Concerning the Underspecialization of Race Theory in

American Philosophy: How the Exclusion of Black Sources

Affects the Field.

Tommy J. Curry

The Pluralist, Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 2010, pp. 44-64 (Article)

Published by University of Illinois Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/plu.0.0042

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/381527

Access provided by Mount Saint Marys University (15 Oct 2017 08:11 GMT)
Concerning the Underspecialization of Race
Theory in American Philosophy: How the
Exclusion of Black Sources Affects the Field.1
tommy j. curry
Texas A&M University

despite the recent rise in articles by American philosophers willing to

deal with race, the sophistication of American philosophys conceptualiza-
tions of American racism continues to lag behind other liberal arts fields
committed to similar endeavors. Whereas other fields like American studies,
history, sociology, and Black studies have found the foundational works of
Black scholars essential to truly understanding the complexities of rac-
ism, American philosophydriven by the refusal of white philosophers to
acknowledge and incorporate the foundational works of Black scholars at
the turn of the century, as well as the relevant insights of contemporary race
theoristsremains in a very real sense underdeveloped and theoretically im-
poverished. This notable absence of historically melaninated perspective
has allowed American philosophers to continually celebrate the seemingly
random reflections of white thinkers, like John Dewey, Jane Addams, and the
recently emergent works of Josiah Royce, concerning race, as indispensable
sources of insight into racism.2
Race theory,3 as understood in American philosophy, is primarily geared
toward proving that historical American figures like Dewey or Royce can
be useful to contemporary race problems by emphasizing their rejection of
biological determinism, their seemingly proleptic embracing of multicultural-
ism, and their participation in liberal race organizations like the NAACP. The
problem with this approach however, is that it erroneously assumes that the
growing rejection of biological determinism around the turn of the century
was concomitantly a rejection of white supremacy and the dogma of Black
inferiority. By failing to ask whether or not embracing the environmentalist
position on race, popularized in America by Franz Boas, can be unproblemati-
cally translated into our present-day language of diversity and multiculturalism,
the American philosophical tradition functions as a first rate apologetican

the plur alist Volume 5, Number 1 Spring 2010:pp. 4464 44

2010 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
curry:How the Exclusion of Black Sources Affects the Field 45

unquestionable defense against claims that its heroes/heroines are in fact anti-
Black racists. By making the symbolism and rhetoric of the post-civil rights
era seem like the inevitable consequence of these white philosophers thinking
about race at the turn of the century, American philosophy unapologetically
maintains it hegemonic exclusion of Black thinkers as sources of philosophical
insight on racism, while simultaneously justifying its exclusive focus on white
thinkers as the unquestionable foundations of race theory.
The purpose of this essay is twofold. First, I intend to historically con-
textualize what American philosophy takes to be progressive race thinking,
and secondly, and more importantly, I aim show that the current approaches
to studying race, as represented by organizations and journals in the American
philosophical tradition, perpetuate the underspecialization of race theory.
Because American philosophers aiming to study race and racism are not held
accountable to historical fact or contemporary finding, current scholarship
revels in the absolution of its heroes rather than contributing to conversa-
tions that explore the persistence of racism in American society at large and
specific practices in the discipline of philosophy that continue to bar Blacks
and non-European descended peoples from describing, addressing, and pro-
ducing scholarship from their own culturally relevant experience.

Mistaking Environmentalist Stances for Antiracist Positions

For many American philosophers, there is an assumption that any anties-
sentialist position about raceor a position that holds the view that race is
not biologically determined, and therefore a product of social, historical, and
cultural originis an antiracist position. While various historical works like
George M. Fredricksons The Black Image in the White Mind, John S. Haller
Jr.s Outcasts from Evolution, and Thomas Gossets Race: The History of an Idea
in America have demonstrated to other humanist disciplines that the nature
of race ideology in America has remained firmly rooted in white supremacy
and anti-Black racism, American philosophy continues to perpetuate the idea
that a change from biologically determined explanations to cultural, social, or
historical accounts are necessarily less racist. What contemporary works like
Gail Bedermans Manliness and Civilization show to the most casual reader
of race theory is that the increase of Americas heterogeneity during the first
decades of the twentieth century forced white race thinkers to create more
effective accounts of race that used progressive education, assimilation, and
feminism to sustain anti-Black racism. In fact, Richard Reess Shades of Dif-
ference argued that the concept of ethnicity became a socially recognized
46 the pluralist 5:1 2010

