If Not Races, then What?: Toward a Revised Understanding of Bio-Social Groupings, by Lucius T. Outlaw
In “If not Races, then What?: Toward a Revised Understanding of Bio-Social Groupings,” Lucius T. Outlaw, Jr. considers W.E.B. Du Bois’ call for the ongoing reconstitution and preservation of a distinctive Negro raciality together with Du Bois’ quest for the realization of Human Brotherhood. Outlaw argues against prohibitions against any and all efforts to conceptualize and/or confirm empirically human bio-social reproductions and shared meaningful bondings of identification, groupings termed “races.” Rather, he draws on recent scientific work that provides interpretive biological confirmations of the evolutionary development of relatively distinct populations that correlate closely in particular studies with groupings long identified as races, while also reconfirming that the populations are of one species. Outlaw sees the challenge of our times to be the task of supporting bio-social and cultural diversity within our species while ensuring that erroneous and misguided conceptions of race are not put in the service of invidious strategies of interaction.
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Lucius T. Outlaw, Jr. is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the African American Studies Program at Vanderbilt University and was the inaugural holder of the Honorable David S. Nelson Professional Chair at Boston College. He was previously T. Wistar Brown Professor of Philosophy at Haverford College. The author of two books, On Race in Philosophy (Routledge, 1996) and Critical Social Theory in the Interests of Black Folks (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), he has published widely in African, African-American, and Social and Political Philosophy.
Lucius T. Outlaw, “If Not Races, then What?: Toward a Revised Understanding of Bio-Social Groupings,” in “Philosophy and Race,” ed. Alexis Dianda and Robin M. Muller, special issue, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 35:1–2 (2014), pp. 275–96.