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WORK TITLE: On Obama
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Taylor, Paul Christopher
BIRTHDATE: 1967
WEBSITE:
CITY: University Park
STATE: PA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.la.psu.edu/people/pct2 * http://philosophy.la.psu.edu/directory/pct2 * http://news.psu.edu/expert/paul-taylor * https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorpaulc/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1967.
EDUCATION:Morehouse College, B.A., 1989; Rutgers University, Ph.D., 1997; Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, M.P.A., 2014.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Washington, Seattle, assistant professor of philosophy, 1998-2004; Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, associate professor of philosophy, 2004-10, chair of department, 2008-10; Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, associate professor, 2010-17, professor of philosophy and African American studies, 2017–, head of department of African American studies, 2011-15, associate dean for undergraduate studies. Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, visiting professor, 2007, 2011.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Ethics in Film, edited by Ward Jones and Samantha Vice, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2010. Contributor to journals and other periodicals, including Contemporary Aesthetics, Du Bois Review, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Philosophical Papers (South Africa), and Transition.
SIDELIGHTS
Paul C. Taylor, a Pennsylvania State University professor of philosophy and African American studies, and associate dean for undergraduate studies, “specializes in social philosophy, aesthetics, Africana thought, pragmatism, and race theory,” wrote a contributor to the Penn State College of Liberal Arts website. He is the coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race, the sole editor of The Philosophy of Race: Critical Concepts in Philosophy, and the author of Race: A Philosophical Introduction, Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, and On Obama.
Race
Taylor’s Race has become one of the foremost texts used for the study of the idea of race in modern culture—and, by extension, concepts like racism and racist ideologies. Taylor’s “work is self-consciously a work of activist philosophy that aims to engage with ongoing issues in society. To that end, much of the work tackles practical questions, including a chapter re-written for the second edition that considers whether America has become post-racial in the age of Obama. Taylor claims that the existence of post-racialism ‘can seem plausible only if issues like immigration can be rendered as non-racial phenomena,’” wrote a contributor to the LSE Review of Books. “But Taylor argues that the very real questions of policy surrounding immigration debates give way to `a maelstrom of existential and cultural panic’ that only exists because `immigrants…are imagined in racial terms.’” “Taylor tackles such issues the intersection of endogamy and ethics (whether, for instance, a black man might have a duty to marry a black woman in order to facilitate social cohesion against white supremacy),” explained Guy Lancaster in Marx & Philosophy, “and the value of affirmative action, the assault upon which illustrates ‘how the cultural inclination toward individualism and away from collective goals leaves us oblivious to the social dimensions of educational opportunities’ as well as the extent to which white supremacy ‘was not simply a matter of individual prejudices and slights but an affair of statecraft, of meticulously crafted distributive schemes, and of methodically expropriated resources.’” “This book, which remains a definitive introduction,” declared T.J. Curry, writing in Choice, “offers a somewhat provocative look into the application of Taylor’s theories.”
Race, Taylor demonstrates, continues to play an important role in American culture in the twenty-first century. “Taylor points out that race continues to have a referent, even if discursive rather than biological, manifest in what ‘everybody knows,'” Lancaster continued, “but that race-thinking in isolation has not led to racial atrocities—rather, it has always been paired with ‘other factors, like a shaky commitment to democracy, or a failure to constrain the pursuit of profit, public order, or political power with norms of decency and justice.’”
On Obama
In On Obama, Taylor looks at the relationship between racial theory and the election of the first African American president of the United States. “As Barack Obama’s tenure as America’s 44th president comes to a close,” “philosophical questions on his rise to prominence and his presidency come to light. Did Sen. Obama’s election as president usher in the `post-historical age’?” stated a contributor to Penn State News. “When Barack Hussein Obama became the president of the United States of America,” Taylor wrote in the introduction to On Obama, “observers around the world and across the political spectrum decided that an old era was ending and a new one was dawning. Many of these people, particularly among U.S. conservatives, took this as an occasion for nostalgia and lamentation. Many more … took it as a reason for hope and celebration. But for a substantial number of both supporters and critics, Mr. Obama’s election meant that things might now be different, in ways that would require new vocabularies, concepts, sensibilities, and practices.” “Taylor argues that Obama has not been post-partisan,” said S.E. Schier in Choice, “but rather has insisted on ‘compromise and centrism.'”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Taylor, Paul C., On Obama, Routledge (New York, NY), 2016.
