Racial Fraud and the American BinaryPosted in Articles, Media Archive, Passing, Philosophy, United States on 2023-02-02 02:01Z by Steven |
Racial Fraud and the American Binary
Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture
Volume 6, Issue 3 (2022)
pages 44-61
DOI: 10.14394/eidos.jpc.2022.0024
Kevin J. Harrelson, Professor of Philosophy
Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana
In response to recent controversies about racial transitioning, I provide an argument that deceptions about ancestry may sometimes constitute fraud. In order to arrive at this conclusion, I criticize the arguments from analogy made famous by Rebecca Tuvel and Christine Overall. My claim is that we should not think of racial transitioning as similar to gender transitioning, because different identity groups possess different kinds of obstacles to entry. I then provide historical surveys of American racial categories and the various types of passing common in American history, in order to distinguish the potentially fraudulent from the relatively innocent styles of passing.
Read the entire article here.