Blackness Visible : Essays on Philosophy and Race /

Blackness Visible : Essays on Philosophy and Race /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Mills, Charles W. (Charles Wade)
Imprint:	Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1998.
Description:	1 online resource (xx, 244 pages)
Language:	English
Series:	Book collections on Project MUSE.
Subject:	Afrocentrism. African Americans -- Race identity. Racism -- United States -- Philosophy. African American philosophy. African American philosophy. African Americans -- Race identity. Afrocentrism. Race relations -- Philosophy. Racism -- Philosophy. United States -- Race relations -- Philosophy. United States.
Format:	E-Resource Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11451809

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9781501702952 1501702955 080143467X 0801484715 9780801484711 9780801434679
Digital file characteristics:	data file
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-233) and index. Print version record.
Summary:	Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience. Ralph Ellison's metaphor of black invisibility has special relevance to philosophy, whose demographic and conceptual "whiteness" has long been a source of wonder and complaint to racial minorities. Mills points out the absence of any philosophical narrative theorizing and detailing race's centrality to the recent history of the West, such as feminists have articulated for gender domination.European expansionism in its various forms, Mills contends, generates a social ontology of race that warrants philosophical attention.Through expropriation, settlement, slavery, and colonialism, race comes into existence as simultaneously real and unreal: ontological without being biological, metaphysical without being physical, existential without being essential, shaping one's being without being in one's shape.His essays explore the contrasting sums of a white and black modernity, examine standpoint epistemology and the metaphysics of racial identity, look at black-Jewish relations and racial conspiracy theories, map the workings of a white-supremacist polity and the contours of a racist moral consciousness, and analyze the presuppositions of Frederick Douglass's famous July 4 prognosis for black political inclusion. Collectively they demonstrate what exciting new philosophical terrain can be opened up once the color line in western philosophy is made visible and addressed.
Other form:	Print version: 9781501702952

Table of Contents:

Non-Cartesian sums: philosophy and the African-American experience
Alternative epistemologies
"But what are you really?" The metaphysics of race
Dark ontologies: blacks, Jews, and white supremacy
Revisionist ontologies: theorizing white supremacy
The racial polity
White right: the idea of a Herrenvolk ethics
Whose Fourth of July? Frederick Douglass and "original intent."