But, Is She (bell hooks) a Philosopher?

This essay draws inspiration from the various traditions of Black feminist philosophy, in particular the works of bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins. Collins and hooks, respectively, write about how being situated at the margin(s) for Black women is not simply a site of deprivation; margin(s) can also be sites of radical possibility, places from which one can see both/and the center and the periphery in ways unavailable to those whose positionality places them at the center alone. As a Black woman professional philosopher, my experiences within the profession and discipline have been neatly situated at the margin(s): often (un)seen, (mis)categorized, (under/de)valued, sexualized, minoritized, Other(ed), and and and…in ways that reveal the discipline’s and professions intramural investments in whiteness and maleness as (pre)requisites for philosophical legitimacy. These experiences, represented as “rememory” to borrow from Toni Morrison’s theorization in Beloved, are not mine alone; they highlight a broader pattern that shapes Black women’s lives across various contexts and geographies characterized by “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” as hooks frames it.

Conference (mis)recognition, rememory one: The elevator doors on the fourth floor opened to the registration desk, where the graduate students who volunteered to welcome conference participants were seated. I walked up to the large table draped with a maroon tablecloth. On the one end, to my right was an assortment of pastries, muffins, and everything bagels, including some tangerines (as they are called in this country), and perfectly colored bananas (not too ripe or over ripe), some water filled in a pitcher with lots of ice, and the large coffees. To my left were the conference programs, and at the center were the name badges. There was someone ahead of me, who was greeted very warmly, and they even inquired after their travel, the usual small talk: “How was your flight?”…“Oh, good to hear that the TSA shutdown did not delay you.” Once they were handed their name badge, they stepped aside towards the pastries, and I stepped forward as I was next in line. However, I was not met with the same warmth. What followed my “good morning” was a cold “how can we help you?” It felt dismissive, almost like: ‘What are you doing here? This is a philosophy conference, are you lost?’ Nonetheless, I stated my purpose: to register. Once they realized I was part of the folks running a workshop with a white male colleague, then the disingenuous apology followed: “Oh, sorry, I thought you were one of the undergraduates, probably lost.” I walked away, unsurprised by this interaction.

“Believe It or Not,” as Leonard Harris states in his essay on the Ku Klux Klan and American Philosophy, this was not the first time I was mistaken for “the undergraduate student” rather than the philosophy professor. Very recently, a senior faculty member (white woman) at work introduced me to a staff member (white woman), who asked me if I was the faculty member’s student. What such encounters reveal to me is that, in people’s imagination, a professor or philosopher does not look like me: a Black woman. Now, one could argue that no one presents as such, or that the misrepresentation is due to my stature, but it’s interesting how the assumption is often followed by a dismissiveness that I find problematic. Instead of making assumptions, they could have waited to hear from me—a simple gesture that I’ve always extended to others.

Such experiences are not unique to me or the result of my small stature; rather, they represent the various ways in which Black women are (de)valued. hooks shares numerous instances where she was not believed to be a professor, noting the intersection of racism, sexism, and classism in educational institutions. Such encounters underscore the various forms of controlling images Collins writes about in Black Feminist Thought. According to Collins, controlling images serve as “the normative yardstick used to evaluate all Black women’s behavior.” These images do not merely describe, but also prescribe who belongs and where. The volunteers at the registration desk operated from a particular image of what the “philosopher” looks like, which excludes many of us who are not white or male. The assumption that I was “probably lost” underscores a controlling image at work: the Black woman as perpetually out of place in intellectual spaces, as someone who must be either a student, an outsider, or anything other than the thinker herself.

Back to rememory one: After getting my name badge, I scanned the room looking for a place to sit while browsing the program. As I was marking the sessions I was interested in, I would occasionally look up to get a sense of who was in attendance, hoping to locate other folks who were similarly situated at the margins—the good thing about being (un)seen, (mis)recognized, (under/de)valued, minoritized, Other(ed) is that you learn how to “people watch” well, as no one is likely to speak to you. While making my marks in the margins of the program, I listened in on a conversation among a small group seated diagonally behind me:

Voice 1: “Absolutely…the semester is going well, looking forward to wrapping up. How are things in the South?”

