Color Conscious [Hardcover]

Kwame Anthony Appiah (Author), Amy Gutmann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 1996

In America today, the problem of achieving racial justice - whether through "colour-blind" policies or through affirmative action - provokes more noisy name-calling than fruitful deliberation. In "Colour conscious", K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, two eminent moral and political philosophers, seek to clear the ground for a discussion of the place of race in politics and in our moral lives. Provocative and insightful, their essays tackle different aspects of the question of racial justice; together they provide a compelling response to our nation's most vexing problem. Appiah begins by establishing the problematic nature of the idea of race. He draws on the scholarly consensus that "race" has no legitimate biological basis, exploring the history of its invention as a social category and showing how the concept has been used to explain differences among groups of people by mistakenly attributing various "essences" to them. Appiah argues that, while people of colour may still need to gather together, in the face of racism, under banner of race, they need also to balance carefully the calls of race against the many other dimensions of individual identity; and he suggests, finally, what this might mean for our political life. Gutmann examines alternative political responses to racial injustice. She argues that American politics cannot be fair to all citizens by being colour blind because American society is not colour blind. Fairness, not colour blindness, is a fundamental principle of justice. Whether policies should be colour conscious, class conscious, or both in particular situations, depends on an open-minded assessment of their fairness. Exploring timely issues of university admissions corporate hiring, and political representation, Gutmann develops a moral perspective that supports a commitment to constitutional democracy. Appiah and Gutmann write candidly and carefully, presenting many faceted interpretations of a host of controversial issues. Rather than supplying simple answers to complex questions, they offer to citizens of every colour principled starting points for the ongoing national discussions about race.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Appiah, a Harvard philosophy professor, and Gutmann, dean of the faculty at Princeton, add an academic gloss to two issues already much debated today: the legitimacy of the notion of "race" and whether color-blind policies can further justice in America. Appiah's sometimes ponderous philosophical excursion reminds us that the notion of race fails as a biological construct (despite contemporary efforts like The Bell Curve to prove otherwise), but he does acknowledge that race shapes social identity in America. But because America's racial groups do not necessarily share a single culture, Appiah protests, as others have, that there should not be one way to be "black" and hopes for the possibility of multiple identities and allegiances. Gutmann's essay returns us to the here and now, calling for color consciousness, which acknowledges the effects of race without assuming genetic determinism. She argues that "fairness" comes closer to justice than color-blindness, and that color-conscious policies?rather than class-conscious ones?can address the effects of race. Gutmann makes a distinction between "affirmative action" and more regrettable "preferential treatment" that may be disputed; she does acknowledge that color-consciousness today aims to achieve a future color-blind society.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Gutmann's essay shines with a brilliance of analysis worthy of widespread attention. -- James O. Freedman, Boston Globe



Despite tremendous ongoing discussion of racial issues in this country, American opinions about race remain contentious and nowhere near a national consensus. . .Each co-author devotes one-half of the book to his or her efforts to bring insight and illumination to what is an often gloomy conversation. -- Washington Post Book World
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr; 1st printing edition (September 17, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691026610
• ISBN-13: 978-0691026619
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #937,126 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "In order to get beyond racism...", January 10, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Color Conscious (Paperback)

This is a terrific book. In clear and persuasive terms, Appiah begins the book by explaining how "race" is a fiction, but "racism" is a fact. This seeming paradox presents the difficult challenge that Gutmann then addresses in the second half of the book. On one hand, she recognizes that social justice seems to require that we not define people in terms of their so-called "race." On the other hand, she also shows how social justice demands that we eradicate racism, especially insofar as it affects people's civic life. This leads to the central problem of the book: If we don't take account of people's race, how can we respond to the social injustices stemming from racism?

Gutmann makes a powerful case why fairness demands that we be "color conscious," at least for some purposes and for the time-being. She also explains why class-consciousness cannot resolve the problems stemming from racism, nor can proportional representation based on race.

These conclusions may raise the hackles of those who believe that our country should be color-blind, but the arguments that lead there are carefully constructed, logical, and in the end, largely persuasive. Moreover, they are chock-full of concrete examples that drive home the theoretical points. Whether she is talking about the attributes of a successful program in affirmative action at AT&T or data on S.A.T. scores analyzed by both race and class, Gutmann makes a powerful case from which even honest critics will have much to learn.

