 Critical Philosophers of Race have generally argued that the elimination of race terms will encroach on our ability to retain an effective historical consciousness, which hermeneuticists such as Hans-Georg Gadamer described as central to the capacity to reason well (Gadamer 1975 [2004]). On the hermeneutic view, individuals engage in the work of judgment and interpretation while embedded within particular traditions, but eliminativism could disable the self-reflection this calls for. And for phenomenologists such as Sartre, at least in his later works, the self is the product of a dialectical interaction between the particulars of one’s social situation and the choices one makes as an individual. As Donna-Dale Marcano explains, Sartre’s approach “enables us to explain how and why members of an oppressed group positively assume and create an identity for ourselves” grounded in that group experience: in order to acknowledge the importance of this shared history as well as the forms of resistance that have had a hand in shaping our current social identities (Marcano 2003, 25). The desirability of forgetting this history may vary across groups, since some might wish to forget atrocities that played a role in their family enrichment, while others wish the world to remember the lessons of the past as well as the history of group resistance and survival. If our selves are indeed the product of dialectical engagement, a philosophical treatment of identity and the self will need to incorporate the situated and relational elements that play a significant role in constituting us, and this will include our racialized identities. This approach is not antithetical to a social constructionist theory but one form it can take.