In this article, I argue that African-American philosophy emerges from a socio-existential context where persons of African descent have been faced with the absurd in the form of white racism (This paper is a substantially revised version on an earlier article. See Yancy, G. (2011). African-American Philosophy through the Lens of Socio-Existential Struggle. Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 37: 551–574). The concept of struggle, given the above, functions as both descriptive and heuristic vis-à-vis the meaning of African American philosophy. Expanding upon Charles Mills’ concept of non-Cartesian sums, I demonstrate the inextricable link between Black lived experience, struggle, and the morphology of meta-philosophical assumptions and philosophical problems specific to African-American philosophy. Because of the philosophical pretensions of white Western philosophy, with it claims to universal truth and objective knowledge, the particularity of African-American philosophical concerns with questions of embodiment and race is often deemed ersatz or non-philosophical. In this article, I argue that whiteness as the transcendental norm is productive of a form of ignorance endemic to Western philosophical practices that are myopic and hegemonic. Finally, African-American philosophy is theorized as a gift, as a critical counter-narrative that can be deployed to fissure Western philosophy’s narcissism.
The meaning of African-American philosophy is in process, responding to historical contingencies, and constantly engaging in meta-philosophical reflection. In this sense, African-American philosophy is not an essence, but a socially engaged project, one that grows out of a larger socio-historical matrix of change. My approach to African-American philosophy, and the assumptions that inform that approach, as with every hermeneutic framework, both discloses and yet conceals. One always begins an inquiry in medias res. There is no hermeneutic perspective from nowhere. Every perspective (etymologically, ‘to look’) is a partial, unfinished look, a beckoning for one to look again. One might argue, along Merleau-Pontyan lines, that there is always the promise of more to see. By foregrounding the social and historical struggle of Black people,1 African-American philosophy reconfigures certain perennial assumptions about the nature of philosophy and the philosopher as conceived within the context of mainstream Western (white) philosophy. Theorizing African-American philosophy within the social matrix of anti-Black racism situates philosophical reflective thought within the concrete muck and mire of raced embodied existence, thus deconstructing the myth of philosophy and the philosopher as Olympian, beyond the body, beyond race, godlike, otherworldly. Within the context of discussing the preponderance of African-American philosophers who deal with issues in the area of value theory, political, and social philosophy, Robert Birt argues that ‘the leisure and liberty to dwell on metaphysical concerns with Olympian composure … isn’t so easy for an outcast and denigrated people’ (Yancy, 1998j, p. 351). Bodies that suffer, bodies in pain, lynched bodies, and mutilated bodies constitute the existentially lived reality of Black people in America. I argue that it is within the context of such pervasive existential and experiential suffering (Black Erlebnis) that African-American philosophy articulates its normative concerns. The philosophical concerns and sensibilities of African-American philosophy are shaped from the ground up; they are shaped from the underside of western philosophical hubris. In stream with Cornel West, any really serious philosophy that grapples with life must make sense of what he calls the ‘guttural cry’ (Yancy, 1998e, p. 38). For my purposes, African-American philosophy is a critical process of rendering that cry, that scream, and that struggle visible and intelligible. In this regard, I would argue that African-American philosophy is a species of recovering philosophy, of forcing philosophy to engage issues that mock abstract reflection and theory or theoros, which denotes ‘spectator.’ Abstract spectatorship is a privilege that Black bodies, within a context of anti-Black racism, cannot afford.
Mills (1998) is also cognizant of the ‘rage … of those invisible native sons and daughters who, since nobody knows their name, have to be the men who cry “I am!” and women who demand “And ain’t I a woman?”’ (p. 10). It is existentially and politically incumbent upon Black bodies, because of their historical malediction (discursive construction as ‘inferior’ and ‘evil’), to demand forms of recognition. And yet, it is a form of demand that already asks too much. It is akin to Frederick Douglass’s impatience with explaining the barbarity of North American slavery. He writes:
What! am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood and stained with pollution is wrong? No – I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply. (Douglass, 1993, p. 144)
Within the context of the non-recognition of Black humanity, Mills explicitly emphasizes the importance of rage that is expressed by persons of African descent who have been deemed sub-persons/Untermenschen. In stream with Mills, I theorize the meaning of African-American philosophy within the context of Black sub-personhood. After all, Black people have had to engage in socio-existential struggle to redefine themselves against longstanding historical racist acts of dehumanization and brutalization. As West (1982) argues, ‘The notion that black people are human beings is a relatively new discovery in the modern West’ (47). Hence, modernity, with its emphasis upon individualism, advancement, and the critique of traditional beliefs and norms, is undergirded by a form of misanthropy, by fear of the Black body, and by racial markings of the Black body as sub-human, ersatz, primitive, expendable. Hence, one might argue that modernity is parasitic upon the denigration of the Black body, where the meaning of the anthropos is grounded upon whiteness. As Frantz Fanon writes,
