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Posts tagged with PHILOSOPHERS ON RACE

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The Stone Dec 24, 2015

Dear White America

By George Yancy

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

In 2015, I conducted a series of 19 interviews with philosophers and public intellectuals on the issue of race. My aim was to engage, in this very public space, with the often unnamed elephant in the room.

These discussions helped me, and I hope many of our readers, to better understand how race continues to function in painful ways within our country. That was one part of a gift that I wanted to give to readers of The Stone, the larger philosophical community, and the world.

The interviewees themselves — bell hooks, Cornel West, Judith Butler, Peter Singer, David H. Kim, Molefi Kete Asante among them — came from a variety of racial backgrounds, and their concerns and positions were even more diverse. But on the whole I came to see these interviews as linked by a common thread: They were messages to white America — because they often directly expressed the experience of those who live and have lived as people of color in a white-run world, and that is something no white person could ever truly know firsthand.

That is how I want to deliver my own message now.

•

Dear White America,

I have a weighty request. As you read this letter, I want you to listen with love, a sort of love that demands that you look at parts of yourself that might cause pain and terror, as James Baldwin would say. Did you hear that? You may have missed it. I repeat: I want you to listen with love. Well, at least try.

We don’t talk much about the urgency of love these days, especially within the public sphere. Much of our discourse these days is about revenge, name calling, hate, and divisiveness. I have yet to hear it from our presidential hopefuls, or our political pundits. I don’t mean the Hollywood type of love, but the scary kind, the kind that risks not being reciprocated, the kind that refuses to flee in the face of danger. To make it a bit easier for you, I’ve decided to model, as best as I can, what I’m asking of you. Let me demonstrate the vulnerability that I wish you to show. As a child of Socrates, James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, let me speak the truth, refuse to err on the side of caution.

This letter is a gift for you. Bear in mind, though, that some gifts can be heavy to bear. You don’t have to accept it; there is no obligation. I give it freely, believing that many of you will throw the gift back in my face, saying that I wrongly accuse you, that I am too sensitive, that I’m a race hustler, and that I blame white people (you) for everything.
Read more…

The Stone Dec 10, 2015

bell hooks: Buddhism, the Beats and Loving Blackness

By George Yancy and Bell Hooks

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

This is the last in this series of 2015 interviews with philosophers on race. This week’s conversation is with the scholar, critic and public intellectual bell hooks, who is currently the distinguished professor in residence of Appalachian studies at Berea College. She is the author of many books, including “Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice” — George Yancy

George Yancy: Over the years you have used the expression “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe the power structure underlying the social order. Why tie those terms together as opposed to stressing any one of them in isolation?

bell hooks: We can’t begin to understand the nature of domination if we don’t understand how these systems connect with one another. Significantly, this phrase has always moved me because it doesn’t value one system over another. For so many years in the feminist movement, women were saying that gender is the only aspect of identity that really matters, that domination only came into the world because of rape. Then we had so many race-oriented folks who were saying, “Race is the most important thing. We don’t even need to be talking about class or gender.” So for me, that phrase always reminds me of a global context, of the context of class, of empire, of capitalism, of racism and of patriarchy. Those things are all linked — an interlocking system.

G.Y.: I’ve heard you speak many times and I noticed that you do so with a very keen sense of humor. What is the role of humor in your work?

b.h.: We cannot have a meaningful revolution without humor. Every time we see the left or any group trying to move forward politically in a radical way, when they’re humorless, they fail. Humor is essential to the integrative balance that we need to deal with diversity and difference and the building of community. For example, I love to be in conversation with Cornel West. We always go high and we go low, and we always bring the joyful humor in. The last talk he and I gave together, many people were upset because we were silly together. But I consider it a high holy calling that we can be humorous together. How many times do we see an African-American man and an African-American woman talking together, critiquing one another, and yet having delicious, humorous delight? It’s a miracle.

G.Y.: What is your view of the feminist movement today, and how has your relationship to it changed over time?
Read more…

The Stone Oct 29, 2015

Whom Does Philosophy Speak For?

By George Yancy and Seyla Benhabib

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

This is the latest in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with Seyla Benhabib, the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University. She is the author of many books, including “Dignity in Adversity: Human Rights in Troubled Times.” — George Yancy

George Yancy: How do you see the importance of the public sphere as a site for critically discussing issues regarding the persistence and reality of race in America?

