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In Thabiti Anyabwile's response to the George Zimmerman verdict yesterday, he made some comments about his ongoing position on the unreality of race, which I've tried to engage with him on before. I'm not surprised he wasn't interested in continuing that conversation on that post, but he did chime in to appreciate the conversation that arose between me and another commenter there. It's very different to engage with this issue on a popular level, as compared with the more technical philosophical engagement with this issue that I've spent much of the last decade of my life working on. It's also different to engage with particularly Christian arguments, which obviously don't arise very often among critical philosophers of race. I thought some of what I wrote in the conversation might be worth preserving here, so here are some excerpts. If you want to read the entire conversation, you can see my initial comment here and then the beginning of the conversation with another commenter here. Perhaps this can give a taste of my forthcoming book on this topic to those who have been asking about it (which I'm trying to finish revising this summer, with the hope of a publication date by the end of the year if I succeed). Here are the excerpts I wanted to preserve, first from my initial comment: I'm not sure you're being fair to those who insist that races are real entities. Most academics who hold that view nowadays do not think races are natural kinds, and thus no scripture that deals with what's fundamentally true about human interconnectedness and the restoration thereof in the new covenant community has anything to do with that kind of claim of racial realities. I agree with all your reasons for rejecting races, but I just don't think that conclusion follows. And here is some of the conversation that followed with another commenter, who had put forward the view that there are no races but there is racism: I'm not sure your view is coherent. If there are no races, then they're in the same ontological category as unicorns, i.e. there are none, and therefore there's nothing there to ground whatever it is that racism is against. If there's such a thing as racism, then there are races, even if they turn out not to be what we might have thought they were. Even if we arbitrarily assigned people to four categories -- the ones, twos, threes, and fours say (e.g. like when we divide people up into teams in gym class as kids), it's true that there are those groups. If the other groups began to discriminate against the ones, then there could be bias against that existing group. It doesn't have to be an ontologically deep group to be an existing group. But it does have to be an existing group for there to be bias, discrimination, etc. against the group. The other commenter appeals to borderline cases as an argument against races and points to problematic origins of our racial notions and then appeals to the irrationality in something like claustrophobia as a comparison with some supposed similarity with race-thinking. surely the existence of borderline cases isn't enough to make there not be such groups. There are plenty of borderline cases for political groups, but that doesn't mean there are no liberals, conservatives, libertarians, socialists, etc. The fact that it's hard to decide whether to count bowling, golf, and curling as sports doesn't mean there are no sports.Most scholars agree that our modern concepts of race (there isn't just one) go back to about the 18th century. Kant is often taken to be the one who most developed it into what it is now. Virtually no one thinks races are natural kinds the way we generally take species to be. The next comment responds primarily to the claim that races can't exist because there's nothing that every member of any given race has in common with every other member. Very few terms in any natural language can be defined in a way that you can give necessary and sufficient conditions for belonging to that category. You can get that kind of precision in mathematics, in physics, and in formal logic, but it's not how natural language works. Any social category is going to admit of vagueness, and that's not a good reason to abandon it. Look at the debates about how we should define the term 'evangelical'. Yet it's clear that the Gospel Coalition is evangelical and that liberal Episcopalians, say, are not. That's so even if we can't agree on the boundaries, and lots and lots of clear cases are uncontroversial. You don't have to think there's one core property everything in a group has to think it's a real group.
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AuthorJeremy Pierce is a philosophy professor, Uber/Lyft driver, and father of five. Archives
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