Race by Degree

According to race contextualism, there is no meaningful sense in which a person’s race remains the same across contexts as different as the United States, Brazil, Senegal, and so on. Michael Root writes, “Race does not travel. Some men who are black in New Orleans now would have been octoroons there some years ago or would be white in Brazil today.” Against contextualism, I argue that racial kinds are global. But to make sense of the global nature of race, we must radically rethink the nature of race. I claim that race comes in degrees; and while the degree of one’s race remains the same across contexts, the exact social significance of one’s degree of race will vary. For example: a person can be black, to some degree, in both the US and Brazil, but the significance of this fact will be interpreted differently in those respective countries. The degree-theoretic account of race makes sense of the global nature of race and its local interpretations.

Any questions, please contact Johannes Himmelreich at jrhimmel@syr.edu