This paper examines Pierre Hadot’s philosophy as a way of life in the context of race. I argue that a “way of life” approach to philosophy renders intelligible how anti-racist confrontation of racist ideas and institutionalized white complicity is a properly philosophical way of life requiring regulated reflection on habits – particularly, habits of whiteness. I first rehearse some of Hadot’s analysis of the “way of life” orientation in philosophy, in which philosophical wisdom is understood as cultivated by actions which (...) result in the creation of wise habits. I analyze a phenomenological claim about the nature of habit implied by the “way of life” approach, namely, that habits can be both the cause and the effect of action. This point is central to the “way of life” philosophy, I claim, in that it makes possible the intelligent redirection of habits, in which wise habits are more the effect than simply the cause of action. Lastly, I illustrate the “way of life” approach in the context of anti-racism by turning to Linda Martín Alcoff’s whiteness anti-eliminativism, which outlines a morally defensible transformation of the habits of whiteness. I argue that anti-racism provides an intelligible context for modern day forms of what Hadot calls “spiritual exercises” insofar as the “way of life” philosophy is embodied in the practice of whites seeing themselves seeing as white and seeing themselves being seen as white. (shrink)

This article introduces some of the key philosophical contributions of W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois studied with Santayana and William James (among others), but chose social science, social theory, journalism, and activism over academic philosophy. Despite this detour, the philosophic depth of his work has won the attention of scholars in fields such as history, English, post‐colonial theory, African‐American Studies, American philosophy, and Africana philosophy, and it has belatedly begun to attract the interest of philosophers more generally. This (...) brief overview will explore the philosophical dimensions of some of Du Bois’s best‐known positions – his claims about the ‘color line’ and the Talented Tenth, his argument with Booker T. Washington, and his account of double‐consciousness. These positions open onto a rich constellation of views in social ontology, epistemology, political theory, existential phenomenology, and more besides. (shrink)

This article offers an overview on current trends and future research possibilities within the philosophy of whiteness. It examines the sub-field of the philosophy of whiteness within the context of the larger field of the philosophy of race in order to assess the viability and relevance of this field of study. Some of the topics on whiteness examined in the article include the problems of white ignorance and privilege, the invisibility of white supremacist racism to white people, and how all (...) these problems can be understood either as examples of epistemologies of ignorance or as unexamined habits in the sense used by pragmatist philosophy. The article argues that the current state of this field calls for a greater emphasis on public intellectualism on whiteness that would incorporate many ideas that are widely accepted by critical race scholars into the under-informed public discourse on race and whiteness. It also argues that the increasing prevalence of negative liberty movements in the United States should be examined in light of established research on the philosophy of whiteness. (shrink)

Does a white philosopher have anything of value to offer to the philosophy of race and racism? If this philosophical subfield must embrace subjective experience, why should we value the perspective of white philosophers whose racial identity is often occluded by racial normativity and who lack substantive experiences of being on the receiving end of racism? Further, if we should be committed to experience, in what sense can the philosophy of race and racism be “objective”? What should that word mean?Tackling (...) this question first, “objective” should at least mean general, that the ideas of the literature can be coherently integrated. An objective take on racism brings together a plurality of perspectives. What’s wrong with just a plurality of satellite ideas? It implies a fragmented approach to ameliorating racism, where different specialists have different recommendations. How can racism, generally, be lessened? If major views of racism are unifiable, then we have a general method to ameliorate racism. This project might appear tone-deaf: a white philosopher unifying things by reducing ideas to some central notion. But this unity isn’t about reducing things but rather integrating them in a way that respects difference. Yet, there’s a reason we should be interested in the white perspective. Whites can speak about racism from a participatory perspective. If whites are knowledgeable, and believe themselves to have no implicit bias, they may suppose they’re “beyond” racism or no longer at risk for perpetuating it. I explore this idea in a psychologically realistic way via my notion of overlooking, where ameliorating racism from the white perspective is an ongoing project. I end by considering how racism is applicable to other philosophical ideas beyond its typical or circumscribed purview. Here, I re-frame responsibility, arguing that we needn’t be forced to choose between responsibility models divided into individual versus social camps. We ought to instead think of responsibility in terms of power, which provides a realistic lens by which persons and groups are held to account. In being more generally convincing, it might actually get folks to take responsibility where they might not otherwise—theory in service of praxis. (shrink)

