Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Race

  • Categories: Limited; Inevitable; Necessary

    By Kevin Currie-Knight ___ “I wonder if we will ever stop putting people into these categories. Could we ever just allow people to be individuals?” The student said this as we were talking after class. What started off as a conversation about class, where we were discussing the politics of banning books in schools, became…

  • Where Does Racism Come From? A Response to Michael Huemer

    By Kevin Currie-Knight ___ Philosopher Michael Huemer thinks we should stop talking to kids about race so much, at least in their social studies classes at school. In a recent piece for the Fake Nous, he argues that if racism is at all evident in today’s culture, it probably has to do with the fact…

  • The Uses of Diversity

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ Imagine that you are in charge of some workplace. You look around and notice that while you are located in an area chock full of diversity of all kinds – racial, religious, and the like – your staff and customers are quite homogenous. Suppose that in your case, you are concerned…

  • Getting Personal About Race and “Transracial” Families

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ Sheena (SUNY Oneanta) and Kevin (East Carolina University) continue an ongoing conversation about the idea of race and Sheena’s arguments about racelessnes. This episode gets more personal about Sheena’s and Kevin’s respective connections to “transracial” families. Sheena was adopted into a “transracial” family and Kevin is adopting a daughter who is…

  • Race Talk

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ Race talk – using racial categories as descriptors in conversation – is inevitably clunky. For the past several years I’ve noticed this, especially as the teacher of an Introduction to Diversity class where we discuss racial diversity, among other things. Race is a hard thing to talk about sensibly, not just…

  • Is Race a Social Construct or Is It Not Real?

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ The second in a planned series of dialogues between Sheena Mason (SUNY Oneonta) and Kevin Currie-Knight (East Carolina) on philosophies of race. In this dialogue, Sheena and Kevin flesh out the difference between saying that race is a social construction and (Sheena’s position) that race isn’t real in any sense. https://youtu.be/zHVre-z2Be4…

  • Race Skepticism and the Racial Satire of George Schuyler

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ Kevin Currie-Knight and Sheena Mason (SUNY Oneonta) discuss Sheena’s theory of racelessness, why she is a race skeptic and eliminativist, and their mutual interest in the race satire of Harlem Renaissance writer George Schuyler. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRkhokQ2ol0&t=11s&ab_channel=ElectricAgora :05 – Why talk about race always seems so polarized and partisan 7:45 – Sheena is…

  • Sources of Human Diversity

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ___ People differ in all sorts of ways. Most of our differences generally go unnoticed when we interact. For example, with regard to a store clerk yesterday, I didn’t notice what her eye color or dominant hand is. But other differences, as the saying goes, make a difference. Historically and into the…

  • Bad genes? Or bad genetics?

    by E. John Winner The following shouldn’t be seen as a condemnation of genetic research, which has proven invaluable in understanding evolution, epidemiology, breeding of better food sources, etc. But there is still a holdover from the era of eugenics that some cling to: the hope that genetics can be used to determine the differences…

  • Self-Made

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ A to B:  “You’re an asshole.” B to A:  “No I’m not.” A to B:  “Well, it’s not up to you whether you’re an asshole or not.  It’s up to everyone else.” —Louis CK (1) The “self-made man” traditionally was someone who had made his own fortune, rather than inheriting…