Both Appiah's and Gutmann's arguments are nuanced, theoretically sophistocated, and informative. Moreover, they are a pleasure to read. Gutmann's essay, in particular, has an impressive style in that it uses concrete examples to illustrate her theoretical points, as well as solid theoretical arguments to illuminate thorny areas of public policy. Wilkins' introduction and Appiah's epilogue are also well-written and valuable. This book is important reading for all people interested in responding to racial injustice.

5.0 out of 5 stars A PENETRATING PHILOSOPHICAL EXCHANGE ABOUT RACE AND POLITICS, December 10, 2010

By 

Steven H. Propp (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Color Conscious (Paperback)

Kwame Anthony Appiah (born 1955) is a Ghanaian philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist who is currently Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He is also author of books such as In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. Amy Gutmann (born 1949) is the 8th President of the University of Pennsylvania and Professor of Political Science, Communications, and Philosophy. She taught at Princeton University from 1976 to 2004 and served as its Provost.

In this 1996 book, Appiah writes a section on "Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections," and Gutmann writes a section on "Responding to Racial Injustice"; Appiah then contributes an Epilogue.

Here are some quotations from the book:

"This is because, as we shall see, the arguments against the use of 'race' as a scientific term suggest that most ordinary ways of thinking about races are incoherent." (Pg. 42)
"It follows that on an ideational view, there are no biological races, either: not, in this case, because nothing fits the loose criteria but because too many things do." (Pg. 72)
"I have insisted that African-Americans do not have a single culture, in the sense of shared language, values, practices, and meanings. But many people who think of races as groups defined by shared cultures, conceive that sharing in a different way... Jazz belongs to a black person who knows nothing about it more fully than it does to a white jazzman." (Pg. 90)
"African-American identity, as I have argued, is centrally shaped by American society and institutions: it cannot be seen as constructed solely within African-American communities. African-American culture, if this means shared beliefs, values, practices, does not exist: what exists are African-American cultures..." (Pg. 95)

19 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Gutman dull and dogmatic, Appiah intelligent but wrong, November 25, 1998

By 

Steve Sailer (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Color Conscious (Hardcover)

Amy Gutman argues that racial quotas are needed because of racial discrimination. There is some truth to this: for example, the Nixon administration invented quotas to fight blatant discrimination by craft unions in Philadelphia, and it's hard to imagine any other tactic working to end discrimination by unions devoted to enforcing anti-competitive, nepotistic hiring. Unfortunately, Gutman makes no attempt to distinguish anti-competitive organizations from competitive ones, which have economic incentives to not discriminate. In fact, I don't think Gutman is even aware of the distinction. She merely assumes that if blacks are under-represented anywhere, it's because of discrimination. Well, we've certainly heard that before, so what's the point of writing another book if you're just going to repeat the same old dogmas?

Appiah, on the other hand, is a more open and intriguing thinker. This may stem from the near-comic ironies of his position in life. He is a Professor of Afro-American Studies at Harvard, but he's not very Afro-American. He was born in Ghana of a local father and an English mother. He has spent a lot of his career arguing that "race" has no biological "essence," but is just a social construct.

It's not hard for him to knock down the absurd strawmen he sets up. He assumes that if there is no Platonic essence to each race, and that if each member of each race can't be perfectly identified, the whole concept of race must be discarded. Of course, reality is not Platonic, it's relativistic and probabilistic. It's humorously hypocritical for a relativist like Appiah to denounce the concept of race just because it's relativistic.

For example, all his criticisms of the concept of race apply with equal, if not greater, force to the concept of family. Nobody can agree on the precise numbers of races? Nobody can agree on the precise number of extended families either. Are some people descended from more than one race? Well, everybody is descended from more than one family. There's no single gene that proves you belong to one race or another? Well, there's no single gene that proves you are your father's child either. Paternity testers examine a host of genes in order to increase the probability of a correct attribution. (In fact, the exact same DNA techniques are used by forensic scientists to inform police of the probable race of criminal who left a bloodstain at the crime scene.)

Why does family provide so many perfect analogies for race? Because they aren't analogies: a race is an extremely extended family. There are no hard and fast borders between families and races -- the only qualitative difference is that races show a degree of endogamy (in-breeding), which means that races are actually somewhat more coherent and definite, and less fuzzy than families.