Race: A Philosophical Introduction

by Paul C. Taylor

Paul C. Taylor provides an accessible guide to a well-travelled but still-mysterious area of the contemporary social landscape. The result is the first philosophical introduction to the field of race theory and to a non-biological and situational notion of race.

Genres: Philosophy, Race, Nonfiction

216 pages, Paperback

First published December 29, 2003

About the author

Paul C. Taylor is Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, where he also serves as the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies. He is the author of Race: A Philosophical Introduction (2004), On Obama (2015), and Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (2016). He is one of the founding editors of the journal Critical Philosophy of Race.

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best thing about this book is that it is easy to read and understand for a book with philosophy as a main subject matter. His philosophy of race is not particularly unique. Again, the main way in which this differs from other philosophy of race works, such as George Yancy, Lewis Gordon, Vincent Lloyd, Naomi Zack, Charles W. Mills, Alberto Urquidez, Zakkiyah Jackson and others is that this book is much more readable.

If you are interested in philosophical underpinnings of race, antiracism, and so forth, then this is a good book to begin with. This is especially true if you are not familiar with many of the issues. Taylor patiently presents and describes the issues, then offers philosophical analysis of them and possible solutions that have a solid intellectual foundation.

[Mark]

COCC

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul Taylor's Race is a work of philosophy but unbelievably practical. The book gives a fair hearing to all the possible issues although Taylor is not afraid to tell you his opinion and give you reasons for him. Taylor argues, for example, that even if we take race to be a social construct and not biologically real, given the way people mark other people off by race it is helpful to take talk of race seriously. If we don't take the discourse seriously we run the risk of further marginalizing the people who are labeled by race.

We all know that people use the word "race" to mark off a group of people based on appearance, typically skin color. We also know that people have used this distinction based on appearance to justify a whole host of prejudices in order to exclude certain groups of people. This is where we come into the dialogue. You don't have to believe in this way of carving out reality according to race to understand the discourse here.

It does follow, though, that if you think race is a social construct that any other supposedly innate characteristics that are supposed to be attached to the construct have nothing to do with the construct. There is no necessary connection between a person's skin color and, say, the way someone makes a living. Now, it might be the case that black people in the U.S., for example, are disproportionately poorer than white people but this has nothing to do with biological or genetic factors. This has to do with other social, cultural, and political factors that arise from the exclusion of certain groups of people according to race.

The book was very enlightening for me, and maybe it will be for you too, Dear Reader.

[Shawn Varghese · Rating 3 out of 5]

To focus on the positives, this book serves as a great introduction not just to the philosophical questions of race, but also to learning more of the topic of Critical Race Theory. From a very general way of dividing the book, the first half is devoted to subjects related more closely to philosophy whereas the second part focuses more on pragmatics - especially in the cultural context of the 21st century US.

[Amanda Chiu · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was alright but there are definitely better books about race and critical race theory out there. If you want very philosophical perspective on race then this book would be useful.