I am delighted to be commenting on Shannon Sullivan's new book, Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege. Sullivan's book is a welcome addition to the small but growing number of recent works by white philosophers looking at race. Not only does this help to make race more respectable as a topic of philosophical inquiry (just as men working on feminism does), but it underlines the crucial point that white people are raced also, including those white philosophers who are blissfully unaware of how their denied whiteness shapes their work. By combining abstract theoretical reflections with concrete autobiographical musings on her experience of growing up as a middle-class white woman in Texas, Sullivan is able, in her doubly signifying title, both to “reveal” whiteness, in the sense of exposing and illuminating its workings, and to demonstrate how whiteness “reveals” itself in its possessors’ actions, even when—perhaps especially when—they are least aware of its determining power. Thus the book is a valuable contribution to critical race theory and critical white studies in general, in mapping this terrain, and to philosophy in particular, given the discipline's notorious Arctic whiteness and history of unreflective and uncritical universalization and abstraction from the European and Euro-American experience.

The specific area of contribution of Revealing Whiteness could be said to be the ontology of whiteness—“One's race indeed has the status of ontology. . . . Race and white privilege are ontological” (Sullivan 2006, 32, 188)—and its implications for phenomenology, epistemology, social theory, and personal moral/political responsibility. One of the happy consequences of the growth of a more extensive body of philosophical work on race has been a broadening of the subject matter typically tackled. If twenty years ago discussion of race would largely have been limited to applied ethics issues, such as the rights and wrongs of affirmative action, today a far more expansive range of topics is being explored: race and the history of philosophy, the phenomenology and existential import of race, the metaphysics of race, race and political theory, race and naturalized epistemology, and others. Sullivan's primary interest is in the metaphysics of race, but not from the more abstract taxonomical perspective of some other recent work in the area that seeks to adjudicate among competing metaphysical positions (realism/naturalism, eliminativist constructivism, anti-eliminativist constructivism, etc.). Rather, she pretty well takes for granted the truth of the anti-eliminativist constructivist position (race is socially constructed but is real and cannot be eliminated as a theoretical term), as against the realist/naturalist position that everyone in the progressive academy distances him- or herself from (race is real because it is biological/natural) or the eliminativist constructivist position held by theorists like Anthony Appiah and Naomi Zack (race is socially constructed, is therefore unreal, and should be eliminated as a theoretical term). So in a broad sense she is working in the tradition pioneered by Marxism (with respect to class rather than race, of course) of a “social ontology”: the idea of environing societal structures that shape our being profoundly, making us what we are, while simultaneously being historically contingent and variable rather than eternal. As Sullivan writes: “A reconfiguration of ontology as historical and malleable allows one to acknowledge the tremendous constitutive impact of race and racism on human life without treating them as eternal and immutable” (2006, 128).

However, unlike that of most other philosophers of race employing this notion, her particular interest lies in trying to reconstruct the actual building blocks, so to speak, of this constructed ontology. Obviously different theorists could be in agreement that the most useful way to think of race is in terms of a social ontology while disagreeing radically among themselves on how this ontology is constituted because of their divergent pictures of social dynamics. A Marxist, for example—a non-class-reductionist Marxist who concedes race's social reality—would be insistent that while not being class in...