From the Foreign to the Familiar: Confronting Dewey Confronting "Racial Prejudice"

Abstract

Can Dewey's pragmatism make a valuable contribution to contemporary criti cal race theory given that Dewey rarely, if ever, took up questions of race in his work? In my view, the answer to this question is yes, particularly since his concept of habit can be used to understand the unconscious operations of white privilege. In order to make the best use of Dewey's work in this respect, how ever, the numerous problems that it presents on race must be critically addressed. I have already mentioned one of them: Dewey's relative neglect of the subject. This neglect is not merely an inhstance of a gap or empty space in his work, although it is that. It is a productive lack, an omission that has significant and powerful effects and that risks perpetuating the conceptual or theoretical white ness of Western philosophy (Mills 1998, 2). Related to but distinct from the physiological whiteness of most academic philosophers in the United States and the Western and Northern hemispheres more broadly, the conceptual white ness of philosophy is found in the particular issues and topics that are seen as philosophically important, in what counts as a resolution to a problematic situ ation, and indeed in what counts as a problematic situation in the first place. Although based on the bulk of his work, Dewey apparently did not think that topics of race and racism had much philosophical merit, he did write two short essays on them (Dewey 1988a; Dewey 1989). Elsewhere I have criticized those essays for reducing what Dewey calls to an epiphenomenona of general political-economic issues that does not do justice to the specific power and influence that concepts of race have and have had (Sullivan 2003a). Here I take up a different concern that I have about one of the essays, Racial Prejudice and Friction, which is Dewey's definition of racial prejudice as an instinctive and universal reaction to what is new or unusual. I am con cerned both with Dewey's implied claim that the nature of habit is such that it must be hostile to anything different from itself and with the inadequacy of