Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race

Preface

Philosophy, like any other subject, has its own distinctive set of images, standard tropes, and classic scenes that help to define both what it is and, by implication, what it is not. These figures act as intellectual signposts, pointing us toward certain areas of investigation and away from others, shaping our conceptions of what counts as a respectable and legitimate topic of philosophical inquiry, indeed of what should be regarded as philosophy in the first place. One thinks of Plato’s cave dwellers, blithely ignorant of the world above; Descartes in his study wondering whether other people exist; Locke’s cobbler’s soul passing into the body of the prince and so changing its personal identity; Kant’s ideal Enlightenment contractarianism, in which raceless persons give each other equal respect; Hegel’s triumphantly expanding World-Spirit; the lifeboat dilemma of having to choose between saving one’s wife and saving the brilliant cancer researcher, between a morality of personal commitment and a morality of abstract welfare; the cognitive possibility that one is actually a brain in a vat being electronically fed a false picture of one’s history and reality. And one gets a template, accordingly, of what the proper concerns of philosophy should be, an iconography of the acceptable and the unacceptable.

In many cases this directing of attention will be perfectly reasonable, indicating the existence of genuine disciplinary boundaries. But sometimes what purport to be objective definitions of the appropriate limits of the world of philosophical inquiry and authoritative pronouncements about what is conceptually interesting in that world have a more questionable provenance. Sometimes they arise out of the specific life-world and local interests of particular populations. Thus the seemingly universal view from nowhere may well be a view from somewhere; the magisterial voice from the heavens turns out to be broadcast from earth. And sometimes it is only through the emergence of alternative views and voices that one begins to appreciate how much of what had seemed genuinely universalistic was really particular. In the dazzle of their official illumination, the canonical images blind us to different possibilities.

The clearest example of this phenomenon is seen in new work on gender. One of the most exciting developments in philosophy over the second half of the twentieth century has been the growth of a feminist theory stimulated by the mass entry of women into the profession. New conceptual and theoretical philosophical horizons have been opened up, revealing realities that in a sense were always there but that were either not seen or not deemed worth mapping. The maleness of orthodox philosophy is now visible in a way that it was not before. Heterodox conceptualizations have thrown conventional assumptions into relief and raised questions about what previously seemed like unchallengeable verities.

There are welcome signs that parallel possibilities may be opening up around the question of race. We have witnessed a remarkable upsurge of interest in matters to do with race and African-American philosophy. Numerous books and anthologies (numerous by comparison with the past, that is) are forthcoming, and a new journal, the Journal of Africana Philosophy, is in the works. We are beginning to see how many old questions can be given a twist and how many new questions can be posed once the color line in Western philosophy is breached. There has always been an alternative, oppositional intellectual tradition in the West centered on the shaping reality of race, but for the most part it has been excluded from the academy in general and from philosophy in particular. (Lewis Gordon chides me here for an analytic chauvinism that makes generalizations about philosophy that are actually untrue, or at least far less true, of the Continental tradition.) Now, however, the situation may be on the verge of changing.

Such a change is certainly overdue. The whiteness of academic philosophy has long been a source of wonder and complaint to minorities. Among the humanities, it has been one of the most resistant to what have come to be called multiculturalist revisions. The very nature of the discipline seems to some practitioners to preclude such innovation: by virtue of its abstractness, philosophy supposedly already generally encompasses the human condition. As almost any introductory textbook can confirm, mainstream philosophy has no room for race as a reality that significantly affects in any way such traditional divisions of the field as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, history of philosophy. The writings of the classic Euro-American authors are treated simultaneously as canonical and as raceless and universal. To the extent that race is discussed, if it is discussed at all, it is usually within the severely restricted category of debates about affirmative action, in a subsection on applied ethics. It is taken for granted that the main debates—about personal identity, existential situations, criteria for epistemic justification, moral topographies, conceptions of the polity, theories of social explanation, jurisprudential disputes, and the evolution of Western philosophy itself—are not affected by race, that race has no implications for the characteristic framings, standard scenarios, and conventional theoretical mappings of these debates. Colorless and universal, they will be able to continue in the same way whether there is a significant nonwhite presence or not; indeed, a significant nonwhite presence is not really necessary, since such concerns are supposedly already subsumed within these seemingly abstract and all-encompassing categories.

