<p>Some
philosophers (Blum 2002 and Anderson 2010) have argued that ‘racism’ and
‘racist’ have been used so widely that they have lost their conceptual potency
and are no longer effective moral evaluations. For this reason, they think we
should use other terms to identify racial injustices. It is the goal of this
dissertation to argue against this conclusion. In Chapter 2, I develop tools
for diagnosing the individualist versus structuralist debate within
philosophical accounts of racism. I use these tools to show that both
individualists and structuralists are committed to entity type monism or the
view that only certain kinds of entities can be racist. I reject this view and
argue for entity type pluralism. In Chapter 3, I move from entity type
pluralism to develop an account of the application conditions for the predicate
‘racist’ that tell us when and why we should apply the predicate to particular
entities. These two chapters serve to clarify RACISM. In Chapter 4, I develop
new resources for understanding moral responsibility for racism, specifically
for how agents can be held accountable for intervening upon racist non-agential
entities like norms, policies, and institutions. I call these resources “oblique
blame” and “intervention-sensitive moral responsibility.” Intervention-sensitive
moral responsibility gives way to a problem. Given the ways in which our
current epistemic practices exclude the testimony of People of Color, we will
have a hard time knowing when we are responsible in this intervention-sensitive
way. I call this the Knowledge Problem. In Chapter 5, I bring together the
literature on epistemic oppression and the empirically-informed norms
literature to show that interventions into epistemic norms help solve this
problem. I provide four candidate norms from activist and organizing
communities as examples. Taken together, this dissertation shows that we need
not discontinue our use of ‘racism’ and ‘racist’ and that the terms can be used
effectively to hold each other accountable toward anti-racist aims and a
liberated future.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/8985791 |
| Date | 13 August 2019 |
| Creators | Lacey J Davidson (7027382) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/That_s_Also_Racist_Entity_Type_Pluralism_Responsibility_and_Liberatory_Norms/8985791 |
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