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The Lived Density of Race While the focus on demonstrating the nonreferential status of race is important work within the context of liberation praxis vis-à-vis racism—indeed, indispensable work—my sense is that it is at the level of the lived density of race that so much more work needs to be done. The former, while necessary, i judge to be conceptually thin;1 the latter, also necessary, i judge to be existentially thick. so, despite the thin/thick designations, both are necessary. i have known whites who are staunchly against the claim that race cuts at the joints of reality. Yet how they live race, how they live their own racism, is unmistakable. i was once interviewed by a white male philosopher for a job opening in a department looking for someone whose areas of specialization were the philosophy of race and african american philosophy. i met with this faculty member for an hour. my assumption was that we would spend time talking about what i would teach, what i desired to teach, my curriculum vitae, and so on. however, he spent the bulk of our time talking about his “antiracism.” he also narrated a personal incident that “demonstrated” this. as i recall, there were no questions about my pedagogy or my relatively extensive publication record. 1 Looking at Whiteness Finding Myself Much like a Mugger at a Boardwalk’s End i feel, i see in those white faces that it is not a new man who has come in, but a new kind of man, a new genus. Why, it’s a negro! —Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks i am walking down Broadway in manhattan, platform shoes clicking on the pavement, thinking as i stroll of, say, Boolean expansions. i turn, thirsty, into a bar. The dimly-lit room, obscured by shadows, is occupied by whites. Goodbye, Boolean expansions. i am seen. —Charles Johnson, “A Phenomenology of the Black Body” 18 Chapter 1 here was a white philosopher who no doubt, if asked, would have said that the concept of race is scientifically vacuous and has no empirical referent in the natural world, that race is a mere social construction/social category . Yet he felt the need to self-present as “pure,” as a “good white,” who was above the fray of racism and lived beyond the trappings of race matters. he used my presence, my hour, as a space for white self-confession and selfglorification . There he was—fully visible, “entrails” revealed—desiring that i spend my time bearing witness to his “white purity” so that i could state emphatically and unequivocally that he was one of the “good guys.” Yet he doth self-praise too much. it was as if he were preparing me for those white real racist others—you know, the “bad” ones. i was unmoved by the implied dichotomy. he needed my approval and admiration. my black body, my presence, functioned redemptively. i remained steadfast, though: “Look, a white! What white narcissism! What white hubris!” But what did he need from me? What did he need to prove to me or perhaps to himself? i wonder if, had i applied for a position that required specialization in epistemology, he would have wasted my time and his bending over backward to prove to me that he definitely knew the ins and outs of the Gettier problem, the epistemological point of neurath’s boat, and the implications of “Gavagai” for the problem of translation. my suspicion is that his identity would not have been implicated in the same way. Then again, he could have used the entire interview trying to prove, because of my blackness, that i was running a sham and really did not know much at all about epistemology. my point, though, is that a racial dynamic in an interview for a position teaching philosophy of race was asserting itself in an otherwise pretty mundane social encounter. indeed, it is at the level of the socially interstitial that race/racism is existentially robust. no matter how scientifically empty the concept of race, its lived reality permeated his office, shaped his disclosures and silences, and shaped his perception of me and how he thought of himself (or needed to think of himself) in my presence. in our contemporary moment, the lived experience of race is anterior to the question of its empirical referential status. Black people are always already raced in relation to the history of the term as a marker of...

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