Critical Philosophy Of Race Research Articles

Fantasies of Asian American Kinship Disrupted: Identification and Disidentification in Michael Kang's The Motel

Abstract This article interprets Michael Kang's independent feature The Motel (2005) as a critique of the Asian American fantasy of post- 1965 incorporation into the multicultural US polity. The film discloses that this Asian American Dream is normatively constituted by heteronormative, middle-class, intra-racial kinship. The protagonist Ernest Chin's longing for this kind of normative Asian American family is symptomatic of his identification with the exclusionary norms of the incorporative fantasy. In a moment of disidentification, though, Ernest is able to release his grip on the dream and its reciprocal grip on him. Disidentification, in my usage, is a kind of political action that both disrupts and reworks processes of social formation from within. As a contribution to the critical philosophy of race, my rendition of disidentification draws on recent developments in cultural studies and political theory to address the critical theoretical question of the psychic life of domination.

I love Myself When I Am . . . What?

Love Myself When Am . . . What? A Response to Shotwell and Sundstrom on Good White PeopleI am very fortunate to have Alexis Shotwell and Ronald Sundstrom comment on my book Good White People.1 Their readings are careful and thought-provoking, helping me revisit some of the book's central claims and reexamine why believe that middle-class white anti-racism is part of the problem rather than a solution to ongoing white privilege and alleged white superiority. Good White People has been controversial, and thus appreciate Shotwell's and Sundstrom's willingness to entertain the risks the book takes to begin developing a new set of raced habits for good white liberals.The title of my response is taken from the collection of Zora Neale Hurston's essays and fiction edited by Alice Walker, Love Myself When am Laughing... and Then Again When Am Mean and Impressive.2 Perhaps best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston's non-fiction essays and articles offer equally valuable affirmations of African American life, and of black southern life in particular. Hurston's literary work and political positions have been neglected and misunderstood, especially in comparison with African American men such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Richard Wright, but what stands out clearly in them is Hurston's refusal to apologize for being black and her rejection of the idea of blackness as an affliction. As Hurston explains about herself, I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal.3 It is no tragedy to be black on Hurston's view, and her work is filled with strong criticism of those (white or black) who think that great sorrow [must be] dammed up in [a black person's] soul4If Hurston's work and life could be boiled down to one thing, it would be selfaffirmation, where is not an isolated individual but a self transactionally constituted by its race, gender, class, and region.5 Hurston loves her complicated, multi-faceted self, period. It doesn't matter whether she is laughing, angry, intimidating, or whatever. This self-love, fueled by joyful affirmation, is incredibly powerful, making Hurston sometimes seem outrageous. What Alice Walker writes about Their Eyes Were Watching God could be said of Hurston's entire body of work: There is enough self-love in that one book-love of community, culture, traditions-to restore a world. Or create a new one.6 It was-and still is-outrageous in white-dominated America for a black woman to think that she could change the world, but Hurston refus[ed] to be humbled by second place in a contest [she] did not design7What then about those white people for whom the contest is designed? What should their relationship to their raced selves be? ask this question not because the white liberal is the primary subject around which political movements, critical philosophy of race, or any other critical approach to race should be organized (cf. Shotwell, 1003-04). As discuss in the book, racial justice movements aren't dependent on white people of any class or type. But here white people are, nonetheless-a big part of the problem and stuck with being white. How are they (we) going to live our whiteness, and might our answers to that question possibly help rather than impede challenges to racism and white domination? In that respect, Good White People is motivated by a simple, existential question, rather than a large-scale political vision for how to organize racial justice movements (although would argue that existential and political questions are not unrelated): how am going to live?Even though it sounds awkward, said raced selves above when talking about white people's relationships to themselves, since striving for so-called colorblindness generally is a bankrupt and harmful strategy for white people to pursue. Sundstrom elaborates this point eloquently, and will return to his comments shortly. …

Kant’s racial mind–body unions

Eric Voegelin’s writings on the historical development of the concept of race in the early 1930s are important to philosophy today in part because they provide a model upon which scholars can further integrate modern philosophy with the critical philosophy of race. In constructing his history, Voegelin’s methodological orientation depends on the centrality of both Kant’s work and the problem of the mind–body union to the concept of race. This essay asks how one might hold these premises if Kant seems to reject the dominant approach to the mind–body union in the mid-eighteenth century, physical influx, and then go on to publish several essays on race that do not thematize that doctrine in any way. I argue that Kant’s racial union of mind and body cannot be understood as an interaction in space, as his contemporaries had presumed. Rather, the union must be approached as a repetition in time. In this way, Kant’s four racial categories are not merely a part of the mind–body problem, but instead each is a veritable mind–body union. This permits the conclusion that ‘race’, as Kant understood it, is a viable solution to the mind–body problem.

