Ontologically subjective// epistemically objective.

If you’re thinkin’ bout my baby it don’t matter if you’re black or white”

-Michael Jackson being a little post-racial

               

 Taylor, in illustrating the metaphysics of race, uses the example of money, to demonstrate the way that race, like money, is ontologically subjective, and epistemically subjective. To quote him; “Just as institutional context turns a properly produced piece of paper—a paper with the right ancestry and appearance—into legal tender, institutional context turns a person with the right ancestry and appearance—the right causal history and physical features—into a member of, say, the Asian race” (111). This was a very helpful way to contextualize what the heck he meant by "ontologically subjective and epistemically objective." Those words stuck out to me as crucial in further comprehension of Taylor's race-talk. The money example was very helpful as well.   

According to Taylor, post-modern racialism, color-blind racism, and racial neoliberalism are all just different names for covering our eyes and claiming that we are past our egregious past. Claiming that the ills caused by racial thinking can be assuaged by moving forward, by being a “post racial” society, is an erroneous, eliminativist view. It doesn’t help to be “post-racial” (as an individual or a society) when the architecture of inequality is already in place.

Saying that we shouldn’t engage in race-thinking because race is a social construct is a dangerous line of thinking. Claiming that race is socially constructed does not undermine the power of this construction itself. Birdcages are birdcages, whether you believe in them or not.