Race, Anti-Social Habit, and Critical Disruption

Philosophers have come to regard habit as a useful concept for thinking about race. Theories of racial habit tend to proceed by identifying particular racist and white privileged habits, and then examining the way those habits are causally bound up with systems of racial domination. Less often discussed is how habituation itself—as a condition of embodied sociality marked by ease, comfort, and affordance—has come to demarcate racial boundaries and hierarchies. Proceeding from a ‘thick’ conception of habit as a core structure of social organisms and environments, race theorists are prompted to look not only at particular racist habits and their effects, but at how the benefits of habituation are asymmetrically distributed along racial lines. This paper examines the normative implications of this asymmetry, which come into view when we take seriously and contextualize the ambivalence of habit—that it is an enabling and inhibiting force, and that it is possible to be too ‘at home’ in the world. I argue that whiteness in particular, and dominant subject-positions in general, exhibit what I call “Anti-Social Habit,” which refers to hegemonic orientations that perpetuate existing dominance structures, and that are marked by a tendency toward homogeneity and world-closure.