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Introduction

This book aims to help its readers think productively about what race is, how it works, how we’ve come to think of it in the ways we do, and what we might do with it now. Seeking this sort of understanding is a peculiarly philosophical endeavor. I don’t mean that only philosophers have done it or can do it. I mean that it is the sort of activity that defines philosophy at its best. Philosophers are often keen to point out that we don’t know as much as we think we do. Think, for example, of (Plato showing) Socrates taking people to task over the definitions of “piety” and “justice.”

If interrogating the obvious is one of philosophy’s core activities, race might be a quintessentially philosophical subject. The meaning of race often seems perfectly obvious, so much so that it usually does its work without calling any attention to itself at all. Sometimes, though, it becomes extremely puzzling and leads to contentious debates and profound reflections. These reflections obviously benefit from the valuable work that sociologists, historians, and scholars in still other disciplines have done and continue to do. But they can benefit also from the ministrations of philosophers, in ways that this book will hopefully make clear.

One way to treat race as a distinctly philosophical subject is to tease out the philosophical questions it raises. I will sort those questions into two very broad categories. The first category has to do with being and knowing, or, if you like, with knowledge and reality, and explores questions like these: Do races and racial identities exist? If so, and especially if we take the evidence of modern physical science seriously, what can they be? What is the right way to study racial phenomena, and what is the right vocabulary for talking about them?

The second category of philosophical questions has to do with ethics and experience, or with living and living well, and focuses on questions like these: When is it morally permissible to distinguish between people on racial grounds? What does it mean to have a racial identity? What is it like to have one? What does race look like in the US after Obama and Trump? Race: A Philosophical Introduction offers accessible ways of formulating these questions, surveys some promising ways of answering them, and gently recommends the answers I find most promising.

Part I, comprising the first four chapters, discusses the questions of being and knowing. Chapter 1 sets the stage by indicating the scope of the discussion and the method of approach. Here I’ll explain what race-thinking means, what a philosophical examination of race involves, and to what extent the argument here will be both local – geared to the United States in the early twenty-first century – and global.

Chapter 2 provides an “unnatural history” of race, to fill in the historical backdrop to contemporary racial practice. This will be the first sustained attempt to talk about how things stand in the world, empirically, and how they’ve gotten that way. I will do this with some regularity in the book, but not with an eye toward offering novel or state of the art analyses of these empirical matters. I propose simply to recruit respectable analyses into the discussion, as resources and, on occasion, guardrails for philosophical arguments. This chapter will also develop some theoretical terms that are key to the analysis to come. In my more ambitious moods, I think of this as a step toward a philosophy of the history of race. (Readers of previous versions of this book, please note: this chapter builds on elements that until this third edition had been scattered across other chapters. The material here is newly freestanding and somewhat more refined, but still tracks the argument of the previous editions.)

Chapter 3 considers three preliminary challenges to race-thinking – “preliminary” because one must meet these challenges, or show that they can be met, before even raising the more interesting philosophical questions. Then Chapter 4 closes the first part of the book by exploring some of the basic questions and core positions in racial metaphysics. The most basic question – do races exist? – will turn out to be too basic, so this chapter will ask several more questions to bring the real issues into focus. (Again, for repeat customers: there are more questions here than before, but the shape of the argument is the same. The additional questions help organize the discussion more effectively and orient it more productively to questions that have become more prominent in the scholarly literature between the previous editions and this one.)

Part II focuses on the questions of ethics and experience. Chapter 5 provides the transition from Part I by returning to some ethical issues that will by then have been introduced but deferred, and then examining some of the existential and phenomenological implications of racial identification.

Chapter 6 discusses some prominent examples of race-related problems of social ethics. The basic question of the chapter concerns the scope and meaning of the familiar norm of colorblindness. The basic argument is that this norm is neither as simple as it seems nor as plausible, and that engaging it properly requires an expanded sense of ethical engagement.

