In this climate, a work as the second edition of Paul C. Taylor’s Race: A Philosophical Introduction bears a great deal of weight. Taylor takes a great care to direct his “little book” to the exigencies of American racial dynamics, attempting to correct the often muddled discourse surrounding such a divisive topic. His method includes frequent references to popular culture, historical developments, and ongoing policy discussions, showing Taylor’s audience here to be the general public: those who experience racial dynamics in the everyday–and who therefore most likely carry opinions, experiences, and entrenched attitudes into the debates–but who lack familiarity with the intellectual work surrounding the subject.
Taylor strains himself to bring as few assumptions as possible into the work, beginning at the very beginning by considering the question of what, if anything, we mean when we talk about race. He draws on ordinary language philosophy and pragmatism in order to examine common sense understandings of “race-thinking”, which he defines as “a way of assigning generic meaning to human bodies and bloodlines” (p. 16). Taylor colours this general notion with an intellectual history of the concept of race, tracing the shifts from ancient us/them dynamics to a pre-modern “theocentric ethnography”, to the modern form of race-thinking that defined the five commonly pictured Races (p. 23)…
But Taylor’s concern in Race is not just metaphysics. His work is self-consciously a work of activist philosophy that aims to engage with ongoing issues in society. To that end, much of the work tackles practical questions, including a chapter re-written for the second edition that considers whether American has become post-racial in the age of Obama…
That a modest conclusion defines Race as a whole. Taylor is nobly aware of the state of his topic today, and deftly utilizes that knowledge to introduce readers to the long history of philosophical work surrounding race by carefully connecting the philosophical issues to students of anthropology, sociology and political science…
Book Review: Matt Hartman