
school
biological racism morphs into cultural racism: the problem is not
nonwhite genes but nonwhite
cultures. Against those who take race to
simply mean biology, Goldberg holds that the language of race can
continue its noxious effects without any recourse to “biological
reference” (1993, 11). Goldberg proposes
that the West is made up
of racist cultures so deeply committed to racism that new forms emerge
as soon as
old ones lose their power. Cultures are inherently dynamic,
counseling against a metaphysically inclined
pessimism, but the
dynamism and plasticity of racism requires permanent vigilance.
Goldberg and Cornel West have independently made use of the

Foucauldian concepts such as “fields of
discourse” and
“epistemes” to suggest that racial ideas are reinforced by
loose coherence relations without
logical entailments or causal
determinism (West 1982). Familiar ways of organizing and achieving
knowledge—such as classification tables—resonate across quite
different disciplines and projects and help to
guide, and control, the
formulation of intelligible objects and problematics. Human
differences, West
suggests, were mapped in the 18th and 19th centuries
via small visual variations to resonate with the ways in
which
botanists organized typologies of flora and fauna, as if such mapping
constituted knowledge.
Despite their variety, racist cultures tend to portray racial

identities and racism as natural in a way that
obscures their
historical construction. Although the 19th century theories and
practices in regard to race have
been discredited and largely rejected,
the ways in which race is approached today in both the social and
natural sciences retain some continuity with these problematic
histories, with disturbing effects: “The
scientific cloak of
racial knowledge, its formal character and seeming universality,
imparts authority and
legitimation to it” (Goldberg 1993,
149).
Foucault’s focus was on the ways in which knowledge projects

are framed, confining those so defined
“within the constraints of
the representational limits” (Goldberg 1993, 152). Such projects
have typically
assumed that the most important goals are uplift,
assimilation, and integration with whites rather than
extending
democracy or reformulating justice (Shelby 2018). Knowledge projects
are themselves conducted
in ways that can exacerbate epistemic
injustice: “The Other, as object of study, may be employed but
only as
informant, as representative translator of
culture” (Goldberg 1993, 150; see also Narayan 1997 and Bayruns
Garcia 2019). Concepts in use today such as “ghettos,”
“ganglands,” “inner cities,”
“underclass,” and
“puppet governments” operate
in a similar manner as older concepts like “savages,”
“primitives,” and
“barbarians” to reify and
naturalize peoples, neighborhoods, and cultures (Goldberg 1993,
152–155).
Resonating effects between the new language and the old does more than
support their plausibility, as
Goldberg points out:
“noncontroversial meanings [of terms such as ‘inner
city’ or ‘underclass’] offer to their
racialized
ones the aura of respectability, just as their racial connotations
spill over silently, unself-
consciously, and so unproblematically into
their racialized ones” (1993, 155). New meanings for old terms
can emerge as needed by new contexts and new social projects, but with
persistently problematic
connotations. The concept of the
“primitive” was originally intended to refer to ancient
social groups from
which contemporary human societies are descended;
only later did it become a synonym for the racially
other and the
culturally “backward”. In this case the meaning remained
stable while the referent group
shifted. Ancient social groups that
were nomadic, polygamous, and communal rather than individualist were
then tagged onto nonwhite groups that exist today, such as indigenous
groups in Africa and Latin America.
4.3 Racist Social Sciences

Both CPR and CRT scholars have shown how a significant amount of
social science research has been
functional for the state, with dubious
results: providing information, data, statistical regularities that are
used
to formulate state policies; assuming frameworks that overlook
agency and divert attention from
considerations of justice (Murakawa
2014; Shelby 2018; Bauman 2003; Darby and Rury 2018). Statistics
gathering on
recidivism rates correlated to race are still used in parole decisions,
as if recidivism is a natural
fact or caused by bad individual choices
rather than inadequate social services and prejudicial labor markets.
In this way social science continues to participate in the construction
of social ontologies, such as “likely
repeat offender,”
through feedback loops between representation and reality. Social
sciences can then
represent racial Others in an ostensibly neutral way
while protecting white dominance (Goldberg 1993, 174).
To believe that we simply need to find more politically correct

alternatives for terms like “underclass” or
“primitive” is to assume that the object of reference can
be defined and demarcated within racist cultures
outside of a racist
linguistic system. If we understand racism to be infecting the
delimitation of fields of
knowledge and the formation of objects as
well as associated meanings, then the task must be to critically
assess
cultures, discourses, and institutions at every level. The project of
inquiry then becomes one of
understanding how racial domination has
been reproduced across generations, encompassing political
sensibilities from conservatism to liberalism.
Goldberg’s approach may be interpreted by some as a postmodern

