In this paper I address the questions posed to me by Bret Davis, Zeynep Direk, and Charles Mills, by focusing on, first, the eurocentrism of academic philosophy in the West and strategies to overcome it; secondly, the interface of critical philosophy of race and global politics, especially as the latter touches on Islamophobia; and, thirdly, the role of critical philosophy of race in challenging the complacency of philosophy departments in the face of the discipline’s long-standing complicity with racism.

Xenophobia is one of the key drivers of marginalisation, discrimination, and conflict, yet many prominent machine learning fairness frameworks fail to comprehensively measure or mitigate the resulting xenophobic harms. Here we aim to bridge this conceptual gap and help facilitate safe and ethical design of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. We ground our analysis of the impact of xenophobia by first identifying distinct types of xenophobic harms, and then applying this framework across a number of prominent AI application domains, reviewing the (...) potential interplay between AI and xenophobia on social media and recommendation systems, healthcare, immigration, employment, as well as biases in large pre-trained models. These help inform our recommendations towards an inclusive, xenophilic design of future AI systems. (shrink)

Although much attention has already been paid to Kant’s ideas on race, more research is needed to determine the sources that he used to support his portrayal of non-white races. A comprehension of the intellectual context gives us the opportunity to see the way in which Kant wished to contribute to discussions on inheritable human characteristics and the inferiority of certain races. This article will emphasize the relevance of the views of Joseph Priestley and Alexander Wilson for Kant’s hypothesis on (...) the relation between phlogiston and the black race. This allows us to comprehend the methodology that Kant prescribed for natural history and its consequences for his understanding of the inferiority of the black race. (shrink)

This article traces the hidden race-religion constellation in Europe. The term “race-religion constellation” refers to the connection or co-constitution of the categories of race and “religion.” Specifically, the term “race-religion constellation” is used to refer to the practice of classifying people into races according to categories we now associate with the term “religion.” This calls for a consideration of European history and forms of racism in Europe, such as anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. This article aims to provide an alternative non-secularized or (...) biological account of the origins of the socially constructed category of race in Europe. The alternative story begins in the sixteenth century, when the category of “religion” as a means for classifying peoples was both constructed and politicized. In tracing this alternative story, this article seeks to outline a framework for a critical philosophy of race focused on a European religion line that intersects with Du Bois's color line. (shrink)

This article is a response to Robert Bernasconi’s critical philosophy of race. I start by speaking of the specific style in which life and philosophy are related in his work. I argue that he devises a political phenomenology which considers the lived experiences of racialization and inquires into their historical conditions, which have become “practico-inert” in facticity. Bernasconi’s thesis that the history of race is not determined by racial essentialism and his account of race as a border concept call for (...) an expansion of the notion of race that will better serve the cause of the global fight against racism. (shrink)

Castoriadis explains racism as a mode of hatred of the other and as a feature of the self-institution of heteronomous societies built on ethnocentrism. At the level of the psychical human being he identifies two forms of racist fixation on others: hatred of the other as the flip-side of self-love and as the other side of self-hatred, which he analyses, respectively, as a mode of pseudo-reasoning and as unconscious desire. We argue that attention to the ontology that underpins the modern (...) European subject’s epistemological deployment of racism in the context of coloniality reveals the limits and a blindspot of Castoriadis’s analysis. (shrink)