That same Europe where they were never done talking of Man, and where they never stopped proclaiming that they were only anxious for the welfare of Man: today we know with what sufferings humanity has paid for every one of their triumphs of the mind. (Fanon, p. 312)
In his genealogical account of modern racism, West provides a narrative that refuses to obfuscate the racial and racist foundations of modernity. He shows ‘the way in which the very structure of modern discourse at its inception produced forms of rationality, scientificity, and objectivity as well as esthetic and cultural ideals which require the constitution of the idea of white supremacy’ (West, 1982, p. 47). Hence, I conceptualize African-American philosophy as a counter-voice to whiteness as a site of hegemonic metanarrative nation building, a site of terror and the desire for totality. In other words, African-American philosophy introduces fissures, differences, and heterogeneity vis-à-vis the white normative same. On this score, Jean-Francois Lyotard writes:
Finally, it must be clear that it is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented. And it is not to be expected that this task will effect the last reconciliation between language games … only the transcendental illusion … can hope to totalize them into a real unity. But … the price to pay for such an illusion is terror. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high price for the nostalgia for the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience … Let us wage war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name. (cited in Gray, 1996, p. 377)
My discussion of African-American philosophy is defined in relationship to its explicitly non-Cartesian or anti-Cartesian assumptions. This is not a novel approach, but it transcends the familial ‘Oedipal conflict’ subtext that is often associated with so many thinkers who eagerly unseat the patriarch of modern philosophy. To think of the history of Western philosophy as constituting a family with cross generational (monochromatic) ties, it is important to note that Black people were never even part of the family; they were always already outsiders, deemed permanently unfit to participate in the normative philosophical community. A non-Cartesian approach to African-American philosophy is conceptually fruitful given the oppression of persons of African descent during European modernity; it is an approach that is prepared to wage war against conceptual totalization. Black people are those who occupy the underside of modernity; they constitute the primitive ‘Other’ of modernity’s self-understanding. Because various Cartesian epistemological assumptions and moves are crucial to modernity, the Cartesian predicament becomes, as (Mills, 1998) demonstrates, ‘a kind of pivotal scene for a whole way of doing philosophy and one that involves a whole program of assumptions about the world and (taken-for-granted) normative claims about what is philosophically important’ (p. 8). Given the materially and ideologically reinforced sub-personhood status of Black people in North America, what Jean-Paul Sartre calls ‘that super-European monstrosity’ (Sartre, 26), African-American philosophy is referentially this-worldly; it is a site of conceptualizing the world that looks suspiciously upon and rejects the ahistorical nature of the epistemic subject. As Crispin Sartwell observes:
Left to my own devices, I disappear as an author. That is the ‘whiteness’ of my authorship. This whiteness of authorship is, for us, a form of authority; to speak (apparently) from nowhere, for everyone, is empowering, though one wields power here only by becoming lost to oneself. But such an authorship and authority is also pleasurable: it yields the pleasure of self-forgetting or apparent transcendence of the mundane and the particular, and the pleasure of power expressed in the ‘comprehension’ of a range of materials. (Sartwell, 1998, p. 6)
African-American philosophy’s point of critical embarkation is not preoccupied with ‘the danger of degeneration into solipsism, the idea of being enclosed in our own possibly unreliable perceptions, the question of whether we can be certain other minds exist, the scenario of brains in a vat, and so forth’ (Mills, 1998, p. 8). To get a sense of the non-Cartesian, this-worldly constitution of African-American philosophy, consider a few philosophical assumptions held by René Descartes.
In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes (1637/1998) assumes the posture of a skeptic. After describing what he depicts metaphorically as having fallen into a whirlpool, a vortex that has tossed him around and thrown him off of his epistemological footing, he reaches his Archimedean point, the indubitable insight that ‘“I am, I exist” is necessarily true every time I utter it or conceive it in my mind’ (sec. 25). Knowing incontrovertibly that he exists, Descartes (1637) will shut his eyes, stop up his ears, and withdraw all of his senses in order to uncover the nature of the self. As he says, ‘I will attempt to render myself gradually better known and more familiar to myself’ (sec. 34). This approach has embedded within it the assumption that the self can be better known through withdrawing from (or radically doubting) the social world, thus challenging the notion that the self is fundamentally socially transversal, constituted dialectically, and thereby inextricably linked to the reality of the social world, its dynamism, and its force of interpellation. Descartes’ point of epistemic embarkation is antithetical to Fanon’s sociogenic approach to the lived experience of Black people; indeed, Descartes’ approach places under erasure precisely the philosophical lens through which Black life can be understood, especially within the context of its lived racist trauma.
