Racism

This article concerns the question of race in late Enlightenment German philosophy and makes the case for why we in that context should reconsider the writings of Alexander von Humboldt in the philosophical canon. Contrary to many other authors who wrote on both natural history and politics in the late Enlightenment, Humboldt produced both a scientific and a political critique of then-contemporaneous natural historical conceptions of race. I give an account of these by analysing his reflections on the concepts of (...) race and species in the first volume of the popular scientific work Cosmos (1845). I also show how Humboldt combined a critique of the pseudo-scientific concepts of race that sustain biological racialism with a diagnostic of the juridical and political reality of racial divides that came to be instituted by the colonial systems of governance and slave-labour in plantation economies. This latter aspect is found in the demographic discussions in his so-called political essays on the Kingdom of New Spain and Cuba (1808–10, 1825–26). The dual perspective onto race theory on the one hand and practices of racialisation on the other makes Humboldt a particularly interesting case to consider in a moment where critical histories of philosophy are re-examining both effects of racialisation and conceptions of race in the history of philosophy. I argue that attending to authors like Humboldt offers one fruitful way to counter two distinct problems that arise from what I call the ‘Kantian frame’ within discussions of Enlightenment race theory and racism: on the one hand that of an overly individualist conception of racism and on the other that of the absence within Kant’s own corpus of expressed links between the theory of race and the practices of racial domination. (shrink)

The debate over the inflation of racism should be understood not as a disagreement about first-order facts, but as a set of competing answers to the Pairing-Dependence Question (PDQ): why should a particular concept of racism be expressed by ‘racism’? Once PDQ is made explicit, prominent defences of inflation that appeal to explanatory power prove unsuccessful. Explanatory considerations may justify represent- ing structural injustice with a concept, yet they underdetermine which word should express that concept. I conclude that inflation was (...) presumptively unjustified because it exposed a term with entrenched moral- pragmatic significance to avoidable evaluative risk, given that the wider concept which it expresses could have been expressed by another term instead. (shrink)

Colonial slavery supercharged Europe’s prosperity in the eighteenth century. It was legally sanctioned, supported by state powers, and largely condoned by the public. Against this backdrop, Kant observed that “Negro slaves” functioned as money in trade, their number measured a nation’s wealth, and the slavery business was therefore intertwined with a competitive intra-European politics. Meanwhile, he racialized the “Negro” as uniquely suited for slave labor, indirectly benefited from such labor, refrained from calling colonial slavery an unjust institution, and occasionally signaled (...) anti-abolitionist sympathies. Given these facts, what is the prospect of a deracialized, radical Kantian liberalism? (shrink)

In contemporary Jewish thought, scholars often identify two broad philosophical approaches to Jewish identity: “essentialist,” which views Jewishness as inherent and unchangeable and “anti-essentialist,” which regards it as grounded in belief or practice. Both face challenges when confronted with a core halakhic reality: according to Jewish law, one can become Jewish through conversion, but can never cease to be Jewish. Essentialism struggles to explain conversion; anti-essentialism, the permanence of Jewish status. This study analyzes various explicit and implicit responses to this (...) tension from thinkers of both camps and explores their broader religious, metaphysical, ethical and political implications. (shrink)

This project aims to identify and explain a phenomenon I call pain-related motivational deficit, which occurs when there is proper uptake of the epistemic contributions of a pain utterance, but defective uptake of the motivational contributions of a pain utterance. I argue that the normalization of fibroid pain in Black women, and of menstrual pain more broadly, causes a pain-related motivational deficit to be unfairly assigned to utterances about these pain experiences. I show that current ways of thinking about epistemic (...) injustice cannot adequately explain these cases. (shrink)

This paper examines whether the violence committed against Indigenous peoples during the Argentine Conquest of the Desert (1878–1885) can be recognized as criminal without violating the principles of legality and non-retroactivity in criminal law. The study challenges a formalist interpretation of legality that limits criminal responsibility to conduct explicitly codified at the time of the events. Through a legal-philosophical methodology combining doctrinal analysis with historical sources —including legislation, parliamentary debates, constitutional principles, and contemporary press accounts— the paper argues that acts (...) such as enslavement, rape, forced confinement, and mass killing were already recognized as wrongful within the Argentine legal order and the law of nations. Drawing on the distinction between mala in se and mala prohibita crimes, the paper defends a comprehensive interpretation of legality that rejects arbitrary distinctions between military personnel, prisoners of war, and civilians in the recognition of fundamental rights. (shrink)

هذا هو عملي، المكتوب باللغة العربية بالكامل، والذي يوثق الفترة التي قضيتها في القدس وفلسطين، ويروي رحلتي عبر أتون الصراع خلال الأعوام من 1978 إلى 1985. لقد تعرضتُ لإطلاق نار على يد جنود إسرائيليين ومتطرفين إسرائيليين عملوا على تهجير الفلسطينيين من منازلهم. وقد استُمدت هذه النصوص من مذكراتي الشخصية التي دونتها في الفترة ما بين مايو 1978 وسبتمبر 1985.

