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The Sociohistorical Consensus
The Sociohistorical Consensus
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The Monist
The view that classic racist ideology is true and specifically true of
the groups 'blacks', 'whites', 'Asians', and so forth, has now been almost
universally abandoned. But that abandonment has still left us with a
myriad of issues concerning race. I will argue that the following proposi-
tions about those groups have, either singly or in tandem, been overlooked
or insufficiently attended to in some social scientific and some prominent
philosophical work about race. Yet these propositions are broadly
accepted, and I will refer to them as the 'sociohistorical consensus'.2 (The
focus of these truths is the United States, and most of my discussion will
be confined to that national context.)
(A) Classic racial groups are the groups that classic racist ideology
viewed as races, but they are not races in that sense because they do not
possess most of the required characteristics (1 through 6 above) in relation
to each other. (They may possess 4, distinctive phenotypes, but these phe-
notypes do not mark the presence of psychological or behavioral essences
and so do not play the role they do in classic racist theory.)
(B) Although classic racial groups are not (classic) races, they are
nevertheless genuine intergenerational collectivities characterized by dis-
tinctive historical and social experiences, and generally current social
locations. They generally have or at least in some historical periods had a
sense of themselves as distinct social groups, often with a sense of peo-
plehood, that is, a sense of shared fate with other members of the group
that encompasses the intergenerational character of the group. That is,
members identify with and feel themselves tied to past, present, and future
members of the group.
(C) The sociohistorical experiences of each of these groups were and
to some extent continue to be deeply conditioned by the classic racist
ideology wrongly thought to characterize them. The classic racial groups
were thought to possess the characteristics attributed to them in classic
racist ideology - the psychological characteristics thought to be innate
and based in their biology - even though they did not possess them. But
the widespread belief that the groups did possess these characteristics
caused and rationalized treatment of them by members of other groups,
and even sometimes by members of the same group, that followed the
logic of those beliefs. Most notably, 'blacks' were treated as if they were
inherently inferior in mental and other important human characteristics by
3. Ancestral/Descent Groups an
I now want to look at racia
concern of some medical resear
terminology in medical contex
7. Mallon s ' Normative not Metaphysical' Proposal about ' Race Talk '
Lawrence Blum
Notes
References
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