Notes
The question of place and social being was an intimate part of the American Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau's thoughts about the uniqueness of America. The importance of the habitat of German folk was, of course, reflected on in Martin Heiddeger's “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and Ernst Cassier directly considered the role of social space in philosophical anthropology in his An Essay on Man. Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space is a classic contribution, along with Michel Foucault's insights about social space. Ed Casey, through a series of books, such as The Fate of Place, has continued the project of theorizing space and place. Yet, for all that is good about this body of work, the role of race in our conceptualization of space and the production of race is not given the role it clearly deserves.
The blocking of the associations between our work as professional philosophers, our social spaces, and race are examples how “epistemologies of ignorance” operate. See Charles Mills' discussion in The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997), 17–19.
For example, Tommy Lott and Robert Bernasconi's The Idea of Race (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000).
Ronald Sundstrom, “Race and Place: Social Space in the Production of Human Kinds,” Philosophy and Geography, 6, no. 1 (2003): 83–95.