The Hearts and Guts of White People

AbstractBeginning with the experience of a white woman's stomach seizing up in fear of a black man, this essay examines some of the ethical and epistemological issues connected to white ignorance. In conversation with Charles Mills on the epistemology of ignorance, I argue that white ignorance primarily operates physiologically, not cognitively. Drawing critically from psychology, neurocardiology, and other medical sciences, I examine some of the biological effects of racism on white people's stomachs and hearts. I argue for a nonideal medical theory focused on improving wellness in a society that systematically has damaged the health of people of color. The essay concludes that to be fully successful, critical philosophy of race must examine not just the financial, legal, political, and other forms of racism, but also its biological and physiological operations.

The ignorance contract: recollections of apartheid childhoods and the construction of epistemologies of ignorance

Working with the recollections of everyday experiences of apartheid collected by the Apartheid Archives project, and drawing on the emerging theorization of ignorance in the critical philosophy of race, this article explores how an ‘ignorance contract’ – the tacit agreement to entertain ignorance – lies at the heart of a society structured in racial hierarchy. Unlike the conventional theorization of ignorance that regards ignorance as a matter of faulty individual cognition, or a collective absence of yet-to-be-acquired knowledge, ignorance is understood as a social achievement with strategic value. The apartheid narratives illustrate that for ignorance to function as social regulation, subjectivities must be formed that are appropriate performers of ignorance, disciplined in cognition, affect and ethics. Both white and black South Africans produced epistemologies of ignorance, although the terms of the contract were set by white society as the group with the dominant power.

On <i>Revealing Whiteness</i>: A Reply to Critics

On Revealing Whiteness: A Reply to Critics Shannon Sullivan I am truly honored to have Charles Mills, Paul Taylor, and Cynthia Willett comment on my recent book Revealing Whiteness. Their careful readings and thoughtful analyses have pushed me to think further about my work on whiteness in particular and critical philosophy of race more broadly. I will not be able to do full justice to their contributions here, but I hope to use their rich comments to clarify parts of Revealing Whiteness and to broach questions about transforming whiteness that follow in the wake of the book. One of the main goals of Revealing Whiteness is to bring American philosophy into conversation with psychoanalytic theory around issues of racism and white privilege. I find the pragmatist concept of habit enormously helpful for understanding how the bodily self is constituted in and through its relationships with the (white-privileged) world and in turn how the (white-privileged) world is affected by and can be changed through human transactions with it. And I find the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious helpful for understanding how habit—especially socially and politically unacceptable habits, which habits of white privilege and white supremacy generally are today—can be deviously obstructionist, working to evade conscious examination and deliberate transformation. It is not merely that habit is non- or subconscious, that habit operates without conscious awareness, as John Dewey and others like Maurice Merleau-Ponty demonstrate well. It is that some habits actively scheme to block critical consciousness's recognition of them, ensuring that they continue to exist by existing relatively undetected. W. E. B. DuBois is the guiding influence of Revealing Whiteness because he explicitly speaks of the fruitfulness of bringing pragmatism and psychoanalysis together to think about unconscious habit. In his 1940 autobiography, DuBois writes that around 1930, “the meaning and implications of the new psychology [Freud] had begun slowly to penetrate my thought. My own study of psychology under William James [who explicitly analyzes habit as ‘the enormous fly-wheel of human society’ (James 1955, 121)] had pre-dated the Freudian era, but it had prepared me for it. I now began to realize that in the fight against race prejudice, we were not facing simply the rational, conscious determination of white folks to [End Page 231] oppress us; we were facing age-long complexes sunk now largely to unconscious habit and irrational urge” (1984, 296). I love this move in DuBois's middle to later work, which steps away from the liberal-scientific strategies for fighting racism that he championed in his early career: the idea that white prejudice against black people occurs because white people are naively ignorant about the lives of black people; and thus what is needed is merely the generation and distribution of accurate sociological data about them. After World War I, DuBois became more pessimistic about white people and the chances for their rehabilitation, and he abandoned his belief that most white people (e.g., those not in the Klan) were fundamentally good-hearted and just needed to be shown the truth about black people. As DuBois writes about white people in 1920, “I see in and through them. . . . I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the workings of their entrails. . . . I see them ever stripped,—ugly human” (1999, 17). Unfortunately DuBois does not explicitly elaborate on the notion of unconscious habit, so I turn to Dewey for his rich analyses of habit as an organism's predisposition to transact with its physical, social, political, and natural worlds in particular patterned ways. But Dewey's notion of habit (and pragmatism's more generally) needs to be augmented with something like the psychoanalytic unconscious. Otherwise it drastically underestimates the obstacles—defense mechanisms, projections, and other psychosomatic symptoms—to personal and political transformation that one's unconscious habits can put up. Dewey's pragmatism is by no means Pollyannaish, but it tends to leave out the ugly hostility of some human habits, and it sometimes strikes a tone that I find too genial for grappling with the “stripped,” “undressed” backsides of white privilege. So pragmatism needs psychoanalysis, but this will have to be a pragmatized...

