PHILOSOPHY AND RACE

What is race?  Is it a biological or a social reality, or both?  Does race exist in some kind of necessary relation to other social phenomena, or does it have an independent dynamic?  Does it evolve in history, and, if so, how?  Does race presuppose racism?  What is racial identity?  Can racial solidarity be a legitimate political ideal?  How does our understanding of race bear on our ability to challenge racism and racial injustice generally?  What tactics are justifiable, which strategies can be effective?  What is the significance of such debates as those over affirmative action and the underclass to the evolution of race in the US?

We will examine these and related questions while discussing the work of a number of contemporary thinkers as well as the most influential theorist on these themes, W.E.B. Du Bois.  We will consider how these issues relate to debates in the history of philosophy and how central they may be to outstanding issues in philosophy today.
 

REQUIRED TEXTS:

 Lewis, David Levering, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader  (R)
 Boxill, Bernard, Blacks and Social Justice, revised ed. (BSJ)
 Morrison, Toni, Playing in the Dark
 Ezorsky, Gertrude, Racism and Justice
 West, Cornel, Keeping Faith:  Philosophy and Race in America  (KF)
 Davis, Angela Y.,  Women, Race and Class  (WRC)

 Course pack at Michigan Documents  (C)
 

COURSE OUTLINE:

Aug. 27 Course overview:  what are the philosophical questions about race?

 I.  Philosophy and historical conceptions of race

Aug. 29 Race as concept and reality;  related concepts:  slavery, freedom, social organization;  inequality and power in philosophy.

 Readings: Aristotle, The Politics, from Book I;  Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, chapters 13, 14, 15:  "Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as Concerning their Felicity and Misery," "Of the First and Second Natural Laws, Of Contracts," "Of Other Laws of Nature"; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book I, chs. 1 through 8 C

Sept. 3 Africa, Africans, and modern racial thinking

 Readings:  G.W.F. Hegel, from The Philosophy of World History, "Geographical Basis of World History: Africa";  Richard Popkin, "Hume's Racism Reconsidered"; Joseph E. Harris, from Africans and their History, "A Tradition of Myths and Stereotypes"; Christian Delacampagne, "Racism and the West: From Praxis to Logos" C

Sept. 5 Early theorization of race

 Readings:  Comte de Buffon, "A Natural History, General and Particular";  Immanuel Kant, "On the Different Races of Man";  Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, "On the Natural Variety of Mankind;  Stephen Jay Gould, from The Mismeasure of Man, "American Polygeny and Craniometry before Darwin" C

   Recommended:  Banton, Racial Theories

Sept. 10 Conceptual issues about agency and identity relevant to race

 Readings: G.W.F. Hegel, from The Phenomenology of Spirit, "Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness:  Relations of Master and Servant" C

Sept. 12 Review of conceptual themes
 

 II.  Challenging biological conceptions of race

Sept. 17   Implications of genetics for the idea of race;  exploring what is at issue in debates over race as a biological reality

 Readings: Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Racisms";  "The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race" C

Sept. 19   Du Bois's argument and its interpretation

 Readings: W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Conservation of Races," pp. 20-27 R
   Lucius Outlaw, "On W.E.B. Du Bois's 'The Conservation of Races'" C

Sept. 24    More on Du Bois

 Readings: Bernard R. Boxill, "Separation or Assimilation?" BSJ
   Tommy L. Lott, "Du Bois on the Invention of Race" C

Sept. 26    Toward a relational conception of race

 Readings: Du Bois, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" and "Of the Meaning of Progress," "The Color Line Belts the World," "The First Universal Races Congress," "The Negro Problems," "The Gift of the Spirit," "The black Man Brings His Gifts," "The Negro College," "On Being Ashamed of Oneself: An Essay on Race Pride," "The Present Plight of the German Jew," "Japanese Colonialism," "Shanghai," "Japan, Color, and Afro-Americans," "Negroes Have an Old Culture," "Gandhi and the American Negroes," "China and Africa,"  pp. 28-95  R
 

 III.  Developing a social and historical conception of race

Oct. 1  Thinking in distinctively social terms;  relational thinking and structural thinking;  race and recognition

