Roundtable on Race and Racism -An Interdisciplinary Conversation

Nov. 13, 2004

OSU Memorial Union Rm 209, 1-5 PM

Lani Roberts, Philosophy

"Moral Epistemology and Race"

I have not yet written up an argument to support what I am presenting. For now, please understand that what I am saying here is primarily a suggestion for a way of analyzing our problems with race. First, a caveat:  when I say "race" I mean the "folk" idea of race.

Moral Epistemology has to do with the idea that how we see the Other has a good deal to do with our valuation of the Other and how we treat her or him. This is a claim about morality generally, made by such people as Josiah Royce, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt,  and Shulamith Firestone. My view is that this claim is especially helpful when analyzing human relationships caught up in various "isms."

How we see "race" has a good deal, if not everything, to do with how we treat the Other who is racialized in our thinking. I was led to this enquiry when, in 1993, I attended a philosophy conference on Multiculturalism and Philosophy. Pablo Iannone, a philosophy professor from Central Connecticut University, and an immigrant from Argentina, said in passing, "When I came to the U.S. to get my Ph.D. at UCLA, I had to learn how to see Black people."

This comment knocked me for a mental loop and blasted open aspects of racism that I had not considered before. Because he is a philosopher, I knew he knew exactly what he was saying. I had a difficult time making sense out of his claim since it seemed to me that  "racial categories," even if socially constructed, were readily apparent. I took as true that we are taught the valuations assigned to each "racial" group and that the groups themselves were highly suspect as biological entities. But it did not occur to me that I had been taught how to recognize and identify certain racial categories. I contacted Pablo this past week in preparation for this Roundtable discussion and learned quite a lot more about his experiences.

We are taught, I believe, to see the particular racial categories that form this particular social category in our given society. And, I have come to find out that racial categories are identified differently in other cultures. In Brazil, for example, there are 134 different racial categories, based on skin color. African-American soldiers from the United States were called "white" by Haitians when they served there. Immigrants from other countries have repeated Pablo Iannone's story. I now ask whenever I get the opportunity.

Skin color and other visible aspects of a person, shape of eyes, nose, lips, hair color and texture, etc. are going to be the indicators of whatever we think about race. We could use blood type or the texture of human ear wax, of which there are two, but they would not work since they cannot be seen. If the production of racial categories serves the creation and maintenance of a particular kind of social hierarchy (which I think is in fact the case), each of us must be able to identify who goes in which group.

In Protestant Christian cultures, young children who attend Sunday school are taught a song which occurred to me is part and parcel of the insidious manner in which we are taught race.

  Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world.
  Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight.
  Jesus loves the little children of the world.

In my Ethics of Diversity class over the past 12 years, students (some 1100 students) tell me how they learned their race, gender and socioeconomic class. I do not accept the answer "I've always known" because we are not born knowing these things. The answers vary widely but it is almost always the case that those lower on the hierarchies in all three cases are negated in some way or another.

Here is my starting point.  Much work remains.