Philosophy Matters: Race-Consciousness, Racism, Remedies: Beauty and the Chaste Eye

In this presentation, PNW Professor Deepa Majumdar explores the nature of race-consciousness, the different genres of racism and the solutions – focusing on the aesthetic aspect of race-based prejudice.

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About the Talk

Affirming free-will, she regards the individual as the atomic root of systemic racism. Defining racism as race-based hatred caused by a rogue will-to-power in the racist who pursues historically-transmitted echelons of racist power – the author uses Plato and Plotinus to place inner above outer beauty, which, she regards as lying in the eye of the beholder.

No more than a subjective conglomeration of phenotypes (especially skin-color) – bodily beauty is a fiction that worsens when racist aesthetics yokes it to power (instead of goodness). Distinguishing socio-demographic solutions (like Diversity-Equity-Inclusion) from the strenuous labor of reaching Conscience, the author seeks the ultimate inner-to-outer remedy to racism, in the individual’s radical self-transcendence that overcomes body-consciousness – by reaching the trans-somatic, body-blind (not just color-blind) aesthetically-indifferent chaste eye.

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