Hi, I am Professor with quantum India, and I teach philosophy at Stony Brook University. But in the fall semester of 2015, I will start teaching at Penn State University. Today, I want to talk to you about race, and more precisely about racism. What I have to say will address the following seeming paradox. How is it that why most scientists and philosophers claim that race does not exist in nonetheless has such material consequence in the lives of most individuals? Let us begin with a thought experiment.

If you're white, how much are you willing to pay to become black? If you're black? How much are you willing to pay to become white? The point of this thought experiment is to get us to recognize that we do have a basic intuition or awareness. That being of one or another race entail certain kinds of privileges and assets or liabilities and provisions and going to claim that While race does not exist, it is in fact produced, renewed and made enduring by racist institutions. Following the work of Angela Davis in Loic, why can't two great critics of us racism, I will talk about four key institutions that have happy to add US citizens into anti black racist.

The first institution is the slave plantation. most historians of the peculiar institution of slavery in the US have noted that it was slavery in the US, the chain blackness to servitude in whiteness to liberty. slaves, historically have been of all races, but in the US, the institution of slavery created a chroma cracy a hierarchical order in which blackness was legally defined as servitude, and whiteness as freedom. Over 245 years, the institution of slavery produced blackness as a race that was marked by dispossession and dehumanization. The second institution or rather set of institutions is what was called Jim Crow, which is shorthand for Jim Crow laws that were legislated after the end of the Civil War. Jim Crow, de facto was the unification of segregation, buses, trains, bathrooms, water fountains, schools, neighborhoods, voting booths, in general, almost every imaginable public institution was racially segregated.

We can understand the impact of Jim Crow on the production of race. If we don't personally however, merge. slavery was abolished with the ratification of the 13th amendment to the Constitution, which reads, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime without the party should have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. This is indeed a remarkable text. On the one hand, it abolished slavery as a form of private property that sustained the whole political economy and cultural life of the South. On the other hand, The text creates immediately illegal exception, slavery will render, but now as a form of punishment to be enacted by the state.

Now, state run slavery, as a form of punishment defines blackness as criminality. At the very moment that blacks were freed, their entry into civil society, in the social space of freedom is immediately made conditional. In fact, during the reconstruction period, a whole set of what were called Black laws were issue. The de facto criminalized any and most activities have recently liberated blacks is the process of criminalizing blackness culminated with the 1896 Supreme Court ruling Plessy versus Ferguson, that ratified the constitutionality of the separate but equal doctrine. The third institution I want to talk about is the black ghetto. The ghetto is not simply an urban space.

It is a series of legal economics. Political and of course, educational institutions. The black arrow is the direct result of Jim Crow. And we could say that the ghetto is the crystallization of the separate but equal doctrine in urban space. It replaces the slave plantation as a way to contain, marginalize segregate and dispossessed African Americans. The fourth and final institution that I will discuss is what I would call the ethno racial prison, the US constitutes 5% of the world population.

Yet it has 25% of the world's prison population in 2015, the United States has a prison population of about 2.2 million prisoners representing a 500% increase in the last three decades. of this number. More than 60% are made up of African Americans in northern minorities, mostly Latinos, while one in every 17 white males has the likelihood of being imprisoned. One in three black males is more likely to end up in prison. In fact, for black males in their 30s, one in 10 is either in a prison or a jail on any given day. But if we look at these rates of incarceration, what we have, in fact, is a racial prison industrial complex.

Prisons are a way to deprive supposes criminals of their freedom as a way to pay society for the crimes and violations of the social contract. They began as institutions of reform and re education, but have turned into size of political disenfranchisement, economic privation, and the socialization. In this way they perform at World War. There's types of dispossession inside of capital extraction. There are political economic engines that transfer economic wealth and political capital from blacks to whites and those that benefit from whiteness in the history of the United States. These four institutions have been introduced in twine seamlessly transitioning into each other.

Over the last 400 years, these racist institutions have produced, reproduce, renewed and made racism enduring in the US. Over the last 400 years, they have produced blackness as a race that is associated with this possession, criminality, marginality, and privation. Race does not exist, precisely because it is the relationship among these institutions, and how they create a certain habits that determine how we interact with each other on assumptions and prejudices about who we think is black. Radical philosophy of race allows us to think through the seeming paradox of the non existence of race, yet grapple with is visible and violent effects. with Angela Davis, we can say the slavery has yet to be abolished, as this long shadow continues to darken our democracy. Thank you