category in American social sciences as an instrument of social and cultural

inclusion for European immigrants while simultaneously excluding Blacks.
The rise of cultural deprivation theories, intelligence testing, and the theo-
rization of the white mans burden made antiessentialist and assimilative
accounts of race development at best short lived and inextricable from the
political ends of white supremacy.4
Admittedly there is a difference between the celebrated racially deter-
minative texts of the nineteenth century, like Josiah Notts and George R.
Gliddons Types of Mankind; Fredrick Hoffmans Race Traits and Tendencies
of the American Negro; Herbert Spencers multiple treatises on social survival
described in Comparative Psychology of Man, his two-volume work Prin-
ciples of Psychology, and his three-volume collection Principles of Sociology;5 and
the environmentalist stances that took hold in America through the work of
Franz Boas. However, it is important to recognize that it was the remnants of
racial essentialism in Boass accounts that allowed his work to resonate with
American audiences. Jean Finot, in his book entitled Race Prejudice, openly
attacked the role that white supremacy played in the findings of anthro-so-
ciology that perpetuated the myth of Black inferiority and maintained that
savage people [who] enter triumphantly into our civilization as civilized
people fall back into barbarism. The Negroes, regarded as occupying
the last rung on the human ladder, have furnished us with proofs of an
unexpected evolution. Within the space of 50 years, they have realized as
much progress as white peoples have in five or six centuries. ... After all,
we have seen the impossibility of attributing immutable psychological
qualities to certain peoples or races. Their virtues and their vices are only
the effects of historical circumstance or the influence of milieu. (316)
Even though Finots views had reached English audiences by 1906, it was the
ambiguous stance that Franz Boas took on the degeneracy of African heri-
tage that would come to form the liberal environmentalism that continues
to resonate in American philosophy.6
Between 1894 and 1938, Boass writing exhibited subtle but strikingly con-
sistent contradiction between his liberal ideology and biological commitments
to racial difference. In Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries,
Vernon J. Williams coined this contradiction between his [Boass] philosophi-
cal egalitarian sentiments and his recontextualization of traditional European
and American physical anthropology (6) the Boasian Paradox. Even in the
Human Faculty as Determined by Race, Boass earliest work championed as
the birth of liberal environmentalismthe idea that there were no differences
curry:How the Exclusion of Black Sources Affects the Field 47

between races which were likely to affect their social, cultural and intellectual
performance; [and] all apparent differences were the result of the environment
(Frederickson 330)Boas still maintained the air of white racial superiority.
Despite Boass obvious attempts to dislodge the myth of white supremacy, he
nonetheless maintains, in the very same essay, that
although the distribution of faculty among the races of man is far from
being known, we can say this much: the average faculty of the white race
is found to the same degree in a large proportion of individuals of all
other races, and although it is probable that some of these races may not
produce as large a proportion of great men as our own race, there is no
reason to suppose that they are unable to reach the level of civilization
represented by the bulk of our own people. (Human Faculty 242)
Unfortunately, Boass limitation does not end in 1894; he continues to argue
in essays like The American People that he does not believe that the Ne-
gro is, in his physical and mental make-up, the same as the European. The
anatomical differences are so great that corresponding mental differences
are plausible (American People 93). Despite his progressive stance on race
which maintains there is every reason to believe that the Negro when given
facility and opportunity, will be perfectly able to fulfill the duties of citizenship
as well as his White neighbor (Mind of Primitive Man 240), it is Boass belief
in the historical process of assimilation and Blacks capacity to be civilized that
allows him to advocate social equality for Blacks.7 This paradoxical position
is a straightforward articulation of what many American philosophers take to
be the antiessentialism of many progressive era thinkers like John Dewey and
Josiah Royce. While Boass environmentalism is adequately termed anties-
sentialist, to the extent that it rejects biological determinism or racial biology
as the determination of culture and intelligence, it is still very much racist
in the sense that it assumes the need for Blacks to be culturally civilized and
assimilated. This is the epitome of antiessentialist cultural racismthe type
of racism I take to function in most if not all of American philosophy well
into the twentieth century.

