3. Identifying as X - race
- Created by: Alasdair
- Created on: 10-12-17 14:04
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- 3. Identifying as X - race
- Race is not a biological kind
- Charles W. Mills
- “One way of making the theoretical commitments here vivid is to think of the issue in terms of transworld identity. For racial realists, people categorizable by their phenotype in our world, with its peculiar history, as belonging to a particular "race" will continue to have the same "racial" intellectual and characterological traits in another world with a radically diferent history.”
- “It is not merely that racism (the natural biological hierarchy of races) is false; it is not merely that culture, psychology, and intergroup relations are far more convincingly explained on the basis of contingent histories than of "natural" racial traits; it is that the very categories used to identify races are significantly transworld relative.”
- Charles W. Mills
- So, anything goes?
- If race isn't a biological kind then an we say whatever we want about it?
- No
- i.e. it may be ontologically subjective but it is epistemically objective
- No
- If race isn't a biological kind then an we say whatever we want about it?
- Race as social structure (according to Albert Akin)
- “The idea is simply that while race may not be a biological kind and something that we find as 'part of the 'basic furniture of the universe', it could nonetheless be real by virtue of the social practices that surround it … race could be real because of we all act and think as though there are races.”
- Race as social structure
- What your gender is has to do with your position within the racial social hierarchy
- Race as identity
- What your race is has to do with what you see yourself as being
- Test case: Rachel Dolezal
- “For me, how I feel is more powerful than how I was born. I mean that not in the sense of having some easy way out. This has been a lifelong journey. This is not something that I cash in, cash out, change up, do at a convenience level or to freak people out or to make people happy,” she says. “If somebody asked me how I identify, I identify as black. Nothing about whiteness describes who I am.”
- 'Race talk is a mess' according to Esa Diaz-Leon
- “... race talk is a mess. So if the question is 'Is [someone] black, according to our ordinary concept of ‘black’?', the answer would probably be 'it’s indeterminate', or 'it depends on who is asking (and which concept they are expressing)'. So we will need to make the concept more precise (by means of revisions or stipulations), in order to get a determinate answer anyway. Because of this ... the most interesting question is not about what our current concepts are but rather about what our concepts should be.”
- Race is not a biological kind
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