The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race

Paul Taylor, Linda Alcoff, Luvell Anderson, Paul C Taylor, Linda Martín Alcoff, Luvell Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134655786
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

For many decades, race and racism have been common areas of study in departments of sociology, history, political science, English, and anthropology. Much more recently, as the historical concept of race and racial categories have faced significant scientific and political challenges, philosophers have become more interested in these areas. This changing understanding of the ontology of race has invited inquiry from researchers in moral philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and aesthetics.

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race offers in one comprehensive volume newly written articles on race from the world's leading analytic and continental philosophers. It is, however, accessible to a readership beyond philosophy as well, providing a cohesive reference for a wide student and academic readership. The Companion synthesizes current philosophical understandings of race, providing 37 chapters on the history of philosophy and race as well as how race might be investigated in the usual frameworks of contemporary philosophy. The volume concludes with a section on philosophical approaches to some topics with broad interest outside of philosophy, like colonialism, affirmative action, eugenics, immigration, race and disability, and post-racialism.

By clearly explaining and carefully organizing the leading current philosophical thinking on race, this timely collection will help define the subject and bring renewed understanding of race to students and researchers in the humanities, social science, and sciences.

Part I

History and the Canon

1
Critical Philosophy of Race and Philosophical Historiography

Robert Bernasconi

Introduction

One of the major areas within critical philosophy of race that so-called mainstream philosophers have found increasingly hard to ignore has been philosophical historiography. This is not only because it puts into question from the perspective of the history of racism the high regard in which some of the main figures of the philosophical canon are held. It also represents a challenge to the discipline’s self-image and to the way the philosophical canon is conceived. That numerous white philosophers within modernity made racist comments is no surprise to anyone familiar with the pervasiveness of such ideas, but it is troublesome to find that mainstream philosophers today still often use that very pervasiveness to dismiss out of hand concerns about the degree to which so many of the canonical figures of Western philosophy played a significant role in the spread of racist ideas, including expressing support for slavery and the slave trade.

The work of investigating any historical philosopher to determine the extent to which their work is implicated in the history of racist ideas is not an easy one, because it goes far beyond collating compromising quotations from their writings. To pass judgment on the extent to which the racist statements of any given philosopher were original or extreme in the context in which they were made, one needs a broad historical knowledge of the period, including familiarity with what the philosopher in question could or should have known. Furthermore, the task of determining the extent to which their racist views contaminated other aspects of their philosophy calls for speculative judgment, and involves a departure from the way mainstream historians of philosophy have tended to practice their craft since the end of the Second World War.

The dominant tendency of historians of philosophy from the 1950s through at least the 1970s was to focus on reformulating and improving arguments rather than on establishing the original meaning of those arguments based on a study of the context in which they were first developed or the novelty of the concepts employed. This was because that generation had inherited a uniquely narrow conception of philosophy. Under the burden of establishing that they were genuine philosophers under this new restricted sense of the discipline, some historians of philosophy compromised their integrity as historians. This has been changing but it is still the case that, for example, students accustomed to hearing questions being asked about the racial views of early American presidents can find their inquiries about the racial views of canonical philosophers dismissed as irrelevant. On this model all that is supposed to matter are those doctrines that are supposed to represent the core of any given philosopher’s thought, even though it is widely known that what is thought to belong to the core of any given philosopher frequently changes across time (Bernasconi 2003a).

Although the questions addressed by critical philosophers of race to the works of canonical philosophers and the way the ideas of those philosophers tend to be presented has led, for example in the case of Kant, to more genuinely historical approaches to the history of philosophy, larger questions about the contribution of canonical philosophers to the spread of racist practices remain by contrast largely undeveloped. An especially egregious example of this is the tendency of historians of modern political philosophy to ignore the role of canonical philosophers in the defense of slavery and their failure to pose the question of why they played at best only a minor role in the history of its abolition. Given the prominence in Europe during the eighteenth century of the debate about the legitimacy of slavery, one might expect it to be equally prominent in historical surveys of the period, especially as the debate led to what could be described as an ethical invention insofar as almost nobody put the institution of slavery as such in question during the previous century, whereas by the end of that time hardly anybody in Europe was willing to defend it. The question of why no canonical philosopher of the eighteenth century seems to have been at the vanguard of the slavery debate raises a further question as to why philosophers today still largely resist demands to expand the canon of political philosophy beyond the list that was established over 200 years ago and continue to exclude those voices that were insistent on its abolition.

