Race. Paul C. Taylor

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Preface to the Third Edition

      The first edition of this book started taking shape in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001. Just after the hijacked jetliners did their terrible work, US public discourse resounded with demands for justice, security, and, sometimes, retaliation. These demands led not just to a national discussion about appropriate responses, but also to a rash of vigilante attacks on, as an Associated Press reporter put it, “people who look Middle Eastern and South Asian, whatever their religion or nation of origin …”¹ This book is about the kind of thinking – what I’ll call “race-thinking” – that plays a crucial role in picking out the targets for these backlash attacks. It is crucial to the argument of the book to note that this is not the only kind of thing race-thinking does.

      The second edition of the book was the product of a moment of unusually explicit and unusually optimistic public reflections on racial phenomena. Barack Obama had burst upon the world stage, ascended to the presidency of the United States (and won re-election), and established his African American wife and children as the nation’s “first family.” This led many people to think that a new day had dawned with respect to (what Cornel West long ago taught us to call) race matters. These people dared to hope that race had finally lost its influence over human relations, and that the world could enter a new, post-racial age. This book is also a gentle introduction to the kind of thinking about race-thinking – call this “race theory” – that underwrites and, one hopes, illuminates these reflections on the prospects for a post-racial world.

The optimism that marked much of the Obama era always struck some of us as ill-advised, and for a variety of reasons, some of which I’ll come to in the pages that follow. The clearest stake in the heart of this optimism, though, was the event that more than anything else sets the context for the third edition of this book. In 2016 the administration of the first black president gave way to the administration of the man that Ta-Nehisi Coates calls “the first White president,” Donald J. Trump.² Coates means for this description to capture Trump’s open determination to mobilize and weaponize whiteness, and to do so explicitly in response to, in repudiation of, Obama’s blackness. One might think that putting it this way is too strong or needlessly provocative – for my part, I find it spot on – but the underlying point is, or should be, indisputable (not least because Trump is usually happy to endorse it himself). The 45th US president’s political success is crucially tied to his whiteness and to his open embrace of a politics of whiteness. This book is also an introduction to some resources for thinking about issues like the politics of whiteness: it is a primer on the broadly ethical, deeply experiential considerations that emerge for attentive inhabitants and students of racialized social worlds.

      I’ve used political events to contextualize each edition of this book in order to specify part of the burden that the book carries. To write about race is to take aim at a moving target. Race is a phenomenon that transforms and evolves in relation to a variety of social forces, including the rapid changes of the culture industries. What’s more, it does this out in the open, as it were, not in settings discernible only to scholars or available only under rigidly defined experimental conditions, which is to say that anyone who’s paying attention to the world that most of us experience every day will have some insight into what’s happening.

      For all of these reasons, philosophical studies of race are apt to go stale rather more quickly than philosophy usually does. One way to register this fact and to keep it in view is by using temporal landmarks to orient the project. Another way is to keep an eye out for elements that don’t age well between editions. The Simple Stories that I used as a model for my chapter prologues are a rich resource and suggestive model, as I explain in the introduction. But Langston Hughes’s tone and framing in those stories can be challenging for contemporary readers. I didn’t manage these challenges as well as I might have in the earlier editions of this book. In hopes of doing better this time, I’ve tinkered with both main characters and with the language. Boyd is now a young woman and a daughter of immigrants, Jesse is a little more fully drawn, and the prose style now probably owes as much to Raymond Carver and Amy Hempel as to Hughes.

The practice of studying race is also rapidly evolving, as scholars in a variety of fields continue to dig out from under the myths of the past and refine the tools that they bring to the work. When the first edition of this book came out, contemporary professional philosophers had written very little on the subject. That has changed. This salutary development enabled me to set aside one of the burdens that shaped the original edition, but it also forced me into a difficult choice. In 2003 one could aspire to provide, all at once, a philosophical introduction to the topic of race and a comprehensive introduction to the field called “the philosophy of race.” Now that the field has grown in scale and complexity, with more people contributing more work exploring more questions in more detail, these two aspirations work at cross purposes. Forced to choose between introducing race in a philosophical spirit and introducing philosophical studies of race, I choose the former.

      Having chosen philosophical engagement with the subject of race over an engagement with the subject of the philosophy of race, I should offer this warning to readers with some experience in this area: this may not be the book for you. If you’re expecting sustained engagements with cutting-edge work as it appears in the pages of professional journals, you will be deeply dissatisfied. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for a user-friendly introduction to the questions that animate that work, with bits of that work making guest appearances along the way, then we should get along just fine.

Notes

      1 1. Laurie Goodstein and Tamar Lewin, “A Nation Challenged: Violence and Harassment: Victims of Mistaken Identity, Sikhs Pay a Price for Turbans,” New York Times, September 19, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/19/us/nation-challenged-violence-harassment-victims-mistaken-identity-sikhs-pay-price.html.

      2 2. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The First White President,” Atlantic, October 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/.

Acknowledgments

      A great many people and institutions have made this book possible. I’ll appeal in advance for the forgiveness of the ones I will inevitably forget to mention.

      I developed the perspective worked out in the first edition of this book while teaching social philosophy and race theory courses at Le Moyne College, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Washington in Seattle. Accordingly, I owe a great deal to students at all three schools, and especially to Jennifer Pettit, Noah Purcell, Jasmin Weaver, and Stephanie McNees. Linda Martín Alcoff and Charles Mills gave helpful comments on the original manuscript, and equally helpful encouragement and feedback as I turned the original edition into its successors.

      While working on the second edition, I had the great privilege