Reid Miller’s Stain Removal: Ethics and Race is a philosophical examination guided by the task of troubling ethics through an examination of its relation to race. The standard move, as Miller bemoans, is to trouble race by examining its relation to ethics. There, the judgment appears near-universal: race cannot withstand ethical scrutiny—although, as Miller notes, this often involves a collapse of race into racism.
Stain Removal can be viewed, then, as a move toward the principle of supervenience not within ethics but about ethics: in other words, what do we discover if we treat “ethics” and “race” as like cases and, hence, do the work of examining how they appear if we treat them alike?
Such a move may seem heretical for a variety of reasons. For instance, it is commonplace to regard ethics as an ahistorical universal and race as a historical particular. The former can thus be understood as standing in legitimate judgment of the latter, but not vice versa. Yet all ethical judgments are, nonetheless, historically situated.
If an ethical doctrine can be demonstrated to be timelessly valid, it is nonetheless the case that that demonstration emerges at a historical moment, and the critical question of how historical context shapes one’s thoughts remains as a task that philosophical rigor demands. Miller, then, facilitates such rigor by calling into question ethics as we now know it in light of race as we now know it.
This implies, then, a treating of these objects of inquiry in terms of their equivalencies: they are shaped, to borrow a phrase from decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo, by local histories and global designs. Race, as critical philosophers of race and researchers in decolonial studies explore in a variety of ways, is a product of a peculiar form of modernity—which I will call simply “Euro-modernity”—that raises the possibility of dialectical connections between how the ideals of philosophical modernity were formulated and the production of a global colonial order.
Ethics demands a critical suspicion, a willingness to use reason to its fullest to guide one’s conduct toward the right or the good. But to turn this same critical suspicion onto ethics would require that the ways in which ethics and race may be historical bedfellows would need to be evaluated through a critical project of reasoning.
Stain Removal is just such a project. In this sense, the text can be viewed as a phenomenological work. I do not mean what many take phenomenology to mean—namely, a scholarly look at one of a dozen or so European philosophers identified as a phenomenologist, or the application of that scholarly look to a contemporary problem. Rather, by phenomenology I mean a philosophical practice in which the philosophical problem at hand demands the rigorous examination of consciousness of that problem. Put simply, Stain Removal suspends the tendency to view race through an ethical consciousness.
The treatment of race as an object for ethical consciousness, one may argue, functions for many as a sort of what Husserlian phenomenologists call a natural attitude. Note, though, that this suspension does not mean, ultimately, to shift from an ethical consciousness of race to a racial consciousness of ethics. Such a reversal would treat race as a priori innocent in the same way that ethical consciousness of race may tend to regard itself as a priori innocent. Rather, it is a phenomenological movement that facilitates a suspicious consciousness of both ethics and race. This implies, in turn, that it raises the question of how one can be suspicious of race if the commitment to an ethical consciousness of race is suspended. In that sense, Stain Removal can be regarded as a work in Africana phenomenology.
As Paget Henry argues, Africana phenomenology is distinct from Euro-modern phenomenology in that the existential impetus for the latter lay in crises in the sciences, but the impetus toward the former came from crises of practical struggles for liberation and decolonization. Africana phenomenology, thus, is responsible for calling into question the ethical consciousness peculiar to Euro-modernity, and, by extension, must ask tough questions about ethical consciousness altogether.
This means that Stain Removal should be considered in light of two sets of questions, the first metaethical and the second metaphilosophical.
Because it is a book about but not of ethics, it is a metaethical work. But again, it is not easily classified within the frame of analytic metaethics in which, ultimately, the guiding concern for many has to do with defining and clarifying the terms that govern moral inquiry. I suggest it can be viewed, rather, as a work in phenomenological metaethics, because it is showing what can appear if the commitment to an ethical mode of inquiry is suspended. With “ethics” thus rendered as an object (rather than mode) of study, we note more fundamental dimensions of its relationship to race, which Miller draws out in a number of very creative ways.
These can be broadly thematized in terms of (1) how race and ethics are similar and (2) how the historical production of ethical consciousnesses is entangled with the historical production of racial consciousnesses. Miller draws upon a wealth of resources to demonstrate these similarities and entanglements, including major figures in Africana (Alain Locke, Kelly Miller, and Frantz Fanon) intellectual history, the lineage of Euro-Continental thought (via Immanuel Kant, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Louis Althusser), and a variety of allegories and their interpretations both ancient and modern. In particular, the way in which Miller draws these out through a reading of Kant’s raciology in relation to his metaphysics of morals is novel and quite striking.
In short, Miller makes the case that race appears in modernity as a stain, a mark of value denoting that which is pre-ethically criminal. Whiteness thus shares an apparent telos with modern ethics: it is called upon to achieve the removal of the stain of criminality.
However, whiteness is nonetheless racial; it occupies, then, the paradoxical situation of being the stain of a stain removed. It represents the absence of racial staining, but does so racially and hence as a stain of its own.
Ethics would appear to represent the same problem. If ethics is an effort to remove the stain—to render one innocent through eradicating the possible sources of one’s criminality—then ethics becomes, as it were, a useless passion: having finished the “Out, damned spot!” movement, it turns around and finds it is stained by this very movement.
If metaethics here is read as “the ethics of ethics,” then we may draw the conclusion that ethics ought to be rejected—it is shown to be unethical. Yet to regard this judgment as final would be a performative contradiction. What directions do this leave?
One direction would be to argue that ethics could be broader than what Miller has made it out to be—that ethics need not be guided by the implicit telos of stain removal. That would suggest a critical project of constructing alternative modes of ethical consciousness.
