Black Issues in Philosophy: The Present Absence of Africana Thought in Juliet Hooker’s Theorizing Race in the Americas

by LaRose Parris

Juliet Hooker’s Theorizing Race in the Americas presents an inventive hemispheric analysis of late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American and Latin American thinkers’ political theories of race through a juxtapositional critique. By examining the writings of Frederick Douglass, Domingo Sarmiento, W.E.B. Du Bois, and José Vasconcelos, Hooker argues that a thorough consideration of these thinkers’ discursive responses to scientific racism’s hegemonic cultural, socio-economic, and political manifestations requires a specifically hemispheric examination that performs several related ideological functions.

Hooker’s juxtaposition offers a “South-to-South,” side-by-side reading in which she demonstrates that Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos, and their respective ideas, traversed the region, “reveal[ing] intellectual connections and political genealogies of racial thought within the Americas…at key historical moments,” while simultaneously unbinding their political thought from the strictly national contexts within which they are typically circumscribed (2–4).

The book’s thesis is two-fold. First, it situates thinkers from the Americas as pivotal interlocutors on discourses of race, empire, colonialism, mestizaje, and mestizo and Afro-futurism. This focus is both fitting and timely since the region itself embodies the manifold theoretical and political consequences of European imperial expansion, chattel slavery, and colonialism.

Second, Hooker categorizes these African American and Latin American theorists’ works as responding to three principal strains of racist thought that emerged out of late eighteenth-century Enlightenment racial science: ethnological-biological determinism (stemming from polygenetic evolutionary theories widely promulgated by the American school of ethnologists); the historical (civilizational) school, founded on monogenetic evolutionary theories and evinced in the writings of Arthur de Gobineau, the nineteenth-century French writer who is also known as the “father” of modern racist theory; and social Darwinism (derived from monogenetic theories of evolutionary mutations) (6–7).

This historical contextualization of scientific racism’s widespread promulgation discloses its ideological reach, as well as its seminal impact on domestic policy and geopolitical developments—all of which influenced the political thought of Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos. As such, racist thought is duly categorized as a defining hegemonic discourse, neither marginal nor inconsequential, but centrally implicated in the cultures, societies, and politics of the Americas, influencing debates on chattel slavery and abolition, domestic and foreign policy decisions, US expansionism and, as was the case with eugenics, forced sterilization of the poor, Black, indigenous, and other people of color in the United States and Latin America.

The strength of Hooker’s South-to-South inquiry thus lies in its privileging of the Americas as a fecund site of theoretical probing for Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos.

Quite interestingly, Theorizing Race also introduces a transdisciplinary, or creolized (see Jane Anna Gordon’s Creolizing Political Theory, 2014), methodology when the author urges political theorists and others to “mov[e] beyond what counts as a philosophical text” so that they may “think more broadly about the sites where those ideas have been formulated…” (17).

Calling for a wider interpretation of what constitutes a philosophical text becomes a theoretical challenge, however, for Hooker’s juxtapositional readings are conducted in a selective manner that obviates the broader transdisciplinary method she initially proffers.  For example, in her discussion of Douglass’s and Du Bois’s political writings she does not address the philosophical concerns that are simultaneously developed in these works. By focusing solely on socio-political themes—which makes sense for a work in political theory—the issue of philosophical texts is inevitably constrained.  Hooker elides the fact that Douglass’s and Du Bois’s writings have ontological implications as well.  The inevitable consequence of this circumscribed reading is that the greater import of Douglass’s and Du Bois’s transdisciplinary scholarship within the field of Africana philosophy is elided.

Theorizing Race in the Americas is a work of political theory connected to the discipline of philosophy, yet Hooker’s selective juxtapositions did not inspire this reader to “think more broadly about the sites where [Douglass’s and Du Bois’s] ideas have been formulated” (17).   By eschewing a transdisciplinary analysis of political and philosophical themes in Douglass’s and Du Bois’s works, the author overlooks these thinkers’ foundational import to the discipline of Africana philosophy, specifically, and the history of ideas generally. This omission, unfortunately, diminishes the ideological reach of Douglass’s and Du Bois’s seminal discursive contributions.

Since a comprehensive application of transdisciplinarity would highlight the philosophical content and import of Douglass’s and Du Bois’s works, I will use an Africana philosophical analysis to challenge Hooker’s discussion of scientific racism, and her readings of Douglass’s and Du Bois’s political writings.

