ABSTRACT Charles Wade Mills was one of the most influential and recognized philosophers in the English- speaking world and played a major role in changing the discourse of political philosophy. But how did he come to be? This article offers a personal remembrance and an account of his emerging ideas about race and racism as developed in some of his key texts. It also explores the relationship between his philosophy and his Jamaican background, arguing that the everyday practices of cognitive (...) resistance in Jamaican society provided him with both inspiration and specific ideas. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article offers a philosophical exploration of, and critical engagement with, the antiracist slogan “I understand that I will never understand. However, I stand.” Drawing on Charles Mills’s discussions of white ignorance and Édouard Glissant’s conception of the “right to opacity,” it first offers several interpretations and philosophical reconstructions of the claim that white allies “understand that they will never understand,” reading this as potentially articulating either an epistemic failure or a kind of ethical self-limitation. It then draws on (...) the work of Saidiya Hartman to offer a caution about the affirmation and naturalization of this delimited understanding as its ambiguity threatens to reinvoke and re-entrench certain racist conceptions already present within an antiblack context. (shrink)

Due to a mistake of mine the review does not contain my acknowledgements. Thus, I want to take the space here to thank Prof. Dwight K. Lewis and Prof. Peter West for their insightful and constructive feedback on earlier drafts of this review.

ABSTRACT The reception of the work of Charles Mills has mostly been restricted to responses to Rawls, social epistemology, and Black feminist critique. All overlook the sustained analysis of space, race, and waste, which this article argues is its most valuable contribution for critical philosophy of race today. This article claims that that in addition to “cognitive resistance,” an analysis of Black trash suggests intimate ecological resistance as a fundamental aspect of the political self-assertion of racialized “subpersons,” and argues that (...) this challenges any qualified fidelity to the basic tenets of liberal political philosophy. Focusing on waste from the pig industry in North Carolina, the article returns to Mills’s essay “Black Trash” to demonstrate the importance of ecology to the racial contract and its renewed relevance. Building on Shatema Threadcraft’s critical engagement with Mills in Intimate Justice, the article concludes that a Black trash feminist approach that foregrounds intimate matters is necessary for ecological resistance. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article explores the conclusion of Calvin Warren’s book Ontological Terror and the nihilistic suggestion for Black life to reject humanism. In the text’s final chapter, Warren unexpectedly references Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s leap of faith and reflects on Black life’s enduring spirit through an anti-Black world. This article’s analysis faithfully traces Warren’s nihilistic arguments against humanism and scaffolds them through his reference to Kierkegaard. Utilizing the methods of critical philosophy of race and Black existential philosophy, the first section (...) contextualizes Ontological Terror’s main arguments, places Warren’s reference to Kierkegaard inside a longer Black existential lineage, and grafts Kierkegaard’s concept of the tragic hero onto Warren’s antihumanism. The second section offers a reconstruction of Warren’s ideas through Kierkegaard’s knight of infinite resignation and the leap of faith. This section stresses the importance of both endurance and spirit for Warren’s divestment from humanism. The third section puts Warren’s nihilism in conversation with the work of Black feminist philosophers to offer an alternative way to interpret divestment from humanism. The article concludes by engaging David Marriott’s and Frantz Fanon’s understanding of invention to help rethink the links between nihilism, future-oriented thinking, and Black endurance against anti-Blackness. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The shifting dynamics of racial domination across historical contexts present a problem for critical philosophy of race. Much of the literature has focused on answering the question of “What is race?” as the solution to the problem of dynamic variability. In what follows, this article proposes that a better solution should begin with answering the question “What must the world be like for race to shift appearances across contexts?” Answering the latter question recapitulates the classic tension between appearance and (...) reality. A core feature of racial domination is that it abstracts from social relations by presenting them as natural. Drawing on the tradition of critical theory from Karl Marx to Roy Bhaskar, this article argues that the task of critical philosophy of race is primarily explanatory rather than moral. The wrongness of racial