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Ideas of Race in Twentieth Century American and Continental Philosophy

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Abstract

After World War II, American and continental philosophers addressed race in progressive ways that avoided modern science. W.E.B. Du Bois pioneered a methodology of looking for social causes of social circumstances, such as conditions of African Americans living in slums. Alain Locke and William T. Fontaine followed a more theoretical pragmatic tradition. Cornel West, whose idea of prophecy is not prediction, but criticism, has furthered Du Bois’s sense of black destiny. The analysis of experience in Husserl’s phenomenology was developed as existentialism in Franz Fanon’s focus on white supremacy and Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of French anti-Semites. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic continues to motivate analyses of racism. Black theological existentialism is egalitarian in a spiritual dimension.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

    Naomi Zack

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  1. Naomi Zack
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Correspondence to Naomi Zack .

Discussion Questions

Discussion Questions

  1. 1.

    What do Du Bois and Husserl share in their methods and what is different?

  2. 2.

    What did Du Bois mean by racial destiny? Evaluate this idea.

  3. 3.

    How did Du Bois and Locke differ about the aims of art?

  4. 4.

    What does Douglass’s fight with Covey mean in Hegel’s terms of the master-slave relationship?

  5. 5.

    How do Sartre’s ideas of absolute freedom apply to race?

  6. 6.

    Give three examples of bad faith and racism from your own experience and explain how and why they are bad faith.

  7. 7.

    What does Frantz Fanon’s account of how others see him imply about racist societies?

  8. 8.

    Explain how Cornel West’s idea of prophecy is about the future.

  9. 9.

    How is black theology different from egalitarian theology as described in Chapter 2.

  10. 10.

    How do you relate the treatment of race in this chapter to the scientific approaches in Chapter 3. Are they compatible?

Glossary

American philosophy

—work by philosophers in the United States which is nationally distinctive in pragmatic , method or US-related subject matter.

destiny

— fate, what will necessarily happen in the future, what will happen because of some force in control of events.

existentialism

—philosophical focus on human experience in existing, with attention to the structures of consciousness that enable that experience.

phenomenology

—philosophical practice of describing the objects of consciousness while bracketing their existence or objectivity.

prophecy

—prediction of the future, but according to Cornel West, criticism of past and present to motivate action for a better future.

pragmatism

—American philosophical tradition sharing a principle that claims, concepts, and hypotheses need to be understood in terms of their consequences in reality.

rhetoric

— speech of a writer or speaker aiming to educate, persuade, and motivate an audience in a particular context.

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Zack, N. (2018). Ideas of Race in Twentieth Century American and Continental Philosophy. In: Philosophy of Race. Palgrave Philosophy Today. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78729-9_4

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