PERIODICALS
Choice, November, 2013, T.J. Curry, review of Race: A Philosophical Introduction, p. 476; October, 2016, S.E. Schier, review of On Obama, p. 289.
ONLINE
LSE Review of Books, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ (July 15, 2013), review of Race.
Marx & Philosophy, https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/ (July 1, 2013), Guy Lancaster, review of Race.
Penn State College of Liberal Arts, http://www.la.psu.edu/ (August 30, 2017), author profile.
Penn State College of Liberal Arts Department of Philosophy, http://philosophy.la.psu.edu/ (August 30, 2017), author profile.
Penn State News, http://news.psu.edu/ (January 29, 2016), “Book by Penn State Professor Offers Philosophical Reflection of Obama Presidency”; (August 30, 2017), author profile.*
Paul Taylor
Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies at Penn State University
Penn State University Harvard University Kennedy School of Government
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Meticulous and creative thinker with strong background in anti-racist transformation agendas in global higher education. Eager to insist on the university's role as an incubator for democratic citizenship, and as both a resource for and reflection of wider public purposes. Experienced writer and public speaker. Proficient in building, rebuilding, and administering programs in changing institutional settings.
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Experience
Penn State University
Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies
Company NamePenn State University
Dates EmployedMay 2017 – Present Employment Duration4 mos
Penn State University
Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies
Company NamePenn State University
Dates EmployedJul 2015 – Present Employment Duration2 yrs 2 mos
Penn State University
Associate Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies
Company NamePenn State University
Dates EmployedJul 2010 – May 2017 Employment Duration6 yrs 11 mos
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Articulating Africana Philosophy conference
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Pennsylvania State University
Department Head, African American Studies
Company NamePennsylvania State University
Dates EmployedJul 2011 – Jun 2015 Employment Duration4 yrs
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Critical Philosophy of Race
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Book - Paul C. Taylor - Race: A Philosophical Introduction, 2nd Edition
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Rhodes University
Visiting Professor
Company NameRhodes University
Dates EmployedJul 2011 – Aug 2011 Employment Duration2 mos
Temple University
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Company NameTemple University
Dates EmployedAug 2004 – Jul 2010 Employment Duration6 yrs
Temple University
Chair, Department of Philosophy
Company NameTemple University
Dates EmployedJul 2008 – Jun 2010 Employment Duration2 yrs
Rhodes University
Visiting Professor
Company NameRhodes University
Dates EmployedApr 2007 – Jun 2007 Employment Duration3 mos
LocationGrahamstown Area, South Africa
University of Washington
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Company NameUniversity of Washington
Dates EmployedAug 1998 – Jun 2004 Employment Duration5 yrs 11 mos
LocationSeattle, WA
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Education
Harvard University Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University Kennedy School of Government
Degree Name Master of Public Administration (MPA) Field Of Study Public Administration
Dates attended or expected graduation 2013 – 2014
Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Degree Name PhD Field Of Study Philosophy
Dates attended or expected graduation 1991 – 1997
Morehouse College
Morehouse College
Degree Name BA Field Of Study Philosophy
Dates attended or expected graduation 1985 – 1989
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Paul has 4 projects4
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Projects
Critical Philosophy of Race The Pluralist's Guide to Philosophy Program on Philosophy After Apartheid Coal Black Voices
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Publications
Race: A Philosophical Introduction W.E.B. Du Bois
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Paul Taylor
Paul Taylor
ASSOCIATE DEAN UNDERGRADUATE STUDIES, Liberal Arts
pct2@psu.edu
(814) 863-5532
Personal Website
Paul Taylor is an associate professor of philosophy and African American studies. He is also the head of the department of African American studies. He has recently taught courses in Pragmatism and American Thought, African American Philosophy, Black Aesthetics, and Pragmatism and Democracy.
