On the Notion of Black Issues in Philosophy
In 2017 I was a graduate student at the University of Connecticut. My mentor, Lewis Gordon—who in the interim has, among other things, been named a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor—summoned a few other graduate students and myself to his house. With the encouragement of the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Black Philosophers, our task was to prepare a proposal for a series to run on the APA Blog.
The series debuted that fall. The first post was by Lewis announcing the series, and the second was my profile of the work of philosopher Donna-Dale Marcano. Those of us on the initial editorial team contributed many of the earliest pieces, such as Rosemere Ferreira da Silva’s interview with Cornel West, Derefe Kimarley Chevannes’s reflection on the nature of political speech by way of a study of Afro-Deaf communities, Dana Francisco Miranda’s work on Africana philosophy and depression, Brooks Kirchgassner’s examination of Charles Mills and intersectionality, and Darian Spearman’s discussion of Howard Thurman. (Colena Sesanker, the other early member of our editorial team, was busy instead contributing to the New York Times.)
In that first year, we had several pieces attract attention, including three discussions of recent films: Black Panther, Get Out, and Sorry to Bother You. Perhaps our most widely-shared and most impactful edition, though, was Lewis’s detailed profile of the work of the Nigerian scholar Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí, exploring her many contributions to decolonizing knowledge, and, in particular, conceptions of gender and sexuality.
Over the years, the series has run contributions from such esteemed senior scholars as Nigel Gibson, Leonard Harris, Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, Richard A. Jones, Michael Monahan, Richard Pithouse, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Corey D.B. Walker, and Catherine Walsh. We’ve also run dozens of excellent contributions by graduate students and early-career scholars, as well as several independent scholars.
As most of us in the early editorial team completed our doctorates and moved on, Lewis mainly edited the series by himself with Darian’s assistance for a few years. Lewis did this despite taking over as head of the Philosophy department at UCONN in 2020 and despite his having published four books in that period. In 2022, Lewis asked me to return to the project, I am now serving as co-editor, taking the lead in inviting authors to contribute and working with them to develop their contributions. Since then, UCONN graduate students Ananda Griffin and Tiana-Marie Blassingale have joined the team (and also contributed excellent pieces of their own).
Aside from the occasional break, we publish an installment every two weeks, and by my count the series will publish its 155th and 156th installments this month (September 2024). Our installments include scholarly essays both long and short, interviews with scholars and activists, book reviews, profiles of contemporary philosophers and remembrances of the recently deceased, and opinion pieces addressing current events.
One of the questions I have thought about many times over the years is, “What do we mean by Black Issues in Philosophy?” I was there in 2017 when the title was devised, but despite having authored seventeen installments of the series and having spent the last two years as co-editor, no one has ever asked me about the title of the series. Perhaps that’s simply a reflection of a quality title: it says enough that no one is confused. Nonetheless, even though you haven’t asked me either, gentle reader, I will take this opportunity to share my thoughts.
While there are many ways of conceiving of philosophy, I have always remained partial to beginning the discussion with the notion of loving wisdom. Wisdom denotes knowledge, though with the caveat that it may not denote all knowledge. In other words, some knowledge may be unwise, which would prompt the conclusion that wisdom is but a proper subset of knowledge. Often times, the concept invoked to distinguish wisdom from knowledge is that of its practicality: trivial facts may be known, but their practical irrelevance means they do not constitute wisdom.
An objection might be made here that any type of knowledge can be put into practice in some weak sense: I might simply “practice” recalling what I know. Thus, we might surmise that the practicality standard isn’t about the capacity to practice but about those responsibilities that such practice can help to fulfill. I think of wisdom, then, as knowledge that can facilitate the fulfillment of genuine human responsibilities. I thus often characterize wisdom as mature knowledge, in light of my view that human maturity is realized through affirmative consciousness of infinite responsibility. In other words, one who is mature doesn’t shirk responsibilities despite the human condition entailing that we couldn’t ideally fulfil all of our responsibilities. So wisdom, or mature knowledge, enhances our ability to live up to human responsibilities, but it also helps us understand, accept, and lived with the vexed and demanding nature of such responsibilities.
What, then, would it mean to love wisdom?
