The Afterlife of Race: An Informed Philosophical Search [Hardcover]

InThe Afterlife of Race, Lionel McPherson demystifies the Western concept of race and reframes race ideology in America as a caste device that sponsors absurd pretexts for inherited slavery, enforced segregation, and the wilful nonrepair of historical injustice. This reframing paves the way for an anti-caste vision of social equality that emphasizes the moral importance of Black American national specificity--not general antiracism, identity politics, or diversity of color. The result is a non-racial, non-exclusionary account of Black political solidarity that would welcome everyone who supports reparative justice for Black American blacks as descendants of American slavery.The ideology that underlies the concept of race has a long history. For centuries that ideology has spun supernaturalist and scientistic stories about ostensibly natural differences between different groups. The concept of race is in scientific decline, but the intertwined ideology and rhetoric behind it live on, and indeed prosper.In this groundbreaking fusion of philosophy and color-conscious politics, philosopher Lionel K. McPherson enlists sweeping historical and empirical evidence to challenge fascination with the race concept. His lively, incisive analysis illuminates why social lineage matters far more than any race thing ever could, and why race ideology-rhetoric is more a distraction from gross injustice than a primary source. The Western label black was merely a figurative description for African peoples and African ancestry. The idea of continental races came later--with philosophers, theologians, and eventually scientists adding some important but elusive racial factor to visible continental ancestry.McPherson argues that the race concept's main business was to sponsor absurd pretexts for Western slavery and colonialism, and their active legacies of nonrepair. Rejecting endless debate about the possible nature of race, he unpacks how color categories in America arl#N