 Readings: Du Bois, from "White Supremacy and National Politics" ("Houston," "the Arkansas Riots,"  "the Souls of White Folk," "Haiti,"  "Reduced Representation in Congress," "the Superior Race,"  Lynchings"), pp. 448-480  R
   Franz Fanon, "The Fact of Blackness" C

Oct. 3   More on the relational approach

 Readings: Du Bois,  from "Social Science and Civil Rights," ("Economics," "The Meaning of All This,"  The Call of Kansas,"  "Reconstruction and its Benefits," "The Propaganda of History,"  "The Negro Family in the United States"), pp. 153-220  R
   Howard McGary, "Alienation and the African-American Experience" C

Oct. 8  Race, structure and agency in history;  class, power, and inequality

 Readings: Du Bois, "Labor in Black and White" ("Brothers, Come North," "The Negro and Radical Thought," "The American Federation of Labor and the Negro," "Marxism and the Negro Problem," "Behold the Land"), pp. 529-553  R
   Bernard R. Boxill, "The Race-Class Question";  Lucius T. Outlaw, "Race and Class in the Theory and Practice of Emancipatory Social Transformation" C;
   Cornel West, "Race and Social Theory" KF

Oct. 10  Race, structure, class, continued;  specifics of racial reciprocity;

 Readings: Du Bois, from "Radical Thought: Socialism and Communism" ("The Black Worker," "Negroes and the Crisis of Capitalism in the US")  pp. 594-626;  from "War and Peace" ("An Essay Toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War" "The Negro and the War,"  "Negro's War Gains and Losses"), pp. 698-733, 744-46  R
   Michele M. Moody-Adams, "Race, Class, and the Social Construction of Self-Respect" C
 

Oct. 15  Analytical issues

 Readings: David Theo Goldberg, "The Social Formation of Racist Discourse";  Etienne Balibar, "Paradoxes of Universality"  C

Oct. 17   Race and gender questions

 Readings: Angela Davis,  "The Legacy of Slavery: Standards for a New Womanhood," "The Anti-Slavery Movement and the Birth of Women's Rights,"  "Class and Race in the Early Women's Rights Campaign," "Racism in the Woman Suffrage Movement"  "Woman Suffrage at the Turn of the Century: The Rising Influence of Racism"  WRC
   Du Bois, "Women's Rights" ("The Burden of Black Women," "The Black Mother," "Hail Columbia?" "Woman Suffrage," "The Damnation of Women," "Sex and Racism"), pp. 291-314  R

Oct. 22   Race and cultural representation

 Readings: Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark
   Marilyn Frye, "White Woman Feminist" C

Oct. 24   Review
 

 IV.  Race politics

Oct. 29   Aims and strategies of racial solidarity

 Readings: Bernard Boxill, "Two Traditions in African American Political Philosophy" C
   Howard McGary, "Racial Integration and Racial Separatism:  Conceptual Clarifications"  C
   Boxill, "Self-Respect" BSJ

Oct. 31 Du Bois on political strategies

 Readings:  Du Bois, "Niagara, The NAACP, and Civil Rights" ("The Niagara Movement: Address to the Country," "NAACP," "Social Equality and Racial Intermarriage," "On Being Crazy," "The Tuskegee Hospital," "The Amenia Conference," "Propaganda and World War," "Doubts Gandhi Plan," "The Negro Since 1900: A Progress Report," "What is the Meaning of  'All Deliberate Speed'?", "A Program of Reason, Right And Justice for Today," "China"), pp. 367-436  R

Nov. 5   Du Bois on separatism and Pan-Africanism

 Readings: Du Bois, "Separatist Solutions," ("The Class Struggle," "Segregation," "Separation and Self-Respect," "A Negro Nation Within the Nation," "The C.M.A. Stores"), pp. 555-71;
   from "Africa, Pan-Africa, and Imperialism" ("To the Nations of the World," "The African Roots of the War," "The Negro's Fatherland," "What Is Africa to Me?'", "A Second Journey ot Pan-Africa," "The Pan-African Congresses: The Story of a Growing Movement"), pp. 639-676  R
   Adolph Reed, "W.E.B. Du Bois:  A Perspective on the Bases of His Political Thought" C