Like former APA Blog editor-in-chief Skye Cleary, I have found myself coming back to the topic of love repeatedly in my work, particularly in my contributions to the Black Issues in Philosophy series. For Valentine’s Day 2023, for instance, I prepared a philosophical reflection on romantic love by way of the thought of Howard Thurman. There, I defended the view that romantic love responds to the needs of an existential adolescence, which is not a matter of being a biological teenager but rather of confronting oneself as facing adult responsibilities while being, existentially, an unfinished project.
The relevance of love in this sense to philosophy is of course familiar through Plato’s classic Symposium. Diotima’s famous account, as recounted by Plato (by way of Socrates), roots love in the incompleteness of the human condition, defined by its lack of the fixed goodness that defines the divinities in contradistinction to humanity. In the Platonic framework, the existential ascent of the lover toward desire for greater and more permanent iterations of the beloved means that ultimately love may take the form of pure contemplation of the transcendent, as in those moments where Socrates appears to have left the human world altogether, lost in reflection on and appreciation of truth and beauty themselves.
Yet there is an aspect of love that the Platonic portrait may somewhat occlude, which might be best summarized as that of care. We might conceive of love not just as a form of desire but as one infused through and through with a profound sense of responsibility for the desired—that is, the lover not only wants (x) but wants the best for (x) and acts so as to fulfill this latter desire. In that framework, we might conclude that the greatest expressions of Socrates’s love of wisdom are not in his temporary departures from the rest of the world through contemplation, but rather in his returns, where his care for the truth is manifest in the discursive project of helping others achieve the same. As I wrote about in my discussion of Anna Julia Cooper for our series, caring love of this sort might be thought to be a transcendental condition of possibility for value. As Cooper argues, the valuable is produced through the relation of material and labor. Caring love is a form of labor that is necessary to produce human beings capable of laboring valuably.
Philosophy, then, might be conceived of as a desire for mature knowledge that is manifest through taking care of such knowledge, both in its maintenance and its cultivation. Such care, as I argued in my discussion of Kathleen Collins’s wonderful 1982 film Losing Ground, creates an existential conundrum for the philosopher. A social world that values knowledge may comprehend the philosopher as simply one akin to that of a scientist charged with producing true claims where they did not already exist. But for any philosopher who has had the experience of teaching a new crop of students each year the difference between a valid argument and a sound one, the limitation of such framework should be clear: the philosopher’s love of wisdom entails an existential commitment to reproducing wisdom and not merely for producing knowledge.
Some might affirm the account to this point and ask, “Okay, fine; but if this is so, why would ‘Black Issues’ be relevant to the philosopher?” For the proud antiblack racist, blackness is constructed as the antithesis of wisdom, such that to love wisdom would require radically extricating it from anything “black.” For the more moderate critic, the objection often goes that “blackness” is an arbitrary social construction, so true wisdom would require dismissing references to it altogether in favor of the project of apprehending genuine truths.
However, the tension between these two views in part suggests the answer. If one starts with the presupposition that Black people are human, then the viewpoint of the antiblack racist is telling of the type of arbitrary social construction that blackness is. In other words, the construction of blackness is not merely a random historical accident, but is rather something achieved over several centuries in order to make efforts to dominate Africana peoples and others (e.g., those populations in India and Australia that would become known locally as black) appear legitimate. Hence, to state that “white” and “black” are each arbitrary social constructions may occlude the function of each term in relation to the other, and efforts to eradicate the terms from theoretical vocabularies do not as such eradicate the continuing function of those terms and their cognates and euphemisms.
While installments of our series often refer to and make use of the categories “African,” “African-American,” “Afro-Caribbean,” “Afro-Latinx,” etc., as well as the broader “Africana,” it is important to understand why and how these terms are not isomorphic with “black.” Drawing on existential phenomenology, we might note that blackness is an unnecessary formulation: even racist efforts to justify the enslavement of Afro-diasporic peoples and the colonization of Africa need not ever have conceived of such people as “black.” That “black” skin denotes a range of colors that would generally be termed brown drives home the point.
