The man in charge of getting me ready for my first round of job interviews asked me to define “The Epoché.” He watched disgustedly as I stumbled through it, sweating like a 9-year-old being quizzed by an overbearing father at the family dinner table. He could have just warned me that, if I were going for a job in phenomenology, I would need to be able to define “The Epoché” quickly and confidently. But, like many misguided teachers who wield power while claiming they have none, this man played the part of the world, “the they” of professional philosophers. He might have said something like: “I am hard on you because the job market will be hard on you.” It’s a mistaken attempt at care, this “tough love” schtick, and it’s one reason why philosophy fails to get and keep Latinas.
An undergraduate student I know—I’ll call her Maya—recently submitted a proposal for a paper on how to get more Latinas interested in STEM fields. A whole conference would take place on my campus dedicated to the theme, which is especially important because the students at my university are 90% Latinx. Maya is an engineering and philosophy double major and wanted to write about her observations. She noted many shortcomings in her STEM classes, and she could easily produce a list of suggestions for faculty wanting to know what they were doing wrong. Her list of suggested pedagogical improvements included incorporating a sense of community into the classroom, less memorization (or at least more telling students the reason for the memorizing); connecting the material to real life, and fewer threatening talks from teachers about the percentage of students who fail the class. The bravado Maya saw in STEM classes was annoying and off-putting, made worse by tests on material not covered in class and berating students when they asked certain questions.
As an alternative, Maya proposed a Freirian model for STEM education to draw Latinas in. Freirean classrooms would be more communal, she thought, focused on students helping one another in a spirit of friendliness and collegiality (both from student to student but also teacher to student). Although it might sound like we’re asking for a miracle, STEM education should be grounded in care. As a point of reference, Maya compared her STEM classes to her philosophy classes, where she felt taken seriously. Her philosophy teachers knew her name, respected her, and asked her to consider genuine and difficult questions as though she had something to contribute. Maya had gotten a lot out of philosophy classes, which a different student recently described to me as having “made me think for the first time with my brain.”
And yet, despite the fact that Maya prefers her philosophy classes to her STEM classes, the pipeline for Latinas to become professional philosophers is quite leaky. According to a meta-analysis of several studies on gender and race written by Eric Schwitzgebel et al. in 2021, although Hispanics are proportionately represented in philosophy among college majors, they become underrepresented at the PhD student level and consequently as professionals. Schwitzgebel et al. also report that Blacks, American Indians, Alaska Natives, and women in general are underrepresented at all levels in philosophy, which means that philosophy needs improvement at the undergraduate level as well. Whatever the cause, Latinas are underrepresented among professional philosophers, and from what I have heard from my Hispanic and Latinx students who have gone on to graduate school, they sometimes feel like they are being dared to quit philosophy altogether.
Professional philosophy needs something like the STEM conference my university is hosting. We need professional philosophers dedicated to figuring out what’s going wrong and what can be done better to get Latinas the support they need to thrive as professional philosophers.
At least at my university, undergraduate philosophy classes don’t suffer from the same types of errors that STEM classes suffer from. Philosophy professors don’t tend to flaunt our failure rates or try to weed students out by threatening them. The gates of philosophy aren’t made of iron, but they are perhaps comparable to invisible fences that people put up to keep their dogs in the yard without building an eyesore. In academia, this means putting collars on students, collars that pinch and shock disparately. If we want to tear down Philosophy’s invisible fences, we can start with our syllabi. Whether you teach at an HIS/HBCU or not, there is virtue in trying to solve the near-impossible syllabus problem. I see three options:
Option 1: Teach the classical canon without apology: Latinas deserve as much Aristotle as white male students at Notre Dame. Other arguments run the risk of claiming that Latinas should only read Latina philosophers, Black students read Black philosophers, or that female students should only read feminist authors. I’ve seen this logic lead to major siloing, so I don’t think it’s our best option. If bell hooks was right that Feminism is for Everybody, then so is a diverse syllabus. This leads to option 2.
Option 2: Include nonwhite and/or nonwestern thinkers on the syllabus: Latinas also deserve some “culturally sustaining” texts and figures, to show us that we are not complete outsiders to, or interlopers in, the discipline of philosophy. Diverse syllabi help to combat the idea that philosophy is “not for me.” By looking in a mirror I can already see that I am not a dead white guy. Inclusion on the syllabus is a nod in the direction of inclusion in the profession.
But inclusion as a concept is not the answer. Especially not when it means teaching one chapter from Borderlands/la Frontera instead of going deeper into Gloria Anzaldúa’s writings. Even twenty years ago, Anzaldúa felt tokenized by faculty who used her to diversify their syllabi rather than engaging with her philosophy in a more meaningful way. With a goal like inclusion, the best our discipline will ever do is allow Latinas to enter a hostile structure that has no plans to change. Transformation, not inclusion, ought to be our goal.
If we are serious about transformation, we will need to study philosophy that we did not learn in graduate school. We’ll need to combat the tendency to replicate our own graduate studies and to teach our favorite thinkers. We’ll need to incorporate more figures into our research, and we’ll need to be willing to call non-canonical figures “philosophers.” In the case of Latina feminism, for example, we could branch out toward Latina theologians like Ada Maria Isasi Diaz or Daisy Machado.