Education:
B.A., Morehouse College, Philosophy, 1989
M.A., Rutgers University, Philosophy, 1996
Ph.D., Rutgers University, Philosophy, 1997
M.P.A., Harvard University, 2014
Research Interests:
Race theory, aesthetics, pragmatism, social and political philosophy and Africana philosophy
AREAS OF EXPERTISE
Sociology
LOCATIONS
Liberal Arts, University Park
Paul Taylor
Paul Taylor
Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies
Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies
119 Sparks Building
Email: pct2@psu.edu
Office Phone: (814) 865-1438
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Education
B.A. in Philosophy (1989), Morehouse College – Cum Laude, Highest Honors in Philosophy
M.A. in Philosophy (1996), Rutgers University
Ph.D. in Philosophy (1997), Rutgers University
Dissertation: Reconstructing Aesthetics: John Dewey, Expression Theory, and Cultural Criticism. Committee members: Peter Kivy (chair), Howard McGary, Bruce Wilshire, Cornel West.
M.P.A. (2014) Harvard University [Masters in Public Adminstration, Kennedy School of Government]
Areas of Specialization
Race Theory
Aesthetics
Pragmatism
Social and Political Philosophy
Africana Philosophy
Recent Courses
Pragmatism and American Thought
African American Philosophy
Black Aesthetics (seminar)
Pragmatism and Democracy (seminar)
Recent Publications
Books
Race: A Philosophical Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity – Blackwell, 2004; 2nd ed., 2013)
Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (under contract, Blackwell)
On Obama (under contract, Routledge)
The Philosophy of Race (edited series of reference works; Routledge)
The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race (under contract, co-edited with Linda Martín Alcoff and Luvell Anderson)
Articles and Essays
“Taking Post-Racialism Seriously: From Movement Mythology to Racial Formation,” The Du Bois Review 11.1 (Spring 2014)
“Bare Ontology and Social Death,” Philosophical Papers (South Africa), Vol. 42, No. 3 (November 2013): 371-391
“Evading Evasion, Recovering Recovery,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 25:2 (2011), 174-83
“Living Pictures, Dead Souls,” Transition No. 104 (1 January 2011), pp. 58-72
“Melting Whites and Liberated Latinas: Identity, Fate, and Character in ‘Fools Rush In’,” in Ethics in Film, Ward Jones and Samantha Vice, eds. (Oxford University Press, 2010)
“The Last King of Scotland or The Last N----r on Earth: the Ethics of Race on Film,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Volume 2 (2009) – Aesthetics and Race: New Philosophical Perspectives (Monique Roelofs, ed.), http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=533
Keynote Addresses and Named Lectures
“Facing Ferguson,” The 2015 Capen Lectures, The University at Buffalo (SUNY) (forthcoming [October 19-21, 2015])
“The President as Racial Project,” Irving Thalberg Lecture, University of Illinois-Chicago (March 2015)
"Dust To Dust: What Pragmatism Might Be, With Lessons From Race Theory," Keynote Address, "Making It Work: US Thought and Culture Between Practice and Paralysis," conference of the University of Michigan US Literatures and Cultures Consortium, University of Michigan (April 2013)
“Make It Funky: Soul and Style,” Keynote Address, Frederick Douglass Institute Annual Conference, East Stroudsburg University (November 2011)
“Call Me Out My Name,” Keynote Address, Symposium on Affrilachia, University of Kentucky (March 2011)
"How to Make Our Ideals Clear," Kneller Lecture, Annual Meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society, Montreal (March 2009)
“Ethics and Collaboration: Toward a Post-Supremacist Philosophy,” Plenary Address, Annual Meeting of the Philosophical Society of South Africa, University of Fort Hare (January 2009)
“Assembling Black Aesthetics: Thoughts and Themes After Theory,” Keynote Address, 16th Annual Meeting of the Alain Locke Society, The George Washington University, Washington D.C. (November 2008)
“Life Beyond Bread: Why an Africana Aesthetic?” Plenary Address, Thirteenth Annual Meeting of The International Society for African Philosophy and Studies, plenary address (April 2007)
Research Interests
Aesthetics
American Philosophy
Analytic Philosophy
Philosophy of Race
Social and Political Philosophy
Paul C. Taylor
HOME / PEOPLE / PAUL C. TAYLOR
Paul C. Taylor
Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies and Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies
118 Sparks Building
University Park , PA 16802
Email: pct2@psu.edu
Office Phone: (814) 865-1438
Biography:
Paul C. Taylor is Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the College of the Liberal Arts and Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies. He joined the Philosophy faculty in 2010 and served as head of the department of African American Studies from 2011-2015. Paul completed his BA at Morehouse College, his MA and PhD at Rutgers, and his MPA at the Kennedy School of Government. He specializes in social philosophy, aesthetics, Africana thought, pragmatism, and race theory, and has published three books, four edited volumes, and more than 40 articles and book chapters in these areas. He has also provided commentary on race and politics for a variety of international print and broadcast outlets, including the CBC, the BBC, South Africa’s Mail and Guardian, and China’s Xinhua News.His honors include fellowships at the New America Foundation and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.
