Your mid-week read!

Kris Sealey on racialization, embodiment, and otherness

“Other”: Kris Sealey is a philosopher who works in Critical Philosophy of Race, Caribbean Philosophy, and Decolonial Theory. In this brilliant essay for our “New Basics” series (the first uploaded from the “Person” issue), she traces a history of practices of “othering” via modernity’s entanglement with anti-black, imperial violence. Looking to the early racial categorizations of Enlightenment thinkers like Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottfried Herder, Sealey traces an unbroken lineage of thinkers who use pseudoscience to justify racialized hierarchies that, as Sealey highlights, “produce a cultural and political milieu that is deadly and death-making for black life”.