In Ethics and Race, Zack focuses on the intersection of philosophical ethics with race studies. The book is designed for lower-level semester courses and begins by examining ethics and race separately to enable readers to access definitions, issues, and diverse perspectives. As an introductory text, the book simplifies many ideas. For teaching purposes, a background in philosophy will help with unpacking terminology, advanced explanations, and logical argumentation. Such a background will also allow students to move into deeper discussions and to better analyze the complexities and perspectives discussed. This reviewer therefore strongly recommends this volume for philosophical classroom use. The book can also be read successfully outside a course as it offers an expansive discussion of ethics and race, both individually and as they intersect. For those outside academia, this book is an excellent way to enter these difficult conversations but will require more detailed readings for readers to gain proficiency in the subject matter. Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.

Choice Reviews

Race is the most powerful concept of social organization and terror ever created in human history. Naomi Zack’s Ethics and Race offers a conceptually rich study of the ethical dilemmas race creates in law, science, and moral reasoning. In this well-done book, students and scholars alike will become well acquainted with the perils the race concept poses for our contemporary thinking and ethical decision-making.

Tommy Curry, The University of Edinburgh, author of The Man-Not

Dr. Naomi Zack’s Ethics and Race is a refreshing and desperately needed bridging of philosophical ethics and philosophy of race. Lucid and rigorous, this text is an invaluable resource for educators and for anyone who is trying to make sense of our fraught social-political landscape.

George N. Fourlas, co-editor of Radical Philosophy Review, professor, Hampshire College

Philosopher Naomi Zack offers comprehensive, highly readable analyses of critical ethical dimensions of contemporary racism. Digesting much social science and philosophical research, she provides thought-provoking analyses for students, teachers, and general readers. A timely book for Americans facing major anti-democratic challenges from white supremacist uprisings!

Joe Feagin, Distinguished Professor, Texas A&M University, and author of Racist America

Careful, complete, engagingly written, Zack’s approach in this book is fantastic. It is well organized, timely, and extremely useful for teaching.

Emily McRae, associate professor, University of New Mexico

Ethics and Race is a revolutionary book that re-frames the study of ethics and the study of race, showing their profound intertwinement and offering lucid, concrete discussions of such timely issues. There is no other book like this, and indeed no philosopher other than Naomi Zack could have composed this book. The twenty-four chapters of Ethics and Race are precise and fecund; each topic is systematically laid out and supplemented with questions for discussion, videos, and a glossary. Ethics and Race is a gift to teachers and scholars. Zack’s vision for philosophy is that it should illuminate our reality and provide the conditions for us to become better humans, not through an abstract commitment to human nature or the good life, but through police reform, redistribution of wealth, supporting health care for the vulnerable, rejecting sexism, and challenging white supremacy.

T Storm Heter, professor, director of the Frederick Douglass Institute for Intercultural Studies, East Stroudsburg University