Crossed Lines in the Racialization Process: Race as a Border Concept

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, Passing, Philosophy, United States on 2013-07-23 15:23Z by Steven

Crossed Lines in the Racialization Process: Race as a Border Concept

Research in Phenomenology
Volume 42, Issue 2 (2012)
pages 206-228
DOI: 10.1163/156916412X651201

Robert Bernasconi, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies
Pennsylvania State University

The phenomenological approach to racialization needs to be supplemented by a hermeneutics that examines the history of the various categories in terms of which people see and have seen race. An investigation of this kind suggests that instead of the rigid essentialism that is normally associated with the history of racism, race predominantly operates as a border concept, that is to say, a dynamic fluid concept whose core lies not at the center but at its edges. I illustrate this by an examination of the history of the distinctions between the races as it is revealed in legal, scientific, and philosophical sources. I focus especially on racial distinctions in the United States and on the way that the impact of miscegenation was negotiated leading to the so-called one-drop rule.

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