Texts for this seminar

The Idea of Race, Eds. Tommy Lott and Robert Bernasconi

An ideal set of readings to introduce the study of the concept of race. In the first section, pre-20th century works are chronologically arranged to indicate the historical development of the idea of race with representative articles by the influential thinkers who held polygenetic, monogenetic, degeneracy, climatic, and early mixed-race theories. The remaining section offers classic 20th century sources that both reiterate and contest ideas of race as scientific, as well as several philosophically relevant essays that take into account the motives, or interests, behind these views. A general introduction gives an overview of the readings. Headnotes introduce each selection. Includes suggested further readings.

Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race by Charles Mills

Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience. Ralph Ellison's metaphor of black invisibility has special relevance to philosophy, whose demographic and conceptual "whiteness" has long been a source of wonder and complaint to racial minorities. Mills points out the absence of any philosophical narrative theorizing and detailing race's centrality to the recent history of the West, such as feminists have articulated for gender domination. European expansionism in its various forms, Mills contends, generates a social ontology of race that warrants philosophical attention. Through expropriation, settlement, slavery, and colonialism, race comes into existence as simultaneously real and unreal: ontological without being biological, metaphysical without being physical, existential without being essential, shaping one's being without being in one's shape.

His essays explore the contrasting sums of a white and black modernity, examine standpoint epistemology and the metaphysics of racial identity, look at black-Jewish relations and racial conspiracy theories, map the workings of a white-supremacist polity and the contours of a racist moral consciousness, and analyze the presuppositions of Frederick Douglass's famous July 4 prognosis for black political inclusion. Collectively they demonstrate what exciting new philosophical terrain can be opened up once the color line in western philosophy is made visible and addressed.

Racism: A Short History by George Frederickson

Are antisemitism and white supremacy manifestations of a general phenomenon? Why didn't racism appear in Europe before the fourteenth century, and why did it flourish as never before in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Why did the twentieth century see institutionalized racism in its most extreme forms? Why are egalitarian societies particularly susceptible to virulent racism? What do apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany, and the American South under Jim Crow have in common? How did the Holocaust advance civil rights in the United States?

With a rare blend of learning, economy, and cutting insight, George Fredrickson surveys the history of Western racism from its emergence in the late Middle Ages to the present. Beginning with the medieval antisemitism that put Jews beyond the pale of humanity, he traces the spread of racist thinking in the wake of European expansionism and the beginnings of the African slave trade. And he examines how the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century romantic nationalism created a new intellectual context for debates over slavery and Jewish emancipation. Fredrickson then makes the first sustained comparison between the color-coded racism of nineteenth-century America and the antisemitic racism that appeared in Germany around the same time. He finds similarity enough to justify the common label but also major differences in the nature and functions of the stereotypes invoked. The book concludes with a provocative account of the rise and decline of the twentieth century's overtly racist regimes--the Jim Crow South, Nazi Germany, and apartheid South Africa--in the context of world historical developments.

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

This is third in a trilogy of novels by Philip Roth, which also include American Pastoral and I Married A Communist. In this one, it is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."

The Colonizer and the Colonized by Albert Memmi

This work explores and describes the psychological effects of colonialism on colonized and colonizers alike. Dissecting the minds of both the oppressor and the oppressed, Memmi reveals truths about the colonial situation and struggle that are as relevant today as they were five decades ago. When it was published in 1957, many national liberation movements were active. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the preface. The work is often read in conjunction with Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks and Aimé Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism. Several decades later, Albert Memmi published a follow up book called "Decolonization and the Decolonized".

Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate by Jean-Paul Sartre

Anti-Semite and Jew is an essay about antisemitism written by Jean-Paul Sartre shortly after the liberation of Paris from German occupation in 1944. The first part of the essay, "The Portrait of the Antisemite," was published in December 1945 in Les Temps modernes. The full text was then published in 1946. The essay deals with antisemitism and how Jews react to it. More broadly, the book tries to explain the etiology of hate by analyzing antisemitic hate. According to Sartre, antisemitism (and hate more broadly) is, among other things, a way by which the middle class lay claim to the nation in which they reside, and an oversimplified conception of the world in which the antisemite sees "not a conflict of interests but the damage an evil power causes society."

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani

In this brilliant look at the rise of political Islam, the distinguished political scientist and anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani brings his expertise and insight to bear on a question many Americans have been asking since 9/11: how did this happen? Good Muslim, Bad Muslim is a provocative and important book that will profoundly change our understanding both of Islamist politics and the way America is perceived in the world today.