Seyla Benhabib: We are conducting this conversation in the aftermath of the church shootings in South Carolina; the moving and inspiring memorial services to the victims, and the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the South Carolina State capitol. These are events that have raised some of the most significant debates about racial symbolism in the North American public sphere. We have all been reminded of the presence of the past, and to paraphrase William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

I did not know, for example, that the Confederate flag was revived in Southern states during and after the civil rights movement in clear defiance of racial equality and integration. This was not just a flag that Confederate soldiers fought and died under. It became, as some South Carolinian representatives told us, a symbol of defiance and hatred, and a reminder that the Civil War may have been won but that the battle for overcoming racial prejudice has not ended. Read more…

The Stone Oct 8, 2015

The Invisible Asian

By George Yancy and David Haekwon Kim

This is the latest in a series of interviews about philosophy of race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with David Haekwon Kim, an associate professor of philosophy and the director of the Global Humanities initiative at the University of San Francisco and the author of several essays on Asian-American identity. — George Yancy

George Yancy: A great deal of philosophical work on race begins with the white/black binary. As a Korean-American, in what ways does race mediate or impact your philosophical identity?

David Haekwon Kim: In doing philosophy, I often approach normative issues with concerns about lived experience, cultural difference, political subordination, and social movements changing conditions of agency. I think these sensibilities are due in large part to my experience of growing up bicultural, raced, and gendered in the U.S., a country that has never really faced up to its exclusionary and often violent anti-Asian practices. In fact, I am sometimes amazed that I have left so many tense racialized encounters with both my life and all my teeth. In other contexts, life and limb were not at issue, but I did not emerge with my self-respect intact.

These sensibilities have also been formed by learning a history of Asian-Americans that is more complex than the conventional watered-down immigrant narrative. This more discerning, haunting, and occasionally beautiful history includes reference to institutional anti-Asian racism, a cultural legacy of sexualized racism, a colonial U.S. presence in East Asia and the Pacific Islands, and some truly inspiring social struggles by Asians, Asian-Americans, and other communities of color.

It’s a challenge to convey this sort of lived experience, and this, too, has shaped my philosophical identity. So little has been said in philosophy and public life about the situation of Asian-Americans that we don’t have much in the way of common understandings that are accurate and illuminating. Making matters worse is that the void is filled by many misleading notions about race in general, which includes such notions like our country being beyond race, that critiquing white privilege is hating whites, that any race talk is racist, etc.

There is also problematic discourse about Asian-Americans in particular, like the Model Minority myth. This popular notion posits Asian-Americans as being successful along many indices of assimilation and socioeconomic well-being and thus a model for other non-whites. Its veracity aside, its actual political function is to excuse anti-black and anti-Latino racism and prevent interracial solidarity. In any case, I believe the invisibility of Asian-Americans in our culture has been so deep and enduring that Asian-Americans themselves are often ambivalent about how they would like to see themselves portrayed and perhaps even uncomfortable about being portrayed at all. Read more…

The Stone Oct 1, 2015

What ‘Black Lives’ Means in Britain

By George Yancy and Paul Gilroy

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

This is the latest in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with Paul Gilroy, who is a professor of American and English literature at King’s College London in Britain. He has previously taught at the London School of Economics, Yale, and Goldsmiths College. He is the author of numerous books, including “The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness.” — George Yancy

George Yancy: In a review of the 2013 movie “12 Years a Slave,” you wrote that neoliberalism — the unquestioning faith in free market values taken to ideological extremes — essentially ignores the existence of systemic racism, and presents it as “anachronistic.” This worldview, which so many of us in the West confront in society, you wrote, “decrees that racism no longer presents a significant obstacle either to individual success or to collective self-realization.” This made me think of, among other things, the killing in April of Walter Scott, a black man who was shot in the back eight times by a white police officer in Charleston, S.C. Obviously, there is nothing anachronistic about American racism. It is alive and well. From your perspective in Britain, how do you understand events like the Scott killing?

Paul Gilroy: I don’t come to the United States very often but I happened to be visiting when Walter Scott was shot by another trigger-happy police officer. I was angry and upset. I hope I don’t need to emphasize that I am a firm supporter of the movement that has arisen in response to this sequence of killings exposed by the ubiquity of the camera phone and the communicative resources of social media. Britain isn’t a gun-loving or -toting nation. Racism in our country doesn’t operate on the same scale as the racial organization of law and sovereign power in the United States, but our recent history also includes a long list of black people who’ve lost their lives following contact with the forces of law and order. Similarly, our police and their various private proxies have never been held to account for those deaths, so this is very familiar ground. Police in many polities can kill with impunity, and racial hierarchy augments their essentially permissive relationship with the law. The officer in this case was charged with murder. We will have to see whether he is found guilty. That would be a very rare outcome indeed.

