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i
W H AT I S R A C E ?
ii
iii
WHAT IS RACE?
Four Philosophical Views
Joshua Glasgow
Sally Haslanger
Chike Jeffers
Quayshawn Spencer
1
iv
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To our children,
Samantha Rose Glasgow-Shulman, Aminata Lilla Jeffers, Ayo Jelani
Jeffers, Aza Katherine Ida Jeffers, Julian Buo-Hon Spencer, Quentin
Buo-Yi Spencer, Isaac Amazu Haslanger Yablo, and Zina Siyasa
Haslanger Yablo,
in the hope that their generations will find a more just world.
vi
vi
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Tracing the Sociopolitical Reality of Race—S ally Haslanger 4
2. Cultural Constructionism—C hike Jeffers 38
3. How to Be a Biological Racial Realist—Q uayshawn Spencer 73
4. Is Race an Illusion or a (Very) Basic Reality?—J oshua Glasgow 111
5. Haslanger’s Reply to Glasgow, Jeffers, and Spencer 150
6. Jeffers’s Reply to Glasgow, Haslanger, and Spencer 176
7. Spencer’s Reply to Glasgow, Haslanger, and Jeffers 203
8. Glasgow’s Reply to Haslanger, Jeffers, and Spencer 245
Index 275
vi
ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The theories presented in this book are derived from articles and books
that we have previously published. Numerous people helped us as we devel-
oped those earlier publications. We would like to reaffirm our gratitude for
their help.
With respect to the present work, we gratefully acknowledge the
following:
Sally Haslanger would like especially to thank the other authors of the
book, Joshua Glasgow, Chike Jeffers, and Quayshawn Spencer, for their on-
going work, helpful conversations, and friendly collaboration in putting this
book together. In addition, she would like to thank Lawrence Blum, Jorge
Garcia, Adam Hosein, Karen Jones, Lionel McPherson, Megan Mitchell,
José Jorge Mendoza, Deborah Mühlebach, David Plunkett, Laura Schroeter,
Francois Schroeter, Greg Restall, Tommie Shelby, Isaac Yablo, Stephen Yablo,
and Zina Yablo for ongoing conversations on the topics discussed.
Chike Jeffers would like to thank Linda Martín Alcoff, Veromi Arsiradam,
Tiffany Gordon, Tyler Hildebrand, David Ludwig, Tina Roberts-Jeffers,
Katie Stockdale, and his coauthors Sally Haslanger, Quayshawn Spencer, and
Joshua Glasgow for their feedback on drafts of his chapters in this book. He
also presented versions of Chapter 2 at the University of Memphis and at
Northwestern University. He is thankful to all who were present and espe-
cially to those who provided feedback on those occasions.
Quayshawn Spencer is thankful for feedback from Mariana Achugar,
Linda Alcoff, Elizabeth Anderson, Luvell Anderson, Robert Brandon, Liam
Bright, Mazviita Chirimuuta, Haixin Dang, Michael Devitt, Brian Epstein,
Patrick Forber, Justin Garson, Joshua Glasgow, Michael Hardimon, Sally
Haslanger, Jay Garfield, Chike Jeffers, Saul Kripke, Meena Krishnamurthy,
Edouard Machery, Lionel McPherson, Charles Mills, Sandra Mitchell,
Jennifer Morton, Albert Mosley, Wayne Norman, Sumeet Patwardhan,
George Smith, and Daniel Wodak. He would also like to thank the faculty
x
x • Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
2 • Introduction
Take Coleridge: “Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the com-
pany of vulgar people; because they have a power of looking at such
persons as objects of amusement, of another race altogether.” A race of
vulgar or stupid people: is that a genuine or merely metaphoric race?
