In this post, I will reflect on my experience in the Critical Philosophy of Race class I took with Jackie Scott at Loyola University Chicago in Spring 2022. I chose this experience because the pedagogical model of the class offered me something different from other philosophy courses I have taken. I would broadly describe this model as participatory and healing. I will describe these characteristics separately below.
Participatory pedagogy
A few days before the start of the course, Jackie sent us a Google spreadsheet to share our academic interests around the philosophy of race. Two of us students contributed mostly to the conversation, and Jackie took our input into account when putting together the course syllabus. This exercise made me feel considered from the beginning of the course.
In addition, from the third session, we began to put together a mental map that served us the rest of the semester as a route to understanding the logic of racism in the United States. We began this table with the concepts of W. E. B Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and Linda Alcoff’s “Mestizo Identity.” These texts examine American racism from the perspective of people of color.
Throughout the course, we nourished this table with the concepts of Audre Lorde, Kristie Dotson, Shannon Sullivan, George Yancy, José Medina, and María Lugones, among others. In assembling this table, we identified different harms that racism causes to people of color and white people in the United States. We also identified possible strategies to counteract the harms of racism. In class, we called these intervention strategies.
Importantly, in this pedagogical process, the teacher accompanied us as a facilitator and partner in thought and discussion. I remember that, in the classes, Jackie would occasionally ask a question while sharing this paraphrased disclaimer: I am asking this question not because I have an answer ready; I do not have an answer, but I want us all to find it together. This reflection exemplifies the pedagogical approach of the class.
According to Jackie’s conceptualization, racism is a disease, and as such, it detrimentally affects the body (Scott 2019). Or in Du Bois’s words, racism is a problem in which people of color are the problem (Du Bois 2007, 7). From this understanding, the questions “what is racism?” and “how do we confront it?” are ever new questions and ones that, in the context of the class, we all—including the teacher—took on the task of addressing. This approach made the class highly participatory.
Healing pedagogy
During the lectures and in written assignments, Jackie insisted that we support our arguments with examples from our experiences. This invitation helped us put flesh on the concepts in the course texts. Fanon’s historical-racial body schema, Sullivan’s ontological expansiveness, Medina’s epistemic virtues and vices, and Lorde’s uses of anger, among many others, came alive in classmates’ narratives.
From my perspective, the most important aspect of this approach was the group experience during this process. I analyze this experience with Lugones’s concept of “world traveling” below. We worked on this concept during the class, and I developed it in depth in my final essay.
Lugones understands “world” as a “seeing circle” (Lugones 2003, 159–60). According to this notion, particular social circles provide us with specific ways of perceiving ourselves and being perceived by others. The various social circles we move among are “worlds” in which we exist and to which we come and go daily (Lugones 2003, 87–8, 129).
In one of the classes with Jackie, for example, a classmate shared her experiences with a circle of colleagues racialized as white. She expressed discomfort with the racist insults that they used. In Lugones’s language, this social circle is a “world” within the various worlds in which my classmate moves.
Importantly, in sharing this experience with us, our classmate showed the group one of her worlds: a “world” in which white privilege prevails over other ways of perceiving reality. Our classmate shared the pain and discomfort she felt from belonging to that world. This experience opened the door for the group to talk about the “worlds” in which we move and in which we, as people of color, are viewed with distrust and contempt. This sharing was primarily motivated by our interest in illuminating the concepts of the class readings.
Based on Lugones’s philosophy, I categorize this type of experience as a modality of “world traveling,” which I call loving world-traveling. This experience involves contemplating other people’s “worlds” with the desire to “understand what it is to be them” and “what it is to be ourselves in their eyes” (Lugones 2003, 97). In the classroom, I experienced this concept in my own flesh when I listened and looked at classmates with respect, affection, admiration, and affirmation as they narrated their (dis)encounters with American racism.
Likewise, I experienced loving world-traveling after sharing a difficult situation in one of the “worlds” in which I move. In this “world,” the rage and confusion I endured at witnessing the murder of George Floyd was invalidated. This experience led me to distrust myself and my affections when facing this situation that shook Americans in 2020. Floyd’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” resonated with the sense of suffocation I felt when I thought my anger and confusion were personality flaws. This thought, in turn, was confirmed by the attitudes of silence and indifference I contemplated in the “worlds” where white privilege reigns.
When I shared this experience with my class, I felt validated. Moreover, I felt my inner world validated by my classmates’ and teacher’s listening, receptivity, and empathy. It was as if they were telling me: I believe you. This experience helped me regain confidence in myself and my affective experience of racism—an experience silenced and domesticated in circles of white privilege.
In attempting to understand racism collectively, the classroom became a space for collective healing. This process of group reflection helped us not to feel despair for ourselves and our inability to confront racist structures but to project this despair onto the racist structures that surround us (Scott 2019). In this sense, the experience of the course was central to understanding affectively and corporeally that our bodies and affections are not the problems; rather, the shortcomings are in society and the laws that victimize racialized bodies.
A few months after the end of the course, we met again to catch up on what we were doing with our lives. I experienced this meeting with joy and delight thanks to the atmosphere of affection and respect we cultivated during the course.
The experience of this course clarifies that spaces of trust and reflection in communities victimized by white privilege and supremacy are essential. This course offered me an experimental setting to think about what strategies we can adopt in my collectives and communities to confront white supremacy.
Reflecting on the experience of this course, I wonder with awe, what is philosophical work capable of when it focuses on healing people’s bodies and affects, and is oriented towards social justice?
Miguel Cerón-Becerra
Miguel Cerón-Becerra is a Jesuit brother and a doctoral student in philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. His research focuses on the transnational exploitation of women's domestic labor.
