underwrites and, one hopes, illuminates these reflections on the prospects for a post-racial world.
The optimism that marked much of the Obama era always struck some of us as ill-advised, and for a variety of reasons, some of which I’ll come to in the pages that follow. The clearest stake in the heart of this optimism, though, was the event that more than anything else sets the context for the third edition of this book. In 2016 the administration of the first black president gave way to the administration of the man that Ta-Nehisi Coates calls “the first White president,” Donald J. Trump.2 Coates means for this description to capture Trump’s open determination to mobilize and weaponize whiteness, and to do so explicitly in response to, in repudiation of, Obama’s blackness. One might think that putting it this way is too strong or needlessly provocative – for my part, I find it spot on – but the underlying point is, or should be, indisputable (not least because Trump is usually happy to endorse it himself). The 45th US president’s political success is crucially tied to his whiteness and to his open embrace of a politics of whiteness. This book is also an introduction to some resources for thinking about issues like the politics of whiteness: it is a primer on the broadly ethical, deeply experiential considerations that emerge for attentive inhabitants and students of racialized social worlds.
I’ve used political events to contextualize each edition of this book in order to specify part of the burden that the book carries. To write about race is to take aim at a moving target. Race is a phenomenon that transforms and evolves in relation to a variety of social forces, including the rapid changes of the culture industries. What’s more, it does this out in the open, as it were, not in settings discernible only to scholars or available only under rigidly defined experimental conditions, which is to say that anyone who’s paying attention to the world that most of us experience every day will have some insight into what’s happening.
For all of these reasons, philosophical studies of race are apt to go stale rather more quickly than philosophy usually does. One way to register this fact and to keep it in view is by using temporal landmarks to orient the project. Another way is to keep an eye out for elements that don’t age well between editions. The Simple Stories that I used as a model for my chapter prologues are a rich resource and suggestive model, as I explain in the introduction. But Langston Hughes’s tone and framing in those stories can be challenging for contemporary readers. I didn’t manage these challenges as well as I might have in the earlier editions of this book. In hopes of doing better this time, I’ve tinkered with both main characters and with the language. Boyd is now a young woman and a daughter of immigrants, Jesse is a little more fully drawn, and the prose style now probably owes as much to Raymond Carver and Amy Hempel as to Hughes.
The practice of studying race is also rapidly evolving, as scholars in a variety of fields continue to dig out from under the myths of the past and refine the tools that they bring to the work. When the first edition of this book came out, contemporary professional philosophers had written very little on the subject. That has changed. This salutary development enabled me to set aside one of the burdens that shaped the original edition, but it also forced me into a difficult choice. In 2003 one could aspire to provide, all at once, a philosophical introduction to the topic of race and a comprehensive introduction to the field called “the philosophy of race.” Now that the field has grown in scale and complexity, with more people contributing more work exploring more questions in more detail, these two aspirations work at cross purposes. Forced to choose between introducing race in a philosophical spirit and introducing philosophical studies of race, I choose the former.
Having chosen philosophical engagement with the subject of race over an engagement with the subject of the philosophy of race, I should offer this warning to readers with some experience in this area: this may not be the book for you. If you’re expecting sustained engagements with cutting-edge work as it appears in the pages of professional journals, you will be deeply dissatisfied. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for a user-friendly introduction to the questions that animate that work, with bits of that work making guest appearances along the way, then we should get along just fine.
Notes
1 1. Laurie Goodstein and Tamar Lewin, “A Nation Challenged: Violence and Harassment: Victims of Mistaken Identity, Sikhs Pay a Price for Turbans,” New York Times, September 19, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/19/us/nation-challenged-violence-harassment-victims-mistaken-identity-sikhs-pay-price.html.
2 2. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The First White President,” Atlantic, October 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/.
Acknowledgments
A great many people and institutions have made this book possible. I’ll appeal in advance for the forgiveness of the ones I will inevitably forget to mention.
I developed the perspective worked out in the first edition of this book while teaching social philosophy and race theory courses at Le Moyne College, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Washington in Seattle. Accordingly, I owe a great deal to students at all three schools, and especially to Jennifer Pettit, Noah Purcell, Jasmin Weaver, and Stephanie McNees. Linda Martín Alcoff and Charles Mills gave helpful comments on the original manuscript, and equally helpful encouragement and feedback as I turned the original edition into its successors.
While working on the second edition, I had the great privilege of discussing the book with Myisha Cherry, Chike Jeffers, Desiree Melton, and Quayshawn Spencer at an author-meets-critics APA session. Their constructive criticisms were immensely helpful. In addition, two anonymous reviewers offered insightful suggestions on the manuscript, as did Professor Jeffers and Robert Gooding-Williams.
The third edition benefited greatly from the invaluable research assistance of Vanderbilt graduate student Eric Okamoto Akira MacPhail. I also had the opportunity to hear directly from undergraduate students who were working through the book in Eddie Glaude’s African American Studies and Race course at Princeton and in Professor Jeffers’ Philosophy of Race course at Dalhousie. Both groups – and their generous professors, and their professors’ colleagues, especially the brilliant Imani Perry – have my undying gratitude.
Many people guided and pushed me in conversation, including Nikhil Singh, Alys Weinbaum, and the other participants in the University of Washington colloquia on “Black Identity in Theory and Practice”; the participants in the Social Theory Committee’s “Whiteness” symposium at Kentucky; the Affrilachian Poets, especially Kelly Ellis and Nikky Finney; and various other individuals, including Michele Birnbaum, Susan Bordo, Howard McGary, Ron Mallon, Michael Root, Ann Ryan, Sally Haslanger, Lewis Gordon, Ron Sundstrom, and Anne Eaton. Cornel West, Nikky Finney, and Amy Hempel, in different ways and at different times, rekindled my passion for communicating hard thoughts in interesting and accessible ways – or, at least, for trying to live up to their remarkable standards for this kind of work.
The editorial staff at Polity has at every turn been more supportive and patient than I could have expected. Jean van Altena’s careful copy-editing on the first edition helped me in many cases to say what I really meant, or should have meant, and set the stage for much that worked through the subsequent editions. Pascal Porcheron, Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, and Stephanie Homer have been incredibly understanding and supportive through the interminable delays in bringing this project to fruition.
Finally, I should mention a few people to whom I owe special debts. Ken Clatterbaugh, my ever-supportive department chair at Washington, was the first person to suggest that there was a useful project here, and then brokered my
