The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity (Just Ideas: Transformative Ideals of Justice in Ethical and Political Thought)

The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity (Just Ideas: Transformative Ideals of Justice in Ethical and Political Thought)

Michael J. Monahan

Language: English

Pages: 261

ISBN: B01JXQD3YG

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


How does our understanding of the reality (or lack thereof ) of race as a category of being affect our understanding of racism as a social phenomenon, and vice versa? How should we envision the aims andmethods of our struggles against racism? Traditionally, the Western political and philosophical tradition held that true social justice points toward a raceless future-that racial categories are themselves inherently racist, and a sincere advocacy for social justice requires a commitment to the elimination or abolition of race altogether. This book focuses on the underlying assumptions that inform this view of race and racism, arguing that it is ultimately bound up in a politics of purity-an understanding of human agency, and reality itself, as requiring all-or-nothing categories with clear and unambiguous boundaries. Racism, being organized around a conception of whiteness as the purest manifestation of the human, thus demands a constant policing of the boundaries among racialcategories.Drawing upon a close engagement with historical treatments of the development of racial categories and identities, the book argues that races should be understood not as clear and distinct categories of being but rather as ambiguous and indeterminate (yet importantly real) processes of social negotiation. As one of its central examples, it lays out the case of the Irish in seventeenth-century Barbados, who occasionallyunited with black slaves to fight white supremacy-and did so as white people, not as nonwhites who later became white when they capitulated to white supremacy.Against the politics of purity, Monahan calls for the emergence of a creolizing subjectivitythat would place such ambiguity at the center of our understanding of race. The Creolizing Subject takes seriously the way in which racial categories, in all of their variety and ambiguity, situate and condition our identity, while emphasizing our capacity, as agents, to engage in the ongoing contestation and negotiation of the meaningand significance of those very categories.

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raise questions about the criteria by which we evaluate the success of our potential answers to that question. We must ask, in other words, not only whether races are real but also how we understand the meaning and significance of that question, and what would count as a good answer to it. It is in this Husserlian spirit that this text will operate.10 In chapter 1 I begin with an analysis of historical approaches to the question of race not because I take the issue to be a fundamentally or

philosophical circles, racial eliminativism, the view that race is an empty and ultimately harmful concept that should be eliminated altogether, has effectively become the fulcrum for debates surrounding racial ontology at least from the publication of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House (1992). Since Appiah’s articulation of an argument for the illusory status of race, and the moral imperative to abandon the concept, the most common starting point in discussions of the ontology of race

or no answer to the question of the racial status of the Irish in seventeenth-century Barbados, or of any particular group or individual in any particular time and place. The dynamic and ambiguous concept of race that I will argue for rules out any such simple and complete answers to this sort of question. Clearly, the brief sketch of the direction I wish to take offered in this chapter must raise more questions than it answers. In the next two chapters, my task will be to offer a more complete

an as-yet-unrealized future. It is not only the present that is shaped by the future-directedness of consciousness but also the past. Because of my desire to write a novel, my history of poverty and the tepid public responses to my guitar playing is no longer the history of my failure as a musician, but is in fact the history of my path to becoming a novelist—the tempering of my terse and hard-boiled prose. In the context of racial ontology, this means not only that the history of race conditions

more negative experiences (one of my first graduate seminar papers on Hegel and Race was dismissed as “a hot-button social issue” rather than as proper philosophy), into a focus on the philosophy of race and racism. One of the things that happen quite often when one is a white person focusing on race in philosophy is that we are asked (almost always by other white philosophers—I don’t recall a nonwhite philosopher ever asking such a question) about what led us to our interest in this topic, as if

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