For feminists, this line of argument is familiar. In the case of gender, it has famously come to be identified as the just add women and stir approach. The assumption is that it is merely a matter of equal semantic representation, an introduction of a few she’s where previously there were only he’s and a linguistic purging of openly sexist statements. There is little or no appreciation of the fact that, since gender exclusion has shaped these discourses, gender egalitarianism may require that they be rethought from the ground up. The case that those working on race need to make is that a recognition of the centrality of race in the encounter between Europe and the non-European world, and its social, economic, political, moral, and intellectual ramifications for both, may be similarly revolutionary in its implications for rethinking.

But making this case requires the overcoming of major conceptual obstacles. Why is race—in some respects so obvious—so hard for white philosophers to see theoretically? What is there about its patent visibility that makes it philosophically invisible? For an answer, I think we need to look both to the negative associations that race has developed in recent, more enlightened years and to the peculiar features of the discipline itself, above all the abstraction that seems to legitimate ignoring such characteristics as irrelevant.

Since its emergence as a major social category several hundred years ago, race has paradigmatically been thought of as natural, a biological fact about human beings, and the foundation of putatively ineluctable hierarchies of intelligence and moral character. The discrediting of old-fashioned racism of this sort has made a truism in liberal intellectual circles of a claim that would once have seemed quite revolutionary: that race does not really exist. But if this is true, if indeed it is a mark of one’s liberalism and sophistication to proclaim that it is true, one then naturally wonders as a white philosopher why blacks should think that developing a theory of race could be anything but a foredoomed enterprise. And an enterprise that is not pointless yet harmless, but rather one that seems to run the risk of becoming an inverted black version of traditional white-supremacist theory. So almost overnight race goes from being in the body to being in the head, and one shows one’s liberal commitment to bringing about a color-blind society by acting as if it already exists, not seeing race at all, and congratulating oneself on one’s lack of vision.

The response must be, then, that if this foundation for public policy is misguided, it is arguably little better as an aid to philosophical understanding. What needs to be shown—and what I try to show in this book—is that room has to be made for race as both real and unreal: that race can be ontological without being biological, metaphysical without being physical, existential without being essential, shaping one’s being without being in one’s shape.

But a discipline that conceives of itself as seeking out the most general truths about human beings may find it difficult to see any significance in issues centered on race. For philosophers in particular, a major conceptual barrier is that neither mainstream nor radical Western philosophy has much space for such a notion. On the one hand, in dealing with questions of being and the person, mainstream analytic philosophers tend to assume the isolated Cartesian individual, the presocial figure of contractarian theory. They abstract away from history and social process to get at ostensibly necessary and universal truths about people qua people, the deep eternalities of the human condition. On the other hand, in circles sympathetic to the notion of a social ontology, one that is contingent and relative, as in the Continental tradition, this intellectual space has been dominated by the class-based account of Marxist theory. So in neither case is there conceptual room for the notion of race as deep and metaphysical. Since the idea of race as biology, race as destiny, has been discredited, it can’t be an innate part of the human being. And since it’s not class—part of a larger theory about class society (which is at least a familiar and, via Marxism, a well-explored category in Western theory)—it can’t be part of a social ontology, either.

So the task of those working on race is to put race in quotes, race, while still insisting that nevertheless, it exists (and moves people). This is part of the significance of the critical in contemporary critical race theory: to make plausible a social ontology neither essentialist, innate, nor transhistorical, but real enough for all that. And (as I argue in The Racial Contract) the most illuminating framework for defending this claim is, literally, a global one: the thesis that European expansionism in its various forms—expropriation, slavery, colonialism, settlement—brings race into existence as a global social reality, with the single most important conceptual division historically being that between whites and nonwhites. Those termed white have generally had a civil, moral, and juridical standing that has lifted them above the other races. They have been the expropriators; others have been the expropriated. They have been the slave owners; others have been the slaves. They have been the colonizers; others have been the colonized. They have been the settlers; others have been the displaced. So one gets a formal ontological partitioning in the population of the planet, signified by race.

