by Tracy Llanera
The job season is here again. If you’re on the market as an ABD or an early career researcher and you have a non-mainstream profile, you’re likely experiencing these familiar job hunt sentiments and remarks: the bouts of “impostor syndrome,” the threat of competition, the sneers of “diversity hire” from dissatisfied peers and so-called colorblind professors, the resignation to luck and contingency, and, on better days, a strong belief in your capabilities and a calm sense of cautious optimism.
Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy published my musing “The Brown Babe’s Burden” back in Spring of this year. I find myself revisiting it, like an old friend. As with most philosophy essays with catchy one-liners, there’s more to the article’s clickbait title than meets the eye.
The BBB (“Brown Babe’s Burden”) phrase comes from Uma Narayan’s essay entitled “What’s a Brown Girl Like You Doing in the Ivory Tower? Or, How I Became a Feminist Philosopher.” Narayan describes the Brown Babe’s Burden as the joint experience of representation and tokenism: “as the only woman of color and often the most junior person at more panels and events than I want to remember, I have also felt the stress of the recognition that my public performance and philosophical acuity would likely be, whether I like it or not, a measure of whether ‘women of color can do philosophy.’”
Readers can find Narayan’s essay in Singing in the Fire (2003), a fantastic anthology of autobiographical narratives by women philosophers. If any of you haven’t read the book, please get your hands on it. Linda Martín Alcoff, the editor of the collection, had the foresight to collect these testimonies 16 years ago. Today, these stories help us map our progress from being a suffocatingly homogeneous world of philosophy to one that is now less so (but not by too much).
“The Brown Babe’s Burden” continues the conversations initiated in Singing in the Fire, updated to meet the realities of 2019. I’m an early career philosopher in a global academic environment where competition is unsparing and the ratio is one (tenure-track) offer to (at least) three hundred overqualified applicants. This setup is enough to justify anxiety about one’s chances in an abnormal and unjust job market. But the story gets more complicated. For some people, the ordinary job anxieties about academia are compounded by the deep anxieties that come from being underrepresented and undervalued in the profession. Being a woman, a person of color, a member of the LGBTQI community, a person with a disability, or a person with a non-Anglicized name are markers of a non-traditional identity profile in philosophy. Being any of these, or having a profile at the intersection of these identities, puts one at a disadvantage.
There’s a lot of empirical evidence to back up these claims. If you’re a member of any of these categories (or all), implicit biases work against you, and you’re not safe from more explicit biases, either.
In this BBB piece, I argue that problems about intersectionality are less addressed in the Australian paradigm compared to its first world counterparts in North America and the UK. The reason is simple: gender diversity is the only diversity factor that makes the cut there. So more than 10 years after the Australasian Association of Philosophy (AAP) project on “Improving the Participation of Women in the Philosophy Profession,” I make the case that it’s time to do more to address issues of diversity in the region. Without empirical data, strong institutional support, and policy changes in place, statements on Australasian equity and diversity by its key associations and philosophy departments are lip service.
Philosophers and mentors of all colors, shapes, and sizes
One of the memorable events I attended this year was the Black Women Philosophers Conference at The Graduate Center, CUNY (March 2019). This event was reported by Carol Moeller on the APA Women in Philosophy blog and by UCONN’s Heather Muraviov and Taylor Tate, whose participation in the conference was supported by UCONN’s Philosophy Department.
After the conference, I mentioned to Linda Alcoff (CUNY-Hunter), who co-organized it with Charles Mills (CUNY-Graduate School), that the papers were organized neatly according to streams, so that each idea and argument was felt as part of a greater whole. She replied it required no effort: the order and the narrative arose clearly and organically. At hindsight, this is unsurprising. All the papers in the conference were making sense of concrete, universal, and urgent human needs, fleshed out in the philosophical issues raised in their work as Black Women theorists and activists. Surely, this is how one recognizes that one is part of something bigger—and how one knows, hurdle by hurdle, bit by bit—that the Brown/Black Babe’s Burden is being lifted off one’s shoulders.
What stood out most to me in the conference was the camaraderie on full display. Many philosophers traveled to New York to support the event. My general impression is that academics don’t usually go out of their way to attend conferences if they are not part of the program, or if the event is out of state, or if the event isn’t institutionally funded. But those I spoke with at the Black Women Philosophers Conference attended at their own time and expense, recognizing the event’s singular importance in the history of philosophy.
Undergraduate and graduate students also participated; I had the privilege of enjoying dinner with Diana Umana, a Latina undergraduate philosophy student originally from El Salvador. She came, with the gracious support of Smith College, because she knew that this event was nothing short of significant. Meeting Diana—a passionate student with a healthy enthusiasm for philosophy—reminded me once again of the role of mentoring relationships; they are integral to success and the feeling of belonging in our field.
Mentoring relationships habituate a young scholar into academia, a context in which I hope all of us will feel right at home. But the practice of mentoring—in terms of it being a “priority” service to the profession—needs attention and commitment. Helen de Cruz, co-moderator of The Philosophers’ Cocoon and co-organizer of the Cocoon Mentoring Project, and whom I met at the 2019 APA Pacific Diversity Panel in Vancouver, has pointed out that philosophers who sign up to become mentors are disproportionately women. There are notably less senior, mid-career, or early career tenure-track white male philosophers volunteering to become mentors. To me, this suggests that women still feel more committed to taking action and improving the state of the profession, which also unduly burdens them with more of the feminine-coded “nurture” bias. It also makes establishing healthy professional relationships with many kinds of philosophers difficult for early career researchers, especially those who have an intersectional identity.
If there is one thing each person who has had some success in our field should consider doing, it’s this: be a good mentor to someone.
Note: If you don’t have access to Hypatia, please send me an email at tracy.llanera@uconn.edu for a copy of the article.
Tracy Llanera is a Filipina philosopher. She is an Assistant Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut and a faculty affiliate at the UConn Asian and Asian American Studies Institute. She works in social and political philosophy, philosophy of religion, American pragmatism and Philippine Studies, specializing on the topics of nihilism, conversion, and the politics of language. Her writings have been published in Philosophy and Social Criticism, Contemporary Pragmatism, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Critical Horizons, Philippine Sociological Review, Hypatia, Analyse & Kritik, Pragmatism Today, and Journal of Philosophical Research. She is currently working on two books: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism (Palgrave Macmillan) and A Philosophical Defense of Nihilism (Routledge), co-authored with James Tartaglia.