For appointments, contact Jennifer Hessert, 814-865-1438, juh3@psu.edu
Book by Penn State professor offers philosophical reflection of Obama presidency
January 29, 2016
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As Barack Obama’s tenure as America’s 44th president comes to a close, philosophical questions on his rise to prominence and his presidency come to light. Did Sen. Obama’s election as president usher in the “post-historical age” that many people thought it would? Has the United States become post-racial? Does Obama’s pragmatism show the way to a post-partisan approach to politics? And does the reining in of U.S. power and ambitions signal the emergence of a post-imperial moment?
These are questions raised in “On Obama” (Routledge, 2015), a book written by Paul C. Taylor, associate professor of philosophy and African-American studies and associate dean for undergraduate studies in the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts.
The aim of the book is not to answer these questions directly; instead, the purpose is to consider how President Obama’s public image and career raise these questions and explore some lines of thought that emerge in light of the questions. The book seeks to explore ideas of what Obama and his presidency symbolize that other historical and political theory books often presuppose.
Taylor earned his bachelor of arts in philosophy degree with honors from Morehouse College, his master of arts and doctorate degrees in philosophy from Rutgers University, and a master of public administration degree from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Previous honors include the Edmond J. Safra Network Fellowship at Harvard University and the Bernard L. Schwartz Fellowship at the New America Foundation.
Taylor’s teaching and research focuses on race theory, social and political philosophy, Africana philosophy, aesthetics, and pragmatism. He joined the Penn State faculty in 2010 and served as head of the Department of African-American Studies from 2011 until his appointment as associate dean in 2015. Taylor’s previous faculty appointments include Temple University, the University of Washington, and the University of Kentucky. He has also held visiting academic appointments at the Winthrop House, Harvard University; Rhodes University, South Africa; and SUNY College at Oneonta.
In addition to “On Obama,” Taylor has penned “The Philosophy of Race” (Routledge, 2012); “Race: A Philosophical Introduction” (Polity, 2013); and “Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics” (Blackwell, in press). He also provides commentary on race and politics to national and international media outlets.
Last Updated May 19, 2016
Taylor, Paul C.: On Obama
S.E. Schier
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 54.2 (Oct. 2016): p289.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Taylor, Paul C. On Obama. Routledge, 2016. 134p index ISBN 9780415525466 cloth, $140.00; ISBN 9780415525473 pbk, $33.95; ISBN 9781136317170 ebook, contact publisher for price
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Taylor (Pennsylvania State Univ.) examines the degree to which Obama's presidency has been "post-racial, post-partisan and post-imperial." He notes that Obama never claimed to be post-racial but does accuse him of double dealing in that the president has claimed that "race matters" but in office has acted "in ways that render it inert." Taylor argues that Obama has not been post-partisan but rather has insisted on "compromise and centrism" and has refused to "get tougher on his opponents." Thus Obama is less a true pragmatist than one who is "conventionally bipartisan." Taylor finds the post-imperial question regarding Obama so complex that it makes it difficult to draw a clear conclusion. His reaction is "diffidence" because it is "difficult to settle on a single tale to tell." Taylor's summary verdict is that Obama has demonstrated ethical failings in office, but Taylor does withhold moral condemnation. This short volume is heavily focused on racial and postcolonial theory not readily understood by general readers or most undergraduate students. It will mainly appeal to fellow academics who share Taylor's philosophical and theoretical orientation. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Graduate students; faculty.--S. E. Schier, Carleton College
Schier, S.E.
