Race and Racism

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Race and Racism

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Race and Racism

A new paradigm is beginning to emerge across a variety of subjects , a paradigm that takes race , normative whiteness , and white supremacy to be central to U .S . and indeed recent global history . The rate of emergence is by no means uniform - far advanced in cultural studies , retarded in other areas such as political philosophy (unsurprisingly , considering that philosophy is one of the very `whitest ' of the humanities ) nor are the

theoretical presuppositions always the same .If the latter feature is a prerequisite for paradigmhood , therefore , one might want to speak more cautiously of an `orientation ' or a `perspective ' instead . Some authors draw on deconstruction and discourse theory , on Derrida and Foucault .Others seek to modify and update old-fashioned Marxist frameworks to give race an autonomy - and perhaps even a `material status - not usually conceded to it in more class-reductivist accounts .Still others would consider themselves traditional liberals though with a nontraditional appreciation of how racialized actual liberalism has been . And a few view themselves as working toward new theorizations that do not readily fit into any of the standard metatheoretical taxonomies . What they all have in common , however , is that they see race as central (though not foundational ) and as sociopolitically `constructed ' thus distinguishing themselves from earlier theorists of race , who usually took race to be a transhistorical biological essence and whose assumptions were in fact often simply racist .A term originally associated specifically with minority viewpoints in legal studies is now being used more generally by some to refer to this new paradigm : critical race theory

For racial minorities and Third World scholars long interested in the theorization of race and Western domination , critical race theory is a welcome development that provides them with a recognized academic space for work previously regarded as marginal .The perspective holds out the prospect of mounting a challenge to the conceptualizations of orthodox theory , a challenge that will parallel the impressive achievements of several decades of feminist scholarship .My particular interest here is in that unfortunate area of backwardness , political philosophy . How does ostensibly raceless , but actually white First World political philosophy need to be rethought and transformed so as to formally incorporate race into its anatomies of the body politic - instead of , as at present tacitly taking the white body as normative

Let us begin , appropriately , at the global level . Far from being new the idea of race as a global system can be found practically at the inception of the oppositional black tradition . The pioneering Pan-Africanist Martin Delany complained in the mid-nineteenth century that though `there are two colored persons for each White man in the world . the White race dominates the colored (Bell , 1988 . Half a century later , W . E . B . Du Bois 's appeal ` To the Nations of the World at the Pan ? African Conference in 1900 described the global problem of `the color line , the question as to...