Voice 2: “O, you know, with everything happening, it’s all just a sh*t show. But I managed to teach my graduate course on feminist philosophy, and the students are really great at weaving in the materials that I’ve had to omit.”

Voice 3 interjects: “I love it when that happens!”

Voice 1 to voice 3: “Do you still teach your intro course on love and sex? I am teaching a course on love and friendship in the fall—it’s been years, and I want to include some new folks.”

[I was about to jump in and share that I am currently teaching an intro to love and sex, but I hesitated and continued to listen in.]

Voice 4: “Have you considered bell hooks’ All About Love? I’ve truly enjoyed the text, and I think it would be so timely…”

Voice 1 interjects: “Ahh! I have never heard of the text. I’ll look into it. But hooks is not a philosopher…”

“Believe It or Not,” this happened. The issue is not x person’s ignorance of All About Love, but rather what followed: they are unlikely to include hooks in their syllabus. While one could offer various valid reasons for excluding a thinker from their syllabus, the claim that hooks is not a philosopher is problematic. Collins’s analysis of the “Black lady” image is fitting in this regard. The Black lady is a middle-class professional Black woman who “stayed in school, worked hard, […and] achieved much,” yet whose accomplishments “remain questionable.” hooks (like many other Black women, for example, Audre Lorde as discussed in Gwendalynn Roebke’s essay) embodies precisely this figure: a prolific intellectual whose work spans across the philosophy of love, pedagogy, feminism, and race. In some respects, it is not a coincidence that Voice 1 stripped hooks of her philosophical standing. The dismissal points to a governing logic in which Black women’s intellectual work, no matter how hard it is, never really counts. Moreover, the assertion that “hooks is not a philosopher” highlights the enduring gatekeeping mechanisms within the profession and discipline. It makes one wonder if the same comment would have been passed about Simone de Beauvoir.  

In May 2022, a similar comment was made to me, as detailed in rememory two: (De)Legitimized by white authority: I was presenting sections of my dissertation (then in progress) at a philosophy department in South Africa. My talk aimed to show how South African Black women’s experiences of Apartheid, as detailed in their autobiographies, offer a situated analysis of Apartheid as an intertwined and multidimensional system of oppression and domination. During the question-and-answer session, a Black South African professional philosopher asked a question I had anticipated, given my familiarity with South African philosophy (my pre-doctoral education is from South Africa, and I also adjuncted at two universities): “Interesting work, but where is the philosophy?” The question was clear: your work is not philosophy because it uses autobiography. Perhaps I did not foreground the “philosophical” merits of my work clearly, or maybe my work is not philosophy. Yet when this person learned that Nancy Tuana and Robert Bernasconi co-supervised this project, “Believe It or Not,” her response changed. She said, “Well, if Nancy and Robert are working with you, then that means your work is philosophy. It’s really cool how you can do that stuff ‘there’.”

My research, its questions, methods, arguments, and conclusions, remained identical before and after the invocation of my supervisors’ names. Nothing about the philosophical substance of my project changed. What changed was its proximity to white institutional authority. Her remarks are no different from the comment about hooks; they both reflect the discipline’s foundational assumption that philosophical legitimacy flows from European, qua white, centers of authority outward and that philosophical work acquires validity only through these endorsements. Collins’ discussion of the “Black lady” image underscores similar claims in that “no matter how highly educated or demonstrably competent Black ladies may be, their accomplishments remain questionable.”