Taylor, Paul C.: Race: a philosophical introduction
T.J. Curry
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 51.3 (Nov. 2013): p476.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association CHOICE
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Taylor, Paul C. Race: a philosophical introduction. 2nd ed. Polity, 2013. 233p bibl index ISBN 9780745649658, $69.95, ISBN 9780745649665 pbk, $24.95
This volume by Taylor (Penn State Univ.) is regularly mentioned among those who teach courses in race theory. In this second edition (1st ed., CH, Jun'04, 41-5837), Taylor adds a new chapter. "From Anchor Babies to Obama: Are We Post-Racial Yet?" analyzes globalization, immigration, and the Obamas. Additionally, Taylor offers several revisions throughout the book. As he indicates, this volume is situated between two developments in critical race theory: the closeness of the field to mainstream philosophy--what is now called "critical philosophies of race"; and the shifting terms of debate considering post-racialism. Chapter 1 asks what race thinking is, and chapter 2 discusses challenges to this query. Chapter 3 introduces Taylor's radical constructivist view. Chapter 4 deals with racial identity, and Chapter 5 considers colorblindness amid the common charges against race-conscious policies like affirmative action. Chapter 6 displays Taylor's Foucauldian insights into his previous race theory, along with discussions that concretely implicate ethics and policy. This book, which remains a definitive introduction, offers a somewhat provocative look into the application of Taylor's theories to contemporary realities. Summing Up: Highly recommended. *** Lower-division undergraduates through researchers/faculty; general readers.--T. J. Curry, Texas A&M University
Curry, T.J.
Book Review: Race: A Philosophical Introduction by Paul C. Taylor
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Professional HartmanIn Race: A Philosophical Introduction, Paul C. Taylor blends metaphysics and social philosophy, analytic philosophy and pragmatic philosophy of experience, to discuss relevant and important questions on what race means today: Don’t we know better than to talk about race now? Are there any races? What is it like to have a racial identity? The second edition’s new concluding chapter explores the racially fraught issues of policing, immigration, and global justice, and interrogates the thought that Barack Obama has ushered in a post–racial age. A rich and enjoyable read, finds Matt Hartman.
Race: A Philosophical Introduction. Second Edition. Paul C. Taylor. Polity. April 2013.
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It’s a particularly interesting time to (re)release a philosophical introduction to critical race theory, especially one that adopts an explicit focus on racial discourse in the contemporary United States. So far, 2013 has seen the Supreme Court strike down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act and impose strict scrutiny on the use of race policies in college admissions, while the NAACP began a series of weekly protests in North Carolina combating a new voter ID law and austere budget cuts with racial implications.
In this climate, a work such as the second edition of Paul C. Taylor’s Race: A Philosophical Introduction bears a great deal of weight. Taylor takes great care to direct his “little book” to the exigencies of American racial dynamics, attempting to correct the often muddled discourse surrounding such a divisive topic. His method includes frequent references to popular culture, historical developments, and ongoing policy discussions, showing Taylor’s audience here to be the general public: those who experience racial dynamics in the everyday―and who therefore most likely carry opinions, experiences, and entrenched attitudes into the debates―but who lack familiarity with the intellectual work surrounding the subject.
Taylor strains himself to bring as few assumptions as possible into the work, beginning at the very beginning by considering the question of what, if anything, we mean when we talk about race. He draws on ordinary language philosophy and pragmatism in order to examine common sense understandings of “race-thinking”, which he defines as “a way of assigning generic meaning to human bodies and bloodlines” (p. 16). Taylor colours this general notion with an intellectual history of the concept of race, tracing the shifts from ancient us/them dynamics to a pre-modern “theocentric ethnography”, to the modern form of race-thinking that defined the five commonly pictured Races (p. 23).
