not just with the likes of Amy Hempel but also with the likes of Audre Lorde and Kimberlé Crenshaw.
Before we start, some notes on terminology and orthography are in order. First, I’ll sometimes refer to some of the broad subdivisions in philosophy. Just as some social science fields divide into quantitative and qualitative camps, philosophers tend to divide into analytic and continental camps. If this distinction means nothing to you, that’s probably for the best. I’ll introduce it now and then just to help orient readers who might care about it. Nothing rides on it beyond that.
Second, anyone writing about race has to decide whether and when to capitalize the names of the racial populations. Most saliently, one has to decide whether to capitalize “black” and its cognate terms, and then decide what this means for “white” and its related terms. There are several arguments for various approaches here, but I’ll park all that at the door. In a book like this, it is better not to load so much theory and politics onto basic compositional choices. We have enough ground to cover without volunteering to take on even more. Consequently, I will give all racial labels the lower-case treatment unless, like “Asian,” they are also proper nouns.
Third: I will use words like “racialism” in ways that may strike some readers as unusually neutral. For many people, racialism and racism are either the same thing or sufficiently close in meaning for the stink of one to rub off on the other. I prefer to think of racialism just as a commitment to the utility, validity, or accuracy of some form – not necessarily racist forms – of racial discourse. Racialists, then, are just people who consent, for some reason, to engage in race-talk and race-thinking. I will argue that there are better and worse ways to be a racialist. Having a word that refers indifferently to the good ways and the bad will give us room to figure out the difference.
Finally: I will often use the metaphor of colorblindness to refer to a kind of principled repudiation of racial distinctions in public life. I do this in deference to standard practice in US public discourse. This language may seem inappropriately sanguine about ableist prejudices. If so, I’ll invite you to take this up with the people who choose to use the language in this way. As you’ll see, I find their choice sufficiently problematic on other grounds to douse any temptation to adopt this usage myself. I use “colorblind” here the way I’ll use “white supremacy”: to name, without endorsing, a position that this book has to discuss.
Note
1 1. Donna Sullivan Harper, “Introduction,” in Langston Hughes and Donna Sullivan Harper, The Early Simple Stories: The Collected Works of Langston Hughes (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2002), pp. 1–8.
1 The Language of Race
Prologue – Black Power mixup
The first thing I notice when I enter Mona’s Country Kitchen is the glorious smell of frying fish. The second thing I notice is the frown on Jesse Semple’s face.
“I see you, sister,” he says. He’s in the booth closest to the door, so of course he sees me. When I point this out he shakes his head and says, “what I mean is, I know what you’re trying to do.”
I walk over to his table, take off my coat, and drop it on the seat opposite him. “Are we going to get some food? The line isn’t too long yet,” I say. I smile and nod in the direction of the people queuing behind the order here sign.
His frown deepens. “I said, I know what you’re trying to do.” He remains firmly rooted in his seat.
I sigh, move my coat aside, and slide into the booth. “What’s that?”
“You ain’t here to pay me back for fixing your icebox,” he says. “What you really want is to counsel me about Zoe.”
Jesse calls himself a handyman, but he can fix or build or rebuild pretty much anything, which I take to mean that he is either an incredibly good handyman or that he is a retired contractor or engineer or something. I don’t know his background because whenever I ask about it he unspools a story or a rant that is never as relevant to my questions as he thinks it is. Still, people I trust recommended him very highly when I moved here, and he’s proven them right. He’s also become a friend.
I know what he can fix and build because he has almost completely remade my townhouse, bit by bit, since I bought it a year ago. During most of this time he has been living with my next-door neighbor, Zoe, despite having a house of his own nearby. Apparently now there is some problem.
“Counsel you? About what?”
“You want me to stay in good with Zoe so I don’t move out.”
“I didn’t even know you and Zoe were having trouble. What happened?”
“What happened is that something is very wrong with that woman. You seen ‘Black Power Mixtape?’”
“The documentary with the archival footage from the ’60s and ’70s?”
He nods. “I was telling Zee about it and she had no idea what I was talking about.”
“I only know about it because you told me, and I still haven’t seen it. So you had to tell her about it. So what?”
“Listen. She had no idea what I was talking about. Not just about the film. She was a bunch of, ‘what’s Black Power?’ So I told her about Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks and all that. And the whole time she was just looking straight confused.”
“Not everyone knows those names,” I say.
“I had the same thought,” he says. “Thought maybe I was being too specific. So I told her never mind the individual people. I told her I was talking about what happened to civil rights when they realized Jim Crow wasn’t all there was to it. I told her I was talking about race relations.”
“That didn’t help?”
He shakes his head. “She just said, ‘what kind of relations? Which relations?’”
“Maybe she didn’t hear you.”
He taps his index finger to the side of his head, uses the same finger to point at me, then smiles and says, “Way ahead of you. I said it again, louder. ‘Race relations.’ She just stared at me, like I was speaking Sanskrit. That’s when I decided.” Here he leans forward, like he’s about to tell me a secret. “She is not all there.” He returns to his original position and looks at me expectantly.
The would-be diners are now lined up all the way to the sidewalk. The glorious smell races out to join them, riding the draft from the propped-open door right past our table. I’m too distracted to work up the sympathy or outrage that Jesse seems to require. All I can say is, “that does sound like a problem. But I’m not sure why it’s my problem. Why would I invite you here under false pretenses to – how did you put it?”
“To counsel me.”
“Yes, that. Why would I do that?”
“Because you need me to stay next door, so I can come round to your place whenever something knocks or pings and get you fixed up.