Of course, to say that neoliberalism presents racism as anachronistic was not to say that racism is anachronistic. Confronting racism is a timely, urgent matter. The casual killing of black people appears to be a pursuit that originated in an earlier phase of American history. In his epochal analysis of historical and cultural process, the prolific Welsh novelist and academic Raymond Williams drew an important distinction in the way that social and cultural formations develop. Drawing upon him, we can say that we live with neoliberalism but it might not yet be fully dominant. There is certainly worse to come. Neoliberalism could still be emergent, while what appears to be the casual habit of murdering people who come into contact with the police might belong to its prehistory and could be considered either dominant or residual, depending on your point of view. Read more…

The Stone Aug 19, 2015

Cornel West: The Fire of a New Generation

By George Yancy and Cornel West

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

This is the 15th in a series of interviews on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s discussion is with Cornel West, one of the most prominent and provocative intellectuals in public life. He is a professor of philosophy and Christian practice at Union Theological Seminary and professor emeritus at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of more than 30 books, including “Black Prophetic Fire” and “The Radical King.” — George Yancy

George Yancy: Recently, on Aug. 10, you were arrested along with others outside the courthouse in St. Louis because of the collective resistance against continued racial injustice and police brutality. What was the political atmosphere like there?

Fire really means a certain kind of burning in the soul that one can no longer tolerate when one is pushed against a wall.

Cornel West: The black prophetic fire among the younger generation in Ferguson was intense and wonderful. Ferguson is ground zero for the struggle against police brutality and police murder. I just wanted to be a small part of that collective fight back that puts one’s body on the line. It was beautiful because part of the crowd was chanting, “This is what democracy looks like,” which echoes W.E.B. DuBois and the older generation’s critique of capitalist civilization and imperialist power. And you also had people chanting, “We gon’ be alright,” which is from rap artist Kendrick Lamar, who is concerned with the black body, decrepit schools, indecent housing. This chant is in many ways emerging as a kind of anthem of the movement for the younger generation. So, we had both the old school and the new school and I try to be a kind of link between these two schools. There was a polyphonic, antiphonal, call and response, all the way down and all the way live.

G.Y.: One of your newest books is entitled “Black Prophetic Fire.” Define what you mean by “black prophetic fire.”

C.W.: Black prophetic fire is the hypersensitivity to the suffering of others that generates a righteous indignation that results in the willingness to live and die for freedom.

I think in many ways we have to begin with the younger generation, the generation of Ferguson, Baltimore, Staten Island and Oakland. There is not just a rekindling, but a re-invigoration taking place among the younger generation that enacts and enables prophetic fire. We’ve been in an ice age. If you go from the 1960s and 1970s — that’s my generation. But there was also an ice age called the neoliberal epoch, an ice age where it was no longer a beautiful thing to be on fire. It was a beautiful thing to have money. It was a beautiful thing to have status. It was a beautiful thing to have public reputation without a whole lot of commitment to social justice, whereas the younger generation is now catching the fire of the generation of the 1960s and 1970s.

G.Y.: When I think of black prophetic fire, I think of David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Audre Lorde, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Martin L. King, James Baldwin and so many more. In recent weeks, some have favorably compared the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates to Baldwin. I know that you publicly criticized this comparison. What was the nature of your critique?

C.W.: In a phone conversation I had with Brother Coates not long ago, I told him that the black prophetic tradition is the collective fightback of sustained compassion in the face of sustained catastrophe. It has the highest standards of excellence, and we all fall short. So a passionate defense of Baldwin — or John Coltrane or Toni Morrison — is crucial in this age of Ferguson.
Read more…

The Stone Jul 27, 2015

American Racism in the ‘White Frame’

By George Yancy and Joe Feagin

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

This is the next installment in a series of interviews on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with Joe Feagin, a sociologist, and a leading researcher of racism in the United States for more than 40 years. He teaches at Texas A & M University and is the author of more than 60 books, including the forthcoming “How Blacks Built America: Labor, Culture, Freedom, and Democracy.”