domination follows from the critical elucidation of how a given society systemically induces the misrecognition of social conditions and thus blocks the realization of emancipatory agency. By presenting a clearer picture of what the world is like, critical philosophy of race can better aid our capacity for self-emancipation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Black feminist philosophers deserve to be included in philosophical discussions about universalism. In contrast to other approaches to universalism that seek to diminish the importance of identities such as race and gender, black feminist philosophers focus on them. This article argues that black feminist philosophers offer a universalist viewpoint, that is, a “black feminist universalism,” which asserts that a more inclusive world starts with a theory and praxis focused on those who are the most oppressed. The article shows that (...) the Combahee River Collective writers in their manifesto, “A Black Feminist Statement” (1995) demonstrate black feminist universalism. It argues that the Combahee River Collective writers’ emphasis on their own identity as black women is the foundation for their theory and praxis, which aims to include others. (shrink)

The articles in this special issue are a selection of those presented at the conference, “Critical Philosophy of Race after Ten Years,” held in March 2022. The conference commemorated the tenth year of publication of the journal Critical Philosophy of Race. Although philosophical engagement with the concept of race was not new to the field of philosophy, the journal, indeed the term “critical philosophy of race,” served as a catalyst for deepening and widening philosophical efforts to better understand the complexities (...) of racisms and, through such insights, develop resources for combating them.The journal and indeed the neologism, critical philosophy of race, emerged thanks to the hard work of Robert Bernasconi, who has not only contributed to the field through his research but also through his dedication to this journal and his role in ensuring that the Penn State Department of Philosophy would be a leader in training graduate students in this field. The success of his efforts was recognized by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which awarded a grant to the department in recognition of its work in mentoring and recruiting philosophy students of color. While no one person is ever fully responsible for transforming a field or a department, it takes vision and hard work to inspire others to work together to achieve these important goals.The conference was originally designed to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the journal and to mark the completion of the grant awarded to the philosophy department by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and all that the department was able to achieve thanks to their generous support. With the passing of Charles Mills just six months prior to the conference, we added a session to commemorate his many contributions to critical philosophy of race—to the journal, to the field, and to many of us who benefited from his wisdom and humor. Mills’s research focused on the issue of racial justice and examined the reasons why the subject has been so little addressed in Western political philosophy. He saw his task as furthering “the project of unwhitening mainstream political philosophy by bringing issues of race and racial justice into the conversation.”2 While the invited article by Linda Martín Alcoff was written to celebrate the importance of Mills’s scholarship, many of the articles in this special issue reflect the influence and importance of his work in the field of critical philosophy of race.The journal and the work of the Critical Philosophy of Race Initiative is supported by the Penn State Rock Ethics Institute. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Contemporary US discourse on reparations tends to focus on the suppression of Black economic interests, but the harms of slavery are not exhausted by the labor expropriation of slaves and its concomitant wealth accumulation for white people and the United States at large. Reproductive oppression was constitutive of the institution of slavery, and its harms continue to reverberate today. This article thus calls for reproductive reparations, or the transparent and sustained attention to the effects of racialized reproductive oppression as (...) they intersect with calls for reparations for slavery. Reconceiving reparations through histories and presents of reproductive harm is required to more fully account for the wrongs of slavery and provide a broader reach for radical societal transformation in our present. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The social uprisings in the United States during the summer of 2020 renewed public discussion of forms of domination embedded into the social contracts of Western democracies. These discussions echo insights from within political philosophy regarding the domination contract. Despite numerous attempts to shed light on myriad aspects of the domination contract, an analysis of the role of colonialism and coloniality has yet to be sufficiently engaged by political philosophers, particularly within social contract theory. Drawing on the frameworks of (...) intersectionality and decolonial feminism, this article examines the interweavings between two prominent domination contracts, the racia-sexual contract and the colonial contract, to better account for the systematic exclusion of Black, Indigenous, and other women of color (BIWOC) from liberal social contracts that are foundationally predicated on forms of gendered, racialized, colonial domination. (shrink)