Does a concept as nefarious and slippery as that of race admit of a gen-
uine or innocent or primary usage and then parasitic and metaphoric
usages? Or are there no clear core cases to which it applies? If there is
a clear core, does it have to do with something revolving around blood
or genetics? Or, as Coleridge seems to suggest, around hierarchy and
contempt? (290)
Each of the four authors included in this book proposes a different account of
race. Quayshawn Spencer (Chapter 3) is a naturalist about race and believes
that there are racial groups distinguished by biological features (e.g., shared
genomic ancestry), but that the biological features in question do not jus-
tify any social hierarchy among the races. Chike Jeffers (Chapter 2) and
Sally Haslanger (Chapter 1) argue in different ways that races are socially
constructed groups. Jeffers holds that the cultural aspect of racial difference—
that is, the ways in which races are groups differentiated by distinctive ways
of life—is underappreciated in its importance to the past and present and is
the centrally important feature when thinking about how we might continue
to construct races in the future, past the end of racism. Haslanger, by con-
trast, argues that races are first and foremost sociopolitical groups, marked
by bodily features, that function within a dominance hierarchy. In the case
of the current social structure in the United States, the dominance hierarchy
is White supremacy, but races are formed within different hierarchies that
aren’t organized around Whiteness. Joshua Glasgow (Chapter 4) maintains
that the concept of race includes, as a necessary condition, that there be a set
of visible features that are disproportionately held by each race. If this condi-
tion is strongly interpreted to require that visible-trait groups are supposed
to be legitimized by biology, then, Glasgow argues, there are no races (ra-
cial anti-realism); but if, instead, this condition is weakly interpreted to mean
simply that there are differences between humans, then race is arguably real in
a non-biological and non-social way (basic racial realism).
After laying out the fundamentals of our views in the first four chapters,
we each reply to our coauthors in Chapters 5 (Haslanger), 6 ( Jeffers), 7
(Spencer), and 8 (Glasgow).
We don’t consider our four views to exhaust all of the plausible metaphys-
ical views one can have about what race is and whether it’s real, nor do we think
3
Introduction • 3
that our particular ways of defending the metaphysical views represented are
the only ways to defend these views. For instance, the arguments over whether
race is biological cover a wider terrain than we survey here. And it’s possible
that race is, essentially, a social grouping of people without necessarily being
a cultural grouping of people (à la Jeffers) or a political grouping of people (à
la Haslanger). For example, Ron Mallon and Daniel Kelly (2012) have argued
that race is a socio-psychological grouping of people.
These limitations notwithstanding, we aim for this book to highlight
some central themes and compelling arguments in a difficult and contested
debate. The history of sorting out the nature of race has been fraught, impli-
cated both in oppression and in efforts to liberate from that very oppression.
Our hope is that by focusing on some promising lines of argument, analysis,
and inquiry, we can facilitate understanding and progress.
References
Herzog, Don. 1998. Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Mallon, R., and D. Kelly. 2012. “Making Race Out of Nothing.” In Harold Kincaid
(ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science. New York: Oxford
University Press, pp. 507–532.
Morning, Ann. 2011. The Nature of Race. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Stevens, Jacqueline. 1999. Reproducing the State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
4
Sally Haslanger
1.1. Methodological Preliminaries
The question before us is: What is race? When we pose questions of
the form “What is X?” there are a variety of ways we might go about
answering them. For example, if, pointing to a small wiggly thing in
the corner, I ask, “What is that?” I will probably want someone to
help me figure out the species of insect it belongs to, as determined by
entomology. If you tell me it is a silverfish, I might also pose a question
about the kind of thing (e.g., “What is a silverfish?”). Plausibly I am
asking how silverfish, as a group, are classified: what features some-
thing must have to count as a silverfish, what to expect of silverfish,
and how they are related to other sorts of creepy crawly things.
These sorts of questions seem to presuppose that we have a
well-developed science that will provide us with empirically based
answers. However, sometimes our “What is it?” questions take us
beyond what science has figured out. For example, if in the sev-
enteenth century someone pointed at a burning log and asked,
“What is that?” a straightforward answer would be “Fire.” But if
the speaker already knew that and proceeded, “But what is fire?”
the question is probably attempting to probe features of fire that
aren’t apparent from our ordinary familiarity with it; and it would
(and did) take substantial empirical research and future scientific
theory to reach any answers.
