Embodying Community, Disembodying Race: Josiah Royce on "Race Questions and Prejudices"

In 1905 Josiah Royce, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, urged members of the Chicago and the New York Ethical Societies to reflect on a perennial and intractable social problem—the problem of race. "Is it a 'yellow peril,' a 'black peril,' or perhaps, after all, is it rather some form of a 'white peril,'" he challengingly asked, "which most threatens the future of humanity in this day of great struggles and of complex issues?" ("Race Questions and Prejudices" 266). Royce was certainly not alone in considering the question of race and its role in American life at the beginning of the twentieth century; in addition to the numerous pamphlets and newspaper articles devoted to the topic, academics from a variety of disciplines like ethnology, sociology, and anthropology addressed the insistent issue of race relations. ¹ In 1908, for instance, Franz Boas spoke to the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Baltimore on the subject of "Race Problems in America." As had Royce before him, Boas admitted that his goal in choosing this subject was to confront the "grave issues [arising from] the presence of distinct types of man in our country" (839). Despite differing disciplines, presuppositions, and methodologies, both scholars endorsed the conclusion W. E. B. DuBois announces in the early pages of The Souls of Black Folk—"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line" (16).

For Royce, however, racial prejudice was not only a sociological and historical problem but also a philosophical one. If people are regularly rendered uncomfortable by superficial differences, Royce asked his auditors, how can we negotiate in a world where we are increasingly thrown up against strangers? How are we to deal with "men who seem to us somehow very widely different from ourselves, in physical constitution, in temperament, in all their deeper nature, so that we are tempted to think of them as natural strangers to our souls, while nevertheless we find that they are stubbornly there in our world, and that they are men as much determined to live as we are, and are men who, in turn, find us as incomprehensible as we find them?" (266). In other words, how can we manage both our experience and our ideals to avoid finding others "incomprehensible"? What measures can guarantee that we approach people who seem naturally to be strange "fairly and humanely" (266)? For Royce, the answer to these complex questions is clear: we must learn to see beyond the body and the tropological manipulation it appears both to authorize and require. In opposition to thinkers like James Cutler who notes in Lynch-Law that "[a]bstractions still control where racial characteristics, circumstances, and conditions should be the determining factors" (225), Royce contends that only when we recognize the constructed nature of what appears to us to be natural—both in terms of "physical constitution" and "deeper nature"—can we begin to change responses which seem to be necessary and normal. Racial violence based on embodied prejudices can only be countered, Royce explains, by considering the assumptions underlying moral practices, particularly those which rigidly prioritize the emotions over reason.

Royce no longer enjoys widespread recognition, usually remembered for who he knew—T. S. Eliot, George Santayana and William James—rather than for what he thought. ² Consequently, scholars emphasize his prolonged philosophical exchange with James or his attempts to adapt idealism to American traditions of thought; his popular philosophy, such as the lecture delivered to the Ethical Societies, is routinely disregarded as uninteresting. ³ For example Bruce Kuklick opines that Royce's attempts at popular philosophy are trivial in terms of his intellectual development and of philosophy in America more generally (309). Complaining that in them "[t]here [is] no analysis of the roots of concrete social problems, no examination of the distribution of power that determine[s] the structure of the economy, no concern with the...