ABSTRACT W. E. B. Du Bois’s groundbreaking scholarship on race and racial prejudice was inseparable from his lifelong struggle for racial justice, Black liberation, and against social and political oppression. Both in his theoretical and in his historical-political work, Du Bois substantially and critically engaged with the “Jewish question”: with Jewish life, history, and politics, with the experiential perspective of an oppressed minority, and with the fight against prejudice and racial hatred. Throughout in life, and in particular in later years, (...) Du Bois was influenced by Karl Marx’s critical analysis of social and economic life; Marx’s own discussion of the “Jewish question,” concerning the difference between political equality and human emancipation, proved substantial to his argument on civil rights and racial justice. In this article, I argue that Du Bois did not only draw from the Jewish experience and from Marx’s work on the “Jewish question” in his work on African American history and politics, but also that he, in fact, reconsidered the “Jewish question” from an African American perspective, offering his own reading and understanding of the “Jewish question,” thus applying his concept of double consciousness for rethinking it as a question of racial identity and racial consciousness, and as relevant and applicable to Black liberation and the fight against racism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article argues that Frantz Fanon’s critique of the epistemology of the colonial situation is a complex, pluralized, epistemology of ignorance, where ignorance takes three main forms. Fanon first produces a critique of colonial ideology, in which ignorance is the product of the colonizers’ false justificatory ideology. Fanon unveils how Europeans, through human sciences such as “ethnopsychiatry” and “ethnophilosophy,” deliberately produce ignorance and devaluation of colonized subjects and colonized knowledge for purposes of domination. Second, ignorance is the unintentional result (...) of the partial, situated, standpoint of embodied knowers. Fanon does not intend to substitute a “black truth” to white ideology. He rather insists that while truth is unattainable under colonial conditions, the affective perspective of the oppressed/colonized is a necessary constitutive part of any objective account of the world. Third, by analyzing the “Conducts of confession in North Africa,” characterized by deliberate denial, lies, and opacity as resistance mechanisms, Fanon insists that no objective knowledge is possible in a colonial situation because of the total separation, and impossible epistemic collaboration, of dominant and dominated knowers. An anticolonial politics has to focus on producing the conditions of possibility of knowledge. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article I draw upon an analogy between a debate in the critical philosophy of race over the metaphysics of race and a debate in Buddhist philosophy of mind over the metaphysics of selves. I argue that there is a defensible irrealist theory of race, corresponding to the performativist theory of self found in certain Buddhist thinkers.

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the politics of nostalgia’s history as a fatal disease between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, especially as it was applied to slaves in late eighteenth-century Cuba. I trace nostalgia’s medical history beginning with its inauguration in Swiss medicine in 1688, and then describe the contours of its transformation into a military disease primarily affecting white soldiers in France and the United States. Finally, I translate and analyze key elements of Francisco Barrera y Domingo’s work on nostalgia (...) as experienced by slaves in sugar mills in Havana. I show that Barrera uses his analysis of nostalgia and its treatment to describe the slaves’ harrowing conditions and homesickness. Nevertheless, in denying slaves the ability to return home and in failing to propose the abolition of the slave system in the wake of the Haitian Revolution, I argue, Barrera in fact deploys the diagnosis of nostalgia in order to medicalize and pathologize the slaves’ reactions and resistance to their captivity. Thus, despite his sympathy to the slaves, I conclude that for Barrera, nostalgia functions as a tool to better manage the slaves as laborers and as property. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This is a brief introduction to a special section on the work of Achille Mbembe.