The Cartesian approach also presumes that the predicament of the Cartesian self is a universal (de-contextualized) predicament (Mills, 1998, p. 8), one unaffected by the exigencies and contingencies of concrete history. In short, Cartesian epistemic subjects (denuded, as it were, of historical and corporeal particularity) are substitutable pure and simple, and faced with the same epistemic global problems, which I see as a species of totalization. This substitutability assumption places under erasure important markers of African-American philosophy, how African-American philosophy, with its questions, problems, and dilemmas, evolves out of a context where raced embodied subjects undergo shared existential crises of struggle within the context of anti-Black racism. This does not mean that African-American philosophy does not share philosophical concerns with other philosophical traditions and paradigms, and that there are not points of conceptual cross-fertilization. However, to understand African-American philosophy one must reject the substitutability assumption in favor of a perspective that focuses on and highlights the relationship between social ontology and particular aspects of Black Erlebnis, that is, the range of ways in which Black people make meaning within the context of various occurrences or experiences where, in this case, anti-Black racism is salient. In this way, African-American philosophy, with its specific philosophical concerns and articulations, does not aspire to forms of universalism (thus repeating the normative assumptions of whiteness) that obfuscate modes of particularity. Moreover, African-American philosophy does not presume to speak for all epistemic subjects simpliciter. Its point of philosophical embarkation does not rest upon the assumption of a fixed set of abstract and universal problems or solutions. Leonard Harris eludes to this view where he argues that ‘as a genre, it [African-American philosophy] is dominated by issues of practicality and struggle, which means that it is not committed to a metaphysics in the sense of having a singular proposition out of which all other propositions arise’ (Yancy, 1998g, p. 214). And describing his important first anthology, published in 1983, a text which was/is historically pivotal in terms of gathering together important Black philosophical themes and figures, indeed, rendering Black philosophical voices visible, Harris writes, ‘Philosophy Born of Struggle is predicated on the assumption that a good deal of philosophy from the African-American heritage is a function of the history of the struggle to overcome adversity and to create’ (Allen, 1991, p. 273). It is important to note that the very publication of Harris’s text grew out of struggle. Within a context where ‘important’ philosophical texts are determined by white consumption and white norms of canon formation, Harris notes, ‘There wasn’t anybody who was willing to publish it. Not a single publisher in philosophy’ (Yancy, 1998g, pp. 218–219). Even Howard University Press, the press of an important HBCU, would not publish Harris’ text because of its narrowly defined ‘Negro genre’ (Yancy, 1998g, p. 219).
While the complexity of African-American philosophy should not be reduced to struggle, its historical genesis as a professional field of inquiry, its salient themes, and its forms of praxes, presuppose a world of white supremacy, a world that is fundamentally anti-Black. Unlike Descartes, Black self-understanding grows out of a social matrix of pain, suffering, and trauma; a site where the Black body is marked as inferior, different, and deviant. To withdraw from the senses in the style of Descartes, which is a form of negating embodiment as a necessary condition for self-understanding, is to presume an abstract subject from nowhere. As such, this move actually renders the self incapable of knowing itself, as self-understanding is always already from a here, a place of lived embodied knowledge, a here that presupposes a community of intelligibility, the space of sociality. Hence, to understand Black lived experience, and to understand African-American philosophy, it is important to begin with embodiment, history, and lived social context, a context within which Black people were/are reduced to an epidermal logic that signifies pure externality, thus denying any subjective interiority to the Black body. The Black self, then, is not enclosed within a solipsistic bubble free of interpellation and oppression. The Black self has struggled to understand and define itself within a context where whiteness functions as a transcendental norm, where white embodied others’ ego-genesis is parasitic upon the ontological distortion and nullification of Black bodies. Within this context, then, Black bodies can’t afford, as implied by Sartwell, to engage in the pleasure of self-forgetting or the apparent transcendence of the quotidian and the particular. To forget would result in a form of intellectual masturbation that would seduce Black bodies into a vortex of self-forgetting/self-negation, and thus perpetuate the illusion of white universality or Western philosophical myopia. Hence, whiteness as synonymous with humanity is purchased not only through opposition, but negation. As Frantz Fanon argues, ‘When I search for Man in the technique and style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders’ (Fanon, 321). The Black self is raced and so rendered non-normative [read: not white]. On this score, whiteness is deemed normative and un-raced. As Cone (1986) notes, ‘Whites can move beyond particular human beings to the universal human being because they have not experienced the reality of color’ (p. 86).
To understand Black-being-in-the-world, and the historical context of African-American philosophy, the self-Other dialectic is crucial. Not only is it a fundamental assumption of African-American philosophy, but the self-Other dialectic captures the concrete reality of racism. While racism is not a necessary feature of the self-Other dialectic, the former presupposes the latter. Hence:
In their effort to delineate various generative themes that give rise to the views of Black philosophers within their text, I Am Because We Are: Readings in Black Philosophy, Hord and Lee (1995) emphasize the self-Other dialectic as one important theme. They argue that ‘constitutive of the black philosophical tradition … is the idea that identity of the individual is never separable from the sociocultural environment. Identity is not some Cartesian abstraction grounded in a solipsistic self-consciousness’ (p. 7). The sum (I am) of the self is not self-constituted; rather, ‘I am’ presupposes ‘they are.’ The Cartesian self, in its isolated self-certainty has no need for the category of sociality; rather, it appears to inhabit a non-social space of invulnerability and independence. African-American philosophy, however, does not begin with an egologically fixed and estranged self; for ‘the experience of the self with other selves is the meaning of “sociality”’ (Natanson, 1970, p. 47). African-American philosophy begins within a space of profound vulnerability. And while the we-relationship that constitutes any particular self might be taken for granted, the reality of the we-relationship is decisive and its constitutive dynamism precedes the performative ‘I am.’ As Maurice Natanson (1970) notes, ‘We are before I am’ (p. 47).
