Gender, Race and Philosophy: The Blog

Working Through Trauma

In his momentous speech on Tuesday, Barack Obama invoked a psychoanalytic term to describe the task facing the country: "working through." 

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through -- a part of our union that we have yet to perfect.

In psychoanalysis "working through" is what one does to deal with loss or trauma. If one doesn't work through the trauma, one is bound to remain stuck in it, stuck in a repetition compulsion that comes without conscious bidding and causes further damage. This psychoanalytic lesson is so widely accepted that a presidential candidate can invoke it without anyone raising an eyebrow.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

...Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America -- to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

Obama was calling on people to stop ignoring the problem of race, to stop simplifying and amplifying stereotypes.  His speech was a signal that he was changing course and would start paying more attention, instead of saying that his presidential race is not about race.  The bizarre thing is that a country still traumatized by race can't seem to unite behind someone of color unless "the race thing" is not front and center. But working through the trauma requires making it a focal point in some way or another.

Just paying attention isn't enough. To the extent that the trauma is below the surface of consciousness, some work needs to be done to bring it to the surface -- in a constructive and not destructive way.  The psychoanalytic way was through the "talking cure." 

Can we find or create a metaphorical couch big enough or safe enough for the country to work through this issue?

Noëlle McAfee's Reply to Commentators Posted

In the fall, the SGRP posted a symposium on Noëlle McAfee's essay, "Two Feminisms."  The commentators were Amy R. Allen, Nancy Bauer, Scott L. Pratt and Linda M. G. Zerilli.  Noëlle has written a reply to her commentators and it is now posted and available.  You can find it by going to the SGRP website and following the link on top to "Symposia" and scrolling down to Fall 2007.  (Our apologies to Noëlle for taking so long to edit and post her reply!)

**Please note: The links to the Pratt and Zerilli essays were broken, but have been fixed. 3/21/08

We encourage discussion of this symposium on the blog.  What are your thoughts?

Classifying recent work on race

Nathan Placencia, a grad student at UC-Riverside teaching this year at DePauw, was at the Dayton Colloquium last weekend.  I really enjoyed getting to know him and his work.  He sent me a question he'd like our blog community to consider (below).  I hope people will be inspired to help him out!  --SH.

"While working on my dissertation I've been trying to map out the domains of inquiry in which contemporary philosophers of race operate. So far I've come up with at least three very rough divisions:
    (1) theorizing about the social scientific use of race;
    (2) theorizing about the political use of race; and
    (3) theorizing about the popular, folk, or ordinary use of race.
For (1) the primary goal of one's theoretical work is to come up with a viable conception of race that can be used by social scientists to build better theories as well as to improve empirical work. Or one argues that there is no viable conception of race and, therefore, social scientists should stop using it. For (2) the primary goal is to expose conceptions of race that have been used to oppress populations and to construct new conceptions of race that either empower oppressed populations or in someway fight against their oppression. For (3) the primary goal is to capture the "folk" meaning of "race talk" and/or to describe how ordinary practices of racial categorizing operate. Usually what follows this investigation is a discussion of whether or not "race talk" and its corresponding practices ought to be eliminated, significantly revised, or conserved.

I would like to find out if practitioners in the field think that this in apt way to divide up contemporary theoretical work on race. And, if so, how would they classify their own work along these lines."

New Social Science Blog on Race/Racism

Readers may want to check out the excellent new blog Racism Review. I was particularly struck by this very nice post by Adia Harvey on the way that many people seem to think the only racists are those who self-identify as racists.

Is being racist now simply subject to the individual’s choice? Are you only racist if you self-identify as such? At what point do your actions define who you are? If stereotyping racial minorities, passively or actively supporting institutions or policies that uphold inequality, and engaging in behaviors that endorse or perpetuate the basest, most negative images of minorities doesn’t make you a racist, what does? Or to paraphrase comedian Chris Rock, what do you have to do to be a racist? Shoot Medgar Evers? I can’t think of too many other areas where self-definition overrides action in the same ways that it does when we think about who is and isn’t racist. For instance, if I register to vote as a Republican, donate money to John McCain, agree with his policies, and vote for him in the primary and general election, would anyone believe me if I then insisted that I was a Democrat?