This paper examines how recent anti-discrimination trends foster discrimination. The identification of discrimination, which inherently should be accompanied by clear evidence, is being done easily. Because of this, instances where it leads to social sanctions decrease, causing a situation where serious discrimination persists. The concept of a "discriminator (racist/sexist, etc.)" is also used all too lightly. "Non-debate" is unjust as a methodology, and it has turned into an excuse for those who have identified something as discrimination but cannot counterargue. The (...) concept of coming out is also neglected. Discrimination is a serious concept and should not be treated lightly. For the realization of anti-discrimination, understanding of the concept and logical thinking skills are indispensable. For the realization of sustainable anti-discrimination rather than dependent on specific individuals, unjust anti-discrimination must be thoroughly criticized, and if necessary, excluded. (shrink)

Since its 2007 publication, Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice has sparked a vigorous conversation in analytic philosophy about how social power corrodes individual’s epistemic capacities and distorts collective meaning-making in unjust ways. Yet for all its normative insights into social silencing, I argue that Fricker’s theorization of epistemic dysfunction remains too individualized, cognitivist, and dematerialized to account for racialized imaginaries. Rather than view racisms as normal and normative in racist cultures, Fricker frames identity-driven prejudice as a troubling aberration from otherwise unblemished (...) epistemic and moral norms. This leads her into adopting an overly voluntarist and idealist theory of social change that centres training better knowers rather than unmaking racialized worlds. Ultimately, I contend that we should return to a materialist theory of ideology, following the work of Stuart Hall. Doing so jettisons the narrow focus on individual epistemic failures and instead problematizes how certain social ideas consolidate and reproduce racial hierarchies. (shrink)

The contemporary world has become increasingly entangled with so-called artificial intelligence—systems that seem to replicate human speech and thought, proclaiming to make our lives easier, more efficient, and more interesting. But what do these tools and systems actually do, and how do they do it? What systems of power, politics, and other values are embedded within these systems, and who put them there? Throughout this chapter, I take inspiration from and deploy Langdon Winner’s theories of how politics are embedded within (...) and reproduced by technologies. Specifically, I use Winner’s framing to examine values embedded and entangled with “AI” and how those entanglements lead to what has already occurred, and what can potentially go wrong when we integrate “AI” into various aspects of our lives. This discussion and exploration then form the basis for recommendations as to how we might build these systems differently—that is to say, how we might go about building into these systems the values and politics we want to see rather than the ones we allow to make their way in via our uncritical assumptions and unexamined biases. Neither “AI” qua “AI” nor the kyriarchal, hegemonic, environmentally damaging, capitalist, white supremacist, ableist, eugenic, misogynistic, and otherwise prejudicially biased forms these tools and systems currently tend to take are inevitable. Racist facial recognition, sexist and ableist resumé and hiring tools, and other “AI” systems do not care about the harms they perpetuate or the truth content of their determinations—that’s what makes them bullshitters. To change these kyriarchal systems’ configurations, we must understand what they truly do, why they are the way they are, what values they reproduce and reify, and how they could be otherwise. (shrink)

This article examines the controversy surrounding Gary Lineker’s March 2023 tweet, which criticized the U.K. government’s Illegal Migration Act by invoking a comparison to 1930s Germany. By exploring political mobilizations of Holocaust memory, it is noted how the tension between memory and politics was reflected in the media response to Lineker’s tweet. Although criticized for historical trivialization, and violating BBC impartiality guidelines, the controversy revealed the selective application of institutional norms regarding free speech, while also exposing the ideological foundations of (...) media neutrality. As a consequence, it is argued that Lineker’s tweet should be understood as a ‘performative rupture’—a gesture exposing the contradictions in liberal ideals of free speech, impartiality, and historical memory. Rather than reading the tweet as a reductive analogy, the article interprets it as an ethically disruptive act, using the past to challenge dominant narratives so as to revive history’s political urgency in confronting contemporary injustice. (shrink)

This paper states the irrationality of the category of ``antisemitism.'' This concept originated from the Western history of persecution of Jews. It is treated as a category separate from racial discrimination. There is a historical background of judging criticism of Jewish actions as a denial of their existence. Using this for criticism renders it powerless outside the West and leads to the condoning of racism against Jews. Moreover, unreasonable preferential treatment is also a great loss for Jewish people. And presenting (...) a solution that does not address the cause persecution is an expression of contempt, showing that the West does not look history in the eye and thinks Jews will be satisfied with this level of child's play. It is undeniably irrational for them to be subjected to such treatment by an ideology they did not even create. (shrink)

