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For people concerned by philosophy's reputation for ivory-tower isolation, K. Anthony Appiah's work on race is one of the more encouraging developments to come along in some time. Appiah has contributed greatly to making one of the messier and more contentious public issues of our time into an acceptable subject of English-language philosophical inquiry. And having launched his project by taking W.E.B. Du Bois as one of his principal interlocutors, he has also helped rescue an important American social theorist from the shadows of philosophical neglect.
As it happens, Appiah ushers Du Bois into the light mainly to make visible what appear to him to be blemishes. We can see this, and we can see why, from the title of one of the essays that mark Appiah's inception of the project: "The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race."1 Du Bois was a racialist: he believed that races are real entities, that racial identities are real and valuable properties of human individuals, and that racial solidarity can help realize such human goods as equality and self actualization. He accepted, of course, the testimony of the physical sciences, building even in his day toward the conclusion that races are not useful posits for the physical sciences; but he nevertheless insisted that race exists, as a phenomenon that is "clearly defined to the eye of the Historian and Sociologist."2 Appiah, by contrast, is what we might call a racial eliminativist. He believes that races do not exist, that acting as if they do is metaphysically indefensible and morally dangerous, and, as a result, that eliminating "race" from our metaphysical vocabularies is an important step toward the right, or a better-that is to say, a rational and just-world-view.
A number of commentators have taken issue with Appiah's treatment of Du Bois's, or of Du Boisian, sociohistorical racialism.3 Unfortunately, neither Appiah nor his critics seem to have noticed a fairly straight-- forward way of reading Du Bois's argument, a way that leads to a similarly straightforward refutation of the metaphysical underpinnings for Appiah's eliminativism--a way that it is one of the burdens of this essay to make clear. I'm interested in the metaphysics of Appiah's eliminativism because he says often enough that we should stop talking...