Mixed Race Studies

Appiah’s Uncompleted Argument: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Reality of Race

Social Theory and Practice
Volume 26, Number 1 (Spring 2000)
pages 103-128

Paul C. Taylor, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Pennsylvania State University

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 straightforward 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 about race on pain of various sorts of moral error, but he argues mainly that we should stop talking about race because there’s no such thing. He makes his way to his eliminativist conclusion as Peirce suggests: by weaving different strands of argument into, as it were, “a cable whose fibres … are … numerous and intimately connected,” rather than by producing a single chain of reasoning “which is no stronger than its weakest link.”(4) But the metaphysical “strand” does most of the work, does it badly, and gets away with it because of its entanglement with broadly plausible ethical claims that are too poorly developed to stand on their own.

In this essay I will construct the alternative readings of Du Bois and Appiah that I have in mind. I am concerned to do so not, or not principally, because of some abstract interest in clearing the ontological ground. My concern derives from the concrete worry that Appiah’s metaphysical sleight-of-hand obscures the need for a real debate about the merits of racialized and race-based practices and institutions. My sense is that once we quit kicking up the dust with arguments about the alleged non-existence of race, we’ll be able to see how much work remains to be done on the ethics of racial identification. That is: Once we recognize that there are eminently sensible routes to the claim that races do exist, perhaps we’ll recognize also that worries about the prudence and permissibility of appealing to race ought to be explicated and addressed in those terms. It is not enough simply to gesture at moral concerns while using metaphysics to avoid moral argument.

I will begin in sections 2 and 3 by examining the argument that Appiah develops in the second chapter of his important book, In My Father’s House.(5) His claim there is that Du Bois’s allegedly sociohistorical racialism ultimately relies on a more or less garden-variety biological notion of race. My counterclaim on Du Bois’s behalf is that Appiah manages this reading only by seizing upon perhaps the least plausible ways of rendering a few rather crucial details and by manufacturing perplexity in the face of a patently non-vicious circularity.

In section 4, I take a moment to sketch the kind of account that I take Du Bois to have been groping for. Then in sections 5 and 6, I consider the argument that Appiah develops in his contribution to the prize-winning book, Color-Conscious.(6) In “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections,” he uses conceptual analysis to argue that race-talk necessarily involves an untoward commitment to biological racialism. Unfortunately for the eliminativist cause, this argument pre-supposes the success of the earlier attempt to unmask Du Bois as a biological racialist, and eventually gets mired in metaphysical vacillation. Appiah does go on to gesture at the ethical concerns that motivate his inquiry, but, as we’ll see, without their metaphysical accompaniment these gestures don’t get him very far…

Read the entire article here.