The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment

by Helen Ngo

The Habits of Racism examines some of the complex questions raised by the phenomenon and experience of racism. Helen Ngo draws on the resources of Merleau-Ponty to show how the conceptual reworking of habit as bodily orientation helps to identify the subtle but more fundamental workings of racism--to catch its insidious, gestural expressions, as well as its habitual modes of racialized perception. Racism, as Ngo argues, is equally expressed through bodily habits, which, once reformulated, raises important ethical questions regarding the responsibility for one's racist habits.Ngo also considers what the lived experience of racism and racialization teaches us about the nature of embodied and socially-situated being, arguing that racialized embodiment problematizes and extends existing accounts of embodied experience, and calls into question dominant philosophical paradigms of the "self" as coherent, fluid, and synchronous. Drawing on thinkers such as Fanon, she argues that the racialized body is "in front of itself" and "uncanny" (in the Heideggerian senses of "strange" and "not-at-home"), while exploring the phenomenological and existential implications of this disorientation and displacement. Finally, she returns to the visual register to take up the question of objectification in the racist gaze, critically examining the subject-object ontology presupposed by Sartre's account of "the gaze" (le regard). Recalling that all embodied being is always already relational and co-constituting, Ngo draws on Merleau-Ponty's concept of the intertwining to argue that a phenomenology of racialized embodiment reveals to us the ontological violence of racism--not a merely violation of one's subjectivity as commonly claimed, but also a violation of one's intersubjectivity.The original arguments in The Habits of Racism will be of particular value to students and scholars interested in critical philosophy of race, phenomenology, and social and political philosophy, and may also be of interest to those working in feminist philosophy, queer studies, and disability studies.

Genres: Philosophy, Race

208 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 16, 2017

Reviews

[Hayden Berg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm torn on this one!

I found the first two chapters really illuminating and helpful for talking about racism as an embodied experience for those who are racist and those who experience racism. The latter chapters felt less helpful and there were specifically two elements that I took issue with:

1. In part given Ngo's style, which is very dependent on summarizing secondary sources without necessrily committing to their perspectives, I'm unsure about what this project means for those white subjects who are possessed by racist habits. Perhaps the ethical question is not the one Ngo wants to ask in this book (maybe we should advocate a kind of 'tarrying' non-action which she discusses in the Conclusion) but I'm not super satisfied without having something actionable that can come out of this theory. Specifically, I found her discussion of Sullivan's work on 'white expansiveness' and Lugones' 'world-travelling' to be a bit confusing. To be fair, the notion that world-travelling is 'for' white people at all is controversial, so I could grant that this contradiction may not really be there, but there is still the problem of what this account provides us with in terms of actionable steps.

2. I don't really agree with her characterization of 'existential phenomenology' as outdated and incapable of addressing the kind of ambiguous ontological 'intertwining' that she turns to Merleau-Ponty to establish at the end. First of all, the account seems to completely side-step the account of ambiguity from a thinker who wrote extensively on overcoming the object-subject distinction and is one of the major figures of existentialist phenomenology: Simone de Beauvoir. Furthermore (and this may be in part due to my difficulties with understanding Merleau-Ponty's source text), I'm not convinced that the 'flesh ontology' or 'intertwining' really gets her to a simultaneity of object and subject that she goes to Merleau-Ponty for. Merleau-Ponty himself says that the intertwining is always imminent, so how is that different from the way Sartre's Look functions?

Overall, Ngo's text was readable and felt like a great introduction to some critical phenomenology in practice. It was an interesting overview of the work of folks like Yancey, Sullivan, and Al-Saji. I feel better situated in the arena in which Ngo is working, though I'm not sure I buy into every aspect of her argument.