David Theo Goldberg: "On the question of the postracial".

Lewis Gordon on Race and Gender from the Standpoint of Sartre’s Philosophical Anthropology.

Charles Mills Interviewed by George Yancy

New York Times Opinionator

George Yancy: You are a philosopher who thinks very deeply about issues of race. Can you provide a sense of your work?

Charles Mills: I think a simple way to sum it up would be as the transition from white Marxism to (what I have recently started calling) black radical liberalism.

G.Y.: So, how does “white” modify Marxism? And what is it about the modification that helps to account for the transition to what you’re now calling black radical liberalism?

Nahum Dimitri Chandler: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought

I just enriched my bookshelf with a text that will no doubt be required reading.

- Lewis Gordon

Racism as a Form of Bad Faith

Lewis Gordon: Racism as a Form of Bad Faith by TigersEye99

Paul Gilroy: After the great white error....the great black mirage

Paul Gilroy: After the great white error....the great black mirage by TigersEye99

Critical Studies Seminar: Monahan on the Ontology of Race: Race, Being, and the Politics of Purity

The weekly Critical Studies Seminar Series, which is held jointly by the departments of Sociology and Political Studies, is presenting the following

seminar:

Topic: Monahan on the Ontology of Race: Race, Being, and the Politics of Purity

Presenter: Clevis Headley (Associate Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University).

Venue: Politics Seminar Room

Date & Time: Friday April May 10th from 1 pm to 2:30 pm

African-American Philosophy, Race, and the Geography of Reason

Lewis Gordon

by Lewis Gordon, 2006

African-American philosophy has been one of the most recently developed areas of theoretical reflection in African-American Studies. Its emergence is in many ways marked by the  realization of many scholars that philosophy offered much to the enterprise of studying the  African diaspora, and the unique categories of thought endemic to that diaspora offers many challenges to modern and contemporary philosophy. Central in this development has been the importance of philosophical anthropology in the study of race and the challenges posed by race to our understanding of philosophical anthropology. Added to this insight is the anxiety that is a function of studying Africana communities and the ideas they stimulate. 

Anti-Semite and Jew: A review essay

by Joel Pearson, August 2012

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in 1906, at the beginning of what would prove to be a century of great turbulence. Two cataclysmic wars would ravage Europe as ‘modernity’ shuddered through society. In a climate of alienation, marginalization and violence, Sartre developed his diagnosis of the human condition. His writings – plays, biographies, novels and notebooks – explored the problems of “existential thought (la contingence) and the vicissitudes of social history through the troubled lives of individual actors” (Jules-Rosette, 2007:266). With the smoke of Auschwitz still looming large over a continent in ruin after the Second World War, Sartre’s political work interrogated how the devastations of fascism, racism and inequality had erupted, and what their effects were on the individual psyche (Jules-Rosette, 2007:266). In 1944, as the war petered out in Europe and an increasing number of Jews returned home from Nazi Germany, Sartre set out to examine the roots of anti-Semitism in France. Anti-Semite and Jew (Réflections sur la question juive) examined the “interpersonal construction of personal identities” in the dramatic personae of the anti-Semite, the democrat, the inauthentic and the authentic Jew (Walzer, 1995:xxvi). His central claim, perhaps: identity and culture cannot be reduced to timeless essences; they are socially constituted within historical situations; and both individual and group perceptions are intimately tied to the (often hostile) perceptions of the “other/s” (Walzer, 1995:xxiii).

Racism and the Political Economy of Domination

Charles W. Mills interviewed by Tom Mills, New Left Project

Charles W. Mills is John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University.  He is the author of The Racial Contract and has written extensively about racism and political theory.  In an interview with Tom Mills he discussed his views on race, liberalism, capitalism and the potential for social change.

The concept of race as an objective category has long been discredited by anthropology and biology, yet the social sciences show that racial disadvantage persists. How do you understand the concept of race and racism?

Philosophical Anthropology, Race, and the Political Econonmy of Disenfranchisement

By Lewis Gordon, 2005

It has been the practice in recent, mainstream American political theory to appeal to notions of facts from which to draw on the values of American society and to formulate, from such facts, Americans' unique notions of justice and freedom. This approach rests upon an obvious suspension of notions of value that transcend sociological and psychological factors, the culmination of which is the almost slogan-like formulation by its most eminent proponent, John Rawls, of his theory of justice being "political, not metaphysical." Yet such theorists are neither anthropologists nor sociologists, nor for that matter, are they critical theorists, so the assessments they make of "our values" are ultimately either pseudo-social scientific or ultimately a priori notions of what, given our considered judgments, we may believe in spite of facts.

On the State of Race Theory: A Conversation with David Theo Goldberg

David Theo Goldberg

Interviewed by Susan Searls Giroux for the Theory Project 

 

Audio Interview: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5

 

In 1961, the distinguished British historian E.P. Thompson assessed the scholarly and social contributions of Raymond Williams, an ascending intellectual of the New Left, in the following terms:

With a compromised tradition at his back, and with a broken vocabulary in his hands, he did the only thing that was left to him; he took over the vocabulary of his opponents, following them into the heart of their own arguments, and fought them to a standstill in their own terms. (27)

Race after Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism

Race After Sartre

edited by Jonathan Judaken, SUNY Press, 2008

Examines Jean-Paul Sartre’s antiracist politics and his contributions to critical race theories, postcolonialism, and Africana existentialism. Race after Sartre is the first book to systematically interrogate Jean-Paul Sartre’s antiracist politics and his largely unrecognized contributions to critical race theories, postcolonialism, and Africana existentialism. The contributors offer an overview of Sartre’s positions on racism as they changed throughout the course of his life, providing a coherent account of the various ways in which he understood how racism could be articulated and opposed.

Racism: A Passion from Above

by Jacques Rancière, Monthly Review

I'd like to add some reflections on the notion of "state racism" to our meeting's agenda.  These reflections run against a widespread interpretation of measures that our government has recently taken, from the law on the veil to the expulsions of the Roma.  This interpretation detects an opportunism that is exploiting racism and xenophobia for electoral gain.  This supposed critique reinforces the assumption that racism is a popular passion, the frightened and irrational reaction of retrograde layers of the population, who can't adapt to the new mobile and cosmopolitan world.  The state is accused of failing in its duty by showing indifference towards these populations.  But this accusation only reinforces the state's position representing itself as the face of rationality vis-à-vis popular irrationality.

Stuart Hall lecture: Race, the Floating Signifier

Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate

Sartre constructs his landmark postwar analysis of anti-Semitism around four feature characters: the anti-Semite, the democrat, the authentic Jew, and the inauthentic Jew. He presents their interactions as a kind of hypothetical drama. Sartre examines how the four actors in the “drama” create the others, or more precisely, how each character both defines the others and is defined by them.

A Short History of the ‘Critical’ in Critical Race Theory

Lewis Gordon, People of Color Organize

Critical Race Theory is strongly associated with Critical Legal Studies—an approach to American jurisprudence advanced by a group of progressive, often liberal and sometimes Marxist jurists in the 1980s and the present decade. The Critical Legal Studies group, of whom the most prominent associates are Patricia Williams, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Derrick Bell, are most peculiarly marked by their utilization of developments in postmodern poststructural scholarship, especially the focus on “subaltern” or “marginalized” communities and the use of alternative methodology in the expression of theoretical work, most notably their use of “narratives” and other literary techniques.