Philosopher Seminar Spring 2024: "Racialization: Causal and Metaphysical " Kal Kalewold (Philosophy Lecturer, University of Leeds)

This talk addresses the nature and role of racialization in scientific explanations. Debates between racial anti-realists and social realists about race center on whether race is indispensable to the social sciences. Realists argue that race is part of the causal structure of the social world. Consequently, race is necessary to explain a host of phenomena including discrimination, wealth inequality, and health disparities. Recently, anti-realists have charged that the realist case is explanatorily circular (Khalifa and Lauer 2021, Singh and Wodak 2023). Social race realists, the objection goes, explain race in terms of racialization and justify race on grounds that it explains the phenomena that constitute racialization. Race is then both the explanans and explanandum of racial injustice.