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| Question | Answer |
| Race | Many people who think about it claim that race don’t exist, or that races aren’t real. |
| Race Not Real: What could this mean? | One way to think of the claim is as denying that races are natural kinds. Let’s work with the ideas we saw last class, from 1) Plato 2) Coyne 3) Mill |
| Race: According to Plato | You have a principal, divide it in half. This is a way to defend against your principal being divided based on a political (or other) basis. —> Race and Racism have almost always gone together throughout history. One could argue that race is implemented on the basis of racism, as a sort of ‘us vs. them’ (division). |
| Race: According to Coyne | Separate people came up with roughly the same division of living things in the world. Without one another, they still figured out essentially the same thing. —> In different places in the world, different races are considered alike or not like. In one country, being white makes you better, while in another, being brown makes you better. The ‘best’ race has evolved through time, and differs per place. If not everyone is in rough agreement, even when they are not exposed to one another, that means race is not a universal, natural truth. |
| Race: According to Mill | You can divide the world in an infinite number of ways. All of these groups have different things in common and things that make them different. —> Racism is the view that membership in an certain category gives you particular moral (or other) principles, which makes a person in a certain category better or worse. However, the evidence proves that the ONLY reason races have different moral (or other) principles, is due to the way that race is treated. |
| Race: Root | - Races are invented, but are real. - “[W]ith social or human kinds, with kinds like race, what is real is dependent upon rather than independent of how we think and talk about ourselves.” - But, there is a difference: “A naturally occurring category K is real iff K makes extrapolations of many discoverable traits possible across all K things…Where K is a social category, extrapolation across all instances is not possible, but normalization is.” - And: real does not necessarily mean legitimate. |
| Race: According to Haslanger | 1. A parallel with sex and gender: “colour” and race. 2. A disanalogy: in a just future, we might want to get rid of race, but not gender. |
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