Viewed in this way, we might characterize “black issues” as those issues that arise on the basis of an effort to see (x) as if it were (y), particularly where that effort emerges out of a desire to dominate (x). If philosophy is a love of wisdom, then blackness in this sense presents a straightforward issue: blackness is the product of an anti-knowledge masquerading as knowledge.
However, there is another dimension here that has been raised by Africana phenomenologists. If the “black” is what is constructed by the dominators, then it doesn’t follow that this initial construct is all that the effort produces. Those who experience being black in turn may reflect on precisely this experience. Thus, there is a consciousness-of-being-black, or a “lived experience” of being-black, to use a phenomenological term that has now been popularized albeit sometimes at the cost of philosophical precision. Lewis and many other scholars thus distinguish between “black” and “Black,” since the latter involves taking a position on the experience of having been made to be “black.” A racist consciousness that imposes being-black on a human being thus creates the conditions out of which the latter can be self-conscious of becoming Black, that is, of realizing oneself as critically facing the impositions of racist consciousness. Thus, the effort to see (x) as if it were (y) produces (x*) in turn: Black consciousness as (x*) is a human (x) consciousness adopting a critical perspective on its presentation as black (y).
Thus, our series might be characterized as involving both “black issues” and “Black issues.” We might term “black issues in philosophy” those impediments to wisdom that arise through anti-knowledges—that is, the presentation and/or acceptance of pseudo-justifications for false beliefs—in the context of efforts to legitimate the domination of some by others. For that reason, our series has not only featured contributions in the specific domain of Africana philosophy but has involved a variety of installments grounded in feminist, indigenous, Indian, and Latinx thought and topics. In other words, the project of addressing black issues in philosophy can rightly be conceived as a universal philosophical project, since any genuine philosopher can care for mature knowledge by identifying, refuting, and surpassing these anti-knowledges. (Though this does not foreclose the possibility that many purported philosophers, acting on the basis of particular commitments and presuppositions, might fail to approach these black issues rigorously.)
But given this, “Black issues” in philosophy also come to the fore as a somewhat separate matter. In other words, the question how Black consciousness relates to other Black consciousnesses raises issues in philosophy irreducible to “black issues.” If we maintain, for instance, that all Black consciousness rests on a prior foundation of experiencing being-black, then it does not follow that Black consciousness is only concerned with precisely that experience. Thus, as Black consciousness deals with topics that may have been prompted by antiblack racism but that are not thereby reducible to that phenomenon, the question of how to relate to independent philosophical topics from the vantage of Black consciousness comes to the fore.
W.E.B. Du Bois evinced such a perspective in Darkwater, noting that while he was examining perennial philosophical topics, he did so “in the hope that I may strike here and there a half-tone, newer even if slighter, up from the heart of my problem and the problems of my people.” We might say that “Black issues in philosophy,” then, are those issues where critical consciousness of being-black in turn creates conditions that habituate one to identifying anti-knowledges in ways that might remain opaque to one’s philosophical peers and predecessors.
In short, where philosophy deals with black/Black issues—both those lying outside of it and those lying within philosophy—it manifests that desire through which it is driven to care for the maturity of knowledge. In taking on black issues, philosophy manifests its love of knowledge by identifying and displacing those anti-knowledges that antiblack racism and its cognates proliferate. In taking on Black issues, philosophy manifests its care for the maturation of knowledge by realizing philosophy’s significance to those who confront black issues not only as intellectual exercises but as impositions that imbue existence with tragic responsibilities that knowledge alone is insufficient to transcend. In short, black/Black issues are among those where the philosopher’s effort to deal with them may, in turn, make the philosopher’s work and labor more genuinely philosophical.
What else I’m reading:
Kevin Nealon’s I Exaggerate: My Brushes with Fame - For someone who grew up watching Saturday Night Love when Nealon was hosting "Weekend Update," this hits all the right nostalgia buttons. Philosophically, there's quite a lot to appreciate here about the nature of caricature (and representing human character, more broadly) and Nealon's genuine amateurism about drawing, in the sense of loving something so much that one commits to doing it excellently.
From the Archive:
Interview with Dr. Nathifa Greene
Maria Lugones: A Meditation on Acompañamiento, Compartir y Compas
 |
|