Race and Racism

The colour line and lived experience

Du Bois declared that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line” and described the “double consciousness” of Black Americans, always seeing themselves through the eyes of a world that looks on them with contempt. Fanon analysed the same experience phenomenologically: in “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952) he describes how a white child’s gaze fixes him as a racial object. Race, on this view, must be understood first through lived experience and the structures that produce it. Kwame Anthony Appiah (“The Uncompleted Argument”, 1985) objects that Du Bois’s historical and cultural definition of race in “The Conservation of Races” (1897) still relies on the biological notion it set out to replace.

Held by

• W. E. B. Du Bois1868–1963
• Frantz Fanon1925–1961

Race as an illusion

Appiah argues that there are no biological races of the kind the ordinary concept assumes, so strictly speaking nothing in nature answers to the word. Racial identities are nonetheless real social facts that people live with, and they can provide solidarity and meaning. But they also come with “scripts” that can constrain individuals, so Appiah urges us to hold them lightly rather than let them define who we are. Lucius Outlaw (On Race and Philosophy, 1996) and Chike Jeffers object that races can be cultural communities worth preserving, and that abandoning the concept would weaken the language needed to name racism.

Held by

• Kwame Anthony Appiahb. 1954

Race as social position

Haslanger agrees that race is not biological, but argues that it is no less real for that: races are social positions of privilege and subordination, assigned on the basis of perceived ancestry and bodily features such as skin colour. Like money or citizenship, they exist through social practices and have very real effects. Naming them clearly is necessary to dismantle the hierarchy – her goal is a world in which races, so defined, no longer exist. Chike Jeffers (in What Is Race? Four Philosophical Views, 2019) objects that defining races by subordination leaves no room for the positive cultural meaning many people find in racial identity.

Held by

• Sally Haslangerb. 1955

Racism as a political system

Mills argues in “The Racial Contract” (1997) that modern social contract theory, which promises equality to all, in fact rested on an unspoken agreement among white people to treat non-white people as less than full persons. White supremacy is therefore not an aberration in liberal democracies but a political system in its own right, sustained by “white ignorance”, a structured not-knowing about racial injustice. Mills did not reject liberalism, but called for a “Black radical liberalism” that confronts this history. Tommie Shelby (“Racial Realities and Corrective Justice”, 2013) objects that Rawls’s principle of fair equality of opportunity can already address the disadvantages left by racial oppression, so ideal theory supplies the standard for correcting them.

Held by

• Charles W. Mills1951–2021

Race as a thin biological reality

Michael Hardimon (Rethinking Race, 2017) separates the discredited “racialist” concept, which ties race to essences of character or intelligence, from a minimalist one: groups of people who differ in patterns of visible features corresponding to geographic ancestry. Races in this thin sense, he argues, exist. Quayshawn Spencer (“A Radical Solution to the Race Problem”, 2014) argues that in US usage “race” names a set of five populations, defined by genetic ancestry alone – roughly African, East Asian, Eurasian, Native American and Oceanian – that genetic clustering studies recover at one level of analysis; he later defended a pluralism on which race is biologically real in some contexts and socially real in others. Both reject any ranking of races. Adam Hochman (“Against the New Racial Naturalism”, 2013) objects that such continental clusters are arbitrary and superficial groupings that would not count as subspecies by the standards applied to other animals.