African-American Philosophy

I am broadly sympathetic to Dale Matthew’s analysis concerning phenotypic devaluation and disadvantage. However, in what follows, I restrict my remarks to a few areas where I think he either lacks empirical precision, or overstates his case.

Philosophy and the African American Modern Freedom Struggle: A Freedom Gaze analyzes the ways oppression and marginalization produced the philosophical space necessary for the development of a unique form of Black consciousness within the African Diaspora.

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 3, Page 318-327, March 2022.

I will argue that President Biden has not only the right to nominate an African American woman for SCOTUS, but, if he chooses a suitable candidate, he will be doing a great service to our country.

This paper examines W.E.B. Du Bois's Darkwater as an existentialist text offering a conception of socialism best characterized as Africana existentialist socialism. It argues for a conception of Africana existentialism as inclusive of issues of collective, and not solely individual responsibility. Darkwater is interpreted in terms of a unifying thematic of a humanist anti-theodicy, our of which emerges Du Bois's conception of an ideal of "service without servants." This socialistic ideal is in turn worked out in relation to the figure (...) of "the Immortal Child.". (shrink)

Cultural values influence how people understand illness and dying, and impact their responses to diagnosis and treatment, yet end-of-life care is rooted in white, middle class values. Faith, hope, and belief in God’s healing power are central to most African Americans, yet life-preserving care is considered “aggressive” by the healthcare system, and families are pressured to cease it.

This review essay surveys the contributions of the new edited volume African American Political Thought: A Collected History. The thinker-based approach to the study of African American political t...

The trial of Derek Chauvin, the man who murdered Mr. George Floyd Jr on May 25, 2020, has become a national spectacle. For many Black Americans, it is merely another rehearsal of the injustice that befalls Black men in the United States when they are targeted by police violence. Mr. Floyd was murdered in broad daylight by Chauvin, yet it is Mr. Floyd’s character and temperament that is being depicted as threatening to Chauvin and the reason for his murder. Throughout (...) the discipline of philosophy, the murder of Black men and boys is a topic most philosophy departments avoid and the American Philosophy Association neglects. This lecture argues that philosophy must abandon the martyrdom of the Black male body as the symbolic catalyst of racial change. Philosophy must not only accept that racism is a permanent feature of American society, but that this racism is misandric in that racist violence disproportionately targets Black males for death and dehumanization at levels not seen within other groups. (shrink)

In this author-meets critics discussion of Howard Thurman’s Philosophical Mysticism, Anthony Sean Neal argues that Thurman’s work requires systematic recognition of how he was rooted firmly within the Modern Era of the African American Freedom Struggle. Michael Barber suggests that Thurman may be understood in contrast to Levinas on two counts. Whereas Thurman develops the duty to love from within the one who must love, Levinas grasps the origin of love’s duty in the command of the one who is to (...) be loved. And while Thurman’s mysticism yearns for oneness, Levinas warns that oneness is ethically problematic. Eddie O'Byrn challenges the symbolic validity of calling love a weapon, and asks why the book has not treated Thurman’s relations to Gandhi or King. Neal defends a provisional usage of the term weapon in relation to love and offers some preliminary considerations of Thurman’s relation to Gandhi and King, especially in the symbolic significance of "the dream.". (shrink)

European Journal of Political Theory, Ahead of Print. This review essay surveys the contributions of the new edited volume African American Political Thought: A Collected History. The thinker-based approach to the study of African American political thought advanced in the volume highlights the ways in which thinkers reformulate the central political questions of the intellectual tradition and constitute the canon through the citation and invocation of earlier figures. It also draws attention to the rhetorical, strategic, and tactical dimensions of their (...) political thought. The volume sets a new standard for study of African American political thought and makes a persuasive case for the tradition’s important contributions to political theory broadly. However, by tying its significance too closely to its interventions within American political thought, the volume inadvertently minimizes the global resonances of African American political thought. (shrink)

