The Crew

J. ANGELO CORLETT is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at San Diego State University, and the author of the books: Analyzing Social Knowledge; Responsibility and Punishment; Race, Racism, and Reparations; Terrorism: A Philosophical Analysis; Interpreting Plato’s Dialogues, as well as over seventy-five articles in various philosophy and other scholarly journals. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Ethics: An International Philosophical Review; and editor of Equality and Liberty: Analyzing Rawls and Nozick.

 

DERRICK DARBY was born in the South Bronx and raised in the Queensbridge Housing Projects, NYC. After graduating from MLK Jr. High in Manhattan, he received his B.A. in philosophy from Colgate University and his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. He is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas. His areas of research and teaching include social and political philosophy, ethics, and African American philosophy with a focus on questions concerning the nature and value of rights. He is currently writing a book on rights entitled At the Hands of Community: Rights, Race, and Recognition.

 

KATHRYN T. GINES is Assistant Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Her areas of research and teaching interests include: African American Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Diaspora Studies, and Race and Gender Theory.

 

LEWIS R. GORDON is a Laura H. Carnell University Professor of Philosophy at Temple University, where he also is director of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies. He also is President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is the author of several influential books, including the award-winning Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age.

 

MITCHELL GREEN received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. He is now Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. He has held fellowships from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. His research concerns the Philosophy of Language, Aesthetics, and the Philosophy of Mind. His books Self-Expression, and Moore’s Paradox (the latter edited with John Williams) are forthcoming with Oxford University Press. His Engaging Philosophy: A Topical Introduction, is forthcoming.

 

JOY JAMES is the John B. and John T. McCoy Presidential Professor of Africana Studies and College Professor in Political Science at Williams College, where she chairs its African-American Studies program. She is the author of a number of publications including Resisting State Violence (1996); Transcending the Talented Tenth (1997); Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics (1999); and Memory, Shame, and Rage: The Central Park Case, 1989–2002 (2006). James’s edited collections on prisons and policing include States of Confinement (2000); Imprisoned Intellectuals (2003); The New Abolitionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writing (2005); and Warfare: Prison and the American Homeland (2006).

 

BILL E. LAWSON is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. He has published articles on the urban underclass, John Locke’s theory of political obligation, social contract theory and African Americans, jazz, and urban environmental philosophy. He is the author (with Howard McGary) of Between Slavery and Freedom (1992), editor of The Underclass Question (1992), co-editor (with Frank Kirkland) of Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader (1999), co-editor (with Laura Westra) of Faces of Environmental Racism (2001), and co-editor (with Donald Koch) of Pragmatism and the Problem of Race (2004).

 

ERIN I. KELLY is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her research interests are in ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law, with a focus on questions about justice, moral responsibility, and theories of punishment. Her publications include, “Doing Without Desert” (2002) and “The Burdens of Collective Liability” (2002).

 

MARCYLIENA MORGAN is Associate Professor of Communications at Stanford University. She is the director of Stanford’s Hip Hop Archive, which she founded at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute in 2002 while on the faculty in African and African American Studies. Her research focuses on youth, gender, language, culture and identity, sociolinguistics, discourse, and interaction. She is the author of Language, Discourse, and Power in African American Culture (2002) and editor of Language and the Social Construction of Identity in Creole Situations (1994). Her other publications include articles and chapters on gender and women’s speech, language ideology, discourse and interaction among Caribbean women in London and Jamaica, urban youth language and interaction, hip hop culture, and language education planning and policy. She is currently completing a book on hip-hop culture entitled: The Real Hip Hop: Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the Underground.

 

SARAH MCGRATH is an assistant professor of philosophy at Brandeis University. She received her Ph.D. from MIT in 2002, and taught at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, from 2002 to 2005. Her research interests include metaphysics and ethics, and the connections between the two.