Now this is not, to say the least, a standard framework within which to approach Western philosophy. Such matters, it will be felt, are better left to history or sociology. What does this have to do with the standard concerns of the subject, with those classic, timeless images and tropes cited at the beginning? But the claim is that even the seemingly rarefied and remote realm of philosophy has reflected its embeddedness in this binary universe, manifested in conceptions of the person, the existential plight of human beings, the appropriate epistemic norms for cognizers, the descriptions of and prescriptions for the polity. Within this social and historical framework, race becomes significant. Indeed, Westerners created race in the first place, by demarcating themselves from other races, bringing into existence a world with two poles, so it is doubly ironic that they should feign a hands-washing ignorance of these realities. Once the sociality and historicity of the term is recognized, the claim that philosophy, along with other, less lofty varieties of intellectual labor, is going to be influenced by race should seem less provocative and controversial. This claim does not imply any kind of biological determinism; rather, it entails a pervasive social construction, a set of positions in a global structure, for which race will be an assigned category that influences the socialization one receives, the life-world in which one moves, the experiences one has, the worldview one develops—in short, in an eminently recognizable and philosophically respectable phrase, one’s being and consciousness.

And this recognition, I suggest, enables us to answer the argument that the very abstractness of philosophy is proof of its immunity to cultural or racial bias, that philosophy could not possibly have a color when we are simply talking about abstract persons investigating and prescribing for the world. For insofar as these persons are conceived of as having their personhood uncontested, insofar as their culture and cognitions are unhesitatingly respected, insofar as their moral prescriptions take for granted an already achieved full citizenship and a history of freedom—insofar, that is, as race is not an issue for them, then they are already tacitly positioned as white persons, culturally and cognitively European, racially privileged members of the West.

These essays represent my exploration of the possibilities generated when race is taken seriously in some of the standard areas of the field: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, applied ethics, social and political philosophy. With one exception, all were written within the span of four years and show the development of my thinking.

"Non-Cartesian Sums" is a reflection on my experience in teaching my first course in African-American philosophy and having to work out the distinctive features of such a philosophy. By drawing a comparison between the Cartesian sum, that classic statement of European modernism, and the radically different sum of Ralph Ellison’s classic novel of the black experience, Invisible Man, I try to get at some of these differences. This essay first started me thinking systematically about the subject and introduced many of the topics and themes that I later developed in other essays. Appropriately enough, the novel also provided my title, dedication, and epigraph: this is a book about making the black experience philosophically visible, in part through attempting to remove the conceptual and theoretical cataracts on the white eye.

The chapter that focuses specifically on epistemological issues is Alternative Epistemologies. Though it is now somewhat dated in its references (I have added a few sources), the concerns it addresses are still very much with us: the notion that subordinated groups have a privileged epistemic position, and the attempts to defend this claim and adjudicate competing claims of privilege. Written in a period less thoroughly post-Marxist than our own, it compares different varieties of standpoint theory—the original Marxist model and feminist and black variants—and argues, against postmodernism, for a situated objectivism. I still endorse this position, my sympathies being generally realist. And in light of the obvious divergence between black and white perspectives on the world, it remains true that the task of constructing and defending a black epistemology is an important one that has yet to be seriously tackled by black philosophers.

Issues of personal identity have been around at least since John Locke. In "But What Are You Really? I examine the metaphysics of race, explaining the ways in which race is real" and showing how conflicting criteria may generate interesting issues of racial identity. The point in part is to make plausible the idea of race as ontological and to sketch, correspondingly, a set of background realities that needs to be taken more seriously by mainstream social and political philosophy. (My title was inspired by Anthony Appiah’s Journal of Philosophy article ‘But Would That Still Be Me?’ [1990].)

In 1994 I was invited to Toronto to participate in a public symposium and lecture series on black-Jewish relations in the city. The lecture I gave there, Dark Ontologies, introduces the idea of white supremacy as a system both local and global. I argue that this idea should play in critical race theory the same role that class society and patriarchy play in Marxist and feminist theory, respectively. In other words, one should look at race as systemic and objective rather than primarily in terms of attitudes and values. Revisionist Ontologies explores this idea in greater detail, from what is more of a Third World perspective. (The original paper was presented in Mexico to the Caribbean Studies Association.) I focus on the idea of a subperson, first raised in "Non-Cartesian Sums, and make some suggestions about the rethinking of political philosophy that are further developed in The Racial Polity." The point of all three essays is that racial domination should be seen as a kind of political system, whose workings need to be recognized and theorized if normative political theory is to be guided properly.

