How do we support Black Philosophers in our field?

This is the fourth installment of our series on how to counter racism in philosophy, and as philosophers. 

This entry is written by Johnathan Flowers, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Worcester State University, Worcester, Massachusetts

I honestly don’t know. I don’t know how we would begin to support Black Philosophers when our field can’t even decide if Black scholars are doing “philosophy,” if we have a philosophical tradition, and if that tradition is worthy of inclusion in our canons, in our introduction classes. I don’t know what recommendations I can make to a field where the last available statistics (2017) indicate that Black philosophers make up only 4% of tenured faculty in the field, and barely 1% of the field overall (2018).

I don’t know what recommendations I can make in this moment that have not already been made and subsequently ignored in favor of “solutions” that are easier. But I will try. But as I try, I would like us to bear in mind George Yancy’s words from his powerful letter, Dear White America, as I do so:

In this letter, I ask you to look deep, to look into your souls with silence, to quiet that voice that will speak to you of your white “innocence.” So, as you read this letter, take a deep breath. Make a space for my voice in the deepest part of your psyche. Try to listen, to practice being silent. There are times when you must quiet your own voice to hear from or about those who suffer in ways that you do not.[1]

I think the best way that we can begin to support Black philosophers is by reshaping what “counts” as philosophy. This is not a new recommendation in our modern context of philosophy, as there is a long list of brilliant scholars who have made similar suggestions. For example, Kristie Dotson, Bryan Van Norden, Eric Schwitzgebel, Tina Fenandes-Botts, Myisha Cherry, Liam Kofi Bright, Naomi Zack, Charles Mills, Charlotte Witt, Sarah Taylor, Kate Manne, and many others have all argued for the expansion of the philosophical canon to include more Black and Africana Philosophers and Philosophies, not to mention the work done by MAP for the Gap and a variety of junior faculty and graduate students. Many of these arguments hinge not only on the expansion of our ways of thinking, but on the value for potential philosophers to see themselves reflected in the canon of the field, to see themselves as having a place within the field. And yet, as George Yancy notes:

At the end of the day, not only does the canon continue to be policed, but Black bodies continue to be policed within the conceptual space of the profession, especially as issues that grow out of a broad and diverse ‘Black experience’ are not deemed philosophically relevant. Within this context, Black students turn away from philosophy because they don’t see themselves reflected within the field; neither within the phenotypic whiteness of the field nor within the conceptual space of the field.[2]

For all the efforts for expanding the canon, and even with the APA’s listing of syllabi resources for diversity and for sub-fields that would fall under the umbrella of diversity, the organization of our introduction courses, of our field, is still firmly aligned with the view that Philosophy as practiced in the west is the center, and all other ways of engaging with philosophy are to be treated as marginal. This marginalization of non-western, or really non-white male, philosophy has been noted by many former members of our field as a reason why they do not pursue degrees to completion, seek out what limited employment there is in our field, or continue to contribute scholarship to the field. After all, when the very organization of the field implies that your contributions will be treated as minor, that the ways of doing philosophy that proceed from your lived experience aren’t as valuable, why bother? When the standards of the field function as an extension of the policing of your very being in the world, why bother?

Why bother, indeed. I did say that I would try to make some recommendations, and yet the above seems to present more problems. But that might be a starting point, yes? If philosophy cannot acknowledge its problems, then what good are recommendations for change? And by “acknowledge its problems,” I do not mean yet another diversity session at the APA, convened by the Committee for the Status of Blacks in Philosophy: I mean a serious accounting of why there are so few Black philosophers (or philosophers of color, really) in tenured positions within our departments. I mean a serious accounting of the unspoken standards by which we judge the quality of a philosopher’s work as if these standards are race-independent. I mean interrogating the ways that maintaining whiteness is central to who we allow to teach in our departments and what we allow them to teach. I mean a serious accounting of why there exists such resistance to including Africana and other less commonly taught philosophies in our introduction syllabi, in our comprehensive and preliminary examination reading lists, and as part of the organization of the field.

Again, more problems than recommendations, but let me try again. This time (maybe) I’ll get it right. If philosophy wants to support Black philosophers, it needs to start not with syllabi, not with hiring initiatives, or pipeline initiatives, or sessions at the APA (though all of these things help), but with grappling with the very real ways that philosophy has and continues to contribute to the structures of white supremacy that enabled the murder of George Floyd, by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds while Floyd lay handcuffed face down in the street; the murder of Breonna Taylor at the hands of Louisville police officers who fired over twenty rounds into her apartment during the execution of a no-knock warrant; the murder of trans man Tony McDade at the hands of a Tallahassee police officer; and the countless other Black lives lost at the hands of white supremacist violence in all its forms.