The need for historical details stems from two key ideas: first, the general anthropological fact that “the human population is made up of smaller groups…more like each other…than they are like members of other groups” (p. 21); and, second, that there is a “deeply contextual nature [to]…the practices of racial identification” (p. 8). A philosophy of race, then, is necessarily contextual to a certain culture. Specifically, it is tied to a distribution of “social goods” defined “along the lines laid down by the…systems of meaning” defined by racial discourse (p. 24). As such, Taylor claims, racial discourse is a phenomenon worth investigating even if race turns out to be a mere fiction.
Taylor spends such time clarifying “words” to pre-emptively guide a later focus on “things” when he turns to the metaphysics of race. He continues his intellectual history by claiming that it culminates today in “a post-modern racialism [that…] involves flattening difference, insisting on the unity of the human family and the declining significance of race” (p. 76). But this form still “allow[s] the existing patterns of privilege to remain more or less in place”, leaving deep socioeconomic inequities that Taylor highlights in terms of income difference, rates of interracial marriage, cultural standards of beauty, etc. (p. 77).
It is against this background of “‘post-racist’ racism” (p. 80) that Taylor delineates his theory of racial metaphysics. He refers to himself as a “radical constructionist,” claiming that races are real, though socially constructed, things. Like money, they were shaped by an accidental history and may not keep their meaning across cultural borders (Taylor explains that “a person might be white in São Paulo but black in San Francisco” (p. 8)). But, for Taylor, that only specifies what kinds of things races are―namely, things that are “ontologically subjective but epistemologically objective” (p. 93)―not that they aren’t real things. He concludes that “our social practices create populations as well as breeding groups, by connecting certain bodies and bloodlines to certain social locations and modes of treatment,” thus making races “probabilistically defined populations” whose members are likely to have similar experiences (p. 117).
But Taylor’s concern in Race is not just metaphysics. His work is self-consciously a work of activist philosophy that aims to engage with ongoing issues in society. To that end, much of the work tackles practical questions, including a chapter re-written for the second edition that considers whether America has become post-racial in the age of Obama. Taylor claims that the existence of post-racialism “can seem plausible only if issues like immigration can be rendered as non-racial phenomena” (p. 184). But Taylor argues that the very real questions of policy surrounding immigration debates give way to “a maelstrom of existential and cultural panic” that only exists because “immigrants…are imagined in racial terms” (p. 190). The factual record surrounding crime, economics, and security doesn’t justify the intense worries that have historically latched on to the immigrant question, leading Taylor to conclude that “insisting on the salience of race to these phenomena will reveal things about them, and connections between them, that we might otherwise miss” (p. 202).
That modest conclusion defines Race as a whole. Taylor is nobly aware of the state of his topic today, and he deftly utilizes that knowledge to introduce readers to the long history of philosophical work surrounding race by carefully connecting the philosophical issues to students of anthropology, sociology, and political science. Taylor does admirably in that task, clarifying typical assumptions and ensuring the purchase of his work on ordinary life. But it also means he amplifies the inherent difficulty of balancing depth and breadth as he tries to juggle disciplines along with varying schools of thought (notably giving Foucault short shrift). Most disappointing is Taylor’s decision to open each chapter with short bits of dialogue he penned himself when he’d have been better served providing a literary reading. This is especially noticeable given the fact that he mentions Shakira, Chris Rock, and even Sir Mix-a-lot at various points.
But these small faults aside, Taylor has succeeded at introducing a wide audience to a timely and rich topic with considerable purchase on the American social discourse he targets.
'Race: A Philosophical Introduction' by Paul C. Taylor Paul C Taylor
Race: A Philosophical Introduction
Polity, Cambridge, 2nd edition 2013. 240pp., £17.99 / $24.95 pb
ISBN 9780745649665
Reviewed by Guy Lancaster
5
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About the reviewer
Guy Lancaster
Dr Guy Lancaster is the editor of the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture and author of Racial Cleansing in Arkansas, 1883–1924: Politics, Land, Labor, and Criminality (Lexington Books, 2014).
