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This paper begins with a general discussion of chronopolitics and how I intend to apply the term in connection with Eviatar Zerubavel’s “time maps,” using familiar religious and secular examples to illustrate the concept. Then, drawing on recent philosophical and historical work on race and racism, I argue for political “racial” times, albeit of contested periodizations. The uncontroversially racialized time of white modernity then provides the primary focus. Finally, I conclude with a call for the resetting of the Euro-chronometer, whose oppressive temporality has historically come in both left and right versions.

This essay explores the ways “race” has historically been used not merely to demarcate different groups of humans from each other, but to put into question the very humanity of those humans deemed racially inferior. The first section summarizes the three major competing periodizations of race and racism currently contending in the literature: race and racism as modern; race and racism as medieval; and race and racism as ancient. The second section illustrates how—whether through supernatural/theological racism, biological racism, or cultural racism—stigmatized racial groups have been denied the status of equal persons or sometimes even membership in the human race at all.

Tommie Shelby’s Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform is a major contribution to black political thought and the theorization of racial justice more generally. In these brief comments, I begin by situating Shelby’s work both in the Anglo-American political tradition and the Afro-modern political tradition. While praising the accomplishment that Shelby’s book represents, I nonetheless go on to point out some obstacles to his project arising from the tensions between these traditions. Using the concept of “dark mores” (a racially differentiated ethic coming in both white and black versions), I argue that Shelby’s racially revisionist Rawlsianism is pre-empted by Rawls’s own restrictions on the scope of his theory, while Shelby’s invocation of “reciprocity” as a key norm is undermined by the structural asymmetries of a racist society.

In this chapter, Charles Mills looks at the historic framing of race as “the Negro problem” and its implications for the development of American sociology in particular. As black radical theorists of the socio-political order have always insisted: to the extent that there is a Negro problem, it has to be contextualized within the larger structural matrix of the white problem. But the failure to recognize white oppression as the environing and shaping causal background has necessarily misoriented inquiry from the start. Drawing on two prizewinning sociological texts, Stephen Steinberg’s Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (1995) and Aldon Morris’s The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (2015), Mills argues that “epistemic injustice” as a concept has to be expanded to include possible foundational distortions in the structure of the disciplines themselves.

In this essay I explore whether Sally Haslanger’s model of ideology can handle ‘speciesism’ (assuming, for the sake of argument, that some version of the animal rights position is correct). The fir...

Let me begin by expressing my appreciation that such prominent and senior figures as Howard Winant, Stephen Steinberg, and Will Kymlicka, and a prolific rising star like Matthew Hughey, should have...

This article focuses on the contribution Robert Bernasconi has made to the critical philosophy of race. I look at some representative samples of his work under four categories: (i) his racially informed critiques of canonical Western philosophical figures; (ii) his expositions/reconstructions/recuperations of racially informed theory from canonical (and some non-canonical) Western philosophical figures; (iii) his reflections on race/whiteness/imperialism and their implications; and (iv) his views on race as it has shaped the historic and current realities of philosophy as a discipline.

In his pioneering Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, Paget Henry points out that because of the region's colonial history, Caribbean philosophy is far more often found ‘embedded’ in other discourses, such as literature, than in explicit theorising. Following Henry's lead, I seek to find the philosophical ‘moral of the story’ of Voices Under the Window, the 1955 first novel of the late Jamaican writer John Hearne (1926–94), which some critics regard as his best work. In a novel with significant autobiographical elements, Hearne, a ‘high-brown’ or ‘red’ Jamaican, recounts the story of Mark Lattimer, likewise a ‘red man’ positioned at the upper edge of the ‘brown’ stratum of the white/brown/black Jamaican social pyramid. Lattimer moves from a race-denying attempt to ‘pass’ in World War II Britain to a Marxist social activism upon his later return to post-war Jamaica, but is killed in a black protest riot. His tragic fate raises important philosophical questions about race, colour, class, and personal and social transformation that remain very relevant today, especially considering the failure of 1970s Anglo-Caribbean radicalism to fulfil its revolutionary promise.