Option 3: Regardless of what we do with our syllabi, philosophers should seriously consider incorporating “culturally sustaining” pedagogies into our classroom. This isn’t so much about the texts we choose but about the examples we use in class, the assignments we create, etc. No one should be teaching modus ponens using Socrates’s mortality, not when we could be using more vivid, relevant examples. This year the philosophy department at my university got a grant from the APA to develop courses to be taught bilingually or in Spanish. So, even if we don’t change the figures on our syllabi, we are trying something new: teaching bilingual students bilingually. This is an example of a structural change that communicates to students that Latinas are philosophers and that Spanish is a philosophical language.
If options 1 and 2 run the risk of settling for “inclusion” rather than “transformation,” this third option runs the risk of sounding like “chess for girls,” the SNL skit that mocked the idea of selling girls on chess by dressing the pieces in pink and playing with them like dolls. Simply using examples from the lives of Latinas or teaching Seneca in Spanish runs the risk of evading true transformation. Is there an option 4?
Option 4: Find the mean between options 1-3. For some, this will mean reading Anzaldúa alongside Aristotle instead of as separate philosophical traditions (or even in separate classes). For others, it will mean reading Kant in Spanish. For still others, it will mean updating our examples as well as our syllabi. Dismantling an invisible fence is trickier than dismantling a visible one, but philosophy students need new ways of seeing. They need windows through which they can see different people and ideas, but they also need mirrors, where they can see people who look and sound like them. A window to one student is a mirror to another, and we can’t always guess which is which. It’s not just about race and gender but class, family, body, trauma, life experience, etc. María Lugones should be taught not merely for the benefit of the Latinas in the class. She is mirror and window. Feminism is for everybody.
So far, these changes have focused on course design, but there is a whole world of classroom dynamics that must be addressed if we are going to try to dismantle the invisible fences that keep Latinas out. This move involves making philosophy’s fences visible. We need to talk out loud about the poor statistics in professional philosophy and the challenges that different groups of Hispanic students are likely to face. If what’s wrong with STEM fields is their insistence on toughness and bravado, then what’s wrong with Philosophy seems to be, in part, its stubborn insistence that there is no problem, that everyone is treated equally.
I fell for philosophy because I thought I was white. That meant that I thought I was allowed, even entitled, to read the Great Books. In college, I needed to believe that Descartes was mine. And Kierkegaard. And Unamuno. And eventually Anzaldúa. But when I got to graduate school and we started talking about race, I had no footing. I felt like I couldn’t open my mouth or I would be charged with racism. Even with Linda Alcoff’s help, it’s hard to place the brown-skinned, especially the lightly browned skin. My lighter-skinned students have a hard time calling themselves Women of Color, as do I. The categories don’t fit us because they were not designed for us. In classrooms that are predominantly white, or even white and Black, it will likely be very hard for the Hispanic to feel at home. She falls between the cracks, as an afterthought, as someone who had better not speak on behalf of nonwhites because she possesses an indeterminate amount of “privilege.” This word is wielded as a weapon by graduate students cutting their teeth, and even sometimes by faculty who don’t remember that young philosophers learn better by the printed word than by shame. A good class is a sacred space, one in which a thinking student can ask questions without fear that someone will check their privilege. Calling a Latina graduate student racist, or otherwise shaming her because she asks questions in a class on race is no motivator. But humiliation is a great way to get Latinas to believe that philosophy is not for them. And the tragedy is that, when they drop out, faculty will say that they just could not handle graduate school. There is altogether too little emotional intelligence in our discipline.
Even in less controversial classes, the way that faculty sometimes interpret student behavior can be unsettling. I have seen teachers at the undergraduate and graduate levels mistake social anxiety for anti-sociality, laziness, or indifference. We need to listen to students, to see and hear what is going on in their lives, to take their side and say it out loud. Many times, I am not vocal enough in my support of students. But when they know I have their back, when I send an email of encouragement, when I don’t assume the worst of them, my students flourish.
Care is essential not because Latinas are weak, nor because Hispanics are “family-oriented” (though this very well may be the case), but because we want to be seen as human. Many of us have stories of humiliation at the hands of teachers or mentors, like the one I told at the beginning of this essay. Calling harshness “rigor” or “professionalism” explains why philosophy is still so dreadfully bad at keeping its Latinas. The syllabus does have something to do with it. But so does the classroom. We can do better.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Alida Liberman or the Associate Editor Elisabeth Paquette.
Mariana Alessandri
Mariana Alessandri is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Mariana writes public philosophy in defense of dark moods and against toxic positivity. Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods is her first book, and it aims to persuade readers to rethink anger, sadness, anxiety, grief, and depression. She lives with two tesoros and a spouse with whom she founded RGV PUEDE, a nonprofit whose mission is to promote Dual Language Education in South Texas public schools. You can learn more at www.marianaalessandri.com and on Instagram @mariana.alessandri
