Keshav Singh, University of Alabama, Birmingham
Presented by the Philosophy Sapientia Lecture Series
Wednesday, May 7, 2025
Keshav Singh, University of Alabama, Birmingham
Talk title: "The Injustices of Coarse-Grained Racial Categories"
3:30pm
1930s Rm Rockefeller Center
Description: "Racial discourse in the United States, both in official and nonofficial contexts, tends to operate using highly coarse-grained racial categories. In this paper, I argue that the ubiquitous use of these coarse-grained racial categories is seriously unjust in multiple ways. First, it is distributively unjust. Because coarse-grained racial categories fail to accurately track unjust group disparities in important resources such as income and education, operating with these categories in attempting to address group disparities ends up perpetuating these distributive injustices. Second, the ubiquitous use of coarse-grained racial categories is hermeneutically unjust. Because coarse-grained racial categories fail to track many of the distinctive features of people’s social experiences, there are many contexts in which operating with these categories obscures these social experiences from collective understanding. I argue further that these two injustices of coarse-grained racial categories are related: the hermeneutical injustice of erasure partly explains the failure of racial categories to address group disparities. I conclude that we must be significantly more cautious in our use of coarse-grained racial categories."
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