In the sorts of contexts just considered, it would be, at the very
least, odd to answer the questions by consulting our linguistic
intuitions.1 Our judgments about when to use the term ‘silverfish’
1. Some parts of this section are repeated and developed more fully in Haslanger
(forthcoming).
5
don’t tell us what a silverfish is. However, there are a variety of “What is X?”
questions that many philosophers seem to think can be answered by discov-
ering the meaning of the term(s) substituted for X, as determined by our
disposition to apply the term(s) in question (e.g., ‘knowledge,’ ‘moral worth,’
‘justice,’ ‘a person,’ ‘causation’). In some of these cases, one might think that
this a priori methodology is warranted because the boundaries of these kinds
depend in some way on us and our practices. Perhaps moral worth, justice,
personhood, and the like, don’t exist independently of our judgments of what
counts as moral worth, justice, and personhood. So, of course, we should at
least begin by investigating our judgments and putting them in order. (This is
more plausible in some cases than in others; e.g., the answer would have to be
more complicated in cases such as ‘causation’ or ‘intrinsic property.’)
But the idea that (some) philosophical kinds somehow “depend on us” is
not entirely clear; nor is it clear why our a priori (linguistic) reflections should
be sufficient to provide an adequate theory of them—for example, “What is a
sheriff ?” Even if you are a competent user of the term ‘sheriff,’ you may not be
able to tell me what a sheriff is. A full answer would presumably require infor-
mation about the jurisdiction of sheriffs, what their responsibilities are, how
they are chosen, etc. as determined by law. We might need to consult experts
in civics to get answers (and the answers will depend on what country we are
in). We can’t just depend on common sense or linguistic intuitions. But surely
what counts as a sheriff depends on us—there are no sheriffs outside of a hu-
manly constructed system of government.
In the case of ‘sheriff,’ there will be a well-defined role specified by statute,
and someone who knows the relevant statutes will know the answers to
our questions. But there are also social phenomena that in some sense “de-
pend on us” but are not stipulated or planned by us. Such social phenomena
range from macro-scale economic depressions, globalization, urbanization,
and gentrification, to more local social practices and relations (e.g., within a
town, religious congregation, or family). These phenomena call for explana-
tion, and the social sciences (broadly construed) endeavor to provide theories
that enable us to understand them, usually identifying kinds of institutions,
economic relations, cultural traditions, social meanings, and psychological
predispositions, to do so. The kinds in question are social kinds, in the sense
that they are kinds of things that exist in the social world (and so, in some
sense, depend on us). But we discover these kinds through empirical inquiry,
just as we discover chemical kinds through empirical inquiry.
For example, accounts of gentrification often make reference to the “urban
pioneer,” sometimes characterized as artists and “bohemians” who take
6
6 • W h a t I s R a c e ?
advantage of low rents in poor neighborhoods. When single people who share
rent enter a neighborhood, businesses (such as cafés and pubs) take interest,
and landlords see opportunities to raise rents, which drives out the locals.
Urban pioneers are a functional kind that identifies a particular role in an
evolving real estate market. The term ‘pioneer’ is chosen due to the perceived
parallel with pioneers who “settled” the western United States, displacing the
local population. If someone were to object to the term ‘pioneer’—perhaps
thinking that it carried an overly positive connotation—this would not un-
dermine the explanatory claims.2 The adequacy of explaining gentrification
by reference to singles moving into an urban neighborhood does not depend
on our linguistic intuitions about applying the term ‘pioneer’ to them. The
choice of terminology was intended to illuminate a parallel; if the termino-
logical choice doesn’t work, then another term could be used as a substitute.
