Transracialism, defined as both experiencing oneself as, and being, a race other than the race assigned to one by society, does not exist. Translated into hermeneutics, transracialism is an unintelligible phenomenon in the specific sociocultural context of the United States in the early twenty-first century. Within this context, race is a function of ancestry, and is therefore defined in terms of something that is external to the self and unchangeable. Since transracialism does not exist, the question of whether transracialism would (...) be ethically advisable if it did exist is inapposite. Nonetheless, at a minimum we can say that racial transition (defined as attempting to change one’s race through artificial and/or associative changes, and living life as a race other than the race assigned to one by society, etc.) is possible, but is very likely unethical, since it is the same as racial passing. (shrink)

I argue that racism is a form of necro-being entrapped in necro-tragedy. Necro-being, as I present it, is a condition that kills and prevents persons from being born. I defend a conception of tragedy: absolute necrotragedy; absolute irredeemable suffering in a non-moral universe. Explanations of racism are commonly subject to anomalies, for example, volitional accounts offer special desiderata to account for institutional racism; conversely for institutional accounts. I offer a way to see racism, given the existence of a vast array (...) of kinds of racism: a descriptive actuarial approach. The account is intended to avoid the quandaries and anomalies of ‘explanation.’ I use rational-intentional explanations (including accounts by Jorge Garcia and Charles Mills) and social kind racial realism as inadequate explanations and examples of explanations with anomalies. These accounts also help demonstrate that logical systems of racism are inadequate. All such accounts explain racism as a coherent system and offer correlative reasons for its wrongness. I consider death, mortality, morbidity, and irredeemable misery as primary indicators of racism across an array of types of racism globally: racial necro-being. (shrink)

This essay tries to develop a “black radical Kantianism”—that is, a Kantianism informed by the black experience in modernity. After looking briefly at socialist and feminist appropriations of Kant, I argue that an analogous black radical appropriation should draw on the distinctive social ontology and view of the state associated with the black radical tradition. In ethics, this would mean working with a (color-conscious rather than colorblind) social ontology of white persons and black sub-persons and then asking what respect for (...) oneself and others would require under those circumstances. In political philosophy, it would mean framing the state as a Rassenstaat (a racial state) and then asking what measures of corrective justice would be necessary to bring about the ideal Rechtsstaat. (shrink)

Does neo-Rawlsian political philosophy offer an adequate account of the social conditions of capitalism? In this paper, I present two arguments for thinking that it does not. First, I develop a historicist critique of liberal egalitarianism, arguing that it provides a vision of social reality that is intimately connected to the historical and ideological constellation that I call postwar liberalism, and as such cannot account for social reality since the neoliberal revolutions of the late twentieth century. Second, I explore arguments (...) in Marxist and critical social theory that cast liberal egalitarianism as partial, on account of its inadequate portrait of capitalist society. In surveying responses to these critiques, I argue that merely extending liberal egalitarianism into new domains to account for how contemporary circumstances have changed since the mid-twentieth century cannot address the problem of its partial view of the social world. Taking seriously the insights of critical social theory and the study of capitalism should lead to a challenge to liberal egalitarianism, not an extension of it. (shrink)

Examines Bergson’s work from the perspectives of critical philosophy of race and decolonial theory, placing it in conversation with theorists from Africa, the African Diaspora, and Latin America. Building upon recent interest in Henri Bergson’s social and political philosophy, this volume offers a series of fresh and novel perspectives on Bergson’s writings through the lenses of critical philosophy of race and decolonial theory. Contributors place Bergson’s work in conversation with theorists from Africa, the African Diaspora, and Latin America to examine (...) Bergson’s influence on literature, science studies, aesthetics, metaphysics, and social and political philosophy within these geopolitical contexts. The volume pays particular attention to both theoretical and practical forms of critical resistance work, including historical analyses of anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist movements that have engaged with Bergson’s writings—for example, the Négritude movement, the Indigenismo movement, and the Peruvian Socialist Party. These historical and theoretical intersections provide a timely and innovative contribution to the existing scholarship on Bergson, and demonstrate the importance of his thought for contemporary social and political issues. Andrea J. Pitts is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Mark William Westmoreland is a doctoral candidate and instructor of ethics and philosophy at Villanova University. (shrink)

In this paper, I engage with the debate between John Rawls and Charles Mills. In the first part, relevant works by Rawls and Mills are mainly examined. To this end, I first begin by examining Rawls’s ideal theory of justice and its relevance to the issue of racism. I then consider Mills’s non-ideal critique of Rawls and supplement it with the help of the notion of social norms. Whereas Rawls’s view can deal with racial injustice as discrimination, in my view, (...) I argue that Mills’s theory is mostly concerned with racist injustice as oppression. Between racial injustice as discrimination and racist injustice as oppression, however, there are varying degrees of race-related wrongs, which can be elucidated by harmful social norms. As a result, I conclude that Mills’s point can be shown without supposing that the Rawlsian basic structure is inherently racist. (shrink)

This paper argues that debates regarding legal protections to preserve the privacy of data subjects, such as those involving the European Union’s right to be forgotten, have tended to overlook group-level forms of epistemic asymmetry and their impact on members of historically oppressed groups. In response, I develop what I consider an abolitionist approach to issues of digital justice. I begin by exploring international debates regarding digital privacy and the right to be forgotten. Then, I turn to the long history (...) of informational asymmetries impacting racialized populations in the United States. Such asymmetries, I argue, comprise epistemic injustices that are also implicated within the patterns of racialized incarceration in the United States. The final section brings together questions regarding the impact of such epistemic injustices on incarcerated peoples and focuses specifically on the public availability of criminal histories in online search databases as a fundamental issue within conversations regarding digital justice. I thus conclude by building from the work of contemporary abolitionist writers to argue that the underlying concerns of an individualized right to be forgotten should be transformed into a collective effort to undermine societal carceral imaginaries. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.