Chapter 7 moves more fully into the domain of politics and power. The aim here is to zoom out from the social ethics of individual behavior to consider the ethics of large-scale political and social formations. Key topics here include immigration, post-racialism, and the racial politics of the Obama and Trump presidential administrations.

Discussions like the ones I hope to have here sometimes benefit from efforts to make the issues and questions more concrete and vivid. Philosophers sometimes try to do this by creating the fanciful cases that some of us call “thought experiments.” Less often but sometimes more powerfully, we use dialogues and stories, in the manner of figures like Plato, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Du Bois. Inspired by these figures, I will begin each chapter with a short story that introduces the key issues and questions.

While the figures noted above inspired me to include these stories, other writers shaped their form and content. Between 1943 and 1965, Langston Hughes penned a series of short stories that explored “the conflicting views of blacks and … the hypocrisies of America’s platitudes.”¹ These stories featured a black “everyman” named Jess B. Semple, most often in conversation with a stand-in for the author who, as the series evolved, eventually acquired the name, “Boyd.” Taking Hughes’ “Simple Stories” as a model, I have organized my prologues around an African American man named Jesse B. Semple, Jr. and put him in conversation with a young woman named Boyd. (That’s her last name, which Jesse uses because he enjoys pretending that her first name is unpronounceable. That first name – Qoqanani – comes from the Ndebele community in Zimbabwe, where her parents were born and raised.)

Repeat customers will notice that Boyd and Jesse are rather different from the characters we met in the earlier editions. This is the result of an attempt to think harder about the burdens of inheriting Hughes’s work, without forgetting the lessons of intersectional analysis. I’ll say more about this in Chapter 2, so for now I’ll just say that these stories represent my attempt to put Hughes in conversation not just with the likes of Amy Hempel but also with the likes of Audre Lorde and Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Before we start, some notes on terminology and orthography are in order. First, I’ll sometimes refer to some of the broad subdivisions in philosophy. Just as some social science fields divide into quantitative and qualitative camps, philosophers tend to divide into analytic and continental camps. If this distinction means nothing to you, that’s probably for the best. I’ll introduce it now and then just to help orient readers who might care about it. Nothing rides on it beyond that.

Second, anyone writing about race has to decide whether and when to capitalize the names of the racial populations. Most saliently, one has to decide whether to capitalize “black” and its cognate terms, and then decide what this means for “white” and its related terms. There are several arguments for various approaches here, but I’ll park all that at the door. In a book like this, it is better not to load so much theory and politics onto basic compositional choices. We have enough ground to cover without volunteering to take on even more. Consequently, I will give all racial labels the lower-case treatment unless, like “Asian,” they are also proper nouns.

Third: I will use words like “racialism” in ways that may strike some readers as unusually neutral. For many people, racialism and racism are either the same thing or sufficiently close in meaning for the stink of one to rub off on the other. I prefer to think of racialism just as a commitment to the utility, validity, or accuracy of some form – not necessarily racist forms – of racial discourse. Racialists, then, are just people who consent, for some reason, to engage in race-talk and race-thinking. I will argue that there are better and worse ways to be a racialist. Having a word that refers indifferently to the good ways and the bad will give us room to figure out the difference.

Finally: I will often use the metaphor of colorblindness to refer to a kind of principled repudiation of racial distinctions in public life. I do this in deference to standard practice in US public discourse. This language may seem inappropriately sanguine about ableist prejudices. If so, I’ll invite you to take this up with the people who choose to use the language in this way. As you’ll see, I find their choice sufficiently problematic on other grounds to douse any temptation to adopt this usage myself. I use “colorblind” here the way I’ll use “white supremacy”: to name, without endorsing, a position that this book has to discuss.

Note

1 1. Donna Sullivan Harper, “Introduction,” in Langston Hughes and Donna Sullivan Harper, The Early Simple Stories: The Collected Works of Langston Hughes (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2002), pp. 1–8.