My third rememory highlights one of many other ways I (Black women) have been questioned: Sexualized by colleagues’ [or “colonizer” as Kendrick Lamar puts it in “Not Like Us”]: It had only been three months into the position as a “temporary lecturer” (akin to a visiting professor) at the institution, and I was the first Black woman to work in this philosophy department at the level of teaching professor. On one morning, I was having a collegial conversation with one of the (Black male) faculty members in the department in the corridor. He asked after the regular things, “How are your classes going?” “How are you finding this institution?” To which I responded. He then asked if I could share my syllabus with him, as he wanted to include “more (Black) women thinkers in his courses.” When I returned to my office, I emailed him my syllabus, including the names of the folks who were not included. In his follow-up email, he thanked me and added, “That is a lovely skirt you’re wearing, it suits your figure.” “Believe It or Not,” this happened. Sadly, almost a decade later, a similar interaction would happen, albeit in a different context, with a white male colleague. This time, the comments were said to my face, twice and on different consecutive occasions: “That’s a nice dress,” and “Those are really nice shoes.” On neither occasion did I respond; instead, as Pumla Dineo Gqola notes in The Female Fear Factory, women learn to manage sexual harassment through swift, practiced redirection that enables them to navigate discomfort by absorbing it rather than confronting it. So no, their comments cannot be reduced to “attempts at getting to know me better” or “friendliness” as I have numerously heard from folks’ responses when retelling the incidents. Given the power dynamics between myself and these two males, both senior, male, tenured, and the other white, their “attempts” at getting to know me were another instance of how controlling images operate within the discipline in everyday interactions. In this instance, the image of the Black woman as “the Jezebel” came to play.

Collins traces this image from slavery, where Black women “were portrayed as being […] ‘sexually aggressive’,” to its contemporary iterations in which Black women’s bodies become objects of public commentary. The Jezebel image “relegate[s] all Black women to the category of sexually aggressive women, thus providing a powerful rationale for the widespread sexual assaults by White men typically reported by Black [enslaved] women,” thereby reducing them to physical objects. My colleagues’ comments enacted a similar reduction, revealing that they saw me not as a thinking being but as an object. Collins, drawing on Barbara Christian, identifies this pattern as foundational to the controlling image of Black womanhood: “All the functions of mammy are magnificently physical. They involve the body as sensuous, as funky, the part of woman that white southern America was profoundly afraid of.” And as Collins further adds, controlling images need not be dramatic to be effective. They work precisely because they appear normal, “unremarkable observations,” rather than as the objectifying acts they are. Moreover, as my experience shows, controlling images also work within Black communities. The comment/question about the philosophical merits of my work came from a Black woman, and the incident with the Black male colleague equally shows how Black folks can “oppose racial oppression yet perpetuate gender oppression.” Maybe the one colleague was interested in including (Black) women thinkers in his courses, or maybe a performance, either or, his email objectified me.

Such moments are not contradictions; they are the predictable workings of intersecting oppressions. Philosophy, as both a discipline and a profession, reproduces this ideology with a particular tenacity because its self-image as the center of pure reason obscures the controlling images that determine who is recognized as a reasoner and who is placed at the margin(s). Nelisiwe Xaba’s performance piece, “They Look at Me, and That’s All They Think,” serves as a fitting visualization. Through Saartjie/Sarah/Sara Baartman, Xaba shows how Black women’s intellectual presence collapses under a gaze that registers only the physical. As Mlondolozi Zondi puts it, when they look at Xaba/Baartman/a Black woman, “thinking leaves the room.” This is what happens at conferences, in the classroom, at talks, in the corridors of the respective philosophy departments: My interlocutors look at me, and all they see is a Black woman’s body. Not the philosopher, professor, or colleague.

Yet Collins also reminds us that these images, “despite [their] seeming permanence […] can also stimulate resistance.” Black women have always “insisted on [their] right to define [their] own reality, establish [their] own identities, and name [their] history.” This essay, like the larger body of my work, exemplifies this insistence.

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 Elisabeth Paquette or the Associate Editor Shadi “Soph” Heidarifar.