And by “Black lives lost,” I do not simply mean the endless parade of Black bodies lying dead in American streets: I mean the Black intellectual lives lost at the hands of the institutionalization of whiteness within the academy, and within philosophy specifically. Here, I would like to take up Martin Luther King Jr.’s provocative words to frame the context:

The ultimate logic of racism is genocide, and if one says that one is not good enough to have a job that is a solid quality job, if one is not good enough to have access to public accommodations, if one is not good enough to have the right to vote, if one is not good enough to live next door to him, if one is not good enough to marry his daughter because of his race. Then at that moment that person is saying that that person who is not good to do all of this is not fit to exist or to live. And that is the ultimate logic of racism. And we've got to see that this still exists in American society.[3]

We’ve also got to see that this racism still exists in academic philosophy, and we need to be clear on the full meaning of this statement. If philosophy says that the Black experience is not relevant, that Africana and African-American Philosophy is not good enough to be counted within the canon, then it is also saying that the philosophers who have that experience, or who contribute to this tradition of knowledge are not relevant, are not fit to contribute to the field of philosophy. If philosophy says all of this, through words and through actions, then philosophy itself is saying that Black people are not fit to exist or to live. Philosophy, through its marginalization of Black philosophy and Black experience, has implicitly aligned itself with the ultimate logic of racism which is Black genocide. It is further philosophy’s complicitness with Black intellectual genocide which that it needs to address.

But philosophy also needs to address the norms that police who becomes a philosopher, norms that are continuous with white supremacy and its ultimate end in Black genocide. So here, we need to go back to Yancy’s observation that Black bodies are policed within the conceptual space of philosophy and expand it to include the professional space of philosophy. How philosophy decides who is a philosopher, who is a member of the profession, and how our Black colleagues can appear in such spaces, particularly when asked “how do we support Black philosophers,” also contributes to the intellectual genocide of Black philosophers through the exclusion that many Black philosophers experience as their ongoing interactions with the field of philosophy. Demands that we modulate our appearance, our publications, our service to the field such that we can appear to be “safer” or “less dangerous” within the field, so that we can be heard when we speak, is simply another form of genocide by a thousand cuts.

This was a lot, and I think somewhere in what I’ve written above there are some suggestions for how philosophy can support its Black philosophers. Maybe, I’m not even sure at this point. I’m not even sure that it is possible for philosophy to support its Black philosophers when philosophy can’t even grapple with the contexts within the field and beyond it that makes such support necessary. I’m not sure how philosophy can support its Black philosophers when the field as a whole does not treat the experiences, the lives, of those philosophers as philosophically relevant. I’m not sure how philosophy can support Black philosophers, when it says in a thousand different ways that Black lives do not matter, not to philosophy, and not as a source of a tradition of philosophical inquiry.

So, like I said above, I’m not sure what else I can offer to the field that has not already been offered by other Black philosophers. And honestly? I’m not sure if philosophy even cares to support its Black philosophers, at least in any material way beyond tolerating our presence, our intellectual traditions, our lives as a way to break up the unrelenting whiteness of the field.

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[1] Yancy, George. Dear White America https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/dear-white-america/

[2] Peters, Michael A. “Interview with George Yancy, African-American philosopher of critical philosophy of race,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2019, vol 15, issue 7

[3] King, “The Other America”

Comments

[Concerned1]

Hello. I would like to comment on this post to point out a worry I have had in faculty interact with graduate students on this website. I believe that most faculty are wealthy white people and when they interact with graduate students there is the expectation that they occupy a position of delayed adolescence — that is, that they have few or no financial or familial responsibilities. If the philosophers here are serious about changing the culture of philosophy departments (which actively despise minority students — see Jason Stanley’s recent tweet about how professional philosophers would regularly boast about white women ‘diversity hires’) then there needs to be a tectonic shift in how you understand graduate students.

A similar worry motivates hesitation about all of the vocational training advocated for here. While in principle I think it is a good idea, I desperately fear that the white elite of philosophy departments will naturally considered privileged white men as more likely to achieve faculty positions and so will be trained for this purpose while less fortunate graduate students will be “subtly” encouraged to look for opportunities elsewhere. In other words, in currently existing philosophy departments, where there is often the de facto segregation of black students, these vocational trainings can be further impediments to seeing students of color as “really” philosophers in the same sense as their white peers.