This piece is dedicated to the memories and legacies of the late Charles Mills and Lonel Woods. I miss you both dearly.
“So now that we’re having people demonstrate in the street, and young people are taking the lead — and you know, all credit to Black Lives Matter and people of Dwight’s age — the question we need to ask is, given that political philosophers are supposed to be justice guys, where the hell where they when these issues [arose]? …they’re charged to prepare young Americans to deal with problems of the country, to make it a better United States, where the hell were they when entrusted with that valuable task? …think of what a difference it would make as the country transitions to a non-white majority… think of all the problems and confluences that are going to attend this transition. Think of the role of philosophers in preparing, in particular, young white Americans for this new world they’re going to be living in, and to make it as smooth and just a transition as possible. Don’t philosophers, don’t political philosophers need to be talking about issues of race and racial justice and corrective justice? And they need to admit the historically white supremacist character of the United States as a nation.”
“Peace and love.”
Though I had no idea what it was until I was eighteen, I fell in love with philosophy almost immediately upon learning. I was introduced to it during my first year in college through a course on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and psychology. Aside from the fact that Wittgenstein’s intensity, commitment, and struggles with religion resonated with me, early on the course’s teacher contrasted Wittgenstein’s views on language and thought with another philosopher’s views—those of Noam Chomsky. I was first politicized by the very publicly anti-democratic nature of the United States in the George W. Bush elections, as well as the racism—both anti-Muslim and anti-Black—and imperialism of the Bush administration’s response to September 11th, 2001. Furthermore, this politicization brought to fruition seeds first planted by Rage Against the Machine as an eight-year-old. Put these facts together and I was certainly aware of Chomsky. This discipline that, for me, was initially associated with him and Wittgenstein seemed pretty cool. As somebody just realizing how much I had uncritically accepted the problematic world around me, I connected with a discipline so connected to critique of language—in Wittgenstein’s case—and social critique—in Chomsky’s case.
Unfortunately, while it would take me years to realize it, the only part of that experience telling of my time in academic philosophy was the privileging of white men’s perspectives. Genuine criticism, struggle, commitment, were few and far between—though it took me years to notice this underneath the performance of struggle and play criticism all around me. That same calendar year I also took intro philosophy, philosophy of justice, and philosophy of religion. I was introduced to scores of philosophers, but we still read only white thinkers and Elizabeth Anscombe was the only woman whose views I was introduced to. Again, as somebody who was politicized by the Bush administration, the war on terror, and the associated intertwining of the military-industrial and prison-industrial complexes, I was also well-aware of Angela Davis and would have been thrilled to read her work in a class.
Given that I was taking a philosophy of justice course, assigning Davis’ work shouldn’t have been a big ask. At the very least, some writings by some BIPOC philosophers, or even writing about race or imperialism shouldn’t have been a big ask. Alas, nothing along these lines was forthcoming and we stuck to purely abstract, ideal-theoretic questions, as well as the answers white men gave to them. Even though the relationship between the Islamic world and the western world dominated global politics during this time, my philosophy of religion class engaged none of this and we exclusively read western authors. Even the kalam cosmological argument was introduced through William Craig, rather than al-Kindi or al-Ghazali. The next year I took six more philosophy classes—including my first course from a woman philosopher, who was a (white) feminist—but the variety of perspectives got no better. Yet again, I should have realized the perniciousness of this, as on p. 2 of the course text I was introduced to the concept of propositional knowledge through the horrific, but supposedly paradigm example, “I know that Columbus discovered America in 1492”. We’re far removed from any serious criticism or questioning if this is our starting point.
Still, I absolutely loved philosophizing—so I assumed that meant I loved philosophy. I also thought that philosophizing had much to bring to matters of public and personal importance. By the time I published my first article, my topic was public philosophy. Unfortunately, my tone was far too harsh on the public—the first sentence reading, “Increasingly, philosophy is being viewed by the public as a non-essential part of non-academic, political life.” It didn’t occur to me that this might be a reasonable response to a discipline which provided the exclusionary undergraduate experiences discussed above. It didn’t occur to me that those experiences formed part of a pattern which was continued in graduate school—where I was only assigned white thinkers (with the notable exceptions of Delia Graff Fara and being lucky enough to learn from Jiyuan Yu), where a faculty member placed homophobic and misogynistic memes on his door, where a faculty member publicly announced I was an “idiot” for boycotting an anti-LGBTQ2S+ philosopher’s talk, etc. I didn’t see that this all fit neatly into a system where teachers told me things like, “stop writing about people—ideas are all that matter in philosophy”. I didn’t see that this privileging of abstractions and ignoring of real people and their lived experiences could lead to mistreating them or could be connected to institutions which created the context for anti-black and homophobic death threats directed at one of my colleagues—even as responding in a way that would support my colleague’s and our community’s healing began to consume me. To my BIPOC readers, friends, colleagues, students, and comrades, I’m so sorry for that. I owed you much better.
