Your friend represents you as offering a bad argument: people who say they're unattracted to people with characteristic X are prejudiced; your friend says he's unattracted to black women; hence, your friend says, you conclude that he's prejudiced. But that doesn't strike me as a plausible diagnosis of what's going on. The problem isn't that you are relying on the bad argument your friend accuses you of. The problem is that your friend's supposed preferences are awfully hard to credit.

The obvious question to put to your friend is this: does he find all women with dark complexions sexually unattractive? If he says yes, then he might be telling the truth, but it's not easy to believe. If he says no, then things are equally puzzling: among people conventionally labeled "black," there is a wide, vast variety. Could it really be that there's something that all black women have in common that makes them unattractive to your friend? What could it possibly be?

And so we have a puzzle. Your friend is expressing a preference that's awfully hard to fathom given what we know about most people. When we're faced with cases like this, we cast around for explanations. And when race is part of the mix, the hypothesis that there's some unacknowledged prejudice at work has a certain plausibility.

Please note that since I don't know your friend and haven't ever talked to him about any of this, I can't claim to know what's really going on here. And since the word "racism" is so loaded, I've left it out of the conversation entirely. But one more general point might be worth making: human relationships and human attraction are both pretty complicated. If your friend isn't prejudiced, and if he's a properly modest thinker, then he might want to pull his horns in a bit. Few of us know ourselves as well as your friend's remark presupposes.

I'll have to leave the bit about Gauss aside. All I know about the "personal equation" was that astronomers had noticed certain sorts of systematic variations among observers. But there was a different theme in your question that I'd like to address.

A preamble: Yes, Hume, Kant and other western philosophers, no doubt all on this panel included, operate in a mileu that's saddled with various prejudices. I'd add that I'm not aware of any large cultural mileu that's exempt from this sad fact, and Africa, like the west, provides its own set of depressing illustrations. But I'm a bit uncomfortable with using a term like "Western Thought" (or, for that matter, "Eastern Thought" or "African thought" or even "South African thought") as an analytical concept. (I'm uncomfortable for similar reasons when my students write papers with sentences that begin "Society holds that...") As noted, the history of the west embodies a good many prejudices and false ideas. Some of these make their way into political and philosophical thinking. But some of those same ideas are roundly denounced and incisively criticized by thinkers within the very same broad tradition.

This bears on a more general point. Although some philosophers reason from propositions that function more or less explicitly as axioms, that suggests a model of doing philosophy that doesn't seem to me to fit the practice very well. Part of the problem is that this "top down" model simply doesn't capture what goes on in a lot of the best philosophical thinking. Philosophers are sensitive to abstract principles when they seem pertinent, but also to low-level intuitions and to stubborn facts. To borrow a phrase that John Rawls made popular, good philosophy looks for a "reflective equilibrium" among considerations of various sorts and at various levels of abstraction.

But even insofar as some philosophy fits the model you suggest, any philosopher who formulates an explicit axiom and reasons from it can expect that the axiom will become the target of counterarguments and counterexamples. The philosopher's impulse in the face of a sacred cow is to slay it. That's an important part of what keeps the discipline honest.

I'm not sure what you mean by "legitimate harm," but it strikes me that any failure to accord others the dignity they are due as human beings causes significant harm to oneself and to others.

If you agree that racism is a failure to respect human dignity, you ought to recognize it as morally objectionable and ought work to correct that failure in your own life by, for example, striving to overcome the racist fears you describe.