Read through the lens of white racism, the point here is that African-American philosophy presupposes a social ontology where the self, in this case the Black self, is positioned by anti-Black racist forces in terms of which the Black self must contend. In its racially configured form, the self-Other dialectic is captured implicitly by West (1995) where he asks, ‘What does it mean to be a philosopher of African descent in the American empire?’ (p. 356). West’s question raises the issue of philosophical identity beyond the sphere of armchair contemplation and thinking substances. His question presupposes an identity in context, a situated self, one that is anti-essentialist in its constitution. Within the American empire, an embodied Black self is always already the target of vicious gazes and acts of brutality. Hence, within the context of racist hegemony, the centrality of the American empire becomes an important axis around which African-American philosophical identity must be defined. Outlaw (1996) even sees the very attempt by Black people to address important meta-philosophical concerns around the issue of whether or not there can be a Black philosophy as an outgrowth of struggle. He notes that confronting ‘this issue of “Black philosophy” is the expansion of the continuing history-making struggles of African and African-descended peoples in this country (and elsewhere) to achieve progressively liberated existence as conceived in various ways’ (p. 23). Indeed, while African-Americans received PhD’s in the field of philosophy prior to the activism and liberating struggles to establish Black Studies Programs in the 1960s and 1970s, it is important to note that the overall raising of consciousness during this period functioned as a catalyst for African-Americans who entered advanced degree programs in the area of philosophy. Hence, in this respect, African-American philosophy is an outgrowth of a larger socio-political struggle of Black people to gain civil rights and human rights. African-American philosophy is therefore an expression of larger processes of epistemic decolonization and epistemic liberation. Yet, these processes also have freeing implications for Western philosophy, especially as it takes itself as the hub of universal thought, being, and value. African-American philosophy offers the gift of second-sight which is capable of instilling in Western philosophy, a productive form of white double consciousness. I will return this concept at the end of this essay. The question regarding philosophers of African descent within the context of the American empire bespeaks the role of power and oppression as important foci of African-American philosophical engagement. The philosophical selves that are implicated in West’s (1995) question are selves that take seriously ‘the worldliness of one’s philosophical project’ (p. 357). West (2005) also rejects the Cartesian presumption regarding ‘the absolute autonomy of philosophy’ (p. 8). For West (2005), Cartesians assume that ‘philosophy stands outside the various conventions on which people base their social practices and transcends the cultural heritages and political struggles of people’ (p. 8). He concludes, ‘If the Cartesian viewpoint is the only valid philosophical stance, then the idea of an Afro-American philosophy would be ludicrous’ (p. 8). Indeed, any philosophy that takes seriously the importance of struggle against oppression through the exercise of human agency rejects philosophy as a practice that transcends the horror, messiness, and joy of human existence. Within the context of this article, existential struggle not only denotes the historical matrix out of which African-American philosophy evolved/evolves, but the motif of struggle also functions as a source for meta-philosophical insight. Hence, struggle, as used here, is not only descriptive, but heuristic.