The present paper challenges a dogma in the philosophy of race, according to which racism is not only wrong but wrong by definition. After distinguishing this view from three claims in the vicinity, I discuss three arguments for it and find them wanting. Then I put forward two arguments against it. The view that racism is unjustified as a matter of definition can accommodate neither the existence of conceptually competent proud racists nor the possibility of racism in a world without (...) values. That racism is wrong is a substantive moral fact, not a conceptual truth. (shrink)

The article develops a psychoanalytic theory of antisemitism as a specific form of paranoia rooted in an unresolved conflict under late-capitalist conditions. Drawing on Adorno and Horkheimer's "Dialectic of Enlightenment" and on clinical case studies, it argues that antisemitic patients project incompatible demands of inhibition and disinhibition onto “the Jew,” who becomes a paradoxical imago uniting moral law and forbidden desire. This projection both externalises intrapsychic conflict and offers a fantasy of its harmonious resolution, which then fuels alternating movements of (...) idealising identification and murderous hatred. The article links these dynamics to the contradictory social meanings of money as both limitless gratification and coercive capitalist power, suggesting that modern society structurally fosters the very ambivalence antisemitism seeks to deny. Antisemites thus “love the delusion as themselves,” preferring paranoid resolution to tolerating psychic and social contradiction. (shrink)

The Case for Rage is a philosophical defense of anger, particularly anger at racial injustice. Crossing the terrain of moral psychology, ethics, philosophy of race, and social and political philosophy, the book shows anger’s varieties and cautions readers not to paint it in broad strokes. The book shows how a certain kind of anger at racial injustice is a fitting, appropriate, and correct response to racism; can motivate those who are outraged at racism by affecting their beliefs and desires; and (...) can be productive in the fight against racism. It also explains how a person can resist white supremacy with their rage by breaking racial rules. The book also provides suggestions for how the angry might manage their anger—not through eradication or moderation, but through cultivation and community. (shrink)

This chapter investigates how we can be responsible for actions and attitudes from which we are fully alienated. Such attitudes include the implicit biases that many good-hearted people wholeheartedly disavow but nonetheless seem to harbor. Several theories are examined, including among others the real-self theory proposed by Harry Frankfurt, the views of T. M. Scanlon, and Nomy Arpaly’s account. Extant theories seem unable to accommodate certain compelling intuitions. To accommodate these considered judgments, the variantist thesis advanced in this chapter is (...) that responsibility can shift depending on the content of the action or attitude, and more fundamentally on the harm done in or by the act or attitude in question. (shrink)

James Lindsay, who researches the roots of social justice zealousness, observed that, “[s]o far as I know, there’s not some specific piece of scholarship that closes the Woke off to debate, like a single paper or book explaining why they don’t do it” (2020). We now have that paper. It is titled “Pragmatism as a Mediator–Seeking an Illusory Harmony?” (2023) and was written by the Finnish scholar Sami Pihlström. In this short article, I examine Pihlström's stance and show why it (...) is epistemically, ethically, and politically disastrous. (shrink)

The present paper challenges a dogma in the philosophy of race, according to which racism is not only wrong but wrong by definition. After distinguishing this view from three claims in the vicinity, I discuss three arguments for it and find them wanting. Then I put forward two arguments against it. The view that racism is unjustified as a matter of definition can accommodate neither the existence of conceptually competent proud racists nor the possibility of racism in a world without (...) values. That racism is wrong is a substantive moral fact, not a conceptual truth. (shrink)

This article applies Lacanian psychoanalysis to explore race as a psychotic structure, marked by delusion, paranoia, and symbolic failure. Focusing on the hip-hop genre, and the music of Kendrick Lamar, it examines how Lamar’s music exposes and unsettles racial certainties by emphasizing lack and doubt. Through an analysis of “Mortal Man”, and Lamar’s imagined interview with Tupac Shakur, the article highlights how silence and absence disrupt fixed racial meanings. It argues that dismantling racism requires confronting the libidinal and ideological investments (...) in race, while positioning Lamar’s work as a vital for a radical, anti-racist critique grounded in psychoanalytic theory. (shrink)

Richard Rorty does have something ‘to say to [Black Americans]’ and to their racially conscious nonblack allies in the sense that his understanding of liberalism, his prophecies about the future and his urgent appeals to the American Left all paint a picture of a white middle class fully prepared to make life increasingly miserable for Black Americans unless it is ‘protected from catastrophe’. Rorty hopes that this group will undergo a moral transformation that enables it to see past its narrow (...) group interests, but doubts that it will. He, nevertheless, prescribes a politics of hope and appeasement as a hedge against both despair and backsliding. In so doing, he fails to appreciate the availability and the suitability of an alternative ‘racial realist’ (and tragicomic) posture vis-à-vis American liberalism inspired by thinkers like Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Derrick Bell. This alternative enables racially conscious Americans to respond to the intransigence of (certain) white Americans with cunning rather than by escaping into fantasies of a ‘dream country’ unmarked by the damage caused by racism and its long-lingering effects. I uncover and explore this alternative through Rorty’s warnings regarding the white middle class, a somewhat surprising consistency between Rorty’s brand of class politics and Bell’s understanding of ‘racial fortuity’, and, finally, through a development of Bell’s ‘racial realist’ posture combined with Baldwin’s ‘uses of the blues’ resulting in a ‘hard-eyed’ tragicomic sensibility sufficient to effectively pair continued struggle with creative consolation and resilience. (shrink)