The Myth of Progressive White Liberals

As David Chappells Inside Agitators demonstrates,
There is in liberalism as such nothing that precludes racial prejudice.
Most liberals in the South (and, it seems, the North) were racists in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the sense that when
48 the pluralist 5:1 2010

they thought about it at all, they accepted the scientific finding that
Negroes were biologically or culturally inferior to the more developed
race of white people. Negroes might deserve help or someday achieve
uplift, but if so, that was not a central question to liberals, who gener-
ally supported segregation and disfranchisement. (3)
Driven primarily by the fears of northern reoccupation of the South after
Reconstruction, white southerners, like Atticus Greene Haywood, Lewis
Harvie Blair, and George Washington Cable, advanced to varying degrees
Black education, civil rights, and social equality. While these figures may be
seen as progressive liberals, each of them still believed in the idea of Black
inferiority. These white southern voices, while in the minority, were no
less progressive than the deprivation theories of the North and certainly
just as racist. The commonly held assumption that the ideas of the North
and South were absolutely opposed has been an underlying dogma of many
philosophical conversations over race. In fact, southern philosopher John M.
Mecklin had begun challenging the assumption that progressive approaches
of northern intellectuals were in fact innocent in their dealings with the Ne-
gro question. Mecklins works like The Philosophy of the Color Line; his
much disputed book, Democracy and Race Friction; and his two part essay
entitled The Evolution of Slave Status in America are very stark examples
of the problematization of northern approaches to the race problem.8 It is
important to point out as well that Mecklin is certainly not proposing a
nonracist or antiracist system per se. Just like the liberal environmentalism
of Boas, it is saturated in the presumed inferiority of Blacks. The param-
eters of race discussions, much like that concerning ethnicities, is not
whether or not nonwhite groups are equal races but whether or not these
nonwhites should enjoy rights or privileges, what is generally referred to as
social equality.
For many American philosophers, justifying the application of Ameri-
can thinkers to contemporary race problems has largely revolved around the
thematic association of that thinker to the advocacy of social equality. By
and large, this association has been made with the NAACP, since it is one
of the most visible and long-lasting symbols of racial justice in America.
This justification, however, is ill-conceived, since it is American philosophys
attempt to draw upon the well-maintained caricatures of Black intellectual
history that allow for the unproblematized assumption that the NAACP
in fact represented the dominant strategy of dealing with the race problem
for Blacks.9 Decades before the founding of the NAACP, T.Thomas For-
curry:How the Exclusion of Black Sources Affects the Field 49