Out of his successful effort to teach an introductory course in African-American philosophy for the first time, Mills (1998) shares that he effectively deployed the unifying theme of ‘the struggles of people of African descent in the Americas against the different manifestations of white racism’ (p. 6) as an important point of critical and insightful inquiry. Mills especially emphasized how Black people were/are defined as sub-persons and how this sub-personhood is an example of what he terms non-Cartesian sums. Mills’ approach helps to flesh out in insightful ways West’s point regarding the non-Cartesian sensibilities of African-American philosophy. Mills argues that if we take seriously the conception of sub-personhood, and how such a status presupposes a certain social ontology, then the morphology of philosophical questions asked and which philosophical issues and themes are deemed serious and relevant will be different. He contrasts a Cartesian sum with a non-Cartesian sum or the kind of sum that is portrayed in Ralph Ellison’s text, Invisible Man (1947). Descartes was pained with questions about solipsism, whether or not he could know with certainty that the external world exists, and whether or not he could distinguish between when he was dreaming as opposed to being awake. These sorts of questions presuppose a range of implicit assumptions about the self, the world, and one’s lived experiences. Ellison’s invisible man, however, does not doubt his existence in the privacy of a stove heated room; rather, he is made to feel invisible, he is made to feel insignificant, within a public anti-Black transactional space where whites refuse to see him, refuse to respect him. The drama of his invisibility takes place between selves. Of course, the Black self is not deemed a Thou, but an ontologically truncated self, and in other cases not a self at all. As Descartes doubts his own existence, Ellison’s invisible man is constantly reminded of the denial and diminishment of his self/existence. According to Ellison’s (1947) invisible man, ‘I am invisible, understand, simply because people (in this case white people) refuse to see me’ (p. 3). Lynch mobs make a sham of Cartesian hyperbolic doubt. The vitriol of white racism forces one to be ever cognizant of the existence of other minds, not in vats, but as embodied and raced. Solipsism has no place in a world where Black bodies are mutilated and burned for the pleasure of others. Hence, for Black people, the philosophical problem is not whether one exists or not, but how to collectively resist a white supremacist world of absurdity where one is degraded, marginalized, humiliated, oppressed, and brutalized. On this score, taking flight into the sphere of a private subjectivity is overwhelmed and mocked by the sheer weight of racial violence. Within the context of colonization, Fanon (1963) suggests that this hermetic turn inward is an idol that the colonized will abolish. He writes, ‘The colonialist bourgeoisie had hammered into the native’s mind the idea of a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity, and whose only wealth is individual thought’ (p. 47). For Fanon, the very concept of friend within the colonial context belies subjective withdrawal. Friendship presupposes an always already preexisting social matrix and signifies a centrifugal process of mutual recognition. Fanon (1963) notes, ‘Brother, sister, friend—these are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeoisie’ (p. 47).
Sociality is the matrix within which racist action takes place. It is within the mundane everyday world that Black people struggle to be and attempt to make sense of their existence. Existence in Black, then, which is a fluid site of identity formation and the articulation and re-articulation of meaning within the matrix of sociality, presupposes a set of social ills that are conspicuously absent vis-à-vis an ego that takes itself to exist as an island unto itself. As socially embedded and embodied, existence in Black speaks critically to the narrowness of the field of Western philosophy. To do philosophy in Black within a social context of white racism, where one’s very existence is at stake, where one is reduced to a sub-person, even by those white philosophers who have been canonized within the Western philosophical tradition (Hume, Kant, and Hegel, to name a few), one must critically engage and overthrow Western philosophy’s misanthropy, its philosophical narcissism. Even Friedrich Nietzsche (1966), though critical of philosophers who ‘pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic,’ (p. 5) and whose work is held to have critical affinities with African-American thought,2 argues that Negroes are representative of prehistory and that they are able to endure pain or ‘severe internal inflammations that would drive even the best constituted European to distraction’ (Nietzsche, 1989, p. 68). Moreover, to do philosophy in Black, one must critique Western philosophy’s thanatonic normative assumptions. Indeed, one must be suspicious and critical of dead philosophical idols and metaphors, fossilized and existentially inconsequential, that fail to speak to the lives of Black people. Within this context, West (1995) emphasizes the importance of dedisciplinizing modes of knowledge. He writes, ‘To dedisciplinize means that you go to wherever you find sources that can help you in constituting your intellectual weaponry’ (p. 357). Disrupting the disciplinary ‘purity’ and marshaling discursive material that speaks to the lives of Black people is what Angela Davis did as early as 1969. When she began to teach philosophy at UCLA, she discovered that ‘there was not a single course that had anything to do with African-American ideas’ (Yancy, 1998c, p. 23). She decided to design a course where she got students to compare Frederick Douglass’s understanding of the slave–master relationship with particular passages in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. She notes, ‘I found that it was extremely important to legitimate the production of philosophical knowledge in sites that are not normally considered the philosophical sites’ (Yancy, 1998c, p. 23). In this regard, African-American philosophers engage in legitimization practices that install counter-discursive philosophical sites for doing philosophy. African-American philosophy not only functions as a site of knowledge production, but the production of counter-axiological frames of reference that value alternative spaces where the love of wisdom is a community practice.