However, insofar as philosophical kinds such as justice and personhood
“depend on us,” it is not in the sense that we stipulate what they are (like
sheriff), or in the sense that they serve in explanations of social phenomena
(like urban pioneers). Rather, it is something along these lines: the adequacy
of our theory is not to be judged simply by reference to “the facts,” but also
by its responsiveness to our prior understandings. In the case of sheriff, you
might think that there aren’t any independent facts we’re trying to accommo-
date. Oversimplifying, we simply create sheriffs and then talk about them. In
the case of urban pioneer, the prior understandings of ‘pioneer’ are not crucial
to the explanation provided by the theory. But in the case of justice, there is
something we are aiming to understand that is not simply constituted by what
we say, but at the same time, our conclusions cannot float completely free of
the discursive tradition in which we are aiming to understand it.
How might we explain this? Note that in the philosophical cases, we are
not situated as anthropologists trying to understand the social life of the
“natives.” Nor are we legislators specifying new practices. We are seeking an
understanding of practices in which we are currently engaged as participants.
The practices are not fully understood, however. And they are open-ended,
revisable, possibly self-defeating. In making sense of them, we are making
judgments about how to better understand what we are doing, and how then
to go on. This is not primarily a linguistic exercise: we aren’t just deciding how
2. Metaphors and analogies can play an important and even ineliminable role in theorizing and
can aid in explanation. My claim here is only that the choice of terminology for the functional
kinds in the proposed mechanisms of gentrification (specifically the influx of singles) is not es-
sential to the success of the model for some purposes (though it may be for others).
7
There is also the discourse of the social critic, which is identical with
neither everyday discourse nor scientific discourse. Social critics don’t
merely systematize common sense or popularize scientific findings.
Social critics seek to inform, and possibly shape, public opinion with
clear and careful thinking, well-established facts, and moral insight.
They will of course draw on and engage both common sense and
3. I embrace an “eretetic” approach to explanation that takes explanations, and theories more
generally, to be answers to questions. So the first task of any theoretical project is to clarify
the question being asked. Apparent disagreements can sometimes be resolved by noting that
the parties to the disagreement are answering different questions (see Garfinkel 1981; Risjord
2000; Anderson 1995).
8
8 • W h a t I s R a c e ?
Plausibly, all inquiry is situated. Inquiry begins with questions, and all
questions have presuppositions. And any serious effort to answer a question
relies on a method that is taken to have at least some epistemic credentials. I’ve
been suggesting that certain forms of philosophical inquiry are situated in an
additional sense; that is, the project is not simply a descriptive or explanatory
project, but aims to shape or guide our thinking and acting. Social critics take
this even a step further: we are situated as critics of ordinary social practices and
offer tools and understandings that are designed to improve them (Fraser 1989;
Marx 1843). The social critic embraces the normative dimension of philosoph-
ical theorizing, and also relies crucially on empirical research. The idea of race is
already embedded in our customs, practices, and institutions, and facts about
its role in our lives are crucial to the critical project. Such empirical information
and normative concerns are also important, on some accounts, for adjudicating
linguistic meaning, and so, in particular, for understanding what ‘race’ means.
4. I assume for the purposes of this discussion that a racial realist believes that at least some
statements involving the term ‘race’ are both truth-apt and true. Anti-realists disagree. Anti-
realists may hold that all statements involving the term ‘race’ are not truth-apt (they are “non-
cognitivists” about race talk), or they may hold that race talk is truth-apt, but false (they are
“error theorists” about race). In this book, Spencer, Jeffers, and I are all realists (though we
disagree about what makes race talk true); Glasgow is either an anti-realist error theorist or
a “basic” realist that allows ‘race’ to refer, but to uninteresting groups. (Other anti-realists in-
clude Appiah [1996] and Zack [2002]; Blum [2002]; Hochman [2017].)
9
5. For a parallel argument concerning gender terms such as ‘woman,’ and ‘man,’ see Saul (2012)
and Kapusta (2016).
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