Toward a Political Philosophy of Race

Falguni A. Sheth, Toward a Political Philosophy of Race (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), xiii + 256 pp.

While race is not a central focus of Anglo-American political philosophy, pioneers like Bernard Boxili, Charles Mills, and Lucius Outlaw have worked to make the history, metaphysics, and political significance of race legitimate topics of inquiry. Mills, in particular, has compellingly argued that race and racial oppression have played a central role in the founding of the modern liberal state;1 Carole Pateman and Susan Moller Okin have made similar claims about the centrality of gender oppression to apparently gender-neutral sociopolitical structures.2 Such arguments, along with a wealth of other material, demonstrate that race and gender (among other factors) are not merely incidental aspects of ideally raceless and genderless human beings. Rather, they are core - if historically contingent - elements of both individual identity and sociopolitical relations.

Nevertheless, race is still treated as marginal in mainstream political theory.3 However frustrating, this elision makes sense; after all, liberal political theorists concern themselves with "ideal" theory, and generally assume that racial identity (if it existed at all) would be politically irrelevant in a good or just society. Doubtless, another factor is the tendency of white people (over-represented in philosophy and analytic political theory, to say the least) to see race - insofar as it is properly a philosophical topic - as a specialized concern; not being people of color, we find ourselves with neither the authority nor the incentive to examine racial categories or racial identity in a serious way. As such, the study of race offers little professional reward, and is conceptually daunting. Race is an historicized, pseudo-scientific, politically contested, and continually shifting object, useful to oppressive and emancipatory projects alike. As such, conceptual analysis of race and its effects is resistant to the clean lines and unqualified propositions valued in analytic philosophy.

Falguni Sheth' s Toward a Political Philosophy of Race is thus not only ambitious and impressive, but illustrates the sort of intellectual courage that could benefit philosophy as a discipline, were it more often displayed. The central argument, while groundbreaking, is easily stated: in racializing a population, the sovereign power (defined in a liberal state as those leaders and administrations who govern...