 

LIONEL K. MCPHERSON received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University. He is currently an assistant professor of philosophy at Tufts University. His published articles in moral, political, and social philosophy include “Innocence and Responsibility in War” (2004) and “The Moral Insignificance of ‘Bare’ Reasons” (2002). Prior to his academic career, he worked as a music and media critic. He was named, for all of three hours, The Source’s first managing editor.

 

JOHN P. PITTMAN teaches philosophy and justice studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. His research interests include Africana philosophy, nineteenth-century German philosophy, and contemporary social theory. In addition to authoring numerous essays, he is the editor of African-American Perspectives and Philosophical Traditions (1997) and co-editor (with Tommy L. Lott) of A Companion to African-American Philosophy (2003). His sons, Isaiah and Jackson, do what they can to keep him honest.

 

RODNEY C. ROBERTS is a descendant of the African peoples who were enslaved at the Somerset Place plantation in Creswell, North Carolina. He grew up in the Soundview area of the Bronx, New York, and attended the High School of Performing Arts and James Monroe High School. Following ten years of service in the U.S. Navy as a submariner, scuba diver, and electronics instructor, he completed his associates and bachelor’s degrees, and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Dr. Roberts is currently assistant professor of philosophy at East Carolina University where he teaches social and political philosophy, ethics, and Africana philosophy. In 2005–06 he will be a Fulbright Lecture and Research Scholar in the Department of Philosophy, University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is the editor of Injustice and Rectification.

 

TOMMIE SHELBY earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, where he teaches in the Department of African and African American Studies and in the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies. In addition to publishing several articles on African American philosophy, political philosophy, and social theory, he is the author of We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (2005).

 

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN is Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. A recipient of senior NEH and Fulbright Research Fellowships, he is author of The Object of Literary Criticism (1984), T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism (1988), Pragmatist Aesthetics (1992, now in its second edition, 2000, and translated into twelve languages), Practicing Philosophy (1997), Performing Live (2000), and Surface and Depth (2002). From 1992 to 1994 he wrote rap criticism for the North Philly rap fanzine JOR (Journal of Rap) under the moniker “Rich Frosted.”

 

PAUL C. TAYLOR received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Morehouse College and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Rutgers University. He has numerous publications in the areas of aesthetics, race theory, Africana philosophy, and social philosophy, including the book Race: A Philosophical Introduction (2004). Taylor is an associate professor of philosophy at Temple University, Associate Director of Temple’s Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought, a fellow of the Jamestown Project at Yale, and a co-editor of The Africana Review, an online journal.

 

STEPHEN LESTER THOMPSON is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey. He has written a number of papers in the philosophy of language and logic, and is currently writing a book on the grammar of black English. He lives in New York City.

 

LIDET TILAHUN is the Director of World Hip Hop. She’s currently conducting research at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University on Hip Hop’s influence in African youth culture. She received her B.A. in Political Science from Emmanuel College and M.A. in International Relations from Northeastern University. Her research interests include the ways African youth have used—and continue to use—hip hop as a powerful agent for social and political change; a platform of self-expression; a subversive means of critiquing corruption and tradition; a measure of national self-reflection; and a tool for education, HIV/AIDS prevention, and access to health care.

 

CORNEL WEST has authored many groundbreaking and thought-provoking books that have changed the course of discussion of race, justice, and democracy. His best-selling Race Matters (1993), a collection of profoundly moral essays, served as a call to social action and has become a contemporary classic. In his follow-up, Democracy Matters (2004), Dr. West continues his impassioned argument, this time aimed at the raging debate about democracy and America’s role in today’s troubled world. Dr. West continues to explore new avenues for teaching and communicating. He has appeared in the Matrix trilogy and served as the philosophical foundation for the films. His CDs, Sketches of My Culture and Street Knowledge, highlight his belief that growing divisions in our society foster the despair and distrust that undermine our democratic process. By working to create an ongoing dialogue between the myriad of voices in our culture, Dr. West is vigilant in his efforts to restore hope to America.