I think this response is, ultimately, compatible with Miller’s normative conclusions, but with a crucial caveat: because the project of stain removal is a troubled one, then even the effort to remove this project from ethics would be a troubled one. Hence, if Euro-modernity inaugurated historical instantiations of both ethics and race shaped by a peculiar commitment to whiteness as ideality, then the task of ethical reconstruction would not amount to the purification of ethics through the eradication of race. It would demand, rather, the effort to rethink ethics in terms of a philosophical anthropology in which the desire for absolute innocence may predominate but is unfulfillable.
Here Miller points to Sartre’s call for an ethics of suspects in the posthumously published Notebook for an Ethics but shows the naïveté of Sartre’s argument for a Hegelian synthesis that would set ethics afoot on firm ground. It strikes me, though, that Miller’s criticism of Sartre is the same position Sartre advanced in Being and Nothingness: that the notion of an absolute ideal is, though an endemic stimulus to human desire, intrinsically unrealizable.
But if a dialectical movement to an idealized ethics is impossible, it does not follow that there is no meaningful content for an ethics of those—the stained, the suspicious, the criminal—who may ask questions about good, right, value, etc. despite knowing that there is no ethical path back to innocence.
It is worth noting, then, that there is a rich tradition of Africana philosophy in which something like an ethics for suspects has predominated in much normative thought. I have in mind thinkers like Anna Julia Cooper, Richard Wright, and W.E.B. Du Bois, who seriously explored the philosophical implications of Euro-modernity’s radical challenge that black people prove their humanity and worth. Their concern was not fabricating an ethics of removing stains but rather one of giving meaning to the absurd stains affixed by race.
Cooper’s argument in “What Are We Worth?” in particular, would seem compatible with Miller’s project, insofar as for her, human value is manifest through adult acts that, rather than asserting the innocence of the ethical subject, presume the way in which each adult is stained, cursed, and blessed by a childhood in which they received advantages and disadvantages not of their choosing. To do more for the world than what the world has done for you requires maturity but not innocence; a mature ethics, in turn, may require a move beyond the prejudicial favoring of innocence predominant in Euro-modern thought. Indeed, for Cooper, that is why even ethical theories themselves must be subject to a critical evaluation not in terms of their logical strength but rather in terms of what sorts of “men”—which I interpret as meaning adults—they produce.
Of course, a different direction suggested by this work would be to acknowledge that ethics is but one way of being conscious of value. Hence, our suspicious consciousness of ethics here points us toward other ways of being conscious of value.
Politics, for example, insofar as it abides by duties to historically-produced and situated nations and institutions, would seem to demand something other than stain removal. Of course, we note that the tendency in much Euro-modern political thought is to reduce political philosophy to applied ethics. On that model, then, politics is no more than a communal setting for stain removal.
But here, again, we note that there are alternative conceptions of politics. If the notion of the “ethico-political” is rejected, as Miller suggested in his unpublished paper at the 2015 meeting of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, then that would mean that politics could be a source for meaningful human duties irreducible to the demands of an ethical consciousness. Indeed, one could read Miller’s argument as commensurate with Hannah Arendt’s worry that the rise of “the social,” governed by an ethical rationality in which the ends of ethical life are pre-determined, negates the political and, with it, that which is truly human. The desire for stain removal, on that reading, would weave a specious moralism into the social fabric to function as a substitute for political agency, similar to the Marxian critique of morality as bourgeois ideology.
Finally, a similar movement can be made if the text is read in terms of its possible metaphilosophical implications. If Euro-modern ethics are shaped by a prejudice toward stain removal, then we may ask if Euro-modern philosophy confronts the same affliction.
Of course, there is not a shortage of works addressing the question of what happens if we inquire into “philosophy and race” in a manner parallel to Miller’s inquiry into “ethics and race.” But the latter suggests particular dimensions of the former that may not be apparent unless the latter is explored on its own terms. How, for instance, does the history of Euro-modern philosophy look if we examine it as guided by an implicit telos of stain removal? One might contend, for instance, that Euro-modern philosophy is haunted by the search for the indubitable, guided by a desire to remove the stain of arbitrary or illicit foundations in human knowledge. But how does philosophy proceed if its aim is not only to produce indubitable modes of consciousness?
Of course, in this respect, one might ask if what philosophy has always done is to produce a philosophy of suspects: philosophers defend beliefs from the onslaught of dubiety. But note that, in formal contexts, a defense is the province not of the suspect but of the suspect’s advocate. Philosophers on the Euro-modern model may, then, be implicitly guided by the lawyerly task of removing the stains that besmirch their clients’ good names. And like lawyers, the philosopher finds her/himself subject to an ethical covenant to perform this task in a methodical fashion; ideal performance of such tasks should exonerate the philosopher and philosophy even where the client’s guilt is affirmed.
Is there a shift, then, in which philosophers must abandon the task of removing the stains from otherwise pristine outfits in order to instead ask questions about the constitution of irremovable stains and about the challenges posed by bearing responsibility for such stains? If philosophy is unburdened of a concealed desire to remove stains, do other possibilities emerge?
I have argued that Miller’s text can be read as a phenomenological text. I will close by suggesting that what the book accomplishes is a movement in a metaphilosophical direction that its argument perhaps implies: that philosophers proceed to the stains themselves.
Thomas Meagher
Thomas Meagher is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sam Houston State University. He specializes in Africana philosophy, philosophy of race, phenomenology, political theory, existentialism, and philosophy of science. Meagher earned his PhD at the University of Connecticut in 2018 and has previously been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Quinnipiac University, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and a W. E. B. Du Bois Visiting Scholar Fellow at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
