Antiblackness and Philosophical Duplicity

The black woman philosopher Adrian Piper had an unfortunate run-in with Wilfred Van Orman Quine on her first day as a Harvard graduate student. At an introductory meet-and-greet, the godfather of modern analytic philosophy walked up to Piper. She recounted: “Without introduction or preamble he said to me with a triumphant smirk, ‘Miss Piper, you’re about as black as I am.’” 

Piper is one of the most innovative writers on Kant, race, art, ontology, and epistemology in recent memory, yet is scarcely read within philosophical circles. This is, of course, nothing new. To say that black writings and ideas have historically existed at the margins of academic philosophy is to utter an absurd understatement. Yet, we are told, things are changing. Black philosophers are now tenured professors, and editors in chief, and academic deans. They are invited as guests of honor to colloquia, where well-meaning colleagues wax proud on their department’s newest diversity and inclusion committee or whopping three black PhD candidates. And in their wake, these newly minted compatriots bring reams of elided texts, an entire network of traditions from Piper to Lorde to Du Bois to Walker that demand, at last, to be taken seriously. “Attend very carefully to what I have to say to you,” indeed. 

And slowly, surely, academic philosophy is complying. What black people, living or dead, have to say is slowly, surely being listened to. This is undeniably good. But I’m worried about the way professional philosophers are listening, and the way many are subsequently refusing to hear. Their well-meaning exegetical practice—the way they understand what black philosophers have to say—is, I think, fundamentally erasing the truth of these texts. It is erasing their indeterminacy, their ambiguity, what I want to call their duplicity, which is itself a direct product of the very historical elision, and its brutal conditions of existence, that embracing black philosophy is meant to counter. To so erase is to do a disservice to these texts, and to mishear the lessons they have to teach us. 

Piper’s violation reminds us (for those who need reminding) that blackness is often experienced materially for black philosophers. It fundamentally structures, and in many ways troubles, our lives. Piper’s blackness was immediately “up for grabs” to Quine; it existed to be made material, to be pointed to and played with, to be brought to bear on her way of living. Ironically, this is precisely what black philosophers like Piper often seek to elucidate; the way in which blackness dictates (our) social space, organizing our relationships and possibilities of being. I say “blackness,” but one might as well say “antiblackness.” Antiblackness is a real, lived, material part of our lives, in and outside of philosophical spaces. 

My question is this: why, when we (those within the realm of mainstream academic philosophy) read black philosophy, when we seek to understand it, to figure out what it, and by extension its author, says, do we often forget this antiblackness?

Many mainstream academic philosophers remain fundamentally uninterested in biography. The valiant efforts of interdisciplinarians, black radical philosophers, and poststructuralism notwithstanding, philosophers are often satisfied with what a given author has written down. The material conditions of that written content—that is, the lived existence of its writer—are not considered necessary to interpret it. Philosophical ideas are taken as given; we see no need to “uncover” what the author “really” meant.  Even many of those academics who would agree that such presumptions are misguided often then proceed to read and, crucially, teach these texts without actually actively suspending them.

The academy doesn’t, I suppose, treat philosophical texts as an archive: as a set of physical texts, not as heaven-sent but as products of complex historical, biographical, and social relations, patterns, and events. We treat them the way Saidiya Hartman reminds us we often treat historical archives; as “transparent windows,” to borrow from W.J.T. Mitchell, to their referent. For the historical archive, that referent is, say, a certain moment in time, a person’s life story, etc. For our archive, it is the philosopher’s philosophy; what they think, what they believe. In other words, many academic philosophers assume that “Kant’s philosophy” can be found in the things Kant wrote down. But can Piper’s?

Academic philosophy, inasmuch as it is beginning to bring itself to care about Piper at all, insists that it can. I have found that, again, inasmuch as black philosophical texts are brought to light, we typically assume that we ought to treat them exactly as we treat white ones. To give homage to the work, to take black philosophy seriously, amounts to grappling with its content as it is given. We must (we admonish each other) never allow our personal biases, our presumptions about an author’s color, to affect what we take the work to mean. 

What this exegetical (and pedagogical) method presumes is that black philosophers’ texts offer a “transparent window” into the Black Philosopher. It presumes that that author occupies a material, lived existence wherein exact translation—the ability to say what one means—is assured. When we generalize that reading method across historical and social divergences, we cover up the complicated ways in which we often do not have the ability to “say what we mean,” whatever that could be. We actualize, in deed if not word, the presumption that black people are and have been able to speak clearly and with full assurance that what we say will be heard, however and whatever we choose to say. 

This, obviously, could not be further from the truth. As everyday concepts like “codeswitching” remind us (for those who need reminding), the material fact of antiblackness requires reaction from those who live it. Antiblackness is something navigated; it is something that individuals strategically move through, consciously or unconsciously making decisions based on survival, on solidarity, on liberation. What Fanon might have called the presumed density of blackness—that we are what we are, and do what we do, simply because it’s natural—covers up what I’ll call the inherent duplicity of black existential navigation. Duplicity’s negative valence is not, I think, to be disregarded; nor is the word’s implicature of racist myths about the “shifty Negro.” Duplicity captures one of the many ways in which black folks intentionally and strategically make decisions about our existence based on an awareness of the materiality of antiblackness. And this black navigation often must be shifty; reactivity often requires hiding our “true” thoughts, our “true” purposes. 