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Review
In 1929, Ronald Knox, a British clergyman and novelist, issued his “ten commandments” for mystery novels. Written largely in response to the era’s sensationalist fiction, they include such admonitions as “3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable” and “10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.” However, smack in the middle of this Decalogue of narrative common sense is “5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.” While such a rule these days sounds somewhat segregationist in the literary sense, Knox was actually responding to a proliferation of stories which all featured evil Chinese masterminds—Sax Rohmer had brought Fu Manchu to literary life in 1913, and even Agatha Christie herself employed the sinister Chinese trope with super-villain Li Chang Yen in her regrettable 1927 novel The Big Four.
One can easily imagine Ronald Knox, in other times and places, cautioning writers against employing the bestial African, the primitive but spiritual Native American, the hotheaded and passionate Latino/a, and the fanatical Arab, among other stereotypes, depending upon their relative popularity in the culture at large. As Paul Taylor observes in the beginning of Race: A Philosophical Introduction, this sort of race-talk “has been one of the principal media of modern Western society and culture, insinuating itself into our ideas of citizenship, family, education, crime, poverty, entertainment, and sex” (5). How this happened, how the idea of race came to be, has been explored by numerous other writers, but the broader philosophical implications of race as a system for classifying people remain debated, and these debates stand at the center of Taylor’s book, which manages to square the circle of providing a classroom-worthy primer on the subject, summarizing the literature to date, while also advancing its own compelling approach toward a description of something that is arguably not real.
In his introductory chapter, Taylor explains in detail how a philosophy of race “involves studying the consequences of race-talk, the practices of racial identification for which race-talk provides the resources” (11)—that is, rather than tackling the disputed reality of race, Taylor instead aims to analyze the meanings people assign to human bodies, especially as those meanings have been shaped by Europe’s path to modernity. Right off the bat, he sets out to answer three challenges to the project of building a coherent philosophy of race: the idea that any kind of race-thinking itself leads to racism, the falsity of racial biology, and the assertion that race is simply a cover for other sorts of variation, such as class divisions. Taylor points out that race continues to have a referent, even if discursive rather than biological, manifest in what “everybody knows,” but that race-thinking in isolation has not led to racial atrocities—rather, it has always been paired with “other factors, like a shaky commitment to democracy, or a failure to constrain the pursuit of profit, public order, or political power with norms of decency and justice” (30). Regarding the third objection, he admits that “[r]acist practices can certain result in the concentration of one race or another in particular economic niches,” but adds that “[r]ace-thinking isn’t class-thinking, essentially, because the two categories can get out of phase with each other,” while class, like ethnicity or caste, can, in turn, be racialized, “as when the callused hands and sun-darkened skin of the worker come to signify rudeness or inferiority (58-9).
The cornerstone of the book is the third chapter, covering the metaphysics of race. Grounding his work in the American experience, Taylor first examines the developments of late-modern racialism, as perhaps best exemplified by the 1965 Monynihan Report, which explained the persistent racial inequality in the United States as the result of deficiencies in black culture, rather than inherent black inferiority. And after that comes post-modern racialism, or what some call color-blind racism (to use Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s favored term) or racial neoliberalism (to use David Theo Goldberg’s), being the ostensibly progressive push to eliminate any form of racial classification for purposes of determining public policy; in this system, “the legacy of emancipatory struggle gets turned into a standing rebuke to any kind of race-consciousness—where ‘race-consciousness’ is expanded to include ostensibly ameliorative policies, like affirmative action” (80). So what does current Western race-talk point to? Taylor defines races as “social constructs. They are things that we humans create in the transactions that define social life. Specifically, they are the probabilistically defined populations that result from the white supremacist determination to link appearance and ancestry to social location and life chances” (89–90). In defending the reality of race, Taylor compares it to money, which is also ontologically subjective but epistemically objective, dependent upon human agreement for its existence: “Just as institutional context turns a properly produced piece of paper—a paper with the right ancestry and appearance—into legal tender, institutional context turns a person with the right ancestry and appearance—the right causal history and physical features—into a member of, say, the Asian race” (111). Of course, different societies will have different conventions, for both money and race, but this does not eliminate the power of those conventions.
