Critical Philosophy of Race: An Introduction

KEYWORDS:

• Critical philosophy of race
• racism
• coloniality
• whiteness
• immigration

This special section brings together scholars working in Critical Philosophy of Race to explore questions of racism, coloniality, and migration, and in doing so, offers a glimpse into some of the scholarship currently being undertaken in this emerging field. The section has its origins in a one-day workshop, On Anti-Racism: A Critical Philosophy of Race Symposium, which took place in Narrm/Melbourne, Australia in October 2017. The symposium participants, Amir Jaima, Helen Ngo, and Bryan Mukandi, are here joined by Lori Gallegos and Chelsea Bond, in an effort to continue and extend some of the conversations initiated at that event.

Critical Philosophy of Race

While readers might be better acquainted with the established fields, ‘Philosophy of Race’ and ‘Critical Race Theory’, ‘Critical Philosophy of Race’ has emerged in more recent years, gaining traction among communities of philosophers working on questions of race and racism. And while acknowledging that delineations between academic disciplines and sub-fields are rarely clean-cut, one still might ask: What distinguishes ‘Critical Philosophy of Race’ from the more commonly encountered ‘Philosophy of Race’? A useful starting point for working through their differences can be found in Charles Mills’ chapter on Critical Philosophy of Race for The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, where he opens by stating:

Critical philosophy of race is distinguished from traditional —uncritical— philosophy of race in being multiply ‘critical.’ It is critical of racism, as ideas, beliefs, and values, as well as social institutions and practices; it is generally, at least in recent decades, critical also of the traditional naturalistic understanding of race; and it is critical of the denial of the past and ongoing significance of race to the making of modernity and the contemporary world. (Mills 2016: 709)

From the perspective of intellectual lineage, then, Critical Philosophy of Race draws explicitly from – and continues the spirit of – Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory. In this sense, Critical Philosophy of Race can be said to be more explicit in foregrounding its criticism of the historical and social production of race and racism, while engaging the methodological tools of – and extending existing conversations found within – its disciplinary home of Philosophy.

At the same time, this engagement from a philosophical perspective brings a broader range of analyses and concerns to the wider body of critical race scholarship. In their ‘Letter from the Editors’ for the inaugural issue of the Critical Philosophy of Race journal, Robert Bernasconi, Kathryn Belle (formerly Kathryn T. Gines), and Paul C. Taylor write:

Critical philosophy of race is a philosophical enterprise because of its engagement with traditional philosophical questions and in its readiness to engage critically some of the traditional answers. This enterprise intersects with a number of already vibrant areas within philosophy including history of philosophy, epistemology, ethics, and social and political philosophy. However, the practice of critical philosophy of race is also interdisciplinary insofar as it draws heavily on a number of other subjects, including legal studies, history, anthropology, sociology, comparative literature, African American studies, Latino/a and Hispanic studies, and others. (Bernasconi et al. 2013: iv–v)

Thus, while Critical Philosophy of Race tackles questions pertaining to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, social and political philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology, it does so often in conversation with scholars in cognate disciplines – as the articles in this special section demonstrate.

On the other hand, working from and within the disciplinary perspective of Philosophy presents particular challenges. For example, Philosophy's well-known tendency toward abstraction and conceptualisation can make it difficult to reckon with the deeply historical nature and situated specificity of racism. As Charles Mills puts it in his paper, ‘White Time: The Chronic Injustice of Ideal Theory’:

The weirdness of philosophy means that it can claim it was always, or always already, postracial: the self-conception of the discipline itself tends to marginalize issues of race. Dealing as it ostensibly does with the (timeless) human condition as such, philosophy can boast it was postracial through being aracial, while never conceding it was ever racial. So whereas other disciplines might confess, if only grudgingly and belatedly, to a racial past, philosophy denies even this. (Mills 2014: 32)

This is sometimes reflected in the discipline's own reluctance to engage with questions of race and racism as ‘philosophical’ questions, or to recognise such work as ‘philosophy proper’. If Critical Philosophy of Race is only a relatively new sub-field, it is still one working to establish its place and credentials in the broader philosophical community.

Outline of Contents

Amir Jaima opens this collection with ‘On the Discursive Orientation Toward Whiteness’. In this article, Jaima draws on literary theory in order to consider questions of narratorial voice and orientation in the case of Africana and critical race philosophy. In contrast to the frequently conspicuous narrator (whose racial identity, depending on the subject matter, can lend epistemic authority), Jaima notes that narratees in these texts are typically underthematised – which in our cultural milieu invariably means that white readers stand in as the implied and addressed audience. The consequences of this, according to Jaima, are that Africana and critical race scholarship become constrained in the range and scope of arguments that can be made, with intellectual resources diverted to either pre-emptive justifications of, or scaffolding for, their projects. Moreover, Jaima argues that such work is often tasked with anticipating and navigating expressions of white ignorance, racist denial, as well as attending to the emotional fall-out (or backlash) from white readers – all of which serve ultimately to inhibit the productive and generative potential of Africana and critical race philosophy. Given this, Jaima proposes that scholars working within Africana Philosophy take seriously questions of narratorial voice and orientation in their work, and moreover, he calls for a discursive re-orientation or ‘(re)turn’ to Black readers in place of unspecified (white) readers.