Some interesting work has been done on the idea of naturalizing ethics, in line with the older project of naturalizing epistemology. In White Right I examine a naturalized ethic of a Herrenvolk variety; that is, the moral code one would get in a social order explicitly or implicitly predicated on white supremacy. This type of analysis may yield insights into the typical structuring of white moral consciousness that are not so readily available from the perspective of conventional ethical theory. Since progressive social change in respect to race will require the understanding and transformation of this consciousness, the failure of mainstream ethics to pay more attention to its characteristic features is an important omission, one that reflects a broader failure to appreciate the centrality of race in our society.

Finally, the last chapter, Whose Fourth of July?, brings these issues together by considering the question raised by the great Frederick Douglass in his famous 1852 speech, a question that still reverberates in the United States and elsewhere these many years later—whether blacks will ever be included on fully equal terms in the polities created by the West in the New World. If we are to hope that one day this question will be answered in the affirmative, the issue of race must be honestly faced rather than evaded, and philosophy can play a key role in this enterprise.

This book is my own small contribution to the project of expanding that set of paradigmatic philosophical images cited at the start, so that one will also think of W. E. B. Du Bois’s black cave dwellers, trying desperately to make contact with the white world above; Ellison’s invisible man in his basement wondering whether he exists; James Weldon Johnson’s ex-colored man passing into the white body politic and so changing his racial identity; Kant’s actual racial contractarianism, in which white persons give disrespect to nonwhite subpersons; Frantz Fanon’s wretched of the earth and Du Bois’s global color line as the unhappy outcome of European expansionism; Huck Finn’s dilemma of having to choose between turning Jim over to his mistress and helping him to escape, between a Herrenvolk ethics and race treachery; the cognitive possibility that as a slave, as an aborigine, as one of the colonized, one may actually have been ideologically fed a false picture of one’s history and reality….

Blackness Visible can be seen as a companion volume to The Racial Contract, published by Cornell University Press in 1997. It covers some of the same territory but explores it in greater depth and detail. The Racial Contract is a high-flying overview; Blackness Visible is closer to the ground. The two complement each other as different perspectives, long distance and close up, on philosophy and race.

I gratefully express my appreciation to Alison Shonkwiler of Cornell University Press for coming up with the idea of an essay collection in the first place and for guiding it carefully through its various phases, from conception to completion. The conscientious comments, criticisms, and suggestions of the two readers for Cornell have assisted me greatly in improving the original manuscript.

My thanks to the University of Oklahoma for a junior faculty summer research fellowship in 1989, when I first tentatively began to think about the issue of philosophy and race. Some of these essays were written or revised in my year as a Fellow of the Institute for the Humanities, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and the whole manuscript was put into its final shape during a semester’s sabbatical here. As before, I am indebted to John Biro and Kenneth Merrill of the University of Oklahoma and to Richard Kraut, Dorothy Grover, and Bill Hart of UIC, department chairs, for their support of my research, and to Bernard Boxill, Dave Schweickart, and Robert Paul Wolff for their referees’ recommendations for the UIC fellowship. Charlotte Jackson and Valerie McQuay, the UIC Philosophy Department’s administrative assistants, have continued to provide invaluable service, and without Charlotte’s electronic expertise I would doubtless still be trying to format the manuscript to Cornell’s satisfaction. (Her photographic talents with an unprepossessing subject are on display on the jacket of The Racial Contract.)