approach that has gone too far in
conferring sufficient
causality to language or discourse (see e.g. Mills’ critique of
Hall, 2010, on this same
point). Yet both Goldberg and Hall continually

emphasize material structures alongside linguistic and
discursive ones.
There remains the question of how to understand the relation between
these various aspects
of racist cultures. The question of whether there
are ultimate or sufficient causes, however, does not animate
Goldberg’s work. His goal is to unearth the cultural and
discursive elements involved in the constitution,
perpetuation, and
fluid transformations of racist concepts and racist societies. We need
to understand the
constitutive discourses operating in the social
sciences to grasp how it can be the case that they “have done
much to create, authorize, legitimate, and extend both the figures of
the racial Otherness and the exclusion of
various
racisms” (Goldberg 1993, 175).
Other philosophers who analyze the social sciences have also

offered a strong critique of existing
frameworks and policy approaches
(esp. Darby and Rury 2018 meant; Shelby 2018). Tommie Shelby
critiques
mainstream work on racial poverty in the social sciences for
downplaying the agency of the poor as
well as the rationality and
moral reasoning that can motivate decisions to self-segregate, for
example, or, at
times, to resist certain kinds of wage labor. Ghetto
poverty is caused by macro structural forces, but the
collection of
individuals forced into these spaces are actively endeavoring to
survive, to occasionally
flourish, and also to foment resistance of
one sort or another. We cannot explain their choices by their culture
(as in the “culture of poverty” thesis) but by their
choice situation. We also need frameworks that allow
theorists to see
the creative and assertive responses devised by collective effort (the
assertiveness of rap, for
example, that re-describes social worlds
against dominant misrepresentations). Shelby no less than Goldberg
takes apart the linguistic apparatus that produces a large body of
social science functional for racial
capitalism. And his use of what
is a usually denigrating term – “ghetto” – may
be seen as an instance of what
Goldberg calls “standing inside
the terms” as a means to transform and redirect their political
effects (1993,
174).
Critical philosophers of race, even those influenced by

postmodernism, tend to set limits on the plasticity of
linguistic
transformation. Goldberg suggests that those designated by the term
“primitive,” such as
indigenous groups, “are rarely
in a position of power, politically and technologically, to take on the
category
as a form of self-reference, even should they choose to”
(1993, 174). Speech, however constitutive its reach,
exists in a
material world.
4.4 Racist Constructions of Women of Color

Critical race feminist philosophers have developed a critical
analysis of the ways in which categories such as
“Black
women” as well as “women of the global south” have
been constituted as an academic object of study
and analysis (Narayan
1997; Khader 2011, 2018; duCille 1997). Uma Narayan argued that
representations of
women in India reproduce naturalistic frames and
global hierarchies that devised a version of the culture of
poverty
thesis on an international scale. Notably, violence against women in
the global north is not generally
given cultural explanations but
portrayed as a problem of individual pathology or an undifferentiated
misogyny that operates outside of specific histories and contexts. By
contrast, women of the global south are
portrayed as oppressed by their
cultures and religions.
Serene Khader expands on this analysis to show how culturalist

explanations result in underestimating the
agency of women in the
global south, creating the view that their agency is only possible when
they
completely reject their religion or culture. This is a problem not
only in the social sciences but also in
postmodern feminist theory, and
it occludes possibilities of universalist feminism because the
oppressed
Third World woman constructed in this way requires uplift,
not dialogic engagements in which there might
develop a larger
understanding of the complex nature of sexism as well as the multiple
possibilities of
liberation from sexism. In some writings, the Third
World woman is reified to such a degree that no serious
political
engagement about how to formulate shared feminist aims is possible.
Khader develops an approach to adaptive preferences that allows for

non-ideal and historically attuned
assessments of choices in any given
context. All gendered individuals in reality make choices within
structured environments. Outsiders to these environments tend to
misdiagnose women’s choices, viewing
them as accepting of
oppression when in truth they may be efforts at self-protection.
Mistaken analyses can
also occur when cultures are reified as static;
if we drop this idea Khader suggests we can judge choices
based on
their potential for transitions. For example, covering can enable women
to venture out of the home
without risk, and lead to changed public
spheres. She argues for an approach that attends to contextual
conditions of all sorts – material and cultural – for
understanding oppression and gauging effective
resistance.
Contextualization will yield pluralist rather than uniform notions of
liberation from gender-based
oppression, and Western feminists need to
be open to a multiplicity of liberatory forms even including
certain
kinds of gender-based divisions of labor.
Ann duCille takes a critical look at how the category “Black