The paper argues that the methodological tensions in Hegel’s "Realphilosophie"—between affirmation and critique of science, between empirical content and a priori concepts—can be resolved by reading it as a hermeneutics of the sciences, guided by a “hermeneutical a priori.” In Hegel’s "Anthropology", this a priori is the concept of the human as essentially spiritual. A case study of Hegel's reception of race theories (Blumenbach, Camper, Steffens) shows how this a priori lead to alleged physiological differences being interpreted as expressions of (...) spiritual qualities, and ultimately as a hierarchical ordering of “races.” I analyze Hegel's reception of Camper’s cranial morphology and tie it back to the Anthropology's underlying systematic premises and methodological constraints. The result challenges purely culturalist readings of Hegel’s concept of race and adds a methodological layer to the discussion. It shows that Hegel's conception of race was driven by a problematic attempt at scientific grounding rather than being a mere reflection of common prejudice. (shrink)

Fairness in machine learning (ML) has become a rapidly growing area of research. But why, in the first place, is unfairness in ML wrong? And why should we care about improving fairness? Most fair-ML research implicitly appeals to distributive equality: the idea that desirable benefits and goods, such as opportunities (e.g., Barocas et al., 2023), should be equally distributed across society. Unfair ML models, then, are seen as wrong because they unequally distribute such benefits. This paper argues that this exclusive (...) focus on distributive equality offers an incomplete and potentially misleading ethical foundation, especially in the context of text- and image-generation models. Grounding ML fairness in egalitarianism—the view that equality is a fundamental moral and social ideal—requires challenging structural inequality: systematic, institutional, and durable arrangements that privilege some groups while disadvantaging others. Structural inequality manifests through ML systems in two primary forms: allocative harms (e.g., economic loss) and representational harms (e.g., stereotypes, erasure). While distributive equality helps address allocative harms, it fails to explain why representational harms are wrong—that is, why it is wrong for ML systems to reinforce social hierarchies that stratify people into superior and inferior groups—and why ML systems should aim to foster a society where people relate as equals (i.e., relational equality). To address these limitations, the paper proposes a novel multifaceted egalitarian framework for ML fairness that integrates both distributive and relational notions of equality. Drawing on critical social and political philosophy, including the work of Anderson, Young, and Fraser, this framework offers a more comprehensive ethical foundation for tackling the full spectrum of harms perpetuated by ML systems. The paper also outlines practical pathways for implementing the framework across the entire ML pipeline. (shrink)

Some sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers, among others, have expressed worries about the inflation of concepts related to negative experiences, harm, or injustice (for example, the concepts of racism, sexual harassment, and human rights). Others welcome and contribute to the linguistic changes. What is at stake in these disagreements? In this paper, I first give an account of what conceptual inflation, in one important sense, is: change in linguistic practices that makes it easier to indicate a problem of a certain category. (...) Then, I argue—building on work by Shen-yi Liao and Nat Hansen—that such conceptual inflation of problems neither significantly limits nor enhances our ability to communicate about the relevant sub-problems (such as workplace harassment and street harassment) and to recognize the similarities and differences between them. This is because our linguistic resources are flexible, and we are capable of creatively using and developing those resources. There is, however, another way of making sense of the disagreements. The issue at stake could be the allocation of collective attentional resources to (alleged) problems. There are plausible mechanisms whereby how we use the terms in question (such as “sexual harassment”) influences that allocation. (shrink)

What is the connection between capitalism and racial hierarchy? In line with the tradition known as ‘the theory of racial capitalism’ we show that the latter can functionally support the former. As a social construction, race has just those features which allow it to facilitate the sort of stable, inequitable distributions of resources that tend to emerge in capitalist systems. We support this claim using techniques from evolutionary game theory and cultural evolutionary theory, and end by discussing the normative political (...) consequences of this relationship. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty's Invisible Visible's conception of space as flesh explains how space is felt as racialized and social climates can be experiences as hostile or welcoming atmospheres.

