Speaker Series: Quayshawn Spencer (Penn)

A Radical Solution to the Race Problem

Quayshawn Spencer

Abstract. Recent work in population genetics has revealed that the human species naturally subdivides into five major biological populations: Africans, Caucasians, East Asians, Native Americans, and Oceanians.  Since the discovery of these continental populations—as they’re called—there has been a question about what the correct metaphysical relationship is between the human continental populations and the five official races of the US government: Asians, American Indians, Blacks, Pacific Islanders, and Whites.  This question has been of interest to medical geneticists as well as race scholars from anthropology, sociology, history, and philosophy.  In this talk, I will argue that the correct metaphysical relationship is identity.  Furthermore, I will argue this by defending the view that what ‘race’ means in the official race talk of the US government is just the set of human continental populations.  After solving this metaphysical problem, I show that one implication of this result is that metaphysicians of race have been adopting the wrong metametaphysical position about what the correct US race theory looks like.  In short, the trend in the metaphysics of race has been to adopt a monist position about the nature and reality of race given how ‘race’ is dominantly used in American English.  However, I show that this stance is incorrect, and instead, the correct metametaphysical position is what I call radical racial pluralism.