Feedback and criticisms on various of these chapters have come from Linda Alcoff, Susan Babbitt, Bernard Boxill, Susan Campbell, Barry Chevannes, Frank Cunningham, Norman Girvan, Lewis Gordon, Roger Gottlieb, Sandra Harding, Leonard Harris, Nancy Holmstrom, Patricia Huntington, Frank Kirkland, Jane Kneller, Hugh LaFollette, Bill Lawson, Horace Levy, Rupert Lewis, Andrew Light, Louis Lindsay, Grace Livingston, Steve Martinot, Bill McBride, Howard McGary Jr., Brian Meeks, Carlos Moore, Lucius Outlaw Jr., John Pittman, the PCDGC/Politically Correct Discussion Group of Chicago (Sandra Bartky, Holly Graff, David Ingram, David Schweickart, Olufemi Taiwo), Reuel Rogers, Laurence Thomas, and Robert Paul Wolff. I thank Lewis Gordon in particular for his thorough, thoughtful, and systematic engagement with the material, and I tip my hat in respect to one who has shown us all, as black philosophers, what is possible.

As always, my father, Gladstone Mills, and my wife, Elle Mills, have been indefatigable supporters of my work. My special appreciation to both of them for the encouragement they have given me in bad times as well as good.

Some of the chapters in this book were originally presented at conferences and invited talks. I thank the organizers for their invitations and the audiences for their criticisms and comments. A paper titled "Non-Cartesian Sums (the inspiration for rather than the ancestor of my first chapter) was presented in 1992 at a University of Toronto Philosophy Department conference, Philosophy and Non-European Cultures, and in 1993 on a York University panel, Rethinking the Curriculum: thanks to André Gombay and David Trotman, respectively. In 1996 Susan Babbitt and Susan Campbell jointly organized the Queen’s University Philosophy Department’s symposium Philosophy and Racism, where ‘But What Are You Really?’ The Metaphysics of Race was presented, and it was also read later the same year at the second national conference of the Radical Philosophy Association, held at Purdue University. The University of Toronto Philosophy Department and Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple cosponsored the 1994 two-day symposium Race and the City, where Dark Ontologies: Blacks, Jews, and White Supremacy was given as a public lecture. My appreciation to Frank Cunningham and Wayne Sumner, in particular. Brian Meeks, Folke Lindahl, and Rupert Lewis were the main forces behind the political theory panel at the 1994 Caribbean Studies Association meeting in Mérida, Mexico, where Revisionist Ontologies: Theorizing White Supremacy was read. Finally, White Right: The Idea of a Herrenvolk Ethics was presented at the University of Western Ontario Philosophy Department’s 1995 conference, Pluralism and Conflict," organized by Samantha Brennan, Tracy Isaacs, and Michael Milde, and was also read later that year as an invited talk at the Philosophy Department of Purdue University. Hugh LaFollette and Bill McBride provided detailed comments, for which I am much obliged.

Finally, I gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint the following chapters:

"Non-Cartesian Sums: Philosophy and the African-American Experience" first appeared in Teaching Philosophy 17 (September 1994).

Alternative Epistemologies first appeared in Social Theory and Practice 14 (Fall 1988).

"‘But What Are You Really?’ The Metaphysics of Race" is scheduled to appear in a forthcoming volume of selected essays from the second national conference of the Radical Philosophy Association (Humanities Press).

Dark Ontologies: Blacks, Jews, and White Supremacy first appeared as a chapter in Autonomy and Community: Readings in Contemporary Kantian Social Philosophy, edited by Jane Kneller and Sidney Axinn (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998).

Revisionist Ontologies: Theorizing White Supremacy first appeared in Social and Economic Studies 43 (September 1994).

The Racial Polity is scheduled to appear as a chapter in Philosophy and Racism, edited by Susan Babbitt and Susan Campbell (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, in press).

Whose Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass and ‘Original Intent’ is scheduled to appear as a chapter in Frederick Douglass: Philosopher, edited by Frank Kirkland and Bill Lawson (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, in press).

Charles W. Mills

Chicago, Illinois

1 Non-Cartesian Sums

Philosophy and the African-American Experience

Some years ago, I taught, for the first time, an introductory course in African-American philosophy. In a sense, that course led to the present book, of which this is, appropriately, the first chapter. The course forced me to think more systematically about the issue of philosophy and race than I had ever done before. Though my general area of specialization is ethics and social and political philosophy, and I am African-American (at least in the extended sense that the Caribbean is part of the Americas), my main research interests and publication focus had not been in this particular area. So I had to do more preparatory work than usual to come up with a course structure, since at that time, because of the relatively undeveloped state of African-American philosophy, I found nothing appropriate in my search for a suitable introductory text, with articles that would cover a broad range of philosophical topics from an African-American perspective and that would be accessible to undergraduates with little or no background in the subject. Often the structure of a textbook provides an organizing narrative and an expository framework for a course. Here, by contrast, I had to think the course out and locate and assign readings from a variety of sources.¹ And in order to put them all together, of course, I had to work out what African-American philosophy really was, how it was related to mainstream (Western? European/Euro-American? Dead White Guys’?) philosophy—where it challenged and contradicted it, where it supplemented it, and where it was in a theoretical space of its own.