Building Coalitions Across Difference Conference

Just got back from a really interesting conference: Building Coalitions Across Difference, at the University of Dayton. (Thanks to all those at UD who made the conference possible.)  Themes in the papers included:

• How does one's social position affect one's ability to know, especially, to have knowledge of other social positions?  Is it possible to have knowledge across substantial social divisions?  What accounts of knowledge are best suited to accommodate knowers within diverse communities?
• What is an "identity"?  What are intersectional identities?  Are gender and race identities obligatory?  Does membership in an identity bring with it moral and political obligations?
• How does oppression affect one's ability to know and to act?  How can critique of conceptual frameworks help undermine oppression?
• What is solidarity?  What does solidarity with others require of us?

Speakers and their topics are listed below.  It would be great to hear from other participants!

Gaile Pohlhaus, "Coalitional Knowing"
Alison Bailey, "On Intersectionality and White Feminist Philosophy."
Alexis Shotwell, "Enacting Solidarity"
Nathan R. Placencia, "Internalization and Social Identities"
Brian Thomas, "Identification and Organization: Problems for Nominalist Conceptions of Racial Identity?"
Shireen Roshanravan, "Passing-as-if"
Penelope Ingram, "The Signifying Body: Veiled Women and the Ethics of Representation."
Carol Hay, "Rationality and Oppression"
Lorraine Code, "'They Treated Him Well': Fact, Fiction and the Politics of Knowledge"
Camisha Russell, "Thin Skin, Thick Blood: The 'Non-philosophical' Underpinnings of Black Solidarity."
Eric Thomas Weber, "Construction, Art and Politics"

Keynotes:
Tommie Shelby, "The Ethics of the Oppressed: Reflections on Richard Wright's 'Uncle Tom's Children'"
Sally Haslanger, "Race, Gender and Ideology Critique"

New Perspectives in Race Theory

I've organized a small conference of new work in analytic race theory at the University of San Francisco.  The conference will be held on April 25 - 26, 2008.  It is free and open to the public.  More information can be found at:  http://www.usfca.edu/fac-staff/rrsundstrom/NPRT.html

The presenters, and the titles of their presentations, are:

Luc Faucher (Université du Québec à Montréal),  "Race, moral ills and emotions: for a finer texturing of emotions underlying racial ills"

Eduard Machery (University of Pittsburgh),  "The Folk Concept of Race"

Ron Mallon (University of Utah),  "Beyond Non-Essentialism and Toward a New Standard Anti-Racialist Argument"

Quayshawn Spencer (Stanford University),  "Is Cladistic Race a Genuine Kind?"

Paul Taylor (Temple University), “The Racial Stance: Pragmatism and Post-Analytic Race Theory”

Mark Risjord (Emory University), "Race and Social Role"

Julie Shulman (Alliant International University) and Joshua Glasgow (Victoria University of Wellington),  "Is Race-Thinking Biological, Social, or Something Else, and Does It Matter for Racism?  An Exploratory Study”

Michael Root (University of Minnesota),  "The Use of Racial Categories in the Social and Biomedical Sciences"

Yolonda Wilson (Duke University),  "BiDil and the Ethics of Racialized Medicine"

Keynote: Sally Haslanger (MIT), "Race, Gender and Ideology Critique"

Val Plumwood, ecofeminist philosopher, dies

I just heard through the FEAST list that Val Plumwood has died, due (probably) to snakebite.  Here's an article from the Canberra Times site:
http://canberra.yourguide.com.au/news/local/general/miracle-croc-survivor-found-dead/1194437.html

And this on the Sydney Morning Herald site:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/03/03/1204402331572.html

Sad news....

New Work on Implicit Bias

Erica Roedder and Dan Kelly have just posted a very interesting and valuable paper on implicit bias called, "Racial Cognition and the Ethics of Implicit Bias."  It discusses recent work in psychology on implicit racial bias and considers whether it is morally problematic, in an of itself, to have implicit biases.  The paper considers work by Garcia, Blum and Corlett to determine whether and how their accounts of racism take a stand on implicit bias and find that there are important unaswered questions.

If you haven't taken the Implicit Association Test (IAP), you should take it before you read this paper.  Don't try to learn about how the test works first, just take it and see what happens.  I myself have qualms about whether the test is effective for those who know they have implicit biases and try to guard against their impact, but we can talk about that in a later series of posts.