women” has been constructed within
postmodernism, as well as
other radical theoretical platforms. It is problematic to take Black
women as the
quintessential Other or the paradigm of difference
(duCille 1997; Davidson 2010). Black women can be
epistemically privileged in a way that does not reify their otherness,
concealing its contextualization and
internal variability. Maria del
Guadalupe Davidson takes up duCille’s challenge to rethink the
category by
drawing from Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “the
fold” as an alternative approach to identity and subjectivity.
This presents an approach to subjectivity as constitutively relational.
If theorists will focus on activity and
relationality, rather than
being, we may be able to specify unique conditions of Black women
without
reification (Davidson, 2010, 128–130).
Debates continue about how to formulate racial identities as well as

whether identity-based movements have
overshadowed class-based
movements. Shohat and Stam explain that the focus on identity should be
seen
against the backdrop of a larger project of global decolonization,
rather than assumed to be forever complicit
with neo-liberalism (2016).
The point is not to replace the frame of class struggle, but to
complicate it,
bringing ongoing forms of cultural imperialism to the
center of analysis, so that we can begin to discern the
“multiaxial forms of resistance and struggle” that face
down “multiaxial forms of oppression…shaping new
social
actors, new vocabularies, and new strategies.” (2016, 421)
5. Reconstituting the History of Philosophy

The racist beliefs of major figures in the traditional canon of modern
philosophy went unexplored until the
second half of the
20th century. Most historians of philosophy assumed that
canonical figures were simply
men of their time, and that their racism
was devoid of philosophical interest and significance. Critical race
philosophers have opened up debate on these issues, such as how the
racism of important philosophers such
as Locke and Kant may require us
to reassess standardly generous interpretations of their political and
ethical
views (Zack 2017; Taylor et al. 2018; Mills 2017; Bernasconi
and Mann 2005). They have also argued that
bringing racism to the fore
will require changing the standard ways of doing the history of
philosophy.
5.1. Doing Philosophy Differently

First, a change in interpretive methods is in order, to
change the way in which we read canonical texts.
Before we assume that
the racism of a given philosopher was typical of their day, we need to
explore the
historical context and consider the written views of his or
her contemporaries so that we can reasonably
assess what any given
philosopher “could or should have known” about, for
example, slavery (Bernasconi
2018, 3). In fact, as recent work has
shown, throughout the modern period, slavery and colonialism were
subject to vigorous debates both by those inside and outside of
imperial nations (Jeffers 2018; Valls 2005;
Mehta 1999; Pitts 2006;
Dussel 2018, 2013; Mosley 2017). A thorough examination of the
intellectual scene
in which canonical philosophers were ensconced
raises new questions about their views and assumptions
(Bernasconi and
Mann 2005; Ward and Lott 2002). But such an examination requires that
we contextualize
philosophical texts historically and socially before
we can justify our interpretations.
Second, the existing canon has too many omissions on crucial issues,
especially in regard to moral and
political debate, to be taken as
sufficient unto itself, given that such topics as slavery were
extensively
discussed and debated by other theorists in the same time
period. The question of how to expand, if not
reconstitute, the canon
of modern philosophy has generated debate over what constitutes
“philosophical”
writings as opposed to other sorts. It is
important to remember that the canon of modern European
philosophers
does not include only professional philosophers working within
universities: such professionals
did not even appear until the
beginning of the 19th century. And the issue of what makes a
text count as a
philosophical argument is of course subject to further
debate. Many of the already accepted canonical
European texts come in
the form of letters, memoirs, fiction, dialogues, interpretations of
sacred writings,
and journalistic essays. Think of Augustine’s
Confessions, Thomas More’s Utopia, Hume’s Dialogues on
Natural Religion, Pascal’s Pensees, The Federalist Papers,
Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, or Edmund
Burke’s
Reflections on the Revolution in France. Philosophers read texts in a
philosophical manner even
when the text itself is not written in the
form of a logically ordered argument.
There is original philosophical work in Africana, Latin American,