Public debate around cultural diversity has been dominated by a focus on ‘panicked multiculturalism’ – those spaces which have been subject to social anxieties because of perceived conflicts around ethnicity. This article attempts to address the habitual ways cultural differences are transacted and reconciled in the daily conduct of people in culturally diverse settings. Although habit has been a central category for understanding racial prejudice, it has rarely impacted on an understanding of the practices and capacities which people develop for (...) living with difference, the routinised ‘civic virtues’ of intercultural life. Cosmopolitanism and conviviality have become significant tools in framing this enquiry, though not without problems. The issue for this article is whether these terms are methodologically useful for the analysis of the habits of ‘civic virtues’. This article, drawing on the everyday interactions in and around a school, argues that we need to conceptualise conviviality as an object of empirical research. This requires that we think about habit as a pedagogical process, and the temporal and spatial elements through which ‘cosmopolitan’ behaviours are habituated. (shrink)

This article examines the issues that are at stake in the current resurgence of interest in the subject of habit. We focus on the role that habit has played in conceptions of the relations between body and society, and the respects in which such conceptions have been implicated in processes of governance. We argue that habit has typically constituted a point of leverage for regulatory practices that seek to effect some realignment of the relations between different components of personhood – (...) will, character, memory and instinct, for example – in order to bring about a specific end. In reviewing its functioning in this regard across a range of modern disciplines – philosophy, psychology, sociology – we explore the tensions between its use and interpretation in different lineages: in particular, the Cartesian–Kantian/ravaisson–bergson–deleuze lineages. The article then identifies how these questions are addressed across the contributions collected in this special issue. (shrink)