In ‘Conflicts of Home-Making: Strategies of Survival and the Politics of Assimilation’, Lori Gallegos asks after the differential meanings and dimensions of home-making among Latinx communities in the US, as compared with those who argue for assimilation into dominant white American cultural ways of life. Gallegos argues that while the two groups might, on first glance, appear to be motivated by the same desire and need to feel at home, they differ importantly with their respect to their accommodation of that which is foreign. For Latin American immigrants, life in the US is often suffused with a sense of unfamiliarity and non-belonging, and it is against this backdrop that practices of home-making – via strategies of ‘making do’; what Mariana Ortega calls, ‘hometactics’ – unfold. Unlike the assimilationist's elimination of difference, however, hometactics entails the creative incorporation of the foreign and unfamiliar, which Gallegos argues, allows for the emergence of new nexuses of signification, while marking the cultural agility of these migrant communities. Such practices contrast the sense of threat that assimilationists feel when confronted by the unfamiliar, and yet as Gallegos argues, it is the latter group's need to feel at home that is often (if implicitly) accorded priority in political discourse and public life.

Helen Ngo takes up questions of racialised time in ‘Get Over It?: Racialised Temporalities and Bodily Orientations in Time’, exploring the often underthematised temporal dimensions of racism and racialised embodiment. She begins with an analysis of how racism tethers the racialised body to the past, setting the scene for temporal disjuncture. Following Frantz Fanon, Ngo argues that the racialised body is both over-determined and pre-determined, such that it always appears on the scene ‘too late’ in relation to the place already carved out for it. Importantly, she notes that this tethering is to a ‘closed’ and inaccessible past, as opposed to a past that anchors our being and acting in the world, a past that can be elaborated and taken up anew. Against this, Ngo goes on to consider how white racism is marked by a forgetting; of both the processes of racialisation themselves, as well as the racist histories which people of colour must bear and reckon with. Typified by calls to ‘get over it’ whenever charges of racism are levelled, Ngo argues that racialised forgetting reveals much about the temporal structure and disposition of whiteness, which on the one hand is future-oriented in its haste to ‘move on’ from unsavoury histories, while on the other hand, is temporally untethered and free to determine its manner of relating to the past, present, and future.

Closing out the collection is Bryan Mukandi and Chelsea Bond's ‘Good in the Hood or Burn It Down? Reconciling Black Presence in the Academy’. This article proceeds by way of dialogue between two differently situated Black scholars in the academy – one Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman in Health Sciences, and one Zimbabwean-Australian man in Medicine and Philosophy. Together, Bond and Mukandi explore the many dimensions of what it feels like to be a Black scholar in the contemporary academy, from the frequent reminders of non-belonging, the episodic challenges to one's intellectual authority, to the invisible and affective labour entailed in ‘performing’ to the demands of white colleagues, students, and institutions. Such reflections prompt Mukandi and Bond – drawing on the likes of Fanon, Baldwin, Beatty, Yancy, and others – to think more deeply about the goal and purpose behind this labour; who is it for, and who benefits from it. Implicated in this discussion is the role of the academy itself, and the modes of knowledge production it both practises and legitimates. Here Bond and Mukandi explore the idea of the university as yet another site of colonial frontier violence, while imagining the different possibilities available within it – or perhaps more pointedly, getting clearer on what the gains are (and aren't) for Blackfullas and Black folk working within its limits.

The form of Mukandi and Bond's article is worthy of some remark. While departing from the standard scholarly form we have come to expect in academic (and particularly philosophical) writing, in other ways it rings strikingly true to form – at least, in an intellectual tradition that counts Socratic dialogue among its foundational touchstones. And while this paper offers a more conventionally academic conversation parallel in its endnotes, its dialogic form in the main nonetheless challenges our sensibilities about what does and doesn't count as philosophical contribution today. Second, the voicing of this dialogue is also important. If Jaima's opening article urges us to consider questions of the for whom of our intellectual labour, then Mukandi and Bond's closing contribution offers us a glimpse into what critical race scholarship might look like – whose concerns it might address and whose priorities it might take up – when this task is taken to heart.

Together, this collection of articles seeks to explore the range of scholarship possible when Philosophy speaks to concerns outside its usual purview, and in particular, when put in conversation with other scholars and disciplines engaging in critical race work.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Helen Ngo is an Honorary Fellow with the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University (Australia), and completed her PhD in Philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook (USA). She works at the intersection of phenomenology and critical philosophy of race, and is author of The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment (Lexington, 2017), and co-editor of Philosophies of Difference: Nature, ⁣⁣Racism, and Sexuate Difference (Routledge, 2018). She has also published in journals such as Philosophy and Social Criticism and Australian Feminist Law Journal.