This chapter highlights the need to respond to human limits of attention and perspective with sympathetic apprehension of the other points of view—especially those who are rendered opaque. McBride outlines a way that Seigfried’s notions of radical empiricism, experimental logic, and cooperative intelligence can hang together, suggesting that pragmatist feminism comes with an imperative to weave and reweave our social fabric, to broaden the range of our experiences, to incorporate the perspectives left unpictured. To this end, select insights drawn from (...) black feminist visionary pragmatism are expounded with the hopes of broadening and complicating the social fabric across lines of difference. (shrink)

This article argues that non-ideal theory fails to deliver on its promise of providing a more accurate account of the real world by which philosophers can address problems of racism, sexual violence, and poverty. Because non-ideal theory relies on abstractions of groups which are idealized as causes for social phenomena, non-idealists imagine that categories like race or gender predict how groups behave in the real world. This article maintains that non-idealist abstractions often result in inaccuracy and makes the case that (...) empirically informed theories and group-based analyses are needed to correct the course of race-gender theory. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic has been analysed as a distinct from, but concurrent with, more typical racist events, such as police killings in the United States. This article argues that one can conceptualise these two events as inter-related and synergistically enhanced. Anti-Black racism is a dynamic that utilises different social inequalities and violent events to manage the Black population within the United States. This article suggests that theorists would benefit from a syndemic analysis of disease and anti-Black violence in future theorisations (...) of Black oppression. (shrink)

Winner of the 2020 Josiah Royce Prize in American Idealist Thought presented by the Josiah Royce Society Another white Man’s Burden performs a case study of Josiah Royce’s philosophy of racial difference. In an effort to lay bare the ethnological racial heritage of American philosophy, Tommy J. Curry challenges the common notion that the cultural racism of the twentieth century was more progressive and less racist than the biological determinism of the 1800s. Like many white thinkers of his time, Royce (...) believed in the superiority of the white races. Unlike today however, whiteness did not represent only one racial designation but many. Contrary to the view of the British-born Germanophile philosopher Houston S. Chamberlain, for example, who insisted upon the superiority of the Teutonic races, Royce believed it was the Anglo-Saxon lineage that possessed the key to Western civilization. It was the birthright of white America, he believed, to join the imperial ventures of Britain—to take up the white man’s burden. To this end he advocated the domestic colonization of Blacks in the American South, suggested that America’s xenophobia was natural and necessary to protecting the culture of white America, and demanded the assimilation and elimination of cultural difference for the stability of America’s communities. Another white Man’s Burden reminds philosophers that racism has been part of the building blocks of American thought for centuries, and that this must be recognized and addressed in order for its proclamations of democracy, community, and social problems to have real meaning. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an account of Frederick Douglass’s use of declaration as an emancipatory mode of political action. An act of declaration compels an audience to acknowledge the declarer as possessing a type of normative standing (e.g. personhood or citizenship). Douglass, through acts of declaration like his Fifth of July speech and fight with the ‘slavebreaker’ Covey, compels American audiences to acknowledge him as a fellow citizen by forcefully enacting a commitment to resist tyranny and oppression. The distinctive (...) emancipatory potential of declaration is grounded in its political epistemology of acknowledgment, on which political actors understand other persons as members of a shared community through the ways in which they comport themselves in relation to one another. Declaration makes political communities more inclusive not only by changing who we understand as fellow members, but how we understand them as such. (shrink)

This is a long critical discussion of Frank Wilderson's Afropessimism, focusing primarily on Wilderson's claim that Blackness is equivalent to Slaveness. The article draws out some strengths of the book, but argues that the book's central arguments often rest on shaky methodological, metaphysical, epistemic, and political grounds. Along the way, we consider some complications endemic to the project of evaluating a text so clearly geared towards Black audiences from the perspective of a non-Black reader.