George Yancy: To what extent does your work as a sociologist overlap or pertain to what we might concern ourselves with as philosophers?

Joe Feagin: I have been deeply concerned with issues of social and moral philosophy since college. I majored in philosophy as an undergraduate and then went to Harvard Divinity School, where I worked with philosopher-theologians in social ethics, European theology and comparative religions. I studied with Paul Tillich, Richard R. Niebuhr, Arthur Darby Nock and others. When I switched to doctoral work in sociology at Harvard, I studied with the theoreticians Talcott Parsons, George Homans, Robert Bellah, Charles Tilly and Gordon Allport. Allport and his young colleague Tom Pettigrew got me seriously interested in studying racial-ethnic theory in social science as well as the empirical reality of racism in the United States. During this decade (the 1960s) I was also greatly influenced by major African-American social analysts of racism, like W.E.B. Du Bois, Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton. More recently, my work has been used by philosophers of race including Lewis Gordon, Charles Mills, Linda Alcoff, Tommy Curry — and yourself.

To understand well the realities of American racism, one must adopt an analytical perspective focused on the systemic white racism that is central and foundational to this society.

G. Y.: In your book “The White Racial Frame,” you argue for a new paradigm that will help to explain the nature of racism. What is that new paradigm and what does it reveal about race in America?

J.F.: To understand well the realities of American racism, one must adopt an analytical perspective focused on the what, why and who of the systemic white racism that is central and foundational to this society. Most mainstream social scientists dealing with racism issues have relied heavily on inadequate analytical concepts like prejudice, bias, stereotyping and intolerance. Such concepts are often useful, but were long ago crafted by white social scientists focusing on individual racial and ethnic issues, not on society’s systemic racism. To fully understand racism in the United States, one has to go to the centuries-old counter-system tradition of African-American analysts and other analysts of color who have done the most sustained and penetrating analyses of institutional and systemic racism.

G.Y.: So, are you suggesting that racial prejudices are only half the story? Does the question of the systemic nature of racism make white people complicit regardless of racial prejudices?

J.F.: Prejudice is much less than half the story. Because prejudice is only one part of the larger white racial frame that is central to rationalizing and maintaining systemic racism, one can be less racially prejudiced and still operate out of many other aspects of that dominant frame. Read more…

The Stone Jul 2, 2015

Looking ‘White’ In the Face

By George Yancy and John D. Caputo

This is the 13th in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with John D. Caputo, who is the Thomas J. Watson professor of religion emeritus at Syracuse University and David R. Cook professor of philosophy emeritus at Villanova University. He is the author of numerous books, including “The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps” and “Truth.” His next book, “Hoping Against Hope,” will appear this fall. — George Yancy

George Yancy: I’d like to begin with an observation — maybe an obvious one — that the task of engaging race or whiteness in philosophy has been taken up almost exclusively by nonwhite philosophers. My sense is that this is partly because whiteness is a site of privilege that makes it invisible to many white philosophers. I also think that some white philosophers would rather avoid thinking about how their own whiteness raises deeper philosophical questions about identity, power and hegemony, as this raises the question of personal responsibility. I have found that it is often very difficult to convince white philosophers that they should also take up this project in their work — they tend to avoid it, or don’t consider it philosophically relevant. Do you agree?

Stop us and ask, ‘To what extent is everything you just said a function of being white?’

John D. Caputo: “White” is of the utmost relevance to philosophy, and postmodern theory helps us to see why. I was once criticized for using the expression “true north.” It reflected my Nordo-centrism, my critic said, and my insensitivity to people who live in the Southern Hemisphere. Of course, no such thing had ever crossed my mind, but that points to the problem. We tend to say “we” and to assume who “we” are, which once simply meant “we white male Euro-Christians.”

Postmodern theory tries to interrupt that expression at every stop, to put every word in scare quotes, to put our own presuppositions into question, to make us worry about the murderousness of “we,” and so to get in the habit of asking, “we, who?” I think that what modern philosophers call “pure” reason — the Cartesian ego cogito and Kant’s transcendental consciousness — is a white male Euro-Christian construction.

White is not “neutral.” “Pure” reason is lily white, as if white is not a color or is closest to the purity of the sun, and everything else is “colored.” Purification is a name for terror and deportation, and “white” is a thick, dense, potent cultural signifier that is closely linked to rationalism and colonialism. What is not white is not rational. So white is philosophically relevant and needs to be philosophically critiqued — it affects what we mean by “reason” — and “we” white philosophers cannot ignore it.