Scientific Racism’s Material and Epistemological Legacy

Given the extent to which Hooker astutely highlights the ideological impact of eighteenth-century Enlightenment racial science into the nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first century societies, cultures, and politics of the Americas, it is somewhat surprising that she declares on the one hand that “today…scientific racism has largely been debunked” (6), yet on the other that “Older and newer forms of scientific racism…provided support for the encoding of white supremacy in public policy” (10).  If eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific racism had been debunked, we would not need to revisit the writings of the Africana philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary Frantz Fanon to explain its continued legacy. Yet there is global use of Fanon’s thought because of the persistence of racism premised on appeals to science.

In “Racism and Culture” (1956), Fanon examines the same aspects of racist thought’s socio-political and cultural legacy that Hooker addresses. Fanon explicates scientific racism’s transformative movement: from representations in concrete racial hierarchies that are “genotypically and phenotypically determined,” to more socially imbricated forms of “cultural racism.” He also reminds his audience that “Racism has not managed to harden. It has had to renew itself, to adapt itself, to change its appearance. It has had to undergo the fate of the cultural whole that informed it” (ibid).

The cultural whole of which Fanon speaks is that of white/European hegemonic domination, which is the basis of dehumanization and degradation of people of color globally. In order for white supremacy to have survived and thrived for the past four centuries, it became malleable, taking various shapes, while still adhering to its core principles of inherent white racial superiority. Specious though they are, these tenets have generated the racist structural formations and practices that Hooker cites: racially discriminatory immigration laws, forced sterilization of people of color, police murders of unarmed African Americans, among others. These policies point to the fact that racist thought is continually manifested at the material level, perpetuating the subjugation and murder of people of color throughout the Americas and the world. Nonetheless Hooker’s conclusion reasserts that “scientific notions of nonwhite racial superiority have been abandoned” (Hooker: 200). Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

Epistemologically speaking, scientific racism remains a fixture in Western discourse as well. Popular works such as Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1992) (a New York Times bestseller) and most recently Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance (2014), which is now in its second printing despite a New York Times review characterizing it as “troublesome” and “dangerous,” attest to the fact racist discourse is comparable to a hydra. For every head that is decapitated through sound refutation, yet another springs forth. Although these texts do not further seventeenth- and eighteenth-century polygenetic arguments, The Bell Curve relies on racially biased data supporting the preeminence of a so-called “cognitive elite” (Herrnstein and Murray: 25–75) while A Troublesome Inheritance reinterprets the human genome experiment’s findings to reestablish monogenetic evolutionary degeneracy theory.

The highly reputable presses publishing these texts and their popularity mean that racist discourse not only remains hegemonic, but also continues to be validated as a theory of knowledge (and by default humanity) that is imbricated within every facet of Western social, cultural and political life.

Frederick Douglass: Abolitionist and Philosopher of Existence

The fact that scientific racism was the ideological buttress for the chattel slavery system did not escape the famed abolitionist and philosopher Frederick Douglass.  In his 1854 speech, “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,” Douglass identifies the racist polygenetic claims of the American school of ethnologists, represented in Samuel Morton’s Crania Americana (1839) and Crania Aegyptiaca (1844) as evidence that “Fashion is not confined to dress; but extends to philosophy as well—and it is fashionable now…to exaggerate the differences between the Negro and the European.”  For Douglass, the American school’s biological determinism was proof of said racial hyperbole.  It did not only posit the false notion of innate African inferiority but also promulgated a Eurocentric, hegemonic revision of the Western historiographical narrative that erased the ancient Egyptians’ African racial and cultural identity.

While Hooker correctly cites Douglass’s “Claims” speech as a direct refutation of the American school of ethnologists’ findings, there is no mention of the layered, transdisciplinary analysis Douglass used to refute the American school’s attestations of inherent African ahistoricality and further his abolitionist aims. For an in-depth discussion of the ancient and modern historiographical, linguistic, and cultural sources from Herodotus and Diodorus, to Denon and Volney among others that Douglass cites in “Claims,” see pages 47–65 of LaRose T. Parris, Being Apart: Theoretical and Existential Resistance in Africana Literature (2015).

Hooker also avers that the ideas of democracy, fugitivity, and liminal citizenry are problematized in Douglass’s 1852 address, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” She posits that fugitive slaves’ status as liminal citizens rendered them heightened “democratic subjectivities” (Hooker: 30). While this is ostensibly true, the enslaved (and any human being) could not first arrive at this level of inter-subjective political awareness and contingent national identification without first apprehending themselves as intrinsically free human beings despite their material condition of bondage.

It is this inherently existential claim that Douglass outlines in his description of the infamous battle with slave-breaker Covey from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845: 293–294): “I was broken in body, soul, and spirit…my intellect languished…You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.”