Criminal law practices in the US, including policing and incarceration, have drawn heavy criticism for their disproportionate impact on black people, particularly black men. At the same time, some feminist scholars and activists advocate for increases in criminal law responses to sexual assault, including expanding criminal statutes to cover more instances of sexual assault and increasing sentencing guidelines. These reforms are often justified by claims that criminal law should express more feminist values and reject sexist social schemas. This paper makes (...) the case that criminal legal interventions aimed at changing sexist social schemas, such as ‘rape culture,’ are unlikely to be successful because criminal law is effective at maintaining existing social norms, but bad at introducing novel ones. Similarly, in the US, criminality has been ideologically linked to blackness, so attempts to use the stigma of criminality to combat sexual violence are likely to reinforce anti-black racism. The very meaning of a criminal law depends on related social schemas, and the racist social schemas associated with criminality undermine the ability of criminal legal responses to present anti-sexist values. At best, criminal legal reforms aimed at expressing the equal dignity of women will be ambiguous because their meaning is negotiated by existing sexist and racist social schemas. Thus, penal expressivism cannot offer a justification for using criminal law to combat sexual assault. (shrink)

This paper outlines a new pluralistic theory of normative reasons for belief, welfarist pluralism, which aims to explain how there can be basic alethic/epistemic reasons for belief and basic pragmatic/non-alethic reasons for belief that can combine to determine what one ought to believe. The paper shows how this non-derivative first-order pluralism arises from a purely welfarist account of the foundations of theoretical normativity, thereby combining foundational pragmatism with non-derivative pluralism about normative reasons for belief. In addition, this paper outlines howwelfarist (...) pluralism provides a new and potentially attractive account of the value of truth (or its indicators), namely that the value of truth (or its indicators) is its direct contribution to individuals’ personal good or wellbeing. (shrink)

Currently, three broad families of theories (structural, ideological, and volitional) aim to capture the metaphysics of racism. In this paper, we argue for an alternative descriptive theory, the “Racism as Psychological Essentialism” view (RPE). On our view, racism is, at its core, the instantiation of psychological race essentialism (i.e., the tendency to represent races as having discrete “essences” which make their members’ characteristics natural, unified, and stable). We argue that what other theories have identified as the “core” of racism are (...) actually the downstream consequences of race essentialism. This approach allows us to account for both the cases competing theories aim to explain, and those they cannot. The RPE view also sheds light on the cognitive mechanisms which contribute to racism’s prevalence and persistence over time, and opens the door for empirically informed anti-racist strategies. This robust explanatory power makes the RPE view a particularly strong descriptive theory of racism. (shrink)

Readers should be aware that content about Kant’s racism may be difficult and distressing to read. In various texts, Kant makes statements alleging that Indigenous Americans have ‘no culture’ and Black people possess only the ‘culture of slaves’. These are straightforwardly repugnant commitments. In order to address the role of Kant’s account of ‘culture’ in his racism and provide additional support to Charles Mills’ ‘Untermensch (subhuman) interpretation’ of Kant’s views on race, this article situates Kant’s comments on ‘racialized cultures’ within (...) his teleological account of human history. In his system, ‘culture’ refers to the possession of developed capacities to achieve the ends that one sets for oneself. He sees achievement of culture as part of the development of human beings into members of a socialized, moral kingdom. Given his understanding of culture, I argue that Kant’s remarks on the cultural limitations of persons of color commit him to the further claims that Indigenous Americans and Black people are incapable of setting their own ends and that these deficiencies are hereditary and permanent. For Kant, this has the consequence that these individuals do not possess genuine moral worth in his system, thus supporting Mills’ Untermensch interpretation of Kant’s views on race. (shrink)

Charles Mills’ work was (and continues to be) extremely influential in political philosophy, political science, and philosophy of race, but few authors working in philosophical just war theory and military ethics have discussed his work. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, Mills’ work on the Racial Contract and white supremacy as a political system has profound implications for just war theory. Recognizing the colonialist origins of many Western states challenges important jus ad bellum criteria, including legitimate authority, and the use of (...) ideal theorizing in just war thinking has masked yet replicated colonialist tropes about the nature of war and shaped the language of just war theory in ways that reflect histories of colonialism and white supremacy. (shrink)

Theorists have raised worries about conceptual inflation for more than three decades. These worries have been frequently expressed about ‘racism’ and ‘racist’, as well as other politically contested terms. However, these theorists have not always been clear about what conceptual inflation is or why it is worrisome. By disentangling different threads of these conceptual inflation critiques, we construct a taxonomy of different types of conceptual inflation. We start with a brief history of conceptual inflation critiques, with a focus on the (...) terms ‘racism’ and ‘racist’. We then separate out descriptive and normative components of conceptual inflation critiques. Focusing on the descriptive component, we emphasize that it is about meaning and not frequency of use, and we clarify different aspects about variation in the meaning of these terms that has concerned these theorists. We distinguish between two aspects of meaning, extension and intensity, and two kinds of variation, synchronic and diachronic. Our taxonomy reveals what kind of evidence would support or challenge different types of conceptual inflation critiques. (shrink)