Of all the disciplines within the humanities, philosophy has been the most reluctant to entertain a debate about the canon or even, with a few exceptions, ask the question of how the canon came to take on the form it did. The exclusivity accorded to the Western philosophical canon over the last two centuries, the sense that accompanies it of a precious heritage to be protected and not diluted, has served to relegate all forms of non-Western philosophy to the margins and the task of challenging its hegemony is a further task associated with the critical philosophy of race, especially because there is growing evidence that racism shaped the formation of the canon and served to sustain it (Bernasconi 1997).

Perhaps no book has been as influential within critical philosophy of race as Charles Mills’s Racial Contract, and it is a book with a historical basis (Mills 1999). Nevertheless, not all critical philosophers of race are committed to the idea that a rigorous study of the history of racism is a major component of the discipline. The more detailed examination of these issues that follows, in addition to introducing some of the major issues, attempts to make the case that philosophical historiography is indispensable to critical philosophy of race. I treat in turn (1) philosophy’s relation to the history of the concepts of race and racism, (2) its relation to the writing of the history of racism, (3) its relation to the debate about slavery, (4) the racism of canonical philosophers, and (5) the debate about the philosophical canon.

Philosophy and the History of the Concepts of Race and Racism

The term race and the much later term racism both have complicated histories that are still not fully documented. Knowledge of the history of these terms is important for critical philosophers of race, not least because there has been a tendency to focus on only a narrow portion of the history of racism, highlighting such ideas as the elusively biological conception of race, racial essentialism, and the claim that the so-called four or five main races alone should properly be called races. Far from constituting the historical core of racism these three ideas came to prominence relatively late largely as a result of an initiative of the Boasian school of anthropology, an initiative that came to fruition in the UNESCO Statement on Race prepared in 1950 by Ashley Montagu under the auspices of its Director-General, Julian Huxley (UNESCO 1971: 30–35).

The first use of the concept of race in its modern sense as a division between peoples is conventionally attributed to an essay by François Bernier, a student of Pierre Gassendi, in 1684, but he primarily conceived of it as a geographical concept as the title indicates: “A New Division of the Earth, According to the Species or Races of Men Who Inhabit It” (Bernier 2000). Scholars debate whether one should attribute the first rigorous definition of race as a scientific concept to Buffon or Kant or to some third person (Bernasconi 2001; Doron 2012). According to Kant, “the concept of race is: the class distinction of animals of one and the same line of descent in so far as it is invariably heritable” (Mikkelsen 2013: 136). That is to say, for Kant racial characteristics were inheritable characteristics, and to the extent that we judge that to be decisive to the meaning of race, then Kant introduced the scientific account of race two years before Buffon (Bernasconi 2015: 101–102).

It was in the mid-nineteenth century that the concept of race passed from prominence to dominance, and this was at the time when race came to be seen through the lens of history rather than biology or natural history (Bernasconi 2010). For Joseph-Arthur Gobineau and Robert Knox, race was everything (Gobineau 1915: xiv; Knox 1850: v). To be sure, throughout the nineteenth century the term “race” was a very fluid concept often used as a synonym for “people.” The opening pages of W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Conservation of Races” from 1897 reflect the dominant usage of the time, where race is only “generally of common blood or language” whereas it is “always of common history, traditions and impulses” (Du Bois 2000: 110). He was reporting the fact that at that time it was history more than biology that dictated how the word should be used. The exclusively biological concept of race is a product of the twentieth century. The UNESCO Statement on Race recommended that the term “race” should be the exclusive preserve of biologists and that everyone else should use the concept of ethnicity instead. This proposal to abandon the term “race” in favor of ethnicity had its source in a book from 1935 by Huxley and Haddon with the dubious title We Europeans (Huxley and Haddon 1935: 108). Behind this recommendation was the separation of cultural anthropology from physical anthropology that had been accomplished only in the first half of the twentieth century, most notably among Franz Boas’s students. In 1911 Boas deployed statistics in an effort to separate the influence of heredity from that of environment in a way that would endow the distinction between nature and culture a force within discussions of race that Lamarkianism had denied it (Bernasconi 2011c). The implications of this distinction were not clear all at once. Indeed, for some time Boas continued to believe there was a correlation between the physical conditions of a body and the fundamental traits of the mind within that body (Stocking 1982: 191). However, the ultimate achievement of the Boasian school was the idea that if race would be declared by edict to be exclusively a biological concept, then racism (understood as the attribution to someone of moral and mental characteristics on the basis of their biological race) was an epistemological error, not simply because the correlation between moral characteristics and physical characteristics was unproven, but because biologists had failed to establish a sustainable biological definition of race. To be sure, there were historically forms of racism that drew heavily on science, and other established forms of racism that turned to science for support, but not all forms of racism relied on racial science. Indeed, laws defining race in the United States only rarely followed the best scientific knowledge of the time.