indigenous and other traditions on
metaphysics, morality, aesthetics
and a whole host of philosophical issues that should become part of a
revised canon (Jeffers 2018; Henry 2000; Dussel 2013, 2018; Wiredu
2004; Maffie 2013). The existence of
original philosophical work in
ancient China and India is not as contested, yet these sources are also
absent
representation in many so-called “top” graduate
programs. Hence, there is an unjustificable Eurocentrism in
the
existing canon’s formation. The question of whether a given work
counts as philosophy cannot be
decided upon by a priori
criteria created by a foreshortened canon. Therefore, we need to engage
in both
critical and reconstructive work on the question of canonicity
itself.
The third point follows from the last. The traditional canon is not
only insufficient but problematic in ways
that require new analyses and
interpretations. Without doing this critical work, taking concepts
developed
within modern Western political philosophy as the foundation
from which to build further theories of social
justice may result in
extending the life of racist ideas and failing in our anti-racist aims
(Mills 1998; Gines
2014; Basevich 2020; Zack 2017; Taylor et al. 2018).
Concepts that look to be neutral on issues of race may
have racist
effects even without racist motivations, such as the labor theory of
value that excuses the
appropriation of lands from indigenous groups,
or concepts of equality that may be formulated in a way that
assumes
sameness, or ontologies of the self that obscure relationality and
dependence on hierarchical social
infrastructures. Thus, it is not
merely that the traditional canon needs to be augmented: it needs a
thorough
critical analysis that puts ideas and concepts in their
historical context, explores their real-world applications,
and then
considers the reasons for their influence and popularity
vis-à-vis other possible positions available
at the time or,
frankly, even now.
5.2 The Revelations of Contextualization

To reiterate, a historical and cultural contextualization of
philosophical ideas is perhaps the most crucial
methodological reform
needed to change the way we understand the history of philosophy, and
contextualization is just as important in regard to present day work as
for philosophy written in the distant
past. Contemporary approaches to
philosophical historiography have sometimes assumed that
contextualization is unnecessary, but this assumption, left
unchallenged, can constrain critical analysis. When
traditional
historians of philosophy have begun to engage with questions of race,
the problematics have
sometimes been foreshortened by decontextualized
methods of analysis. In this vein, Robert Bernasconi
argues that
naturalistic tendencies in analytic philosophy have overemphasized the
question of whether a
given philosopher believed in race as a natural
kind, resulting in a limited interpretive exploration (2012,
552–553).
Take, for example, Du Bois’s rich 1899 [1986a] text “The

Conservation of Races” where he elaborates an
account of African
Americans as a distinct historical people. Du Bois’s account was
reduced in a number of
contemporary critical essays to the question of
whether he meant “black” to refer to biology, in which
biological concepts themselves were understood as free of culture. But
from phenomenology’s point of view,
the philosophical
conceptualization of nature, and the current political uses made of
naturalist claims, are
themselves cultural artifacts, historically and
culturally contingent. Thus, when we read the history of
modern
European philosophy, we need to be alive to the ways in which
“nature” is being socially constructed
and conscripted for
philosophical projects.
CPR has worked to advance new interpretations of canonical

philosophers but has also, at the meta-level,
contested standard
approaches to interpretation. The interpretation of Kant, for example,
has had to contend
with his extensive writings on anthropology and
geography in which he espoused unambiguously racist
claims (Elden and
Mendieta 2011; Kant 1798 [2012]). Until recently this large body of writings
was
considered irrelevant to the understanding of Kant’s ethics
or his cosmopolitanism on the grounds of
disciplinary distinctions
between philosophical work and other writings. But why ignore
Kant’s writings
about the nature of human difference if we are
trying to understand his actual views about the way peoples
should
interact? Like feminist philosophers who developed an analysis of the
subtle ways in which some
moral theories assumed a male embodiment,
Critical Philosophers of Race have shown that doctrines of
self-
determination and universal reciprocity developed by modern
European philosophers were never intended to
apply to all groups: the
right to autonomy was based on certain capacities that legitimated the
exclusion of
children, the disabled, and usually women, but, also,

non-Europeans who were viewed as developmentally
“behind”.
Taking some aspect of a philosophers’ view and giving it the most
generous reading possible
distorts our understanding of modern
philosophy and its conceptual offerings (Basevich 2020;
Shorter-
Bourhanou forthcoming; Kirkland 2018).
Mills argues that the only way to make sense of the evident
contradictions in modern European philosophy is
to understand this body
of work as distinguishing types of selves among the human race
(Mills 1998).
Because of these type-differences, anti-authoritarian
reforms and demands for democracy were never meant
to be extended to
the colonies. Sub-persons (women, slaves, the members of inferior
cultures) did not merit
suffrage, freedom, consultation, or
self-determination. There was debate over whether these groups would
remain forever inferior, less than human, or whether they might advance
(Boxill 2005). But even those, like
Rousseau, who believed in the
possibility of uplift, assumed that “persons” would be the
ones showing “sub-
persons” the way forward, and judging
their progress.
5.3 Questioning ‘modernity’ itself

