_Philosophers consider race and racism from the perspective of lived, bodily experience._.

Many theories of racism presuppose that ordinary usage of the term “racism” should be preserved. Rarely is this presupposition—the presumption of conservatism—defended. This paper discusses the work of Lawrence Blum, Joshua Glasgow, Jorge Garcia, Tommie Shelby, and others, in order to develop a critique of the presumption of conservatism. Against this presumption, I defend the following desideratum: If ordinary usage of “racism” prompts significant practical difficulties that can be averted by revising ordinary usage, then this counts as a mark against (...) the normative status of ordinary usage and so counts as a reason for revising it. The significance of this argument is that it clears the way for a rigorous defense of revisionism. My paper provides a prima facie case for revisionism, built on two practical criticisms of the ordinary usage of “racism.” First, ordinary usage reflects incompatible norms that promote conceptual confusion and misunderstanding, among other problems. Second, ordinary usage reflects an individualistic conception of racism that serves the interests of whites. By championing ordinary usage in our philosophical theories, we (unwittingly) promote the interests of whites over nonwhites. (shrink)

In the United States today, much interpersonal racism is driven by corrupt forms of self-preservation. Drawing from Jean- Jacques Rousseau, I refer to this as self-love racism. The byproduct of socially-induced racial anxieties and perceived threats to one’s physical or social wellbeing, self-love racism is the protective attachment to the racialized dimensions of one’s social status, wealth, privilege, and/or identity. Examples include police officer related shootings of unarmed Black Americans, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the resurgence of unabashed white supremacy. This form (...) of racism is defined less by the introduction of racism into the world and more on the perpetuation of racially unjust socioeconomic and political structures. My theory, therefore, works at the intersection of the interpersonal and structural by offering an account of moral complacency in racist social structures. My goal is to reorient the directionality of philosophical work on racism by questioning the sense of innocence at the core of white ways-of-being. (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)

There are two competing ways of understanding nefarious expressions of nationalism in countries like the U.S., either as xenophobia or racism. In this essay, I offer a way of capturing what is attractive in both accounts: a way of thinking about the xenophobia of U.S. nationalism that does not miss or minimize the role that race plays in condemning such expressions, but at the same time does not risk overextending the definition of racism. To do this, the essay makes a (...) case for decoupling and slightly revising the meaning of the terms “racialization” and “racial formation” while also proposing a third term, “racial disintegration.” In doing so, we find that the xenophobia directed at certain pan-racial groups, at least in places like the U.S., promotes a unique brand of White supremacy and does so in ways that maintain or reshape the nation's understanding of race and specifically its racial categories. (shrink)

Institutional discrimination matters. The purpose of this longitudinal community‐based participatory research study was to examine institutional procedural discrimination, institutional racism, and other institutional discrimination, and their relationships with participants' health during a maternal and child health program in a municipal initiative. Twenty participants from nine multilingual, multicultural community‐based organizations were included. Overall reported incidences of institutional procedural discrimination decreased from April 2019 (18.6%) to November 2019 (11.8%) although changes were not statistically significant and participants reporting incidences remained high (n = (...) 15 in April and n = 14 in November). Participants reported experiencing significantly less “[when] different cultural ways of doing things were shared, the project did not support my way” from April 2019 (23.5%, n = 4) to November 2019 (0%, n = 0), Wilcoxon signed‐rank test Z = −2.00, p < 0.05. Some participants reported experiencing institutional racism (29.4%, n = 5) and other institutional discrimination (5.9%, n = 1). Participants experiencing institutional racism, compared to those who did not, reported a higher impact of the Initiative's program on their quality of life (t = 3.62, p < 0.01). Participatory survey designs enable nurse researchers to identify hidden pathways of institutional procedural discrimination, describe the impacts experienced, and examine types of institutional discrimination in health systems. (shrink)

Over the last twenty-five years, philosophers have offered increasingly more sophisticated accounts of the nature and wrongness of racism. But very little in this literature discusses what is distinctive to anti-Asian racism. This gap exists partly because philosophy, like much of U.S. culture, has been influenced by civic narratives that center anti-black racism in ways that leave vague anti-Asian racism. We discuss this conceptual gap and its effects on understanding anti-Asian racism. In response to this problem, we offer an account (...) of anti-Asian racism not beholden to the black-white binary. In our view, xenophobia, as a form of civic ostracism, plays a distinctive role in anti-Asian racism and admits of a complexity that is worth philosophical study. We also begin an exploration of a correlated phenomenon, namely xenophilia. It has a peculiar, often pernicious, presence in anti-Asian racism and sexism, but it is morally more complex than xenophobia. (shrink)

American metaphysics of race In the 1990s, a debate about the race began in the United States, in which many philosophers are involved. In philosophy, this debate has become known as the metaphysics of race. The aim of this article is to outline positions that have formed in the area of the metaphysics of race as a separate, mainly American, current of philosophical thought - realism (naturalistic and constructivist) and anti-realism - and to indicate the most important arguments invoked by (...) their most outstanding proponents to justify their metaphysical positions, as well as the counter-arguments of their opponents. The article also discusses the normative aspect of this dispute, very important from the moral and social point of view, listing two main positions on this level: eliminativism and conservatism regarding the presence of racial terms and concepts in public discourses. In the final parts of the article, the relations between metaphysical positions and normative directives formulated by the participants of the debate are considered, and critical arguments concerning the philosophical value and social importance of this trend of thinking are presented. (shrink)

I argue that racism is essentially a civic character trait: to be a racist is to have a character that rationally reflects racial supremacist sociopolitical values. As with moral vice accounts of racism, character is my account’s primary evaluative focus: character is directly evaluated as racist, and all other racist things are racist insofar as, and because, they cause, are caused by, express or are otherwise suitably related to racist character. Yet as with political accounts of racism, sociopolitical considerations provide (...) my account’s primary evaluative standard: satisfying the sociopolitical standard of racial supremacy is what makes racist character racist. (shrink)

This essay explores the intersection of racism, racial embodiment theory and the recent hostility aimed at immigrants and foreigners in the United States, especially the targeting of people of Latin American descent and Latino/as. Anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner sentiment is racist. It is the embodiment of racial privilege for those who wield it and the materiality of racial difference for those it is used against. This manifestation of racial privilege and difference rests upon a redrawing of the color line that is (...) meant towards preserving exclusive categories of political membership. The charge of racism, however, is elided by the fact that this hostility takes the form of a specious embracement of law and lawfulness. “Illegal” in this sense not only captures the actions of those who enter the United States through clandestine or informal means, but, in light of the history of immigration and citizen- ship law, the term operates as a racial trope that designates non-white status, thus marginalizing and alienating certain immigrants from ongoing nation-formation processes. I explain the source for anti-immigrant hostility in the United States, which I take to be connected to the longevity of white normativity as the basis for American identity. I then critically assess how the idea of national belonging is crucial to the perpetuation of white-ways-of-being, especially when citizenship has historically been a venue for the embodiment of racial and even colonial privilege. I conclude by posing several questions about the nature of racial identities and racism that suggest new avenues for further research on racial embodiment in a “postracial” era. pp. 65–90. (shrink)