Infiltrated consciousness occurs when a subject's sense of self comes to be strongly and negatively shaped by victimizing master narratives. Consider the stay-at-home dad who has internalized a harmful narrative of traditional masculinity and so feels ashamed because he is not the family's bread winner. One way master narratives infiltrate consciousness is through conditioning self-simulation by assigning a hierarchy of values to different social roles. Further, master narratives confine self-simulation by prescribing certain social roles to an individual and prohibiting others. One common suggestion for counteracting infiltrated consciousness is to transform it through membership in new communities with new master narratives. But how does such healing happen? This essay offers a response. Recent psychological research on constructivist theories of memory outlines a naturalistically plausible mechanism for self-simulation. I argue that this mechanism is implicated in transforming infiltrated consciousness. This clarifies features of our psychological architecture that make the alteration of self-concepts possible.

Whether seen after a vehement denunciation of one's former values or a subtle change of heart, it is often thought that significant change to one's evaluative character could undermine responsibility for past wrongdoing. In this article, I explore this intuition by analyzing Angela Smith's concept of “responsibility as answerability.” I introduce an alteration/replacement distinction to define the limits of answerability over time. These limits are then further qualified by drawing on Delia Graff's work on Sorites type cases to argue that persons are answerable for past wrongdoing if they remain “saliently similar” in some relevant respects

Speech does not merely reflect social identity; it helps create it, by ingrouping and outgrouping individuals and establishing and clarifying community boundaries and norms of membership. We define a pragmatic category of community-specific speech that is used by and directed at community insiders. We focus on a species of community-specific speech that has flown under the philosophical radar, a type of speech we term peripheral speech: Peripheral speech is informal, typically playful, insider speech that includes inside jokes, riffs, gossip, insider references; it is loosely constrained, and only those who have skills and normative competence characteristic of a community can play along successfully. Peripheral speech is shared by a community, but also used to bring people into it and cast people out of it. We argue that entitlement to peripheral speech requires a type of speaker authority that is not granted by way of established rules and conventions, but rather settled locally and in situ.

Most discussions of racial fetish center on the question of whether it is caused by negative racial stereotypes. In this paper I adopt a different strategy, one that begins with the experiences of those targeted by racial fetish rather than those who possess it; that is, I shift focus away from the origins of racial fetishes to their effects as a social phenomenon in a racially stratified world. I examine the case of preferences for Asian women, also known as ‘yellow fever’, to argue against the claim that racial fetishes are unobjectionable if they are merely based on personal or aesthetic preference rather than racial stereotypes. I contend that even if this were so, yellow fever would still be morally objectionable because of the disproportionate psychological burdens it places on Asian and Asian-American women, along with the role it plays in a pernicious system of racial social meanings.

Simple acts of kindness that are performed sincerely and with evident good will can also, paradoxically, be perceived as deeply insulting by the people we succeed in benefiting. When we are moved to help someone out of genuine concern for her, when we have no intention to humiliate or embarrass her and when we succeed at benefiting her, how can our generosity be disparaging or demeaning to her? Yet, when the tables are turned, we sometimes find ourselves brusquely refusing assistance from others or accepting it only grudgingly while trying to show that we do not need their charity. People with disabilities often find ourselves in situations of this sort, where we bristle at others who rush to open doors for us, for instance, while our kindhearted benefactors are surprised and hurt by the cold reception they receive for their efforts. My aim is to explain some of the ways in which well-intentioned and effective beneficence can be offensive, with special emphasis on cases in which someone provides assistance to a disabled person.

‘Race’ has long searched for a stable, suitable idea, with no consensus on a master meaning in sight. What I call deflationary pluralism about the existence of race recognizes that various meanings may be true as far as they go but avoids murky disputes over whether there are races in some sense. Once we have rejected the notion that racial essences yield innate cognitive differences, there is little point to arguing over the race idea. In its place, I propose the idea of socioancestry, which jettisons racial thinking yet recognizes the social dynamics of color. For example, Black Americans, many of whom have traceable non-African ancestry, constitute an Africa-identified, socioancestrally black subgroup. ‘Race’ talk is not needed to sustain legitimate color-conscious approaches to social identity and social justice. Long-standing fixation on the race idea has obscured the simple truth that visible continental ancestry is the root of the social reality of color consciousness.

In the debate over the reality of race, a three-way dispute has become entrenched: race is biologically real, socially real, or simply not real. These three theses have each enjoyed increasingly sophisticated defenses over roughly the past thirty years, but we argue here that this debate contains a lacuna: there is a fourth, mostly neglected, position that we call ‘basic racial realism.’ Basic racial realism says that though race is neither biologically real nor socially real, it is real all the same. Our goal is to establish this theory's credentials and provide it with initial support. It appears to be in a strong dialectical position and to nicely capture what many want from a theory of race.