I don’t mean to moralize this navigational practice. Too often, what is being duplicitously pursued is not, say, black liberation, but one’s own success and comfort, one’s own tenure, one’s own fellowship or grant. The ethical complexities of duplicity, then, are not what I’m interested in right now. Nor do I insist that all black writers are automatically duplicitous. I do not, though, necessarily insist the reverse: that some, perhaps the more radical, are not. As philosophically oriented theorists like Nahum Chandler, Fred Moten, and Hartman herself seem to suggest, perhaps we can find social ontologies that admit that duplicity, in a more general sense than the discrete practical behaviors I’m discussing in this piece, is a necessary condition for black life. As such, I do insist that duplicity is not necessarily synonymous with conservatism, antiradicalism, and anything one might call “inauthenticity.” What I want to argue is that such duplicity exists, that it endangers our typical ways of reading philosophy, and that those of us invested in it are largely ignoring that danger.

This shiftiness is, indeed, often the condition of possibility of our being able to participate in the white-dominated academic philosophical world. Were it not for our duplicity, were it not for our awareness of antiblackness and our intentional and strategic reactions to it, we would not long survive in these spaces. In response to Quine’s materializing of Piper’s blackness (ironically, by dismissing it), Piper did not scream or challenge. Surely, if the threat of being the angry black woman did not exist, if such an outburst would not have been personal and professional suicide, she might have, or at least would have had no reason not to. And yet, those threats existed (and largely exist to this day). And so her response, whatever it was, was necessarily duplicitous; she had to hide, to cover up, her interiority; she had to strategize; she had to be shifty.

And so many black folks write a certain way or on a certain thing; they fall short of making a certain radical claim, or throw in an appeasing qualification to an otherwise radical claim; they treat certain people in certain ways, and present themselves in certain ways. They do this not because it’s simply “what they want” (although they may duplicitously present it as such) but for other, darker reasons.

If duplicity is often an essential expectation of black presence within philosophical space, then it seems reasonable to suggest that black writing is caught up in such a practice. That is, it is not merely Piper’s immediate reaction to Quine’s racism that must be strategized; what black philosophers write surely itself must be reactive to the material force of antiblackness that conditions its existence. 

Why did Du Bois, or Wells, or Spillers, or (insert whatever contemporary black philosopher, including myself, you wish here) say that, or say it like that? The standard philosophical answer to such a question is, simply: because they believed it. And that is all our methodology is often prepared to say. We have constrained ourselves to the words spoken or written, and thus must assume that everything to know is already there, in those words. But truly appreciating the existence of antiblackness means, I think, grappling with the fact that “Because they believed it” simply is not the only possible, and often actual, answer to the question “Why did (black philosopher) say that?” Such a presumption is as intellectually troubled as the presumption that the only sensible answer to the question “Why did freed slaves wish to stay with their former masters?” is “Because they wanted to!” The archive, as Hartman reminds us, covers up as much of our interior life—of the “truth” of what black people think or want—as it pretends it reveals. To treat black words at face value is to erase their duplicity, to erase the strategic doublethink, the necessary navigation, that is often the condition for you being able to hear them at all. Other reasons beyond truth, or beyond earnest belief, exist for black philosophical production; our survival demands it.

That, then, is the problem: a standard, still well-circulated, philosophical exegetical method is ill-equipped to grapple with the materiality of black speech, with the bizarre conditions of possibility of black philosophy. What is the solution? I’m still figuring out. It might seem like I’m suggesting that philosophy needs to become historiography, biography, in order to access the truth of its black documents. Perhaps that’s true. But then, such an effort would surely run into the problems Hartman locates within historical archives.

 Hartman writes:

I work a lot with scraps of the archive. I work a lot with unknown persons, nameless figures, ensembles, collectives, multitudes, the chorus. That’s where my imagination of practice resides.

Perhaps there is hope for exegesis; perhaps we can one day speak in confidence: “This is what W.E.B. Du Bois believed, or at the least wanted to say.” Perhaps not. Perhaps the only way to truly grapple with the antiblackness intrinsic to the philosophical tradition is to soberly admit that its black inhabitants are, in a true sense, “unknown persons.” Perhaps their writings—our writings—will never offer a transparent window into their interiority, into “the thought that is theirs.” Perhaps their thought —our thought—can be spoken of only in quotations, in hypotheses, in wondering. Perhaps this opacity (as Edouard Glissant would call it) is a great tragedy (or else a great opportunity).

I have no answers, then, no solutions. (If I did, I wonder if many readers would in fact want to hear them.) All I have is a charge to humility, and, I suppose, honesty. The chorus, the multitude, the black ensemble, within which I duplicitously reside, deserves as much.

Nicholas Whittaker

Nicholas Whittaker is a PhD candidate at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Their research is focused on a cluster of  interrelated questions bubbling out of contemporary black studies, philosophy of art, phenomenology, philosophy of language, and metaphilosophy. Their publications, published and forthcoming, include essays on the work of "black duplicity," blackface, the work of Adrian Piper, aesthetic experience, and abolitionism in popular culture.