The Logic of Racial Practice: Explorations in the Habituation of Racism (Philosophy of Race)

The title of this collection, The Logic of Racial Practice , pays homage to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who coined the term habitus to name the pretheoretical, embodied dispositions that orient our social interactions and meaningfully frame our lived experience. The language of habit uniquely accounts for not only how we are unreflectively conditioned by our social environments but also how we responsibly choose to enact our habits and can change them. Hence, this collection of essays edited by Brock Bahler explores how white supremacy produces a racialized modality by which we live as embodied beings, arguing that race — and racism — is performative, habituated, and enacted. We do not regularly have to “think” about race, since race is a praxis, producing embodied habits that have become sedimented into our ways of being-in-the-world, and that instill within us racialized (and racist) dispositions, postures, and bodily comportments that inform how we interact with others. The construction of race produces a particular bodily formation in which we are shaped to viscerally perceive through a racialized lens images, words, activities, and events without any self-reflective conceptualization, and which we perpetuate throughout our day-to-day choices. The contributors argue that eradicating racism in our society requires unlearning these racialized habitus and cultivating new anti-racist habits. Contents 7 Foreword 9 Acknowledgments 17 Introduction 19 Chapter One: “The Talk” 37 Chapter Two: Searching for Romance in the Age of Trumpism 61 Chapter Three: The Asian-American Experience and the White Gaze 91 Chapter Four: Anger, Silence, and Epistemic Injustice 113 Chapter Five: The “What,” “How,” and “Why” of Racialized Seeing 133 Chapter Six: Embodiment and Oppression 157 Chapter Seven: The Embodied Practices of Whiteness 179 Chapter Eight: Racialized Habitus in Criminal Immigration Defense Attorneys 201 Chapter Nine: Three Kinds of Racialized Disgust in Film 221 Chapter Ten: Disappearance, or, the Neat Punctuation of an Invisible Sentence 243 Index 281 About the Editor and Contributors 285 This book explores how white supremacy produces a racialized orientation in our lives, arguing that racism is habituated, enacting within us racialized and racist dispositions and bodily comportments that inform how we interact with others-- Provided by publisher