ABSTRACT
Black, white, red, brown, yellow, and multi-racial people are as much a part of the landscape of this country as its geography. To Henry Louis Gates's question, "Who has seen a black or red person, a white, yellow, or brown?" The Advisory Board in effect responds that we all have—such persons are as unmistakable as America's purple mountains and amber waves of grain. Intersubjectivity creates a certain kind of objectivity". Echoing Mills's analysis, philosopher Linda Martín Alcoff has captured this notion of intersubjectivity by using a different term, "common sense": "Racial knowledges exist," she asserts, "at the site of common sense," where "[c]ommon sense is made up of that which seems obviously true and enjoys consensus or near consensus". On the basis of this inter-subjective status, race gains an objective status. And just as Wimsatt and Beardsley had assumed an "ontological" basis for meter, so Alcoff asserts that "race is an ontological category".