Second, in spite of the fact that Kant contributed to the development of a scientifically based racial essentialism by lending support to the idea that racial characteristics were heritable and permanent, one cannot attribute a strict racial essentialism to Kant because of the status of the study of natural history (as opposed to natural description) in his work. Blumenbach, who is often referred to as the father of racial science, had an approach more typical of the time: in 1795 in the third edition of On the Natural Variety of Mankind, Blumenbach still maintained that there were no essential divisions between the five main human varieties; they formed a continuum (Blumenbach 1865: 264). It was only with the rise to dominance of polygenesis in the second half of the nineteenth century, first in the United States and then in France with anthropologists like Paul Broca, that a scientific racial essentialism became widespread (Loring Brace 2000: 239). Racial stereotyping in the sense of attributing a strong tendency for certain populations to behave in certain specific ways remains widespread, but strict scientifically understood racial essentialism was always relatively rare, and so attempts to combat it are important but leave much racism untouched.

Third, the identification of four or five main races is a long-standing tendency but the idea that the only proper usage of the term race was in reference to them is more recent and suited the North American context in which it was important for white people to form a coalition to maintain their dominance. Its role in doing so is confirmed by the way the range of whiteness frequently expanded to serve this purpose. By contrast, the European tendency was to multiply the number of races both because it reflected national histories and because it served to divide colonized peoples in order to better rule them. The idea that the proper use of the term race is restricted to the main races has, like the other two ideas considered here, distorted the writing of the history of racism especially when it is imagined that racism is limited to discriminating against someone on account of their race.

The first uses of the term racism are in French and date back to the end of the nineteenth century (Taguieff 2001: 82–96). Racism was not seen as something evil but as a step on the way to internationalism, as nationalism had been earlier (Malato 1897: 47). In the 1920s the French began opposing “racism” to universalism, where “racism” was largely understood as a scientific doctrine associated with the Germans. This was also the dominant sense “racism” had when in the late 1930s the word was introduced into English and was quickly adopted by the Boasian school of anthropology and the Chicago school of sociology (Bernasconi 2014: 8–12). According to Ruth Benedict, “racism is the dogma that one ethnic group is condemned by nature to congenital inferiority and another group is destined to congenital superiority” (Benedict 1942: 97). The advantage of this and other narrow accounts of racism to its proponents at that time was that it could readily be applied to some of the more prominent Nazi racisms without obviously compromising the racial institutions within the European colonies, the United States, and South Africa (Benedict 1942: 126; Dubow 1995: 277). As Oliver Cromwell Cox, a Trinidadian-American sociologist trained at the University of Chicago observed, anti-Black racism in the United States was “only a symptom of a materialistic social fact” (Cox 1944: 452). In the same vein Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton subsequently introduced the idea of “institutional racism” (Carmichael and Hamilton 1967: 4).

Philosophy and the History of Racism

In this section, I will outline the potential contribution of critical philosophy of race to an understanding of the history of racism. Whereas critical race theory, which has its roots in legal studies, has tended to focus on laws and cases brought under those laws to illuminate historical forms of racism in their specific contexts, philosophers have tended to look more at the history of the concept of race itself and the racial science which gave legitimacy to new ways of thinking about race. However, critical philosophy of race also has the potential to use its resources to introduce new ways of conceptualizing the history of racism, much...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I History and the Canon
• Part II Alternative Traditions
• Part III Metaphysics and Ontology
• Part IV Epistemology, Cognition, and Language
• Part V Natural Science and Social Theory
• Part VI Aesthetics
• Part VII Ethics and the Political
• Part VIII Politics and Policy
• Index