Race and Reality: Towards a Social Aesthetics of Race

In this chapter, I draw upon the social aesthetics of Whitehead to argue for a social aesthetics of race. The social aesthetics of race draws on the aesthetic dimensions of social life in response to the function of race as a predatory abstraction, which bifurcates human societies between worlds of colour. These worlds realize themselves through the maintenance of hierarchical, segregated material conditions alongside an ideology of liberal universalist progressivism. This contradiction, I argue, generates forms of sensibility that ontologize the fundamental distinction between worlds and people as a necessary feature of our experience. Thus, our engagement with social aesthetics should work on cultivating forms of sensibility grounded in collective practices that draw upon these forms to identify their origins in lived experience, critique their ideological underpinnings and develop novel sociological ideals for the advancement of societies out of their colonial forms.