Naomi Zack - Race/Sex: Their Sameness, Difference and Interplay

METAPHYSICAL RACISM
(OR: BIOLOGICAL WARFARE BY OTHER MEANS)

Berel Lang

Naomi Zack

J.L.A. Garcia

RACISM AND SEXISM:
THE COMMON GROUND

James P. Sterba

BUT WOULD THAT STILL BE M?:
NOTES ON GENDER, RACE, ETHNICITY, AS SOURCES OF IDENTITY,

Anthony Appiah

J. Angelo Corlett

Nancy Holmstrom

Helena Jia Hershel

RACE, SEX, AND MATRICES OF DESIRE IN AN ANTIBLACK WORLD:
AN ESSAY IN PHENOMENOLOGY AND SOCIAL ROLE

Lewis R. Gordon

Kevin Thomas Miles

Naomi Zack

Maria P.P. Root

METHEXIS VS. MIMESIS:
POETICS OF FEMINIST AND WOMANIST DRAMA

Freda Scott Giles

Laurie Shrage

Judith Bradford and Crispin Sartwell

MALCOLM X:
MASCULINIST PRACTICE AND QUEER THEORY

John P. Pittman

Naomi Zack

I ORIGINALLY had one vague aim for this collection. Given the present interest of feminists in racial and ethnic studies and the use of feminist insights by racial theorists, I wanted to create a context in which race and sex (in the sense that includes gender) could be considered together, both as a new combined subject and as a meeting ground for feminists and racial theorists.

I had three two-part questions that I hoped could be answered in such a forum. First, my ongoing project of exposing the false biological foundation of ordinary and intellectual ideas of race had encountered resistance and criticism that I was not able to understand fully: If there is no such thing as race biologically, then why do liberal and even radical intellectuals want to retain the concept?

Second, can we have a unified field theory for combined liberatory feminist and racial theories in which both the categories of race and sex and the ways they intersect can be respected and given voice? Can we think about the rejection of both kinds of essentialism as an opportunity to consider the common political goals of both women and nonwhites? Third, since white men are now doing feminism and black men have had the crudest enemies on the American battlefield of race and sex, can black male gender be critically explored in emancipatory terms within a combined race/sex forum? Specifically, can black male masculinity coexist with liberatory intent toward both black and white women?

With that vague aim and three questions, I put out a call for papers under the working title, Comparing Sex and Race. Most of the chapters of the book are original responses to that title; but there are always more things in philosophy than even a philosopher can dream of, and far more is at work here than comparison, though four contributors do mainly compare race and sex (Appiah, Corlett, Holmstrom, Hershel) and comparison is a subtheme that runs through most chapters.

My vague aimto construct a forum on race/sexhas been attained here. My questions have been answered as follows. First, unified field theories are possible because we have at least six here (Corlett, Garcia, Lang, Shrage, Miles, Sterba). Second, the social reality of race is often physical in a way that overpowers the lack of biological foundation, which renders the lack of a scientific foundation for the concept of race a mere theoretical truth (Gordon, Hershel, Miles, Zack). Third, some racial theorists are willing to discuss black male gender in a context that overlaps with feminist theory (Gordon, Miles, Pittman). Furthermore, the combined discussion of black and mixed-race identity with gender allows for application of the concept