Drawing from the work of William Barrett, Outlaw (1996) argues that professional philosophy is a site of deformation. This deformation is
evidenced by the degree to which the ‘problems’ of philosophy continue to be, even in these very problematic times, discipline immanent, thus without foundation beyond the boundaries of the discipline itself. They have not emerged from the practices of life. (p. 25)
The fact that some philosophers of African descent leave ‘philosophy’ or are unwanted in various philosophy departments is linked to the disciplinary hegemony, philosophical narrowness, and racist practices of so many Anglo-American departments of philosophy. Not only does Lewis Gordon point out that he was denied a position in a philosophy department because it was said that he might attract “too many Black people” (Yancy, 1998h, p. 112), but he argues that even those Black philosophers who primarily do logic and epistemology are at risk of not being hired by particular philosophy departments if they also raise serious questions about what it means to live in a racist culture as Black people, that is, questions that counter the legitimating practices of mainstream philosophy. Gordon argues that if the universities found this out ‘then that person is automatically not going to be considered at that institution in the department of philosophy’ (Yancy, 1998h, p. 112). Commenting on the need to have African-American philosophers well-placed in departments of philosophy, Laurence Thomas notes, ‘I believe that no philosophy department in America would hire a Black who would trouble the waters’ (Yancy, 1998f, p. 293). And, yet, African-American philosophy is itself a site of parrhesia or courageous speech as it dares to trouble the waters of Western philosophy’s tendency to create racist mytho-poetic constructions of its own self-image. What becomes obvious is that philosophy’s disciplinary bias and its prevalent monochromatic exclusive membership have militated against the presence of Black people. Harris describes the case of Broadus N. Butler, who received his PhD in philosophy as early as 1952 from the University of Michigan, to illustrate an important point about racism and the profession. After he received his doctorate, Butler applied to teach in a mostly white university. According to Harris (1983), Butler found out that his letter of reference stated, ‘“a good philosopher, but of course, a Negro,” and the one-line response, “Why don’t you go where you will be among your own kind?”’ (p. ix). Like contemporary White-topias, Black philosophers are marked as unwanted and assigned to the back of the proverbial philosophical bus.
Gordon insists upon ‘raising the question of whether philosophy has been responsible to itself in terms if what it is’ (Yancy, 1998h, p. 112). Raising the important issues of intersectionality, Anita Allen asks, ‘With all due respect, what does philosophy have to offer to Black women? It’s not obvious to me that philosophy has anything special to offer Black women today’ (Yancy, 1998d, p. 172). Given this, what becomes especially relevant is West’s observation that ‘a relativizing of the discipline’s traditional hierarchies of importance and centrality thus becomes necessary’ (Mills, 1998, p. 10). The logic and significance of West’s observation is captured in an example provided by Allen where she talks about studying analytic metaphysics at the University of Michigan. She notes:
Yet as a Black person it felt odd to sit around asking such questions like ‘How do you know when two nonexistent objects are the same?’ There you are in the middle of the era of affirmative action, civil rights, women’s movements, etc., and you’re sitting around thinking about nonexistent objects and how to tell when they are the same. (Yancy, 1998d, p. 168)
Albert Mosley also experienced this tension after he was invited by prominent philosopher of science Rom Harre to study with him at Oxford. Mosley was passionate about conceptual problems in the philosophy of science. Important among these were incommensurability, scientific realism, and the differential accounts of science given by Thomas S. Kuhn and Karl Popper. Mosley applied for a Fulbright and received it. ‘But’ as he says, ‘1966–1967 found me torn again between scholarship and activism. I almost refused the Fulbright scholarship because I felt guilty that I was not actively involved in the civil rights struggle’ (Yancy, 1998b, pp. 145–155). And while Bernard Boxill was steeped in Bertrand Russell and Alfred North White-head’s Principia Mathematica, and works by Alonzo Church and W. V. O. Quine, he was passionately attracted to all of the discussions and political upheavals around 1965. Boxill eventually wrote his dissertation on the Black Power debate through the lens of Frantz Fanon’s work. It is important to note, though, that Boxill did not abandon the tools of analytic philosophy; rather, conceptual analysis was used to address significant issues such as social justice and affirmation action vis-à-vis the lives of Black people.
The insights of Mills, West, Outlaw, Davis, Gordon, Allen, Mosley, and Boxill raise the issue of critically rethinking and transgressing the narrowness of philosophy’s self-image. Concerning the paucity of Black people in the field of philosophy, West maintains that philosophy has not been made attractive enough. The image of the philosopher that we have is ‘the analytic philosopher who is clever, who is sharp, who is good at drawing distinctions, but who doesn’t really relate it to history, struggle, engagement with suffering, how we cope with suffering, how we overcome social misery, etc.’ (Yancy, 1998e, p. 38). African-American philosophy’s point of embarkation, then, will begin with a different set of existential problematics. W. E. B. Du Bois (1903) points out that, for whites, Black people do not simply have problems; rather, they are a problem people, ontologically so. The very wish ‘to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face’ (pp. 45– 46) already raises significant issues around the struggle for self-definition, political power, and survival. The existential weight of this struggle, which, again, speaks to the reality and importance of sociality, presupposes the capacity of whites who have the political and material power to make non-whites suffer. When one shouts a greeting to the world and the white world slashes away that joy, and one is told ‘to stay within bounds, to go back where [you] belong’ (Fanon, 1967, p. 115), one must begin with opposition; one must take a stand, one must rethink and critically evaluate one’s status within the polity, one must engage in forms of critical thought that enable one best to navigate the terrain of anti-Black racism. Indeed, one must take to task the hidden philosophical anthropological assumptions upon which the polity was/is founded. One must raise the question of philosophy’s duty to this world, the world of the ‘cave,’ where white ghostly appearances have killed and brutalized Black bodies in the night. Situated Black bodies within the context of white gazes generate questions regarding the here of embodied subjective integrity in ways that are more urgent and immediate than traditional Western philosophical discussions regarding the mind-body distinction. Allen notes, ‘Two very prominent [white] philosophers offered to look at my resume (I was flattered) and then asked to sleep with me (I was disturbed)’ (Yancy, 2008, p. 155).