Blacks and White Philosophy

The natural starting point of my reflections was blacks and philosophy itself. There are as yet so few recognized black philosophers that the term still has something of an oxymoronic ring to it, causing double takes and occasional quickly suppressed reactions of surprise when one is introduced.² As a result, I would imagine that most black philosophers think about philosophy and race to some extent, even if they don’t actually write or publish in the area. What exactly is it about philosophy that so many black people find alienating, which would explain the fact, a subject of ongoing discussion in the APA Proceedings and Addresses, that blacks continue to be far more underrepresented here than in most other humanities and that black graduate students generally steer away from philosophy?³

I reject explanations that attribute this pattern entirely to present-day (as against past) racist exclusion. Rather, I suggest that a major contributory cause is the self-sustaining dynamic of the whiteness of philosophy, not the uncontroversial whiteness of skin of most of its practitioners but what could be called, more contestably, the conceptual or theoretical whiteness of the discipline. This alone would be sufficient to discourage black graduate students contemplating a career in the academy, so that, through mechanisms familiar to those who study the reproduction of dynamic systems, certain defining traits are perpetuated unchallenged or only weakly challenged, and the socialization and credentialing of newcomers proceeds in a way that maintains the persistently monochromatic character of the profession.⁴

This notion is hard to tease out; it is a pretheoretical intuition, and as with all intuitions, it can be hard to convey to those who do not, in this case because of their color, spontaneously feel it in the first place. But I will make the attempt, using gender as a comparison, because of the interesting similarities and interesting differences, and because the line of argument here is far better known, even by those who do not accept it.

In an enlightening paper in Teaching Philosophy, Thomas Wartenberg described the experience, from the perspective of a white male instructor, of trying to see his assigned texts from the viewpoint of his female students and gradually developing a revelatory sense of the schizophrenic relationship they would be bound to have to works characterized by a systematic denigration of the nature of women.⁵ There is no mystery, then, about why women are likely to feel at least some initial discomfort with classic philosophy. But the response of blacks poses more of a challenge, because for the most part blacks are simply not mentioned in classic philosophy texts. Whole anthologies could be and have been filled by the misogynistic statements of various famous philosophers, and entire books could be and have been written on the inconsistencies between the ostensibly general moral and political prescriptions of famous philosophers and their proclaimed views on the status of women.⁶ But in Western philosophy there is no rationale for black subordination in particular (as against arguments for slavery in general) that can compare in detail and in theoretical centrality to the rationale for female subordination.⁷ A collection of explicitly racist statements about blacks from the major works of the central figures in the Anglo-American canon would not be a particularly thick document.⁸ It is more that issues of race do not even arise than that blacks are continually being put down.

What, then, is the source for blacks of a likely feeling of alienness, strangeness, of not being entirely at home in this conceptual world? The answer has to be sought at another level, in a taxonomy of different kinds of silences and invisibility. The position of women in society had to be theoretically confronted by Western thinkers (after all, they were right there as mothers, sisters, wives) in a way that the position of enslaved blacks did not. The embarrassing moral and political problems posed by the fate of slaves could more readily be ignored, dealt with by not saying anything about them. As David Brion Davis observes in his book on slavery in Western culture: "[N]o protest against the traditional theory [of slavery] emerged from the great seventeenth-century authorities on law, or from such philosophers and men-of-letters as Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Pascal, Bayle, or Fontenelle…. The inherent contradiction of human slavery had always generated dualisms in thought, but by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Europeans had arrived at the greatest dualism of all—the momentous division between an increasing devotion to liberty in Europe and an expanding mercantile system based on Negro [slave] labor in America. For a time most jurists