But, by the time I was twenty-eight, my attitude toward philosophy was changing. After teaching some mathematics and spending time criticizing the eurocentric and androcentric canon there, I started to do so in philosophy too. I was also finishing my PhD and thinking about my own place within academic philosophy. So, when I read the first page of Mills’ first masterpiece, The Racial Contract, around this time, my eight-year old, eighteen-year old, and twenty-eight year old time slices were finally able to come together. Here, Mills points out that “White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. You will not find this term in introductory, or even advanced, texts in political theory”. As a result, Mills saw his work as needing “to redirect your vision, to make you see what, in a sense, has been there all along”. He did this for me and it reinvigorated my love of philosophizing like nothing has before or since. So, I set my own goals along these lines as well.
Having always been political and somebody who attempted to engage in criticism in my philosophizing, I assumed that when I turned my presenting and writing toward critiquing the whiteness and maleness of philosophy, it wouldn’t be seen all that differently. I was wrong. Instead, colleagues who had been my most common interlocutors refused to engage. One told me that they’d love to attend a talk of mine when I started doing philosophy again. Another who was at least willing to attend my talks, said that all my claims about the ways in which the construction of the modern canon in philosophy was connected to the history of global white supremacy, colonialism, and patriarchy may be true, but they still have the right to teach this way without justification. On subsequent attempts, they gave more directly white supremacist responses like “There’s no such thing as Latin American philosophy” and a defiant “We teach western philosophy in this department.”
Some colleagues apologized for such behavior, but then did things like issue public statements against me when I asked them to look at the whiteness of their own curriculum. Amidst all of this, I lost my position in the philosophy department. As I was appointed to multiple other departments, one of my new chairs encouraged me to leave if I were going to continue criticizing the school’s white supremacy. They also dog-whistled that I might be doing so because I’m too angry from listening to too much hip-hop. Back within academic philosophy—after critiquing white feminist approaches to social justice that I saw within one professional philosophical organization, I was chastised and threatened with not being included in future programs by a representative of the organization in the discussion session.
I don’t include these experiences because I want to call out those involved. I also don’t include these experiences because I think I’ve had a particularly bad time or that I’ve been wronged in some way. Quite the opposite, in fact. I know full well that, as a white man, I’ve had an experience conditioned by institutions designed precisely to include, overserve, and validate me over my BIPOC brothers, sisters, and nonbinary siblings. This makes it significant that the only time I’ve ever run into any sort of issues in academic philosophy is in relation to my budding attempts at anti-racism, equity, and inclusion. Imagine if I were somebody with different social identities who had to experience first-hand the oppression of white supremacist and patriarchal systems. Of course, we don’t need to just imagine. There are a great number of BIPOC philosophers who have written and spoken about their own experiences of near-constant exclusion, under resourcing, tokenizing, oppressing, and marginalizing. I simply wanted to engage in some storytelling and theirs are not my stories to tell.
As alluded to, I also don’t believe I come out of this story without fault either. As the paragraphs above show, I had ample opportunity to see these patterns and respond sooner and better than I did. So, I see this piece as calling myself in just as much as I call in other white philosophers. We need to respond to Professor Mills’ call to action. And we need to be willing to be held accountable to, and by, our BIPOC community members in judging how successful our actions have been (this post included). In all honesty, though, I wasn’t there as recently as this summer. I wasn’t seeing myself as in relationship with the philosophy community any longer. Thankfully, my colleagues at the Center for Equity & Inclusion have pushed, and worked with, me on seeing that my feeling just anger at, and walking away from, white folx and predominantly white communities perpetuates the individualism which is so central to white supremacy culture. In doing so, I shirk my responsibilities as a white man to work toward racial harmony—toward greater peace and love. So, ironically, it was going outside of philosophy which helped me to grow in my own relationship to philosophy (Lewis Gordon was the first to point out this possibility to me.)