While Part I of the book deals with theory, Part II examines practice, what race means for people’s existence in our society, especially how race impacts the existential condition, producing what W. E. B. Du Bois termed a “double consciousness” or what Ralph Ellison called the experience of “invisibility,” and how undoing the depredations caused by racialist thinking likely depends upon continued use of the race concept. Taylor tackles such issues the intersection of endogamy and ethics (whether, for instance, a black man might have a duty to marry a black woman in order to facilitate social cohesion against white supremacy) and the value of affirmative action, the assault upon which illustrates “how the cultural inclination toward individualism and away from collective goals leaves us oblivious to the social dimensions of educational opportunities” as well as the extent to which white supremacy “was not simply a matter of individual prejudices and slights but an affair of statecraft, of meticulously crafted distributive schemes, and of methodically expropriated resources” (176). The last chapter addresses how race intersects with the growing concerns over immigration in America, as well as the increased securitization of society. Taylor explicitly defines immigration enforcement as a racial project, no matter how much proponents want to argue that they are simply “upholding the law,” by pointing out that “the most familiar arguments and ideas about what the USA is… descend from traditions that were forged in the fires of classical racialism,” especially in the implicit, unstated assumption that America proper is a white man’s country, dating from the first European settlers to touch down here (195-6). Likewise do globalization and securitization define certain populations as problematic, as being the incarnation of specific weaknesses rather than struggling against the policies of hegemonic powers—constant American intervention in Haiti (including the installation of dictators) preventing that nation from managing itself, just as the prison-industrial complex in the United States regularly lobbies for an ever-expanded criminal code, one filled with laws that disproportionately (and purposefully) target minority populations, as with the well-known disparity in sentencing faced by users of crack cocaine versus the powdered form. (Lisa Marie Cacho refers to these as “de facto status crimes” in her 2012 book, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected.) Like a virus does old-fashioned racialism mutate into new forms.
Many historians like David Roediger understand the modern Western view of race largely as the product of unequal social relations in a capitalist society—race as we understand it emerged in that great triangle of an expansionist Europe, Africa, and the New World, in that ferment of exploration and the persistent desire to justify exploitation. Seeing race as intimately caught up in manufactured economic inequality, many on the Left have operated on the assumption that the elimination of class will, accordingly, eliminate the salience of race as a social division. But race is not simply another word for class, and an emphasis on class to the exclusion of all other modes of division and oppression overlooks “the complex nature of Negro life,” as African-American writer Richard Wright put it in Black Boy (1993). As Wright listened to communist street speakers in 1930s Chicago, he ruminated these speakers had taken “the first step toward a creative attitude toward life” but seemed to be lacking the bigger picture, that “if the Negro solved his problem, he would be solving infinitely more than his problem alone. I felt certain that the Negro could never solve his problem until the deeper problem of American civilization had been faced and solved. And because the Negro was the most cast-out of all the outcast people in America, I felt that no other group in America could tackle this problem of what our American lives meant so well as the Negro could” (350).
It is a point that Babacar Camara makes in his 2011 book, Marxist Theory, Black/African Specificities, and Racism (reviewed here in June 2013)—the struggle for justice must occur at the intersection of all forms of oppression, or it will simply end up recreating old forms of social division and not even recognize them. This is what makes the witty and clearly-written Race: A Philosophical Introduction such a valuable book, for Taylor not only thoroughly dissects the concept of race to show its inner workings but also provides a cogent and rational argument for the continued employment of race as a category for both describing our present social reality as well as serving to undo the harm inflicted by ever-evolving forms of racialism. As he writes, “Unlearning our version of Race-thinking would require a massive effort at public education, and anything related to public education won’t go anywhere unless it works through a variety of racial neuroses and through an assortment of issues in ethnic politics that we misleadingly think of as racial” (128). True liberation occurs at both the collective and individual levels, and with this book in hand, we can begin the process of learning to challenge our own easy assumptions (after all, both racist and anti-racist ideologies can fall prey to simplistic thinking) and to discover our own racial neuroses with the goal of at long last dismantling the system of white supremacy in all its manifestations.
1 July 2013