Nov. 7   Politics, leadership, and intellectuals

 Readings: Du Bois, "Race, Class and Leadership:  The Talented Tenth" ("Of MR. Booker T. Washington and Others," "The Parting of the Ways," "Back to Africa," "A Lunatic or a Traitor," "Marcus Garvey and the NAACP," "Leadership Is Vital," "The Talented Tenth: Memorial Address," "The Present Leadership of American Negroes," "Will the Great Gandhi Live Again?", ""Crusader Without Violence,"), pp. 319-362 R
   Boxill, "The Limits of Civil Disobedience" BSJ

Nov. 12   Intellectuals and political evolution

 Readings: Cornel West, "Dilemmas of the Black Intellectual," "The Paradox of the African American Rebellion," "The Role of Law in Progressive Politics"  KF
   Frank M. Kirkland, "Modernity and Intellectual Life in Black" C

Nov. 14   Culture and cultural criticism

 Readings: Du Bois, "The Politics and Propaganda of Arts and Letters" (Jesus Christ in Texas," "The Younger Literary Movement," "A Negro Art Renaissance," "Criteria of Negro Art," "On Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven," "Mencken," "Passing by Nella Larsen," "Black No More by George S. Schuyler" pp. 495-524 R  West, "The New Cultural Politics of Difference," "Black Critics and the Pitfalls of Canon Formation," "Horace Pippen's Challenge to Art Criticism,"  KF
 

 V.  Combatting racism

Nov. 19   The affirmative action debate

  Readings:  Gertrude Ezorsky, Racism and Justice, pp. 1-95

Nov. 21   Affirmative action, continued

  Readings:  Boxill, "Affirmative Action," BSJ
  Anita A. Allen, "The Role Model Argument And Faculty Diversity" C

Nov. 26 Debates over reform strategies

  Readings:  Boxill, "The Color-Blind Principle," "Black Progress and the Free Market," "Busing: The Backward-looking Argument," "Busing: The Forward-looking Argument," "Ronald Dworkin and Busing,"  BSJ

Dec. 3   Debates over the underclass idea

  Readings:  recommended:  Lawson, ed., The Underclass Question

Dec. 5 Review
 

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:

Students must attend all classes and be prepared to discuss assigned readings.  For each section of the course there will be a short writing assignment that will focus on the critical analysis of specific arguments and concepts.  A term paper will develop an extended treatment (8 to 10 pages) of a problem or controversy regarding race.  The short writing assignments will be due Sept. 17, Oct. 1, Oct. 29, Nov. 19 and Dec. 5, and the term paper will be due no later than 10 am, Friday Dec. 13 in the Philosophy Department Office, 503 S.Kedzie Hall.
 

OFFICE HOURS:

Tuesdays and Thursdays,                                     512 S.Kedzie Hall
2:15 to 3:30 and by appointment                  phone:  353-9378 or 355-4490
                                              E-mail:  PetrsnRT@pilot.msu.edu

TEXTS ON ASSIGNED READING:

 Balibar, Etienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class
 Banton, Michael, Racial Theories
 Collins, Patricia Hill, Black Feminist Thought
 Cox, Oliver, Caste, Class, and Race
 Davis, F. James, Who is Black?
 Dent, Gina, ed., Black Popular Culture: A Project by Michele Wallace
 Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic
 Goldberg, David Theo, ed., Anatomy of Racism
 Goldberg, David Theo, Racist Culture
 Gordon, Lewis, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism
 Gossett, Thomas F., Race: The History of an Idea in America
 Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man
 Harding, Sandra, ed., The "Racial" Economy of Science
 Harris, Leonard, ed., The Philosophy of Alain Locke
 Harris, Leonard, ed., Philosophy Born of Struggle:  An Anthology of African-American Philosophy
 Lawson, Bill E., ed., The Underclass Question
 Lewins, et. al., Not in Our Genes
 McGary, Howard and Bill Lawson, Between Slavery and Freedom
 Omni and Winant, Racial formation in the US
 Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and Social Death
 Roedigger, David, The Wages of Whiteness
 Sartre, J-P, Anti-Semite and Jew
 Wellman, David T., Portraits of White Racism, second edition