Lucius Outlaw characterizes modern European philosophers as sharing
a commitment to a “project of
modernity” that aimed to put
all human activity “under the aegis of
‘reason’” (1996, 147; see also Kirkland
2018; Yancy
2020; Dussel 1995, 2013, 2018; McCarthy 2009; Mehta 1999). Despite a
diversity of
approaches and disagreements, the modern Europeans shared
a distinctive philosophy of history that defined
progress as the
expansion of freedom and rationality. Social institutions and cultures
could then be compared
and ranked in regard to this singular metric of
universal development. It was useful for Empire, as Outlaw
argues, to
reframe the wide expanse of alterity among human beings and cultures as
developmental
differences. The possibilities of a true pluralism was
then foreclosed by norms of modernity. The unfortunate
result still
with us is that the impetus to study current social and cultural
differences in thought, or the variety
of philosophical writings, is
diminished on the grounds that these constitute inessential and
accidental
aspects of the human condition, irrelevant to the
formulation or discernment of freedom and reason.
Eurocentrism in
philosophical curricula is then no accident, Outlaw concludes, nor is
it viewed as a
deficiency since the modern European canon is assumed to
provide sufficient elaboration and debate over the
universal principles
of freedom and reason.
Thus, this project of modernity gave birth to a

“false universalism that blocks the appreciation of racial and
ethnic differences…and contributed to deceptions that masked
various forms of domination that were
rationalized…” (Outlaw 1996, 150). Critical social theory
worthy of the name needs to embrace a pluralism
of philosophical
projects, concepts, and frameworks that have arisen from differently
situated thinkers from
diverse regions or group experiences who are
addressing, at least in some cases, dissimilar puzzles and
challenges.
A pluralist approach to philosophical projects can then engage in
critical dialogue across these
differences. The point of noting real
philosophical alterities for Outlaw is not to counsel empty tolerance
but
to avoid presumptive judgments based on putative universals crafted
by only one side.
Questioning European projects of modernity has been productively

disruptive of the staid problematics that
have dominated numerous
sub-fields, from political philosophy to aesthetics to epistemology
(Narayan and
Harding 2000; Dotson 2012, 2014; Taylor 2016). Previously,
the focal points that dominated these sub-fields,
such as skepticism,
ideal forms of justice, the universal nature of aesthetic value, and so
on, came exclusively
from modern European or ancient Greek
philosophers. The recent critical work is challenging the hegemony
of
the traditional canon in setting out the agenda for philosophy. To be
sure, previous movements in
philosophy have also made progress in
expanding the problematics, such as pragmatism, post-structuralism,
social epistemology, feminist philosophy, and others. New questions
have made it to the table, and old
questions have had new
formulations.
Particularly important has been the transformation of political

problematics, reaching well beyond the
debates over liberalism,
conservatism, and Marxism (McGary 1999; Cohen 1999, Gooding-Williams
2009;
Shelby 2018; Lugones 2003; Corlett 2003 and 2010; Darby and Rury
2018; Hanchard 2018). The move from
ideal to non-ideal approaches has
played a particularly productive role in opening up the field of
political
philosophy to engage with racial injustice and inequality
(Mills 2005). Non-ideal approaches have cast new
light on ideal
conceptions of normative, optimally functional behavior. Shelby,
Gooding-Williams, and Cathy
Cohen have all, in different ways, turned
to the project of investigating “how [so-called] deviant
practices
can be transformed into political challenges to the power
that the state exercises over the ghetto poor through
the promotion and

enforcement of [illegitimate] norms” (Gooding-Williams 2009,
251). Gooding-Williams
indicts Du Bois’s adoption of mainstream
norms of respectability in his account of the Philadelphia ghettos
and
suggests that we look instead to Frederick Douglas as the better
political philosopher for emancipation
(see also James 1997). The
project of civilizing Black people was a strategy that would only
ensure their
subjection. Douglas envisioned a subaltern black
counterpublic that might have its own distinct ideas about
the optimal
norms of communal life and what constituted civilized behavior (see
Dawson 2011).
These new problematics in political philosophy often draw from

