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Racism and Philosophy

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In their Introduction to this 1999 book, the editors write, "The contributors to this volume attempt to identify and clarify important structures of meaning through which Western philosophy has both evaded acknowledgement of racism and has, at the same time, offered influential conceptual schemas that have helped produce the destructive racializations of contemporary society. In rethinking the implications of philosophical accounts of the social contract; the great chain of being; the idea of history; the liberal analysis of harm, of persons, and of rationality, this volume suggests that acknowledging the importance of racism can effectively inform the development of questions in all areas of philosophy."

Here are some additional quotations from the book:

"I find myself in an awkward position when I raise these questions. After all, I am a philosopher. I am also a critical race theorist. I conseqently face the risk of a performative contradiction if I take too skeptical a stand. Yet, as a philosopher committed to a conception of philosophy that is ultimately a form of radical critique, I need consider these questions with all the gravity they occasion." (Pg. 32)
"This was the concept in which the notion of race was taken up by natural philosophers and other philosophes in the modern period. How---or why---it was that the word and concept of 'race' came to be used to classify human groups is not entirely clear ... but a number of contributing factors stand out. First, tensions within Europe arose from encounters among groups of peoples who differed culturally or, more narrowly, religiously. Second, a more basic impetus, intensified by these tensions, came from the need to account for human origins in general and for human diversity in particular and social sciences, including anthropology, as endeavors to meet this need. Third, there were the quite decisive European voyages to what would be called the Americas, the East, and Africa, and the concomitant developments of capitalism and the slave trade..." (Pg. 54)
"To summarize, if systematic power to oppress on the basis of race (or something like race) is the central feature of racism, then racism cannot be confined to whites." (Pg. 83)