A Short History of Liberal Guilt

Previous articleNext article No AccessA Short History of Liberal GuiltJulie EllisonJulie Ellison Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 22, Number 2Winter, 1996 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/448794 Views: 49Total views on this site Citations: 15Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1994 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Henry B. Wonham Postcritical Howells: American Realism and Liberal Guilt, American Literature 92, no.22 (Jun 2020): 229–255.https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8267720Elizabeth Mamali Researcher’s guilt: confessions from the darker side of ethnographic consumer research, Consumption Markets & Culture 22, no.33 (May 2018): 241–255.https://doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2018.1474109Marianne Noble Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, 34 (Mar 2019).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108698931Christina Belcher There Is No Such Thing as a Post-racial Prison, Television & New Media 17, no.66 (Aug 2016): 491–503.https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476416647498Christi van der Westhuizen Race, Intersectionality, and Affect in Postapartheid Productions of the “Afrikaans White Woman”, Critical Philosophy of Race 4, no.22 (Jul 2016): 221–238.https://doi.org/10.5325/critphilrace.4.2.221Christi van der Westhuizen Race, Intersectionality, and Affect in Postapartheid Productions of the “Afrikaans White Woman”, Critical Philosophy of Race 4, no.22 (Jul 2016): 221–238.https://doi.org/10.5325/critphilrace.4.2.0221Samantha Bernstein The Joys of the Elevated: William Dean Howells and the Urban Picturesque, Canadian Review of American Studies 45, no.33 (Dec 2015): 278–299.https://doi.org/10.3138/cras.2015.s08Charles Kurzman, Rajesh Ghoshal, Kristin Gibson, Clinton Key, Micah Roos, Amber Wells Powerblindness, Sociology Compass 8, no.66 (Jun 2014): 718–730.https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12161Marianne Noble Making this whole Nation Feel: The Sentimental Novel in the United States, (Mar 2012): 170–186.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118384329.ch10Janette Habashi Colonial Guilt and the Recycling of Oppression: The Merit of Unofficial History in Transforming the State's Narrative, Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education 6, no.11 (Jan 2012): 50–59.https://doi.org/10.1080/15595692.2011.633132Jack Niemonen Antiracist Education in Theory and Practice: A Critical Assessment, The American Sociologist 38, no.22 (Sep 2007): 159–177.https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-007-9006-xNichole T. Rustin Cante Hondo: Charles Mingus, Nat Hentoff, and Jazz Racism1, Critical Sociology 32, no.2-32-3 (Sep 2016): 309–331.https://doi.org/10.1163/156916306777835394Patti Lather Troubling Clarity: The Politics of Accessible Language, Harvard Educational Review 66, no.33 (Sep 1996): 525–546.https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.66.3.6qxv1p081102560gRodney D. Coates Racial Hegemony, Globalization, Social Justice, and Anti-Hegemonic Movements, (): 319–342.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-70845-4_17 Bibliography, (): 381–417.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373612-011