Who K(New): The Nation-ist Contour of Racial Identity in the Thought of Martin R. Delany and John E. Bruce‪.‬

Introduction Despite the irrefutable failure of integration1 and multiculturalism, race theory in philosophy continues to endorse the dilapidated ideas of color-blindness (Bonilla-Silva 2003, 2001), (2) and liberal democracy, which ignore the historic and systemic racism of American society. (3) Currently, theories about race focus on the socially constructed nature of the term--its contingency, rather than the effects it has had on African descended people's political orientation in America and the cultural heritage various African thinkers have infused the term with over the centuries. The dominance of anti-essentialist rhetoric and cosmopolitan care ethics in philosophy has forced scholars to write a historical and textually skewed apologetics of historic Black figures as the condition for their acceptance into the canon.