Phenomenology of Race

There are some among us in the recent months leading up to the presedential election in the united states who have wondered about the role that the appearence of senator obama in mass media will have on the consciousness of race in america. His famous speech during the primaries before June's democratic convention had for a moment captured the attention of everyone in america - have we really admitted our tolerance and familiarity with the divisions of race?

There has also been a sense that philosophy has left behind the practacle world, a reference to the issues we face in the everyday life. Typically within phenomenology, philosophers have gone the root of describing only essence but rarely do we accept the diversions into biased opinions. But these are in certain respects very revealing on their own and speak to the over arching structures that support the production of these concepts. Gadamer, although not speaking about race relationship, had often spoke about the way that our prejudices are formed through a historical process. He called for scholars to change their attitude towards prejudice as misleading or errornious, a "prejudice against prejudice" that has been inherited from the enlightenment fixation on continuity, we should instead try to keep ourselves open and regard heurminutically the way these concepts come to be transmited and formulated within a historical context.

A phenomenology of race would require an approach that would not concern itself strickly with the physical aspects of race nor the knowledge of race, rather a phenomenological understanding of race would be more in line with the feeling of embodiment, a feeling or attunement to self from within and in relation to the body. What are the limiting conditions of that perspective? What other ways does the experience of embodyment serve to reaffirm this tension within a rational being? Neither of these questions can be fully decided upon for we are dealing with the subjectivity of a variety of independant experiences. Should we seek to reduce the focus of independent experiences to some primordial or aporitic foundational? That is an even more baseless question which then goes to complicate further what we already have the impression resists clear expression. How many number of decisions made throughout the course of every day are done with a preknowledge of race?

Perhaps what I am trying to evoke here is more along something that Heidegger would have meant by calling language the "house of being". Language always implies its preexisting origin, not a teleologically fixed or mystical origin, but one that reproduces itself within the historical context it emerges - a genative origin. What type of origin can that be? Is this a self-obsessed nihilist forging the world with the stroke of an existential brush? Or does one need to surrender to the impossibility of a true Origin in order to make being accessible? All these are good criticism and show the faith in the prejudged position (scholars should always conduct research in a sympathetic mode that acknowledges all ideas as having merit). As a genative origin I mean simply the act of creating or perhaps one might understand it as a changing the shape of what was there. As opposed to any definitive Origin, one more mystical in function, is itself only a possibility among infinite possibilities. There is no hierarchial value attributed to the concept of a genative origin but what it does propose is something much more startling. The confirmation of the relational character of production! It simpler terms, the genative origin is one that describes what it is comes forth at every moment, not strickly reserved to physical or even language based relations, through the sometimes intangible and emotive subtleties of being. A phenomenology of race would not take for grantide the way in which this web of relations bleed into each other, where the embodiment of being is the site of real investigation in how relations are not at any time formed by one type of exchange.