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Basic Racial Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2015

JOSHUA GLASGOW  and
JONATHAN M. WOODWARD
JOSHUA GLASGOW
Affiliation:
SONOMA STATE [email protected]
JONATHAN M. WOODWARD
Affiliation:
Independent Scholar [email protected]
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Abstract:

In the debate over the reality of race, a three-way dispute has become entrenched: race is biologically real, socially real, or simply not real. These three theses have each enjoyed increasingly sophisticated defenses over roughly the past thirty years, but we argue here that this debate contains a lacuna: there is a fourth, mostly neglected, position that we call ‘basic racial realism.’ Basic racial realism says that though race is neither biologically real nor socially real, it is real all the same. Our goal is to establish this theory's credentials and provide it with initial support. It appears to be in a strong dialectical position and to nicely capture what many want from a theory of race.

Keywords

racerealismconstructionismsocial philosophyphilosophy of race
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , Fall 2015 , pp. 449 - 466
Copyright
Copyright © American Philosophical Association 2015 

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