More specifically, it is the work of Ruth King on mindfulness and anti-racism which forms the basis of this feedback. In Mindful of Race: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out, King identifies this individualism as one of the habits of mind which is a significant hindrance to racial harmony. Another is the tendency for us white folx to systematically ignore racial patterns—seeing only disconnected, individual stars where there are intricately interrelated constellations. Having also given a talk at this year’s Pacific APA on what I learned about philosophizing during a year on the ground in activist circles in what is now known as Portland, Oregon, this seemed an opportunity for me to point out a few of the patterns I’ve noticed when looking at philosophy from outside of the institutions of philosophy generally—whether that be in activist or race equity communities.
One of the reasons I gave that talk was a further attempt to engage in the self-reflection I’m encouraging in other white philosophers and to show where I was complicit in these systems that I critique even while engaged in that very criticism. In Race, Gender, and the History of Early Analytic Philosophy, I wrote a chapter on Black Lives Matter and the logic of conversation. While it isn’t all bad, one of my mistakes was not making it clear who I thought was to be the judge of who. In academic philosophical circles, analytic philosophers are treated as the default judges and standard bearers. As a result, my chapter could have the impact of making it seem as though my connecting Black Lives Matter with standard work in the analytic tradition should be seen as somehow legitimizing the Black Lives Matter movement. This is clearly wrong-headed. To be perfectly blunt, academic philosophy of language needs the thinking of the Black Lives Matter movement much more than the Black Lives Matter movement needs the thinking of academic philosophy of language.
Because of this, I spent time talking about some areas that I thought philosophers of language would benefit from learning from activists for racial justice in the Black Lives Matter movement. One that I want to mention here is how my experiences on the ground in these movements made me realize the importance of the physical manifestations of utterances in a way that my training in the philosophy of language never did. A very common tool in this and other protest movements is graffiti. Now, I think graffiti is an underappreciated form of political protest. I’ve often thought that one of the best ways to know what’s going on in a place is to look at the graffiti in the area. Furthermore, much work by anti-racist scholars and activists has shown that the horrifically white supremacist world we live in requires us (especially white folx) to lie to ourselves constantly, to avoid saying certain things, to avoid using certain concepts. Because of this, I see graffiti as an essential tool for reminding us that those things are lies, for saying the unsayable, for getting us to see the possibility in certain concepts.
When we’re focused on linguistic acts like graffiti, the physical manifestation of language comes clearly into focus. We see that where an utterance is physically manifested can have an essential role in its significance and force. For instance, some of the most beautiful, powerful, and impactful pieces of graffiti and more traditional murals in this city show up on Alberta St., Killingsworth Ave., and Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.. These streets’ connections to the power and resilience of historically BIPOC communities, as well as the history of redlining here cannot be left out in understanding the linguistic and social function of the graffiti found there. Furthermore, the way that location is discussed in philosophy circles today in the theory of indexicals and context-sensitivity—playing a merely reference-determining role—simply does not cut it.
In the other direction, being on the ground in Portland also made me think about location in relation to covert communication, where we may want to restrict where certain utterances are manifested. Various forms of covert communication are very necessary in a city where marches, rallies, and picketing are regularly met with Proud Boys, a police force which is much more like the Proud Boys than anybody should be comfortable with, and a mob of clueless white liberals ready to do damage with our good intentions, but lack of experience, knowledge, courage, awareness, and empathy. Focusing on covert communication would also seem to cause problems for e.g. the cooperative principle’s centrality to Gricean takes on communication.
In addition to keeping us from seeing important topics like physical manifestation of utterances and covert communication, the ideologies of whiteness can keep us from seeing important aspects of the topics we do focus on as well. Being trained in analytic philosophy of language, the topic I have arguably spent the most time talking about with professional philosophers is that of names. Yet, I regularly have experiences in my race equity work which show that philosophers of language are fundamentally misunderstanding huge parts of the ways that names function. Most recently, I was at a conversation on incarceration, justice, and family led by Hanif Fazal, co-founder of CEI, and Ethan Thrower. Ethan is a wonderful father, husband, son, alternative school social worker, and author of the forthcoming “A Kids Book About Incarceration”.
I encourage folx to watch the entire conversation, but there is one portion particularly relevant to this current context. Ethan, very powerfully, recites a page of his book from memory: “When I was in prison, my name became a number. People in charge no longer called me ‘Ethan’.” Rather, they called Ethan by his prison number, ‘12392588’. The dominant, neo-Millian picture of names, where the function of a name is merely to tag an object and the meaning of a name is simply its bearer, which it refers to directly, would have nothing to say to Ethan about why that was so unbelievably impactful. If you watch Ethan and Hanif discuss what this shift in names did to his sense of self and the way he interacted with others in the world, if you see how this impacted him emotionally, if you see how this manifests trauma in his body still, you’ll see that this should be concerning for where philosophy of language is at.
