Race as Phenomena

Book excerpt: This book introduces and explores the relation between race and phenomenology through varied African American, Latina, Asian American, and White American perspectives. Phenomenology is best known as a descriptive endeavor to more accurately describe our experience of the world. These essays examine the ways in which this relation between phenomenology and race acts as a site of racial meaning. Philosophy of race conceives race as a social construction. Because of the sedimentation of racial meaning into the very structure and practices of society, the socially constructed meanings about features of the body are mistaken as natural. Hence although racial meaning is theoretically recognized as socially constructed, during an every-day interaction, racial meaning is mistaken as inevitable and natural. Ideal for advanced students in phenomenology and philosophy of race, this volume pushes the phenomenological method forward by exploring its relation to questions within philosophy of race.