I will teach two sections of this philosophy of race course at California State University, San Bernardino this coming Fall 2020 semester. I have been teaching at CSU, San Bernardino for about a year as an assistant professor.
The course has four pedagogical goals. The first goal is to give students a sense of how many interesting debates go on in the philosophy of race literature. To this end, we cover material that takes up the metaphysics of race, epistemology of ignorance and the nature of racial injustice.
The second goal is to give students a sense of the varied areas of inquiry that the philosophy of race literature draws on. I meet this goal by including work from sociologists, philosophers of biology and epistemologists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Philip Kitcher and Kristie Dotson.
The third goal is to help my students hone their ability to develop their own arguments. I do this by scaffolding the course’s final paper over the course of the term. I begin by requiring them to submit their argument in its most basic premise-and-conclusion form. With this as a starting point, I give students feedback throughout the term as they expand their argument into a paper with sections devoted to particular tasks such as rebutting objections to their argument.
The last goal is to give students a sense of how much race and racial injustice affect things such as the way people experience the world, socio-economic outcomes and the degree to which democracy flourishes not only here in the US but around the world. To this end, I find that assigning films can help make concrete some of the abstract ideas in the philosophy of race literature. I have found that director Spike Lee’s films such as Do the Right Thing and Clockers are quite effective in this regard. I require students to identify scenes that invoke the ideas that philosophers of race develop. For example, I have students describe a scene where, say, Kristie Dotson’s testimonial quieting or smothering occurs. Then, the students are required to explain why this is instance in the film is an example of these phenomena.
Students’ favorite element of the course is when we engage with the nature of racial injustice. These students are mostly philosophy majors who have taken courses in modern philosophy where they covered political philosophy from philosophers such as John Locke, Rawls and Rousseau. When students encounter Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract, they are often surprised and then motivated by the fact that race and the history of racial injustice are largely absent from these philosophers’ analyses of justice.
I include parts of this course’s racial injustice module in my introduction to philosophy courses. I teach an excerpt of Mills’ The Racial Contractright after we cover Rousseau’s Social Contract. This helpfully flags for introduction-to-philosophy students that race properly figures into
In the future, I plan to include material that takes up how race’s relation to popular culture and aesthetic products. To this end, I plan to include portions of Paul C. Taylor’s book, Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. And I would like to include more material that takes up colonialism and how race functions in Latin America. To meet this goal, I plan to include work from José Carlos Mariategui.
A theme that I consistently emphasize when teaching this course is the relationship between the past and the present. I regularly appeal to the way that the legacy of slavery, Indigenous American genocide, Jim Crow laws, real estate redlining practices and discriminatory apartment rental practices shape the distribution of wealth and opportunity in the US and around the world.
Emphasizing history’s relation to the present matters because many students cherish the idea that in the US people only have what they deserve. This idea of desert can make them resist many of the arguments that philosophers of race make. I suggest that instructors who use this syllabus to teach this similarly emphasize this theme. Consistent emphasis over the course of the semester can get students to consider how things outside of their control negatively affect socio-economic and psychic outcomes for Black folks, Indigenous folks and People of Color.
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Eric Bayruns García
Eric Bayruns García is an Assistant Professor of philosophy at California State University, San Bernardino. He specializes in philosophy of race and epistemology. In his work, he focuses on epistemological questions raised by race and racial injustice. In his current research project, he explains why so many Americans get things so wrong regarding the history and current state of racial injustice.
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