Allen was reduced to her black body; she became the object of their white sexual fantasies. Here is a context where armchair discussions around the conundrums of the mind-body distinction are transformed into serious matters of ethical and political urgency because of the reality of lived embodied distress. Through the white male gaze, she is her body. In their eyes, Allen is a ‘Jezebel,’ the so-called Black slut whose interiority is nullified through the racist mythology that Black women are, as it were, solely constituted as lustful and lascivious. Within the context of white racist mythmaking regarding Black women, Sharpley-Whiting (2005) notes, ‘Epitomizing hypersexuality, driven by some racially coded instinct, the black female renders herself available, even assailable, yet simultaneously unassailable, sexually invulnerable, in effect, unrapeable, because of her “licentiousness”’ (p. 410). Roberts (1997) argues that in 1736, the South Carolina Gazette depicted ‘African Ladies’ primarily as women who had a ‘strong robust constitution,’ capable of long sexual endurance, and ‘able to serve their lovers “by Night as well as Day”’ (p. 11). There is something profoundly hollow about philosophers who sit around leisurely discussing Descartes’ bifurcation between two substances (mental and physical) that are deemed really distinct when Black women have been reduced to their bodies and been raped and even lynched, when Black people have been denied Geist. Adrian Piper, the first African-American female philosopher to receive tenure, notes:
I think the primary problem [facing Black women entering the profession of philosophy] is that everybody assumes that Black women are basically maids or prostitutes, and so, you have a lot to get over when you go into a department. (Yancy, 1998a, p. 59)
To be profiled as a prostitute, to be defined as sexually insatiable, to be reduced to one’s genitalia, and deemed a prisoner of a presumed ‘racial essence,’ speaks to the experiential domain of radically non-Cartesian sums. Such an experience has no pretensions to a form of de-contextualized universality, where epistemic subjects are substitutable. In fact, such a false universality does an injustice to the intersectional, heterogeneous, lived reality of Black women and women of color. Out of the complexity of such experiences grow philosophical assumptions and problems that render philosophical homogeneity deeply suspect. Within this context, for example, issues regarding self-interrogation and the ‘nature’ of the self do not emerge from a universal conundrum. Rather, ‘systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity’ forces Black people to pose constantly: In reality, who am I? (Fanon, 1963, p. 250).
Contra Plato, the practice of African-American philosophy is not one of death, but of life, of affirming life in the face of uncertain non-being. This is not the sort of uncertainty that all of us experience in the face of our inexorable death because of our finitude, where death is the great equalizer. Rather, it is the sort of social death and physical death that Black bodies specifically face in the land of the ‘free.’ The exclamation, ‘Look, a Negro!’ has the power to objectify. It has the power, as Fanon (1967) says, to cause ‘a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood’ (p. 112). ‘A Black man did it!’ has ignited forms of racist fanaticism that have resulted in unspeakable forms of bloodlust. Within such a context, the love of wisdom does not delight in immutable truths, but embodies modes of actively engaging in second-order critical reflection toward the end of making sense of one’s situational and tragic reality and offering engaging critiques of systems of oppression that militate against freedom. From a Black locus philosophicus, the love of wisdom (philo-sophia)is a form of thought-cum-action. In other words, given the fact of pervasive and systemic anti-Black racism (and how this racism is non-additively linked to issues of class and gender), one way of thinking about African-American philosophy is in terms of a discursive and praxis oriented activity in which philosophers engage in second-order critical reflection on the lived experiences of Black people as they struggle against racist epistemic and normative orders that degrade, dehumanize, and militate against Black self-flourishing. In stream with Herbert Marcuse and Outlaw (1996) in terms of their characterization of critical thought, I would argue that African-American philosophy is a species of dialectical thought, a mode of critical engagement that refuses to leave the world unchanged and static in its hubristic and procrustean ways (pp. 29– 30). In this regard, African-American philosophy is negative; it strives to destabilize the rigid conceptual terrain and normative landscape of Western philosophy’s self-constituting and self-perpetuating metanarrative that presupposes whiteness as a given. Yet, understanding Black existence as a site of historically superimposed un-freedom, African-American philosophy deploys its hermeneutic energies toward the positive aim of liberation struggle, of securing and asserting lived freedom, and telescoping the various ways in which Black people create frameworks of meaning that promote and sustain that freedom. On this score, African-American philosophy inspires existential and socio-political hope and engages in self-validating practices and thereby affirms Black agency and the restructuring of social configurations of power in the quest for equality and the positive advancement of social transformation.3