This brings me to my last lesson for philosophers from my time in activist and race equity circles that I’ll share here. Us philosophers need to not be so narrowly focused on our minds—on intellectual, abstract, theoretical, cognitive matters. Many philosophers for many years from many cultures and backgrounds have thought that there is something essentially human about philosophy. Well, we humans are not just minds, but bodies and hearts as well. Of course, a discipline where the mind-body problem has been central for some time may have some understandable skepticism in response here. So, let me clarify.
What I mean is that we need to not just philosophize about bodies and emotions. We need to attend to them in the doing of our work. And, to return to the mind-body problem, we need to do so in a way which doesn’t perpetuate a logic of domination that sees logic and emotions as fundamentally at odds with each other. We need to recognize that how we’re feeling about the content and the social dynamics in a discussion impacts our ability and willingness to lean into learning and having our minds changed. We need to recognize that what our bodies have experienced in spaces like these or in relation to the content of our discussion impacts how we show up in the discussion. We need to remember that settled bodies settle bodies, that unsettled bodies unsettle bodies, and that many of our norms of discussion do not lend themselves to settling our bodies.
In short, we need peace, love, and racial justice in philosophy. So, the next time I’m at a philosophy conference, I’ll push you to do better and ask you to push me to do better. And, I hope we’ll do it after settling in together with an emotional check-in, with some music or some mindfulness practices, and with an established alignment around an open, honest, and vulnerable discussion. I’ll also continue to be out there in the streets, following my BIPOC comrades’ lead, in calling for a more just world. I hope more white philosophers will join us and maybe I’ll have a brighter view of philosophizing and philosophy by the time I’m thirty-eight.
Matt LaVine
Matt LaVine is a race equity consultant and facilitator at the Center for Equity & Inclusion in what is now known as Portland, Oregon (unceded lands of peoples from the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde and the Confederates Tribes of Siletz Indians). Prior to this, he spent nine years teaching courses on logic, history of analytic philosophy, environmental ethics & justice, residential segregation, and global intellectual history at SUNY Potsdam (unceded lands of the people at Akwesasne and of the Mohawk Nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy). Despite making a decision for Fall 2021 to be his first semester outside of academia since 2004, he is assured of the importance of philosophizing now more than ever. This piece is an attempt to sit with and understand this apparent tension. This article expresses his opinion only and not those of any of the organizations he is affiliated with.
Necessary stuff. Thanks, Matt. As you know, the power and authority granted to the institutions of academic philosophy, the analytic tradition, etc. by states and academic cultures of whiteness has roots that go back to empire and all of its attendant horrors. It’s vital then, as you say, that you and I as white academics listen and collaborate–where most equitably sound for the benefit of transformative justice–with historically marginalized communities, particularly if ever we as the benefactors (whether we like it or not) of white supremacy want to make radical the way we talk about the analytic tradition, its framing and its history, and the real dilemma of bodyminds under capitalism–which is the dilemma of evaluating bodyminds according to unjust systems of ‘capacity’.
Thanks very much for the comment, David. I appreciate the engagement. I especially appreciate you drawing attention to philosophy’s role in empire and its attendant horrors, as well as our obligations in the face of this. The silence around these connections in our profession is, itself, unjust, oppressive, and harmful. The people standardly taught as the giants of early modern philosophy, especially, all belong in a history of empire and its attendant horrors. Very few human beings have been as unbelievably central to slavery and settler colonialism in the Americas (Turtle Island) as John Locke. Locke played a central role in writing the first draft of The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (and attempts at implementing them all the way through revisions into the 1680’s)—which advocated for, and played a large role in creating, racialized and hereditary slavery in the USA (n.b. 110. “Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.” 107. “Since charity obliges us to wish well to the souls of all men, and religion ought to alter nothing in any man’s civil estate or right, it shall be lawful for slaves, as well as others, to enter themselves, and be of what church or profession any of them shall think best, and, therefore, be as fully members as any freeman. But yet no slave shall hereby be exempted from that civil dominion his master hath over him, but be in all things in the same state and condition he was In before.” 23. “All the children of leet-men shall be leet-men, and so to all generations.”).
