ABSTRACT
THE CHALLENGE OF RACE SEVERAL YEARS AGO A colleague approached me and asked: “What do people mean when they say that there are two Americas, one white and the other black?” I tried to explain to my colleague that there is a color line separating whites from blacks in America. This separation is not merely physical or geographical, but is manifest in terms of the distribution of social and economic resources, cultural capital, respect, and opportunities for self-development. My colleague refused to believe that there is such a color line producing radically different experiences of American society. On another occasion the same colleague inquired about my schedule on that day. I explained that I was busy hosting Professor Charles Mills, who was visiting our institution to give a talk on race. My colleague was not familiar with philosophy of race or Africana philosophy. After I explained to him in more detail what philosophy of race was, he proceeded to warn me that we should be careful because “this sounds like what the Nazis were doing.” Needless to say, I was quite puzzled by this comment. My colleague’s comment was the result of his assumption that because race is a myth, any attempt to explore racial difference could only lead to further conflict between the races. As I tried to explain further that what we are doing is in no way similar to Nazi racist science it became clear that he was simply
not hearing me. As I listened to him state his case he became an object of study for me, much like (as I later realized) I had been for him. It became clear to me that this colleague had a thoroughly white way of seeing the world. This colleague was not a mean-spirited racist, but just a white male whose entire epistemic grid for deciphering social data was too white to empathize with and comprehend the AfricanAmerican experience. By “too white” I mean that my colleague’s experience of the world as a white male produced a barrier between himself and those who experience the world in black bodies. Such a person tends to speak to and not hear from those whose different bodies have forced them to experience the world differently.
