Race. Paul C. Taylor

Melton, and Quayshawn Spencer at an author-meets-critics APA session. Their constructive criticisms were immensely helpful. In addition, two anonymous reviewers offered insightful suggestions on the manuscript, as did Professor Jeffers and Robert Gooding-Williams.

The third edition benefited greatly from the invaluable research assistance of Vanderbilt graduate student Eric Okamoto Akira MacPhail. I also had the opportunity to hear directly from undergraduate students who were working through the book in Eddie Glaude’s African American Studies and Race course at Princeton and in Professor Jeffers’ Philosophy of Race course at Dalhousie. Both groups – and their generous professors, and their professors’ colleagues, especially the brilliant Imani Perry – have my undying gratitude.

      Many people guided and pushed me in conversation, including Nikhil Singh, Alys Weinbaum, and the other participants in the University of Washington colloquia on “Black Identity in Theory and Practice”; the participants in the Social Theory Committee’s “Whiteness” symposium at Kentucky; the Affrilachian Poets, especially Kelly Ellis and Nikky Finney; and various other individuals, including Michele Birnbaum, Susan Bordo, Howard McGary, Ron Mallon, Michael Root, Ann Ryan, Sally Haslanger, Lewis Gordon, Ron Sundstrom, and Anne Eaton. Cornel West, Nikky Finney, and Amy Hempel, in different ways and at different times, rekindled my passion for communicating hard thoughts in interesting and accessible ways – or, at least, for trying to live up to their remarkable standards for this kind of work.

      The editorial staff at Polity has at every turn been more supportive and patient than I could have expected. Jean van Altena’s careful copy-editing on the first edition helped me in many cases to say what I really meant, or should have meant, and set the stage for much that worked through the subsequent editions. Pascal Porcheron, Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, and Stephanie Homer have been incredibly understanding and supportive through the interminable delays in bringing this project to fruition.

      Finally, I should mention a few people to whom I owe special debts. Ken Clatterbaugh, my ever-supportive department chair at Washington, was the first person to suggest that there was a useful project here, and then brokered my introduction to the editorial team at Polity. This book truly would not exist without him. My sister, Mona Phillips, keeps reminding me what it means to take thinking seriously. Eddie Glaude and Falguni Sheth have heard and seen and encouraged my thinking on race more than anyone else. Anika Simpson has, more than anyone else, helped me cope with the peculiar contradictions of thinking these thoughts as a philosopher. And, finally, my wife and children, Wilna Julmiste Taylor, John Taylor, and Julia Taylor, have been tremendously patient as I have neglected them to stare at pages and screens and peck at keys. They have been more supportive and loving than I could reasonably have hoped.

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