This article aims to reconstruct the concept of “race” in Nietzsche's work, particularly in his late writings. We seek to test the hypothesis that Nietzsche attempted to reform the concept of race to overcome the descriptive and normative shortcomings of classical racialist theories, by making the notion (a) descriptively more accurate and (b) better suited to his normative agenda. Tosituate Nietzsche's views within a purely abstract space of conceptual possibilities, the first section outlines two contemporary approaches in the philosophy of (...) race, Kwame Appiah's naturalist-eliminativist approach and Sally Haslanger's constructivist approach, both in their original formulations. The subsequent sections examine Nietzsche's treatment of the problem of race, aiming to extract a definition of the concept and assess the extent to which it retains elements of the classical conception while proposing a reformed version of it. Nietzsche employs the term “race” in various ways, sometimes referring to nations and ethnic groups, sometimes to classes and social stratifications. While he rejects key presuppositions of the racialist view – denying that races are biologically discrete units – he replaces it with a proto-constructivist, culturalist and historicist notion in which races are made rather than innate. Nonetheless, he draws on Lamarck’s thesis of the inheritance of acquired characters as a means of preserving the concept’s explanatory ambitions without relying on essentialist assumptions. The final part of the article evaluates the strengths and limitations of this reformed concept of race from both an explanatory and normative perspective, using criteria internal and external to Nietzsche’s philosophical commitments. Although Nietzsche resolutely opposes antisemitism and intrinsic racism, he nonetheless makes racist generalizations and advocates a eugenic project aimed at breeding a“purified” European race, often with strong imperialist overtones. However, when disentangled from the more problematic aspects of his normative agenda, his approach may still offer valuable insights for both political and explanatory purposes. (shrink)

The special issue you have in your hands arose from a somewhat peculiar premise: we preferred not to be very clear, beforehand, about what it was going to be about. It may seem a risky bet for a “thematic” issue, but the truth is that we only had a set of concerns related to the cultural imperative of monogamy that, on closer inspection, did not even seem to point in the same direction. We knew, for example, that we did not (...) want to focus on polyamorous relationships, open couples or free relationships, nor on ethical or political non-monogamy, consensual or non- consensual. Nor did we want to focus on the relational styles of swinger networks, kink sexualities or BDSM. Neither did we want to focus on the proposals of relationship anarchy. In the same way, we did not want to dedicate this issue to the legal life of monogamy, nor to the intimate relations between state, citizenship and mononormativity. We also decided not to limit our proposal to exploring the intersections - and tensions - that arise between resistance to monogamy and feminist, anti-racist or LGBTQIAPN+ struggles. Similarly, we did not feel it appropriate to devote this issue to something like the study of “non-monogamy” in Brazil, Abya Yala or the multiple souths of the planet, or to the possible coalitions between decolonisation and de-monogamisation of the world. It is true that we wanted to open up a space where we could talk about all of this, and other things. But, above all, we hoped that this issue would serve to raise a question that underlies these topics without ultimately being reduced to any of them. (shrink)

O imperativo cultural da monogamia impregna toda a arquitetura jurídica do Estado e, ao mesmo tempo, a excede, saturando as relações sociais de formas nem sempre evidentes. A partir dessa premissa, este trabalho se concentra, geograficamente, no Brasil e, temporalmente, no contexto aberto pela pandemia de covid-19, com o objetivo de defender a hipótese de que a monogamia foi fortalecida como princípio organizador do campo da sexualidade e das relações de parentesco durante o episódio pandêmico. A análise proposta tem o (...) propósito de alertar, também, para as formas pelas quais as normas de exceção implementadas durante crises pandêmicas se sedimentam na sociedade, tornando-se, assim, parte constitutiva da ordem pública. (shrink)

This article, composed six months after the Oct. 7th Hamas operation “Al-Aqsa Flood,” in the shadow of Israel’s retaliatory genocide, was catalyzed by a viral social media video with alternating clips of Palestinian and Native American people dancing in defiant resistance to ongoing white settler colonial ethnic cleansing and genocide, in loving embrace of their own Indigenous ways of being. After an introductory setting of the stage for this video, the first section rehearses the two historical chapters of dance scholar (...) Jacqueline Shea Murphy’s The People Have Always Danced, emphasizing the paradoxical late nineteenth-century campaigns (1) criminalizing Indigenous American dances, and (2) appropriating these dances and dancers for non-Indigenous audiences. The second section then pivots to Australian choreographer Nicholas Rowe’s Raising Dust: A Cultural History of Dance in Palestine, emphasizing the appropriation of a traditional shepherd dance (Dabke) into the Zionist project of fabricating an orientalist tradition to justify their colonization. Finally, the concluding section spotlights Palestine’s Birzeit University and the El-Funoun folkdance troupe as exemplars, captured in the Palestinian hip hop song’s neologism “Palest-Indians,” of loving Indigenous death-defying dance resistance. (shrink)