This article takes up the idea of language as a home and dwelling, and reconsiders what this might mean in the context of diasporic bilingualism – where as a ‘heritage speaker’ of a minority language, the ‘mother tongue’ may be experienced as both deeply familiar yet also alien or alienating. Drawing on a range of philosophical and literary accounts (Cassin, Arendt, Anzaldúa, Vuong, among others), this article explores how the so-called ‘mother tongue’ is experienced by heritage speakers in an English-dominant (...) world. From navigating one’s being in-between language-worlds, to the experience of language loss and efforts of reconnection, I argue that bilingual dwelling involves many complex layers often overlooked by philosophical accounts of language that do not attend to the lived world of the migrant and racialised outsider. By turning to the example of bilingual parenting, I then examine how such an undertaking, while labour-intensive, offers opportunities to refresh and co-create language-worlds anew. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article addresses the growing literature in critical race studies, which holds that racism is permanent or incurable, and that by adopting this pessimistic view of racism, we can enact improved and healthier racialized lives. I argue that the focus on curing anti-Black racism, and the failure to do so in the civil rights era and its aftermath has left people of all races, to varying degrees, stuck in pessimistic states of racialized anger, resentment, guilt, and shame. These pessimistic (...) states have brought about an additional level of oppression for targets of racialized oppression. I call it “meta-oppression,” and it is the oppression of being oppressed. I argue that this oppression has exacerbated the effects of the social disease of racism, and it has literally affected the physiologies of many African Americans. This article provides a diagnosis of these existential and physiological states of meta-oppression and a clarification of its characteristics. This diagnosis is an initial step in a larger project of formulating and enacting effective treatments for it. I then argue that meta-oppression is a helpful diagnostic tool for clarifying the characteristics and ramifications on Blacks of US systemic racism during the post–civil rights movement period. I aim to establish meta-oppression as an existential and physiological condition that requires attention so as to expand the social imaginations of people of color and to allow us to engage in more systemic joyful affirmations of our racialized lives while still living within racist conditions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Necropolitical arrangements of bifurcations delineate those ontological antagonisms that code Blackness as ontological lack (as non-position). In this article, I attempt to think about this evacuation of being in terms of the necropolitical’s fleshy excess, as what Alexander Weheliye’s work names “habeus viscus.” In so doing, I explore the implications, for our understanding of the “repressed proximities” of which the necropolitical consists, of arrangements that always-already include entanglements with their fleshy excess. In other words, if the nonposition of the (...) excluded is always positioned within, then living in/against the death-logics of necropolitics is always happening from that “nonposition within.” Hence, a reading of Achille Mbembe’s account of necropolitics must reckon with what Katherine McKittrick names “the creative consequences of the plot and the plantation,” with the implications of the inextricable proximal entanglements between the killing of life and the living that persists, despite. This article focuses on this “living despite.” Through a constellation of thinkers like Katherine McKittrick, Alexander Weheliye, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (to name a few), it aims to show that there are, perhaps, other futures that are already “now,” shattering what Édouard Glissant refers to as the “stone of time,” shattering (necropolitical) history as destiny. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Across the Mexico-United States borderlands, overlapping white supremacist and Anglo-nationalist movements are building private walls as monuments to Donald Trump. Numerous social justice activists and ecological stewards have warned that these Trumpist border walls present specific and new threats to social and ecological landscapes, particularly along the riparian sections of the borderlands. To slow their building and even topple these walls, justice activists and ecological caretakers are working to fortify networks with similar efforts elsewhere. In an effort to provide (...) analyses useful to such justice endeavors, I employ Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to situate the borderland activist struggles against the Trumpist walls within a broader context of struggle against the commemoration of racist terror in the US South. Specifically, I use Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitical deathworlds to illustrate some potential common cause linking protests against Trumpist walls in the Paso del Norte region of the Mexico-US border with a Black Lives Matter/Say Her Name coalition that is bringing down Confederate monuments in central Texas. In placing these movements in connection with each other, I highlight a synergy of the white supremacy of Jim Crow with the Anglo nationalism behind a Juan Crow variant of racist terror and anti-immigrant hatred driving the Trumpist wall constructions. Recognition of this convergence is one way, I maintain, for identifying opportunities for making common cause across the Americas’ myriad struggles to destroy the racist monuments that glorify the necropolitical legacy of racist colonialism and its ongoing social and ecological devastation. (shrink)