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Robert Bernasconi is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University. By returning to the work of Fanon, Biko, and Sartre, Bernasconi outlines an alternative approach. The tendency within the mainstream has been to think of racism as parasitic on the concept of race in the expectation that scientific challenges to the concept of race make racism untenable. Critical philosophy of race has a role to play in rendering both the material and psychological effects of slavery and segregation more intelligible as forms of systemic racism.As part of its Great Texts/Big Questions lecture series, the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA, formerly GIPCA) presents Pennsylvania State University professor, Robert Bernasconi.īernasconi will present Why Do We Think About Racism As We Do? – a critical examination of the dominant approach to racism since the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race.

If race is indeed a social construct, then it is necessary to uncover the different forces, material as well as intellectual, that at different times shaped the various forms the concept of race has taken and the value then placed on preserving racial purity. Du Bois, shows the value of allowing them to set the terms of the debate, instead of trying to fit them into debates shaped by other areas of philosophy. Studying the interventions of such Black philosophers as Ottobah Cugoano, Ant?enor Firmin, and W. Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon, the late Sartre, and Michel Foucault, Robert Bernasconi argues for a holistic approach that integrates the concrete experience of racism faced by individuals into the study of institutional, structural, and systemic racism. It also ignores the prevalence of forms of racism, such as cultural racism that do not take their starting point in biology.

For example, relying on biology to reject the concept of race as a way of disarming racism misses the fact that racism precedes the biology of race. Genealogies of the concepts of both race and racism are deployed to clarify why some of the dominant strategies for combatting racism tend either miss the target altogether or give it only a glancing blow. "The fifteen essays collected here set out to demonstrate why the critical philosophy of race needs to take a historical turn.