Racist Habits: A Phenomenological Analysis of Racism and the Habitual Body

Helen Ngo (Deakin University )

PHILOSOPHIES OF DIFFERENCE: Seminar Series #1  

Wednesday 6:00-7:30pm

Building 9, cnr Bowen & Franklin Sts
Room 9.3.4A

Free admission. Wheelchair accessible (entry at the rear of Building 9). 

Racist Habits: A Phenomenological Analysis of Racism and the Habitual Body

Helen Ngo (Deakin University)  

Abstract:

This lecture will examine how the phenomenological concept of habit can be productively deployed in the analysis of racism, in order to propose a reframing of the problem. Racism does not unfold primarily in the register of conscious thought or action, I argue, but more intimately and insidiously in the register of bodily habit. This claim, however, relies on a reading of habit as bodily orientation – or habituation – as developed by Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception. Drawing on his account, I turn to two salient dimensions of racist praxis which I argue are better understood through the frame of habit: bodily gesture or response, and racialised perception. Building on the analyses of contemporary critical race thinkers, I argue that racism is habitual insofar as it is embedded in bodily modes of responding to the presentation of racialised ‘others’ and in ‘sedimented’ modes of racialised seeing. However, this is not to suggest that the acquisition of racist habits is passive, or that such habits foreclose the possibility of change. In the final section, I revisit the concept of habit and its usual characterisation as ‘sedimentation’ or ‘calcification’. I argue that while such a reading gives voice to the anchoring weight of the temporal past in habit, a more prospective rendering of the concept is available to us through a rereading of sedimentation as active passivity; habits are not only acquired, they are also held. This in turn will allow us to recast the question of responsibility in relation to one’s racist habits.

Bio:    Dr. Helen Ngo is an Honorary Fellow in Philosophy at Deakin University. She completed her PhD at Stony Brook University, USA, specialising in phenomenology, critical philosophy of race, and feminist philosophy. She is currently engaged in teaching and research at Monash University, and is also working on a forthcoming book based on her doctoral dissertation, The Habits of Racism.

About PoD:

The Philosophies of Difference group (PoD) are a Melbourne-based group of scholars working in continental philosophy and interested in problems that have been marginal to the dominant traditions of Western thought. We engage with approaches including: critical philosophy of race, decolonial thought, feminist theory, Indigenous studies, philosophy of disability, philosophy of nature, queer theory, and trans philosophy. The first PoD seminar series will consist of weekly seminars beginning in March 2016. We especially welcome participation and contribution from women, people of colour, and other minority groups.

For further information email: [email protected]