G.Y.: Do you think that this avoidance of race among white philosophers is rooted in fear?

J.D.C.: I think that racism arises from a profound fear of the other, and fear is not far from hatred. But my experience is that most philosophers, most academics, are quite progressive in their thinking about race and sexuality and politics generally and they are often active in progressive causes. My guess is that if they don’t write professionally about racism — I suspect it is often part of their teaching — it is in part because of a certain thoughtlessness, like my “Nordo-centrism.” I am not afraid of the Southern Hemisphere; it just didn’t hit me that this expression assumes “we” all live in the Northern one!
Read more…

The Stone May 27, 2015

Peter Singer: On Racism, Animal Rights and Human Rights

By George Yancy and Peter Singer

This is the 12^th in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. He is the author of numerous books, including, most recently, “The Most Good You Can Do.” — George Yancy

George Yancy: You have popularized the concept of speciesism, which, I believe was first used by the animal activist Richard Ryder. Briefly, define that term and how do you see it as similar to or different from racism?

Peter Singer: Speciesism is an attitude of bias against a being because of the species to which it belongs. Typically, humans show speciesism when they give less weight to the interests of nonhuman animals than they give to the similar interests of human beings. Note the requirement that the interests in question be “similar.” It’s not speciesism to say that normal humans have an interest in continuing to live that is different from the interests that nonhuman animals have. One might, for instance, argue that a being with the ability to think of itself as existing over time, and therefore to plan its life, and to work for future achievements, has a greater interest in continuing to live than a being who lacks such capacities.

If we were to compare attitudes about speciesism today with past racist attitudes, we would have to say that we are back in the days in which the slave trade was still legal.

On that basis, one might argue that to kill a normal human being who wants to go on living is more seriously wrong than killing a nonhuman animal. Whether this claim is or is not sound, it is not speciesist. But given that some human beings – most obviously, those with profound intellectual impairment – lack this capacity, or have it to a lower degree than some nonhuman animals, it would be speciesist to claim that it is always more seriously wrong to kill a member of the species Homo sapiens than it is to kill a nonhuman animal.

G.Y.: While I think that it is ethically important to discuss the issue of failing to extend to other (nonhuman) animals the principle of equality, we continue to fail miserably in the ways in which we extend that principle to black people, the disabled, women and others, here in the United States and around the world. What is it that motivates the failure or the refusal to extend this principle to other human beings in ethically robust ways? I’m especially thinking here in terms of the reality of racism. Read more…

The Stone May 7, 2015

Molefi Kete Asante: Why Afrocentricity?

By George Yancy and Molefi Kete Asante

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

This is the 11th in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with Molefi Kete Asante, a professor of African-American studies at Temple University, known for his pioneering work in the area of Afrocentricity. He is the author of more than 70 books, including “As I Run Toward Africa,” a memoir. — George Yancy

George Yancy: From an Afrocentric perspective, how do you define race in America?

Molefi Kete Asante: Race in America is a psychological, physical and social location for determining the conditions of one’s current and future life. This is because America’s benefits and privileges have been structured around race and its markers for difference. Those markers, largely physical, identify some people as being privileged and others as being victims. As a central concept in America’s history, race has always been an arena for selecting who will eat and who will not eat or for determining the quality and condition of a group’s possibilities.

G.Y.: Given the recent killings of unarmed black people by white police officers, does Afrocentricity provide a prescription of any sort for eliminating racism?

In Baltimore people took to the streets and seized the space, the time, the limelight of the media and the assertive rhetoric of action that demanded change in the system.

M.K.A.: Afrocentricity as an intellectual idea takes no authority to prescribe anything; it is neither a religion nor a belief system. It is a paradigm that suggests all discourse about African people should be grounded in the centrality of Africans in their own narratives. However, the warrant “given the recent killings of unarmed black people by white police officers” is part of a continuing drama in America; its contemporary emergence is simply a recent exposure through popular media.

When one asks about the elimination of racism, then the concentration cannot be on African people but on the perpetrators of racism. Who acculturates racists? What does a white child learn about privilege? How can we dismantle the apparatus that supports white exceptionalism in a multicultural society? It will take really bold and courageous action to bring about several key components of a national will to overcome racism. It must mean an acceptance of the fact that racism is a principal fact of American life.
Read more…

Inside Opinionator

April 26, 2016