In this article, I channel the autobiography of Black Panther cofounder Huey P. Newton, entitled Revolutionary Suicide, against the misogyny of the alt-right movement today. Both Newton and the alt-right have been powerfully influenced by Nietzsche, but one way of grasping the central difference between them is by comparing their conceptions of Dionysus. While the alt-right sticks closer to Nietzsche’s conception, which minimizes the god’s androgyny, Newton’s thought resonates with that androgyny, thereby bringing him closer to the most influential Dionysus (...) scholar since Nietzsche, Walter Otto. I therefore turn to the latter’s Dionysus: Myth and Cult, whose analyses I synthesize into the following image inspired by the god’s closest animal familiar: the dancingly-graceful panther as aqueous-androgynous soul-hunter. Reimagining Newton’s Black Panther in this way, finally, can help us overcome the alt-right. (shrink)

Ethics and Insurrection articulates an ethical position that takes critical pragmatism and Harrisian insurrectionist philosophy seriously. It suggests that there are values and norms that create boundaries that confine, reduce and circumscribe the actions we allow ourselves to consider. McBride argues that an insurrectionist ethos is integral in the disavowing of norms and traditions that justify or perpetuate oppression and that we must throw our faith behind something, some set of values, if we want a chance at shaping a future. (...) This book encourages us to (re)imagine and shape futures with less subjection, less degradation. It urges us to interrogate and deconstruct those intervening background assumptions that authorize and reinforce the subordination of stigmatized groups. It implores us to pursue new conceptions of personhood and humanity, conceptions that forefront reciprocity and solidarity-conceptions that do not cast groups of human beings as inherently subhuman or naturally bereft of honor. And finally Ethics and Insurrection beseeches us to form new coalitions and bonds of trust, to engage in those forms of collective action likely to shape a better future. (shrink)

A journey through The Mind of Africa offers one a breath-taking scenery of the cultural traditions, practices, and conceptions of African societies. Interlacing his exposition with proverbs and sayings, Abraham offers unique perspectives and interpretations of the Akan culture and conceptual scheme – Akan cultural values, social and political institutions, metaphysical conceptions of man and society – as paradigmatic of the culture and conceptual schemes of African societies. But crucially, Abraham reveals, examines, and rejects, a plethora of unfounded notions about (...) Africans and their cultures – some of these erroneous ideas are often repackaged and recited even in present times. In reading the book, one will come to understand and appreciate the theoretical underpinnings and the practical significance of the African experience. (shrink)

This article draws on the antebellum political thought of Black abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany in critically assessing the efficacy of reasonableness in advancing the aims of emancipatory politics in political discourse. I argue, through a reading of Douglass and Delany, that comporting oneself reasonably in the face of oppressive ideology can be counterproductive, if one’s aim is to undermine such ideology and the institutions it supports. Douglass and Delany, I argue, also provide us with a framework for evaluating (...) alternative discursive strategies we might wish to employ in light of the limited value of reasonableness for emancipatory politics. (shrink)

The work of Arthur de Gobineau has presented scholars with a number of interpretive problems concerning his status as a race theorist, his place in the history of racial thought, and the influence of his work on subsequent thinkers. This essay addresses the particularly vexing issue of the origins of Gobineau's racism from the perspective of his affiliation with French royalists in the 1840s and challenges the existing scholarship on the derivation of L'Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines by placing (...) the Essai in the context of his international experience as a member of the French diplomatic corps. Although disillusioned with legitimist politics during the July Monarchy, Gobineau never abandoned his youthful ideological priorities. From the perspective of his royalist past, the Essai appears as part of an extended rumination on the decadence of the French aristocracy and its failure to stem the tide of revolution and bureaucratic centralization. As such, Gobineau's racism can best be understood as a royalist heresy rather than a continuation of his aristocratic elitism or a clean break with his earlier preoccupations. (shrink)

Creative activities in a classroom can often be mistaken for negligence of academic requirements. This is especially true for many African American students. Recognition of the mental processes used in the expression of creative behaviors should give teachers the opportunity to harness this creative energy to develop academic skills. This article draws upon a historical perspective of creativity and its relationship to this trait in African Americans. Although many of the behaviors listed are common in all ethnic groups those behaviors (...) listed as uniquely evident among African American students are derived from assumptions made from experiences by various scholars, research documents and historical data. Strategies for addressing and enhancing these creative behaviors are included. (shrink)