My aim in this dissertation is to analyze Black oppression and White domination. I attempt to show how social systems unjustly diminish Black Americans’ opportunities to form and pursue their conceptions of good lives and unjustly strengthen White Americans’ opportunities for the same. I believe that the accounts of Black oppression and White domination I offer are more adept at identifying the expansive and varied wrongs of Black oppression in America, analyzing the relationship between theorizing oppression and addressing oppression through (...) social and political change in America, and demonstrating the ways that Whites benefit from and are incentivized to maintain oppressive systems in America, than the accounts put forward by other theorists. In Chapter 1, I begin by discussing why I frame my project in terms of oppressive “wrongs” rather than “harms”. I worry the term ‘harm’ may be taken to imply that one has experienced subjective suffering or a measurable loss, whereas I am concerned with instantiations of oppressive systems even when they don’t cause the person subject to the oppressive system to experience a measurable loss or subjective suffering. In an effort to describe how I identify wrongs, I then argue that in virtue of the deep importance of freely pursuing one’s chosen life plan, any barriers one faces in pursuing his or her life plan must be justifiable. Barriers one experiences in virtue of his or her race are typically not justifiable. On this basis, I argue for my principle of racial injustice, which states that individuals are prima facie wronged by socially constructed barriers to their abilities to form and seek their conception of a good life if those barriers exist in virtue of their race. The “prima facie” nature of the wrongness is significant, I argue, because correcting the injustices of Black oppression will require that Whites face some barriers to pursuing our life plans that we do not currently face; it is not the case, then, that every race-based barrier is truly wrongful. I then discuss my understanding of race, arguing that race’s mutability across contexts and how one’s race is intimately tied to systems of subordination and domination support my view that race is socially constructed. I end with a brief history of White domination and Black subordination in the U.S. In Chapter 2, I outline general experiences of racism as espoused by Black writers and the statistical data that support these accounts. I then take a deep look at mass incarceration, including a history of the system, its disproportional impact on Black Americans, and the many resulting injustices inflicted largely on incarcerated Black Americans, their families, and their communities. I specifically highlight the recognition-wrongs inflicted on Black Americans through mass incarceration, where recognition-wrongs are acts that function primarily as a mode of dehumanizing individuals. Recognition-wrongs include verbal degradation through things like slurs, but also epistemic injustices, a concept developed by Miranda Fricker and others to identify injustices that wrong individuals in virtue of their status as knowers and communicators of knowledge. I then discuss kinship-wrongs, a concept I develop to identify wrongs that impact people’s ability to form and maintain relationships. I highlight and conceptualize these wrongs in an attempt to draw attention to their significance in racial subordination. In Chapter 3, I develop an account of oppression that is particularly responsive to race-based wrongs. I begin by showing why the influential accounts authored by Iris Marion Young and Ann Cudd are unsatisfactory for capturing Black oppression. I attempt to develop an account that is sensitive to the experiences of subordination detailed by Black Americans, equipped to address the material harms of oppression, and also able to make sense of the recognition- and kinship-wrongs raised in Chapter 2. I ultimately determine that a member of a c-group is subject to an oppressive wrong when, in virtue of his or her or their membership in that c-group, he or she or they suffer wrongs that are systematically perpetrated through social, political, or legal norms, conventions, or practices. A c-group is any collection of persons who share some set of constraints, incentives, penalties, and the like. I end the chapter by carefully describing my commitments to each clause of the definition of oppression, beginning by analyzing c-groups, describing systematically perpetrated wrongs, explaining what it means to be wronged in virtue of one’s c-group membership, and showing that my account of oppression is sensitive to both material and recognition-wrongs. In Chapter 4, I argue that we ought to understand oppression in the framework of a capabilities approach. I begin by explaining the concept of capabilities, which are real opportunities to function in particular ways. I then argue that securing capabilities is a better aim for justice than ensuring that people function in certain valuable ways because a focus on capabilities protects people’s opportunities to pursue the kinds of lives they want to live, respecting their interest in freely determining their life goals, while a focus on protecting valuable functionings inappropriately prescribes life goals to them. I show how capabilities can be utilized as part of a theory of justice, and argue that my utilization of capabilities, combined with the other moral commitments I defend throughout the dissertation, comprises a rectificatory theory of racial justice aimed at eliminating Black oppression. I argue that through the framework of capabilities, I can analyze both the material and recognition-wrongs of oppression, avoid the kinds of bad idealizations that often skew our understanding of oppressive systems and their impact, and make judgments about modern day society without developing an account of perfect justice. I next show that to avoid inflicting further recognition-wrongs, it is essential that oppressed peoples are the primary arbiters of which capabilities and oppressive systems should be prioritized in policy and advocacy. I conclude Chapter 4 with a brief sketch of how we can turn the priorities of the oppressed into public policy, moving from the prioritization process, to policy development, to implementing policies, and finally to monitoring and revising them. My final chapter, Chapter 5, shows how my account can also be used to analyze the norms of White domination that coincide with Black oppression. I begin by discussing “correlative capabilities,” which are those capabilities that are strengthened for Whites in virtue of the fact that Whites are not subject to oppression as Black Americans are. My discussion of correlative capabilities maps closely onto the advantages typically described as White privilege. I then turn to more insidious advantages Whites gain from Black oppression. I argue that oppressive norms advantage Whites by creating a social structure that empowers us with the capabilities to dominate racial narratives and ignore our racialized identities. The capability to dominate racial narratives consists in Whites’ abilities to pontificate on racialized events without justification for our views and still have our perspectives treated as mainstream, worthy of debate, and often as nearly definitive. I demonstrate this capability in action by examining Colin Kaepernick’s protest in the NFL, the coverage it received, and his resulting treatment. I then discuss Whites’ capability to ignore our racialized identities, showing how we establish Whiteness as a central, unconditioned perspective. Whites see ourselves as “simply people,” while seeing non-Whites as raced. This leads to Whites promoting color-blind conceptions of justice, which move us farther from true justice by ignoring social norms’ impact on policy development and implementation. I then show how Whites may go one step further and argue that we are victimized by “reverse racism” when efforts are made to eliminate oppressive systems. Finally, I end Chapter 5 with a discussion of how Whites are also disadvantaged by Black oppression, particularly in our capabilities to perform our jobs well, live morally, and establish and maintain relationships. I then conclude the dissertation by discussing how we might teach race-sensitive virtues in an effort to change White-favorable social norms. (shrink)