Locke was also a founding member of, and one of the larger shareholders in, the newly-chartered Royal African Company in 1672 (his longtime patron and collaborator, Anthony Ashley Cooper, was the third-largest investor). Part of what set the Royal African Company apart from its predecessor was increased militarism and violence in an already-horrific practice of slave trading. As secretary of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, he was also one of nine people most responsible for the colonial practices in the Carolina colony (which included the land which would become North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia). Furthermore, Locke was a colonizer himself, owning 48,000 acres in Carolina as a landgrave of the colony. A defender of the status quo in philosophy may want to say that we’re teaching and promoting Lockean ideas, rather than Locke, the man. That said, Locke’s ideas have been central to the horrors of colonialism and slavery as well. His labor theory of property, for example, was used to “justify” the theft of land from Indigenous people for European colonizers (even though the “consistent” way to carry through this idea would have made enslaved people the owners of the land and all fruits of their labors—as Lewis Gordon has argued, this seems to show that Locke and followers didn’t even consider enslaved Africans to be human).
Locke was not unique here at all, either. After the white-supremacist modern period was set in motion in the religious contexts of papal bulls laying out the doctrine of discovery (dum diversas, romanus pontifex, inter caetera, and the related Treaty of Tordesillas), academics and philosophers took up the mantle of “justifying” and creating race-based domination, enslavement, and colonization. They also participated in these practices extensively. Theologian and historian, Bartoleme de las Casas, was one of the first colonizers of New Spain, an encomendero, and–even after being morally horrified by the inhumane cruelties of these treatments of Indigenous Americans–advocated for the enslavement of Africans for the sake of saving Indigenous souls. His opponent in the Valladolid debate was the Aristotelian philosopher, Juan Gines de Sepulveda. Sepulveda argued that colonialism, encomienda, and enslavement were all part of a just war against Indigenous Americans—who he took to be Aristotelian natural slaves.
This centrality of philosophers to colonialism and imperialism reached its peak in the second century of European white-supremacist imperialism led by the British empire and British empiricists. Francis Bacon was one of the investors named in the second Virginia Charter of 1609—which was the first formal proclamation of British continent-wide (Atlantic Ocean to Pacific Ocean) settler intent. The following year, Bacon would play a significant role in establishing the first permanent population in the Newfoundland colony. In Bacon’s last two decades, his theoretical work would attempt to justify conquest, imperialism, and colonialism—as his own colonial involvement would stretch to the Indian subcontinent with his joining the East India Company in 1618. Thomas Hobbes would also join the Virginia Company as a very active member in 1622. It seems this may be where Hobbes first was introduced to terra nullius style arguments for expropriation of Indigenous land. Again, the development of the formal doctrine of terra nullius, and its implementation into the Carolina colony in absurdly racist ways, would be greatly aided by Locke’s labor theory of property. George Berkeley intended to do work in colonial Bermuda, but would only make it to colonial Rhode Island, where he was a slave-owner. Berkeley’s writings even included proposals suggesting that he thought the domination of Africans and Indigenous peoples through enslavement and colonization was insufficient and needed to be increased. David Hume’s well-known horrifically anti-Black and anti-Indigenous sentiments don’t seem such an outlier in this context. Furthermore, John Stuart Mill’s continued defense of settler colonialism throughout his life suggest that this connection to empire remained at the theoretical level outside of the early modern period as well.
The French and German rationalist traditions also played a significant role in later imperial, colonial, and white supremacist projects by laying the foundation for various forms of scientific racism. Rene Descartes’ theory of human persons as consisting of the union of mind and body set up the structure and location for later scientific racisms—most notably in Kant, who thought that “only the white race contained the type of racial unity that possesses the psychological ability to reason and propel humanity to its final ends in moral completeness” (Lewis 2019, 129). Kant’s particular racial hierarchy and scientific racism have influences still seen today in their special role for anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity. Leibniz would also have an influence on Orientalist discourses and practices through an alternative linguistic scientific racism. The German rationalist tradition would also have a strong connection to Nazism through the scientific racism of Christoph Meiners. To be clear, none of this is my own work. These are all clearly established conclusions from the works of folx like Charles Mills, Dwight Lewis, Lewis Gordon, John Harfouch, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Patricia Springborg, Julie Walsh, Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, Peter KJ Park, Huaping Lu-Adler, and others. My hope is that my bringing them all together in one condensed space can reveal a pattern which makes the current way that the philosophical canon is taught seem a clear function of white ignorance. At the very least, hopefully folx will go out, read, and teach these thinkers listed a couple sentences back.