The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race provides up-to-date explanation and analyses by leading scholars of contemporary issues in African American philosophy and philosophy of race. These original essays encompass the major topics and approaches in this emerging philosophical subfield that supports demographic inclusion and diversity while at the same time strengthening the conceptual arsenal of social and political philosophy. Over the course of the volume's ten topic-based sections, ideas about race held by Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche are (...) supplemented by suppressed thought from the African diaspora, early twentieth-century African American perspectives and Native-, Asian-, and Latin-, American views. The contributors bring philosophical analysis to bear on the status of racial divisions as categories of humanity in the biological sciences, as well as within contemporary criticism and conceptual analysis. Essays present the special applications of American philosophy and continental philosophy to ideas of race as methodological alternatives to more analytic approaches. As a collection of analyses and assessments of 'race' in the real world, the volume pays trenchant and relevant attention to historical and contemporary racism and what it means to say that 'race' and racial identities are socially constructed. The essays analyze contemporary social issues including the importance of racial difference and identity in education, public health, medicine, IQ and other standardized tests, and sports. Additionally, the essays consider the societal limitations and structures provided by public policy and law. As a critical theory, the volume compares the study of race to feminism. Historical and contemporary, academic and popular, racisms pertaining to male and female gender receive special consideration throughout the volume. While this comprehensive collection may have the effect of a textbook, each of the original essays is a fresh and authentic development of important present thought. (shrink)

In this paper I chart the origins of modern day “biopedagogy” through an analysis of two historically specific figures of abnormality: the nervous child and the degenerate. These two figures form the positive and negative surfaces of biopolitics in education, sustained and articulated through the category of immunization. By analyzing the relation between the medical discourse of immunity and the practice of pedagogy, I will reveal how biopedagogy is predicated on a dialectical reversal of life into death and thus unsustainable (...) for furthering social democracy. In conclusion, I begin to search for an affirmative notion of biopolitical education that is no longer predicated on the dialectics of immunization. For help in this project, I briefly suggest that a theory of natality helps to disentangle the promise of life from its negation in the form of educational eugenics and mental hygiene. (shrink)