Science, Racism, and Post-racism

• Authors: Artur Koterski

Title variants

PL

Nauka, rasizm i postrasizm

EN

Science, Racism, and Post-racism

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

PL

The paper presents three strategies used nowadays against the so-called scientific racism. The first one is that since there are no biological grounds to discern races, the very concept of race - as the key concept in the body of socially harmful doctrines -should be eliminated from any kind of discourse. According to the second strategy, while the racial claim has no biological justification, the concept of race is, nevertheless, useful if it is only made clear that races are social constructs. Thirdly, it is believed that a biologically correct redefinition of the concept of race is feasible, but it by no means supports racism. Furthermore, the paper considers the following two questions: (a) do these strategies allow us to say that the hereditary program in the IQ debate fails to provide scientific support for racism? (b) does any of these arguments show the irrationality of "racism without races"? The answer to (b) is in the negative. I will argue, however, that if post-racism is not reducible to biological racism, then "post-racism" is a misnomer. If it is so, it can still be maintained that science and philosophy of science overcomes normative racism and falsifies its descriptive counterpart.

• Publisher: University of Warsaw, Institute of Philosophy
• Journal: Filozofia Nauki
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 23
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 123-139

Dates

published

2015-06-01

Contributors

author

Artur Koterski