Volume 48, Issue 3, September 2025
KC Lynch

Pages 431-453
https://doi.org/10.5840/teachphil2025714231
Concretizing Philosophical Concepts of Race and Gender
Teaching the National Memorial for Peace and Justice
Before they reach university, many U.S. students have been taught incomplete or sanitized histories of racist violence¡ªand the situation is worsening due to legislation that prohibits full discussions of Black erasure. I find it helpful to bridge the knowledge gap by concretizing philosophical concepts of race through exploration of The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The memorial materially combats philosophical conceptions of racism by speaking to and against the ¡°inverted epistemology¡± described by Charles W. Mills in The Racial Contract (1997); and questions, though somewhat inadequately, the overlapping injustices described in Kimberl¨¦ Crenshaw¡¯s ¡°Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex¡± (1989). In this way, the memorial is not a side note or visual aid to discussing philosophy of race and gender¡ªit allows students to concretize what otherwise would be abstract or ephemeral. It is a material thinking-through.