neglected historical sources, including
Douglass and Du Bois as well as
Martin Delaney, Anna Julia Cooper, Simon Bolivar, Kwame Nkrumah,
Amilcar Cabral, Walter Rodney, Haya de la Torre, Jose Martí,
Aimé and Suzanne Cesaire, Edouard Glissant,
and many others.
Related to these new non-European sources has been an altered map of
the European
sources of greatest interest, to include more of
Montaigne, Las Casas, Condorcet, Rousseau, Gramsci,
Marcuse, and
others.
To be sure, many Critical Philosophers of Race decline to follow

Outlaw in believing that there is a ‘black
counterpublic’
that represents a racially cohesive formation. To the extent there is
cohesion, it is based more
on opposition to white supremacy, some
argue, than an expression of shared sensibilities and orientations.
And
so the debate ensues. As this entry has shown, strong differences
abound among CPR scholars over the
history of Negritude and
metissage, the implications of intersectionality, the meaning
and future of racial
concepts, and the weighty role of capitalism as a
causal factor. A newly interpreted, reorganized and
expanded history of
philosophy is reformulating our central questions in many sub-fields,
invigorating new
lines of argumentation, more relevant for current
challenges.
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Related Entries
colonialism |
critical theory |
Du Bois, W.E.B. |
existentialism |
Fanon, Frantz |
Latin American Philosophy |
Latinx Philosophy |
liberation, philosophy of |
Locke, Alain LeRoy |
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phenomenology |
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The Critical Philosophy of Race (CPR) developed in large part as a

While borrowing from CLS and CRT, CPR’s distinctive

1.1 Critical Legal Studies

To see this required new methods of legal analysis that could

CLS scholars argued that conventions of legal analysis promulgated

The emergence of classical liberalism coincided with the development

1.2 Critical Race Theory

In an influential article, CRT scholar Richard Delgado shows that

Connected to this has been the ongoing problem of the

implicit racism. Judging which

1.3 Philosophical Influences on CPR

Continental philosophy has also begun to critique its own

In a recent innovative move to approach the history of philosophy

To suggest that CPR has a singular methodology would be a mistake:

In general, Critical Philosophers of Race focus on how race operates

2. Phenomenologies of Race and Racism

Phenomenology was one of the first philosophical resources that CPR

Edmund Husserl initially developed the phenomenological method as a

In the mid-20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de

Inspired by this work, new existential categories were developed by

2.1 Multiple Racisms

While there are some similarities in racist habits—such as forms

Even when racism involves a negative projection, there is also

Martin Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, or “being

2.2 Revisions of Phenomenology

As early as 1944, Sartre began to apply his concept of “bad

racism, which is motivated by the desire to maintain the

The use of the concept of bad faith in this way challenges

The phenomenological approach has also taken up the way in which

3. The Construction of Racial Identities

3.1 Race and the Self

How, then, should we understand the interaction between social

3.2 The Social Construction of Race

Race itself is a historically and culturally specific aspect of

This history may make race appear to be something imposed on the

On this version of social construction, two important ideas follow.

Theories that take a social constructionist approach to race often

Critical Philosophers of Race have generally argued that the

3.3 The Historical Construction of Race

W.E.B. Du Bois took a Hegelian approach that understood African

Similarly, in the southern part of the Western hemisphere, theorists

In contrast, Mariátegui criticized the way in which mestizo

In Latin America and the Caribbean, theorists tended to hold that

The contrast between political philosophy in Latin American versus

This is what fueled Martí’s concern that the

In many post-liberation, post-slavery writings, racial identity

3.4 The Cultural Construction of Race

Perhaps the most philosophically rich discussion and debate over

For both Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Negritude was the

To be sure, Negritude has sustained decades of critical debate

hands of white supremacists. Senghor

Negritude was motivated by the project Aime Césaire called

The emphasis on the historical construction of cultural differences

Edouard Glissant took the concept of metissage and applied

As Kris Sealey argues, homogenized teleologies such as Sartre

3.5 Racial Identities and Whiteness

In his essay, “The Souls of White Folks,” Du Bois

asks, to believe that his skin entitles him to ownership of the

More recently Charles W. Mills used the concept of the

Shannon Sullivan (2006) has explored the idea of unconscious habits