Affective realism, roughly the hypothesis that you “perceive what you feel”, has recently been put forward as a novel, empirically-backed explanation of police shooting errors. The affective states involved in policing in high-pressure situations result in police officers literally seeing guns even when none are present. The aim of this paper is to (i) unpack the implications of this explanation for assessing police culpability and (ii) determine whether we should take these implications at face value. I argue that while affective (...) realism stands to diminish, if not eliminate, the moral and legal responsibilities of officers who have made shooting errors, the empirical data itself does not directly support such a radical rethink of police culpability. (shrink)

This chapter explores the conceptual relation of facts about racial injustice to two key aspects of Rawls’s ideal theory. First, it explains why Rawls excludes race from his representation of a well-ordered society and why he believes this exclusion does not mean that justice as fairness cannot support racial justice. Second, it considers three recent accounts of the justificatory role of facts about racial injustice in justice as fairness, focusing on the methods of the Original Position and Reflective Equilibrium. It (...) concludes with a reinterpretation of the method of Reflective Equilibrium that shows why it provides a promising pathway for showcasing the explicit role of facts about racial realities in ideal theory. Namely, their consideration can add justification to the idea of justice as fairness. (shrink)

In this essay, I fill this gap in knowledge by arguing that the central object of Fanonian dialectics is violence (anticolonial guerilla warfare), the achievement of the decolonized Black nation and the eventual creation of a new anti-colonial (Pan-African) world order over and against its dialectical negation: Neo-colonialism via colonial counterinsurgency. Furthermore, I argue that Fanon’s dialectical thought helped lay the basis for the emergence of a new theory of revolution against US empire coined by Huey P. Newton as intercommunalism. (...) The complementarity and conceptual harmony between Fanon’s and Newton’s dialectical thinking about US/colonial empire, counterinsurgency, the imperative of creating new forms of humanism, and the lumpen masses as primary agents in the revolutionary transformation of society comprise what I call the ‘empire as pacification’ thesis. (shrink)

Filling a gap in knowledge in gender theory, genocidal, and Holocaust studies, this paper operationalizes the concept of phallicism as an analytic explanation of the simultaneous killing and sexual victimization of racialized men in western, capitalist, patriarchal societies. The theory of phallicism posits that racialization lays the basis for a sexualization process wherein racialized males are caricaturized as both salacious savages (who can be raped by the men or women of the dominant racial group) and bestial/wanton creatures deserving of immediate (...) death for the sake of liberal civility. Breaking with the dominant interpretive lenses in scholarly discourses around race and gender that understand racialized femininity as the basis of dehumanization, this paper will operationalize the notion of phallicism through historical and comparative analysis of the writings of political prisoner George Jackson and Primo Levi, a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust. With the theory of phallicism—the guiding theoretic of the paradigm of Black Male Studies—we can sharpen our conceptual acumen to account for the function of misandric patterns of intergroup violence and its role as the organizing principle of the negrophobia characteristic of Western, patriarchal, capitalist regimes. (shrink)

Derogatory terms (racist, sexist, ethnic, and homophobic epithets) are bully words with ontological force: they serve to establish and maintain a corrupt social system fuelled by distinctions designed to justify relations of dominance and subordination. No wonder they have occasioned public outcry and legal response. The inferential role analysis developed here helps move us away from thinking of the harms as being located in connotation (representing mere speaker bias) or denotation (holding that the terms fail to refer due to inaccurate (...) descriptive content). The issue is not bad attitudes or referential misfires. An inferential role semantic analysis of derogatory terms shows exactly what is at stake between those who argue that the terms should be eliminated (Absolutists) and those who claim they can be successfully rehabilitated (Reclaimers). The Reclaimer maintains, and the Absolutist denies, that certain contexts can detach the derogatory force from deeply derogatory terms. The article looks at these claims with respect to ‘nigger’ and ‘dyke,’ setting out the inferential role of each term and examining detachability potential. Explaining detachability in terms of linguistic commitments, this article also addresses the issue of whether such terms count as political discourse, and examines the implications of that issue. (shrink)

In what follows, I will argue that racist ideology should be understood in terms of racist social norms that constitute certain incentive structures. To this end, I will motivate my position by examining two existing accounts of ideology: those of Tommie Shelby and Sally Haslanger. First, I will begin by reconstructing Shelby’s account of racism as ideology. After analysing three dimensions of ideology (epistemic, genetic and functional), I will argue that his view is too cognitivist. In this regard, Shelby’s view (...) is doxastic in viewing that racist ideologies consist in misguided beliefs. Rather, what is essential in ideology is its functional dimension. Here, ideologies persist because they function to stabilize and reinforce the unjust status quo of subordination and oppression. Then, I will turn to Haslanger’s account of ideology as cultural technēs. Her view is more functional than Shelby’s since the former is based on the account of social practice and culture. While Haslanger is right about her critique of Shelby’s cognitivist view of ideology, I argue that what she calls nonideal moral epistemology weakens her overall insight. The problem is that without considering how to intervene in concrete social mechanisms, merely knowing certain moral truths may not practically motivate subjects under ideologies. Taken together, both Shelby and Haslanger narrowly understand ideology in terms of epistemic deficiency. Even though Shelby and Haslanger deal with the discursive superstructure of ideology, both underestimate the functional substructure of ideology such as social and psychological motives, desires and needs. Ultimately, I will argue that ideology is better understood in terms of a racist social norm. This account is explanatorily superior to Shelby and Haslanger’s views in its stress on the nonepistemic, nonmoral and functional aspects of ideology. (shrink)

