Ethics and Race

Review
Race is the most powerful concept of social organization and terror ever created in human history. Naomi Zack’s Ethics and Race offers a conceptually rich study of the ethical dilemmas race creates in law, science, and moral reasoning. In this well-done book, students and scholars alike will become well acquainted with the perils the race concept poses for our contemporary thinking and ethical decision-making. -- Tommy Curry, The University of Edinburgh, author of The Man-Not
Dr. Naomi Zack’s Ethics and Race is a refreshing and desperately needed bridging of philosophical ethics and philosophy of race. Lucid and rigorous, this text is an invaluable resource for educators and for anyone who is trying to make sense of our fraught social-political landscape.
-- George N. Fourlas, co-editor of Radical Philosophy Review, professor, Hampshire College
Philosopher Naomi Zack offers comprehensive, highly readable analyses of critical ethical dimensions of contemporary racism. Digesting much social science and philosophical research, she provides thought-provoking analyses for students, teachers, and general readers. A timely book for Americans facing major anti-democratic challenges from white supremacist uprisings!
-- Joe Feagin, Distinguished Professor, Texas A&M University, and author of Racist America
Careful, complete, engagingly written, Zack’s approach in this book is fantastic. It is well organized, timely, and extremely useful for teaching. -- Emily McRae, associate professor, University of New Mexico
Ethics and Race is a revolutionary book that re-frames the study of ethics and the study of race, showing their profound intertwinement and offering lucid, concrete discussions of such timely issues. There is no other book like this, and indeed no philosopher other than Naomi Zack could have composed this book. The twenty-four chapters of Ethics and Race are precise and fecund; each topic is systematically laid out and supplemented with questions for discussion, videos, and a glossary. Ethics and Race is a gift to teachers and scholars. Zack’s vision for philosophy is that it should illuminate our reality and provide the conditions for us to become better humans, not through an abstract commitment to human nature or the good life, but through police reform, redistribution of wealth, supporting health care for the vulnerable, rejecting sexism, and challenging white supremacy. -- T Storm Heter, professor, director of the Frederick Douglass Institute for Intercultural Studies, East Stroudsburg University
Professor Zack’s Ethics and Race: Past and Present Intersections and Controversies, offers instructors a very useful tool to help them engage and educate students on the perennial moral issue of race and racism.
-- Rodney C. Roberts, associate professor of philosophy, East Carolina University
This dynamic new text for ethics and philosophy of race courses brings together subjects philosophers have generally kept separate—ethics and race. But every issue concerning race is an ethical issue, and it's time we studied them as such.
Naomi Zack introduces students to historical and contemporary issues of race and racism and provides an ethical foundation for students to critically engage with these issues in the classroom and in their lives. The chapters discuss affirmative action and diversity, current protests from across the political spectrum, police killings, the relevance of race to the effects of disasters and climate change, white privilege as a cause for political impasse, racial identity (including mixed race identities), race and gender, and media representations of race.
While treating issues of race as moral subjects with suggested moral foundations, Zack does not lead the student to specific conclusions. Rather, through thought, discussion, and writing questions, students learn to construct their own chains of reasonings based on explicit moral foundations.
The book features:
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