Penned nearly a decade before his famed 1852 fourth of July address, Douglass clarifies that despite his legal and social status as another man’s chattel, he became a free man when he grasped the veracity of his intrinsic freedom, fought to maintain it, and chose to die in order to defend it. As Douglass’s words show, the chattel slave system’s groundings in racist thought emboldened slave-owners to attempt to divest enslaved people of their humanity, and agency, through the system’s sheer brutality.

Unfortunately, Hooker identifies Douglass’s 1845 autobiography as one of the oft-cited canonical texts that does not articulate the American hemispheric concerns central to her work of political theory.  This is regrettable, because to thoroughly understand Douglass’s evolution as a political thinker one needs first to appreciate his awakening as a philosopher of existence and proto-existentialist.  In this regard, one could consult Broadus Butler, “Frederick Douglass: The Black Philosopher in the United States,” in Leonard Harris’s classic anthology Philosophy Born of Struggle: An Anthology of Afro-American Philosophy from 1917 (1983) and Lewis R. Gordon’s in-depth discussion in Existentia Africana (2000) on Douglass as a philosopher of existence and existentialist.

Just as Douglass understood philosophy’s epistemological and material impact on the abolition debate, he also grasped that his lived reality as a slave provided him the opportunity to further articulate his own conception of freedom, a theory that would later become a cornerstone of Africana existentialist thought. Douglass’s words, in “Lectures on Slavery No. 2,” express the fact that freedom is an intrinsic aspect of human existence: “Such is the truth of man’s right to liberty. It existed in the very idea of man’s creation. It was his even before he comprehended it. He was created in it, endowed with it, and it can never be taken from him” (Life and Writings, 1950). Thus Douglass’s political identification and agitation as a freeman was arrived at and initially determined through a distinct awareness of his existential freedom.

As Hooker cites portions of Frederick Douglass’s oeuvre as a cornerstone of Black fugitive thought, the encapsulation of what she terms “a radical black fugitive democratic ethos” (29), establishing a conceptual bridge between Douglass’s black radical democratic ethos and his incipient Africana existentialist concerns would elucidate the philosophical significance of his writings even further. Douglass’s existential explorations of his innate agency, being, and freedom are the theoretical sources for his radical egalitarianism, on the basis of race and gender, which became the defining feature of his political thought.

Thus the seed of inspiration for Douglass’s political commitments lies in his fundamentally existentialist thought, for it was the awareness of his ineluctable ontological freedom, in spite of his material bondage, that compelled Douglass to actualize his physical liberation. This process of existential self-actualization made Douglass the philosopher, political theorist, and activist that he became.

Identifying Internalized Racism in Vasconcelos’ Works and While Ignoring It in Du Bois’s Works

The works of both Vasconcelos and Du Bois are explained as having been influenced by the white supremacist racist terrorism of the nadir era in U.S. history; yet Hooker limits her juxtapositional analysis of internalized racism to Vasconcelos’s The Cosmic Race (1925) and Indología (1926), and omits a similar examination in Du Bois’s Dark Princess (1928). Given that Du Bois originated the theory of double consciousness in the study of race in the social sciences, doesn’t his work warrant a parallel reading of the same psychological and inter-subjective effects of white supremacist domination that his theory of double consciousness plainly delineates?

Hooker cites Vasconcelos’s portrayal of Afro-Latin and indigenous populations in Indología as “active co-contributors in the development of the region’s mestizo identity” (174) in direct contrast to their relative absence in Vasconcelos’s earlier work, The Cosmic Race. What is more, she highlights Vasconcelos’s disdain for ruling Latin American elites who deny their own African and indigenous roots (175).  This skin color hierarchy, or pigmentocracy, is not unique to Latin America but prevalent throughout the United States and the Global South. While it is manifested in varying degrees and may characterize power struggles pertaining to assimilation and/or separation, it informs the lived experience of people of color throughout the Global South, the United States, and the world.

Nonetheless Hooker contends that the ideological and thematic content of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk is not representative of Du Bois’s later more internationalist, Pan-African, and anti-colonial commitments. While this is seemingly true, Souls’ theory of double consciousness provides the very critical lens to problematize Du Bois’s choice of female protagonist in Dark Princess. Double consciousness may also be used to explain his (and the NAACP’s) own intra-racial color conflict with Marcus Mosiah Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). David Levering (2000) Lewis cites numerous references to Du Bois’s paradoxical opinions of Garvey’s leadership and followers, all of which appear to be rooted in Du Bois’s elitist color consciousness. Du Bois praised Garvey’s Back to Africa Movement for electrifying the masses, yet characterized Garvey as a “very black man” and denigrated his followers as “the lowest Negros, mostly from the West Indies.”

