What's at Stake in the Race Debate?

Abstract

How can there be so much apparent disagreement about what race is, when there is so much agreement on the facts surrounding race? In this paper, I develop this puzzle and consider several interpretations of work in the philosophy of race to try to answer it, several ways of understanding what the metaphysics of race is doing. I consider and reject the possibility that apparent disagreement is metaphysically substantive, and I also consider and reject the view that apparent disagreement primarily reflects semantic disagreements. Instead, I suggest that apparent first-order disagreement over the existence and character of race is a part of a broader, metalinguistic negotiation or conversation about how racial terms can or ought to be used, and I note a range of considerations-including semantic, pragmatic, epistemic, and ethical-that properly play a role in this discussion.

Tricky Truths: How Should Alethic Pluralism Accommodate Racial Truths?

“…Old biological theories of race (e.g., those discussed in Appiah, 1994) define race solely in terms of mind-independent properties (i.e., in terms of either biological kind groupings or biological properties exclusive to one group but shared amongst members of that group). These views are systematically undermined by scientific evidence (there is consensus on this in the topical literature [see Mallon, 2006Mallon, , 2022).…”

Social Ontologies of Race and their Development

“…There are also social constructivist/realist accounts of race. Within this group, we have positions that claim, to quote Mallon, that races are “social identities useful for various political projects (Alcoff 2006; Shelby 2005), cultural identities (Outlaw 1995, 1996; Jeffers 2019), “discursive formations” (Omi and Winant 2014), social roles (Mallon 2016), … hierarchical social roles (Haslanger 2000), … conferred social identities (Ásta 2018), [and] kinds figuring in social scientific generalizations that are at least partially constituted by structure (Sundstrom 2003; Mallon 2018; Mallon 2022)”. There are also skeptics that question if races, socially construed, do any explanatory work that can’t be done using non‐racial concepts (e.g., Khalifa and Lauer 2021).…”

“…First, racialism is false: there are no behavioral dispositions associated with racial essences because there are no racial essences. Second, there are biological differences, such as observable differences associated with race as well as “genetic markers among members of different racial groups because of different ancestral origins” “(Mallon 2022)”. (Hardimon's minimal race concept has much in common with this second condition.…”

“…Mallon suggests that most of the disagreement concerning the metaphysics of race does not arise from considering the biological or social facts. The disagreement arises when we introduce racial terminology (Mallon 2022). Mallon concludes that the debate concerning race is not metaphysically substantive.…”