文档介绍：: Problems of Philosophy
Prof. Sally Haslanger
October 3, 2001
Racisms
I. Racist Propositions
Appiah distinguishes three importantly different ideas relevant to race and racism:
Racialism:
...there are heritable characteristics, possessed by members of our species, that allow us to divide them into a small
set of races, in such a way that all the members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other
that they do not share with members of any other race. These traits and tendencies characteristic of a race
constitute, on the racialist view, a sort of racial essence; and it is part of the content of racialism that the essential
heritable characteristics...account for more than the visible morphological characteristics­skin color, hair type,
facial features­on the basis of which we make our informal classifications. (5)
In other words: A racialist is one who maintains that people who appear similar on the basis of certain inherited physical
characteristics (such as skin color, hair type, facial features) share a distinctive "racial essence" that is responsible for a
range of psychological and behavioral traits and tendencies.
ï Appiah argues (elsewhere) that racialism is false: There is no "racial essence" (ic or otherwise) underlying the
morphological features shared by members of what we count as races that i