Given the historical facticity out of which African-American philosophy emerges, questions of identity, community, selfhood, respect, dignity, self-determination, resistance, epistemic authority, and psychic survival are philosophically indispensable, they are themes that get configured and reconfigured within the context of a collective journey through the crucible of American racism. Mills (1998) notes, ‘African-American philosophy is thus inherently, definitionally oppositional, the philosophy produced by property that does not remain silent but insists on speaking and contesting its status’ (p. 9). In this way, African-American philosophy asserts a philosophical anthropology that opposes misanthropy and calls into question many of the normative assumptions of modernity—the nature of rationality and who qualifies as human. Against the racist procrustean tendencies of modernity, Blacks have had to engage in ‘heroic efforts to preserve human dignity on the night side of modernity and the underside of modernity’ (Yancy, 1998e, p. 39). Such efforts are not carried out by monadic subjects, but within the context of a shared community, a shared sense of we-experiences that ground a sense of dynamic community. Harris is critical of thinking about African-American philosophers as constituting a community through a specifically shared philosophical vocabulary. After all, there are philosophers of African descent who are Marxists, existentialists, phenomenologists, and pragmatists who conceptually dwell within different and conflicting discourse communities. Yet, Harris argues that there is an overriding aim which African-American philosophers share that constitutes them as a community. It is the engagement ‘in the common project to defeat the heinous consequences of racism. That’s the kind of community that it is … that binds them together regardless of their philosophy.’ (Yancy, 1998g, p. 216). Indeed, it is the kind of community that avoids abstract pretentiousness, de-contextualized assumptions regarding what constitutes a philosophical problem, and the bad faith of claiming to be able to conceptualize the world from nowhere, from a site of non-perspectival, value neutrality. African-American philosophers engage (self-consciously) in philosophical endeavors that are inextricably linked to the social world through the mediation of the body which, as I have argued, is precisely the site of white anti-Black hatred and vilification. Yet, it is through this embodied pain and suffering that a specific epistemic capacity is installed.
As intimated above, African-American philosophy offers insights through a dynamic form of second-sight (Dubois, 45) that speaks parrhesia vis-à-vis Western philosophy, which is inextricably linked to the normative structure of whiteness. As Devonya N. Havis (2013) writes, ‘In taking up the parrhesiastic attitude, one’s actions disrupt the familiar by introducing a critique that calls attention to something that escapes the normal register’ (p. 55). Through its performance of the ‘god-trick’ (that is, pretentions of seeing the world from nowhere) and in terms of its production of ignorance, that involves blinkers that produce forms of knowing incorrectly, Western philosophy obfuscates its historical and contextual contingency. African-American philosophy offers second-sight as a measure in terms of which Western philosophy can better recognize its productive ignorance. From the insights of African-American philosophy, white philosophers—that is, those who have come to construct Western philosophy as the mirror of reality—can begin to nurture a form of white double consciousness, which, in this case, is learning to see the problematic nature of their philosophical idols and metaphors. Seeing the world through the lens of African-American philosophy is meant to be dangerous; it is meant to be unsafe. It is to undermine Western philosophy’s predication upon the lie that it is philosophy qua philosophy. The objective is to provide philosophers who have been blinded by occidental philosophical hegemony with what I call a gift. Not all gifts are free of discomfort. Indeed, some gifts are heavy laden with tremendous responsibility. Yet, it is a gift that ought to engender a sense of gratitude, a sense of humility, and an opportunity to give thanks —not the sort of attitude that re-inscribes Western philosophical arrogance and messianic imperialism. To give thanks is to be receptive; it is to engage in what I call a process of un-suturing (Yancy, p. 2015). Within this context, un-suturing is a process of being open to have one’s historical and cultural philosophical foundations shaken, though not through hyperbolic doubt, but through dwelling near those African-American philosophical voices that have come to recognize the terror of Occidental philosophical practices, practices that continue to be fundamentally silent about its own racist philosophical assumptions and history, its cultural conceit, and the question of Black suffering and trauma in a world of white anti-Black racism. White double consciousness offers insights not only into its philosophical narrowness, and encourages a profound generative sense of self-alienation, but also its complicity with the denigration of Black bodies. In this gift, lies the opportunity for Western philosophy to know itself. As Sartre notes,
Our victims know us by their scars and by their chains, and it is this that makes their evidence irrefutable. It is enough that they show us what we have made of them for us to realize what we have made of ourselves. (Fanon 1963, p. 13)
And if this is true, then Western philosophy, its white racial ethos, has made of itself a monster, something fraudulent, immoral, and unable to see so much of its own conceptual decay.
1. The reader will note that while I use the terms Black and African-American interchangeably, it is my position that ‘Black,’ as a marker of identity, is broader than the term African-American, especially given the fact that ‘Black’ includes people who are not African-American.
2. See Critical Affinities: Nietzsche and African American Thought, eds. Jacqueline Scott and Todd Franklin, (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006).
3. I would like thank philosopher Clarence S. Johnson for suggesting that the negative/positive distinction that I draw here be made more explicit.
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