Hooker is quite right in her assertion that there was no “love lost” between Du Bois and Garvey (129). Though they were both Pan-Africanists, Garvey’s earlier program of African repatriation, combined with the UNIA’s mission of instilling racial pride through the valorization of African history and culture, uplifted the Black masses in an unprecedented and revolutionary way. His timeless symbols and sayings of Black Nationalist and Pan-African unity—the Red, Black, and Green flag of Black liberation; “Up ye mighty Race” and “A people without knowledge of their history is like a tree without roots”—became badges of racial honor that were sorely needed by the Black masses in the early twentieth-century, and still have currency today. These symbols of cultural nationalism also made Garvey an incomparable charismatic leader and a radical, albeit contradictory race man. For instance, It is widely known that Garvey met with Ku Klux Klan leaders in 1922.

Though Du Bois’s and Garvey’s disagreements ran the ideological gamut—from the NAACP’s intergrationist aims versus the UNIA’s program of African repatriation to the practical issue of tactics of implementing day-to-day practices of social transformation—in addition to Garvey’s questionable finances and The Black Star Line, one would be remiss to argue that Garvey did not reawaken people of African descent, throughout the diaspora, to their historical significance and dignity.

Regarding the symbolic representation of African diasporic pride, Du Bois had a similar opportunity to present literary images of valorized Black identity in his 1928 novel, Dark Princess. However Du Bois crafted his fictitious narrative of Global South unity through the romance between the African American protagonist, Matthew Townes, and his East Indian lover and intellectual equal, Princess Kautilya. This work is widely cited as presaging both the 1955 Bandung Conference of African-Asian anti-colonial alliance, and Afro-futurism.

Rightfully so. Nonetheless two pertinent questions remain: Why didn’t Du Bois choose to depict an African princess as Matthew’s lover during such an era of heightened Pan-African consciousness? And how does this apparent disavowal relate to Du Bois’s own internalized racism? For instance, in David Levering Lewis’s first biography of Du Bois, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (1994), he uses Du Bois’s characterization of himself as a mulatto, distinct from “full-blooded Negroes,” to support his point that “proud hybridization is so prevalent in [his] sense of himself that the failure to notice it in the literature about him is as remarkable as the complex himself.”

These points of contention stem from the author’s seeming indifference to Douglass’s and Du Bois’s crucial contributions to Africana thought, as well as her use of selective rather than comprehensive juxtaposition. If readers are urged to conduct side-by-side readings of the works of Douglass and Sarmiento, and Du Bois and Vasconcelos, should we not also be called to juxtapose the texts within each author’s respective corpus? Such intra-corpus analyses would both illuminate the prescience of Douglass’s and Du Bois’s disciplinary plurality and disclose Du Bois’s awareness that, in Jane Anna Gordon’s words from Creolizing Political Theory: “the creation of an African-American population through the institution of enslavement, create[d] radically unique opportunities for human study—a clarifying mirror into the nature of the human species through studying it in the fullest range of predicaments” (42).

Examining humanity through the dialectical lens of enslavement and liberty, subjugation and resistance inspired Douglass and Du Bois to interrogate a broad range of academic disciplines, including historiography, philosophy, psychology, social science, and political science. They pursued such catholic inquiry to illuminate white racial superiority as a myth that has been accepted as truth, specifically because it has been reified through its penetration into every facet of symbolic, material, and discursive life.

Douglass’s and Du Bois’ shared goal of establishing discourses of freedom led to their embrace of disciplinary plurality that, in turn, led to their becoming pillars of Africana thought. As thinkers indebted to Douglass’s and Du Bois’s shared emancipatory vision, we should utilize their meta-theoretical, transdisciplinary processes of inquiry, so that we may appreciate and disseminate their ideas as thoroughly as possible.

Valorizing Douglass’s and Du Bois’s prescient vision in our own scholarly productions would equip our students, colleagues, and larger reading public to grasp what these thinkers understood:  ridding the world of injustice and oppression begins with correcting the discursive and structural fallacies that have perpetuated them. In other words, Douglass and Du Bois understood that changing the world truly begins with changing ideas. As their theoretical heirs, shouldn’t we honor their bequest and continually strive to do the same?

LaRose T. Parris is Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College/CUNY. Her first book, Being Apart: Theoretical and Existential Resistance in Africana Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2015), was awarded the Nicolás Guillén Prize for Outstanding Book in Philosophical Literature by the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2016. Her fiction and criticism have appeared in Callaloo, Entre Letras, The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, and The Journal of Pan African Studies.