Eyes and Darkness: Race and Idealism Through Cinga Samson’s Okwe Nkunzana 6

Abstract

This article critiques a strain of critical philosophy of race that presumes an ability to remove the evaluative “distortions” of race-based judgements from perceptual accounts, exemplified by Charles Mills’ liberal recovery project. Utilizing Cinga Samson’s Okwe Nkunzana 6 as an example of a perceived human figure, it argues that one’s apprehension of the world requires an idealist approach where individual valuations guide their definition of worldly phenomena. Drawing from J. Reid Miller’s account of evaluative perception alongside George Yancy and P. F. Strawson, I explain how perceptual accounts of any subject necessarily include evaluative judgements based on embodied characteristics. I then reexamine the role of ideology in subject formation to explain the necessary disjunction between perceivers on said judgements. “Evaluative idealism” challenges the realist presumptions inherent in Mills and other antiracist prescriptives that imagine a value-neutral world beyond race-based ethical valuations. These valuations are then a necessary component of human perception.