In recent years an uneasy peace has descended in U.S. academe between those who feel research universities have done too little to advance the representation of minority groups and women and those who feel that the administrative policies developed to improve representation can and sometimes do come into conflict with core intellectual commitments of universities. Using quantitative and qualitative evidence from interviews with 47 natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics faculty members at a U.S. research university, the paper examines the background (...) characteristics of three sets of protagonists - academic progressives, academic traditionalists, and those whose views bridge the divide - and the way respondents discussed and justified their viewpoints. The paper draws on the theory of strategic action fields to illuminate the structure and dynamics of the conflict and suggests modifications to the theory that would improve its explanatory power for this case. (shrink)

This article defends an account of racism as centrally an ideology, a system of illusory ideas. It argues that the relevant ideology has the effect of oppressing people of some racial identities, an idea it explains and explores. It defines ‘racialism’ as a kind of essentialism about racial identities and argues that it is false. Both racialism and the vice of racism, which consists of having morally impermissible attitudes to people in virtue of their racial identities, are among the consequences (...) of racial ideology. On this view, not all differential treatment on the basis of racial identity is racist. (shrink)

This paper argues that public pedagogy—an educational activity that takes place outside of the traditional classroom setting—has had a potent impact on the history of racism in the United States of America (USA). Yet this paper questions why the education academy’s scholarship has not shown a commensurate focus on the subdiscipline of public pedagogy, particularly racialized public pedagogy. I explore these topics by first examining a fateful confluence of historical circumstances involving slave codes and indentured servant laws governing low-income white (...) workers, laws passed by the Barbados Assembly in 1661, that made their way across the Atlantic to be lifted, word for word, by leaders of colonial territories that became the USA. These laws ended up regulating not only the legal status of black slaves and white indentured servants in the USA, but also regulating social relations between those same black and white people. The resulting black–white social relations led to the evolution of racialized customs in what eventually became the USA, inspiring practices that undergirded black inferiority and white superiority for hundreds of years. Those customs contributed to the construction of what I have labelled a United States (US) values infrastructure dominated by racism, which I contend is a racialized values infrastructure that exists to this day. To gain more insight into this phenomenon, this paper considers the question: how might the complexity of racialized public pedagogy be addressed in the scholarship of education literature and be imagined in a way to fit into an anti-racist curriculum? (shrink)

Racism in nursing is multifaceted, ranging from internalized racism and interpersonal racism to institutional and systemic (or structural) elements that perpetuate inequities in the nursing profession. Employing the socio‐ecological model, this study dissects the underlying challenges across various levels and proposes targeted mitigation strategies to foster an inclusive and equitable environment for nursing education. It advances clear, context‐specific mitigation strategies to cultivate inclusivity and equity within nursing education. Effectively addressing racism within this context necessitates a tailored, multistakeholder approach, impacting nursing (...) students, faculty, administration, professional organizations, and licensing and accrediting bodies. This all‐encompassing strategy recognizes that the interplay of interpersonal dynamics, community culture, institutional policies, and broader societal structures intricately shapes individual experiences. Nurses, nurse leaders, educators, organizations, and policymakers can work together to create a more equitable and inclusive nursing profession by targeting each of these levels. This transformational process can yield positive outcomes across various environments where nurses learn, work, and serve people and enable the demographic composition of nurses to better match the populations served. (shrink)

In mental health ethics, it is generally assumed that coercive measures are sometimes justified when persons with mental illness endanger themselves or others. Coercive measures are regarded as ethically justified only when certain criteria are fulfilled: for example, the intervention must be proportional in relation to the potential harm. In this paper, we demonstrate shortcomings of this established ethical framework in cases where people with mental illness experience structural racism. By drawing on a case example from mental healthcare, we first (...) demonstrate that biases in assessing whether the coercive intervention is proportional are likely, for example, due to an overestimation of dangerousness. We then show that even if proportionality is assessed correctly, and the specific coercive intervention would thus be regarded as ethically justified according to the standard framework, coercion may still be ethically problematic. This is because the standard framework does not consider how situations in which coercive measures are applied arise. If structural racism causally contributes to such situations, the use of coercion can compound the prior injustice of racist discrimination. We conclude that the ethical analysis of coercion in mental healthcare should consider the possibility of discriminatory biases and practices and systematically take the influence of structural discrimination into account. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant viewed himself as the first person to have properly defined the concept of a human ‘race’. He distinguished four human ‘races’ and ranked the.