## 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 (Bernabe 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 Jose Vasconcelos and Jose Carlos
Mariategui were articulating specifically racialized forms of
social identity with political implications (Vasconcelos 1925 [1997];
Mariategui 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, Mariategui 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,"
Mariategui 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 Jose Marti, Simon Bolivar and
Mariategui 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
Mariategui, 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 Marti's concern that the
Eurocentric universities of Latin America offered no "analysis of
elements peculiar to the peoples of America" (Marti 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..."
(Marti, 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
Marti'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 Leopold Sedor 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 Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, Negritude was the
cultural fruit of the historical process of intellectual
cross-fertilization known as *metissage*. 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" (Cesaire 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 (Cesaire
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 Cesaire called
"disalienation": to overcome the denigration of Africa and
the forced assimilation into the culture of the colonizer
(Taiwo 1999). Yet to be clear, disalienation for
Cesaire did not require a denial of *metissage.*
His own writings were influenced by the French poetry and literature he
had imbibed as a student, but Cesaire insisted that his project
was to "create a new language, one capable of communicating the
African heritage" (Cesaire 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.
Jose 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
*metissage*, 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-a-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-Rodriguez 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 (Beltran 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-a-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 Marti,
Aime 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.