Masculinity and femininity have been associated with different properties at different times and in different cultures. Despite all this variation, however, that which is associated with masculinity is valued, and is often identified with the human, while that which is associated with the feminine is given lesser status and is often identified with the "other than" or "less than" human. These symbolic associations operate in many areas of inquiry, including in philosophy. As you note, these associations often don't reflect reality: men are indeed just as emotional as women and just as irrational! However, feminists think we should be worried about them for two reasons: First, they feed into the social construction of gender identity, so that they have psychological and social consequences for men and women who try to live up to the gender ideals they represent. Second, gender metaphors and associations can shape inquiry, making some questions seem pressing, hiding others from view, and bridging what would otherwise appear to be gaps in arguments. (For example, why did it take so long for there to be serious inquiry into the positive contributions that emotions make to our rationality? One possible answer is that emotion has been associated with the feminine and hence with the irrational.) The use of gender metaphors within an area of inquiry can have an ideological function; that is, it can give rise to theories that ratify current gender relations of dominance and subordination. (Sociobiology provides a much-discussed example of how this works.) For these reasons, I don't think we should think of them as "mere associations", or "mere metaphors." Metaphorical uses of "blackness" can play a similar role and so need to be treated with equal suspicion.

I agree with Richard. But there is also another sense in which racism leads people to underestimate the number of 'whites'. I am thinking here of the practice of counting somebody as unequivocally 'black' if their ancestry is half European and half African, or even 80% European and 20% African. If skin colour were not considered to be socially and politically significant, this would make no sense at all.

I'm sure there are more and less worrisome ways of answering this question, and I'd never wish to downplay the reality of racism. But, in some such cases, there is a fairly simple answer: Black-ness may be an unusual trait in certain circumstances, in the sense that there are relatively few black folks in the relevant group. If so, then mentioning that someone is black may contribute rather a lot to the effort to identify or individuate them. It's easy enough to imagine circumstances in which that would not be so. Maybe one is at the NAACP convention. Then one would be rather less likely, I'd think, to say, "I'm looking for my friend. He's black...."

It is also, sadly, easy enough to imagine that racism infects the use of this method of identifying people: Some or even many people may be inclined to suppose that the relative number of black people in a certain population is lower than it actually is. So someone might say, "the black congressman" or "the black professor", thinking those descriptions are individuating when they are not.

Of course there could be all kinds of differences between races, including differences in native intelligence, ability to learn, and so forth. The only significant question is whether there are such differences, and there has never been any decent reason to believe that there are.

Part of the problem here is that people often speak as if "race" is a well-defined notion, perhaps even a notion with biological significance. But it is not.

Yes, I think we do--generally speaking. For this reason, one of the purposes of philosophical interrogation of the concept of "race" must be to undermine it. In my teaching I try to do this where possible, and in ordinary conversation I have been experimenting with either trying to avoid racial terms altogether or using "lighter-skinned" and "darker-skinned" as descriptive terms. These terms, unlike "black" or "white" are comparative and suggest gradations and continuity (which I think accurate to the biological facts of the matter). Ethnic terms like "African" are useful, too, but don't quite bear the same force of inclusion and continuity. Nevertheless, I don't think their use terribly pernicious, except when their use is exceptional. That is, using ethnic rather than racial terms may sometimes still serve to "other," separate, subordinate, etc. when members of other groups are not desgnated with ethnic terms.

There are situations, however, where using the concept of race can serve morally desirable purposes. ("Using," of course, is different from "upholding.") Such cases typically involve using the concept to subvert itself. I more or less agree with Linda Alcoff's concept of "positionality," which acknowledges a certain kind of social reality to the concepts while not implying that they are fixed, natural, or necessary. Understanding this one might, for example, use the concept of "race" as it exists in some context to advance affirmative action and diversity policies, to teach black literature courses, to run anti-racism workshops, to analyze judicial decisions, to criticize housing and banking practices, to prosecute hate crimes etc. Rather than "upholding" race, these uses of it can help to eliminate it.

I do think it true, however, that improperly used--even in these sorts of contexts--using the concept can reinforce the concept. Taking steps to problematize the concept whenever while engaged in these sorts of practices, therefore, is morally advisable in order to minimze or eliminate this result.

the tendency to think worse of some people (e.g., in regard to their character or abilities), or to treat them worse than others, merely on account of information about their race or ethnicity.