Racism (Key Concepts in Critical Theory) [Import] [Paperback]

Leonard Harris (Editor)

Product Details

• Paperback: 440 pages
• Publisher: Humanities Press International Inc (February 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0391037927
• ISBN-13: 978-0391037922
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,000,187 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars A LARGE, COMPREHENSIVE SELECTION OF ESSAYS ON THIS TOPIC, December 2, 2010

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

This review is from: Racism (Key Concepts in Critical Theory) (Paperback)

Leonard Harris is a professor of Philosophy at Purdue University, and former Director of African American Studies. He is a specialist in the philosophical work of Alain Locke.

In his Introduction to this 1999 book, "This anthology is limited to concepts of modern racism. Thus, it does not address the deeply religious or mythological antecedents to modern racism. The anthology focuses on complex notions about the existence of differentiations that are theoretically understood as racial. The anthology avoids issues of color prejudice and ethnocentrism except in relation to race."

Here are some quotations from the book:

"What I deny is the eliminativists' insistence that racial divisions correspond to nothing in nature ... However, even though I opposed the thesis that races are purely social constructions, there is a deeper sense in which I want to accept, and even to take further, this theme in eliminativism." (Philip Kitcher, pg. 104)

"And, so far as I can understand history, it is always a folk-product, with the form and flavor of a particular people and place, that is to say, for all its subsequent universality, culture has root and grows in that social soil which, for want of a better term, we call 'race.'" (Alain Locke, pg. 218)

"But there is also something of a muddle here: If the Celtic and the Saxon essences are so opposite, what is an individual like who inherits both of them? What would a man be like who was steady and sentimental; or who suffered from commonness and humdrummery and ineffectualness and self-will?" (K. Anthony Appiah, pg. 273)

"I have no problem with people who want to use the word 'race' in population genetics. Many plants and animals do in fact have local populations that are isolated from each other, different in clustered and biologically interesting ways, and still capable of interbreeding if brought artifically together; and biologists both before and after Darwin could have called these 'races.' It's just that this doesn't happen in human beings. In this sense, there are biological races in some creatures, but not in us." (K. Anthony Appiah, pg. 276)