tune, Ida B. Wells, and Booker T. Washington founded and supported the
National Afro-American League, which functioned with the same goals as
the NAACP with the exception of not allowing white participation and
not fighting against segregation. According to Emma Thornbrough, the
program of the NAACP, both in its objectives and methods, was essentially
the program which Fortune had conceived for the Afro-American League
twenty years earlier (National Afro-American League 512). From its incep-
tion, the NAACP has been accused of perpetuating a narrow white liberal
interest concerning race and resisted by Black intellectual giants like Booker
T. Washington, who believed the organization was against the interests and
survival of the Black race.10
The need to represent symbolically progressive race thinking of white
philosophers through popularly conceptualized rhetoric and icons has allowed
American philosophy to deal with race theory almost exclusively through the
lens of their white heroes. Whereas previous works on the relation between
Deweys theory of education and racism, like Ronald K. Goodenows two
essays entitled The Progressive Educator, Race and Ethnicity in the Depres-
sion Years: An Overview and Racial and Ethnic Tolerance in John Deweys
Educational and Social Thought, have problematized Deweys support of
segregated education and the reliance of his pedagogy on G. Stanley Halls
recapitulation theory,11 contemporary works (see Eldridge; see Pappas, Dew-
eys Philosophical Approach to Racism) continue to romanticize the alleged
separation between Dewey living up to his ideas and the ideas of Deweys
thought. While the apologetics of Deweys ideas have been built around the
distinction between his thoughts and the extent to which he embodies those
thoughts, an investigation into his correspondence with Franz Boas and his
Philosophical Interpretation of Race Prejudice finds that his views of race are
very much in line with other Chicago School thinkers like Robert E. Park (see
Park). This process of not problematizing the transfer of ideas is no different
when we look at the works of contemporary Royce scholars, like Jacquelyn
Kegleys Is a Coherent Racial Identity Essential to Genuine Individuals and
Communities? Josiah Royce on Race and Shannon Sullivans Whiteness
as Wise Provincialism: Royce and the Rehabilitation of a Racial Category,
which ignore both Royces support of the white mans burden in an essay
entitled Characteristic Tendencies of American Civilization delivered at Ab-
erdeen University and his indebtedness to Joseph LeContes Race Problem in
the South. The use of LeContes understanding of art is especially important
for understanding Royces use of that term to describe assimilation.12
50 the pluralist 5:1 2010

How Philosophizing about the Ethics of Disdain

Underspecialize Race Theory in American Philosophy
For many philosophers in the American tradition, formulating the proper
ethics of disdainthose ethics that outline the proper rules of engaging
racism and colonial oppressionso that the resulting engagements of non-
European peoples against their oppression can qualify as philosophy is of
the utmost concern. For these scholars, resisting racism and combating
the psychological and cultural effects of white supremacy on people of
non-European descent, who remain oppressed to this day, are secondary
concerns that are necessarily overshadowed by the need to theoretically
idealize the rules of philosophical inquiry. Thus, to these scholars, the idea
of developing a specialization or enforcing standards of rigor in race
theory appear foreign, since it is on the basis of their practicing being a
philosopher that their distance from and resistance to actual knowledge
about racism is mandated. It is in this regard specifically that American phi-
losophy, despite the decades of work by Black philosophers, has continued
to privilege and reward the works of contemporary philosophers who con-
tinue to think about race through the anecdotal treatments of their white
heroes, like Dewey or Royce, over the knowledge that historic Black fig-
ures have produced with further reaching impact. Because other disciplines
with larger representations of Blacks and other people of non-European
descent have reflected on a much deeper reservoir of thoughtover the
development of race and the problem of racism in AmericaAmerican
philosophy continues to perpetuate the illusion of a serious engagement
with race theory, when in reality very few philosophers claiming to work
on race can speak to any scholars in fields like (Black) psychology, (Black)
history, or (Black) sociology that have historically been the havens of cut-
ting edge works theorizing race.
In Distance, Abstraction, and the Role of the Philosopher in the Prag-
matic Approach to Racism, Gregory Pappas argues,
What each one of us can do in order to ameliorate the problem of rac-
ism is a different issue than what we can and must do qua philosophers.
This is, of course, an abstraction, but it is a very useful one. It helps us
inquire about the potentials and limitations we share with other prag-
matic philosophers, even if our personal circumstances and responsibili-
ties are very different. We must be clear about our limitations on what
we can do as philosophers against racism. ... (31)
curry:How the Exclusion of Black Sources Affects the Field 51

What is immediately striking about this statement is that it operationally privi-

leges the function of the philosopher on the basis of white American figures
who had the luxury of not having to say anything about racism, over and against
the historic role of the Black philosophers who had to actively challenge rac-
ism by their organization of social clubs, creation of curricula, publication of
various occasional papers, and acceptance that their mastery of literacy made
them soldiers in the intellectual warfare against white supremacy.
Given the vast historical difference in the role of philosophers who dealt
with race and racism, one has to wonder upon what unspoken duty Pappas
constructs his depiction of the philosophers limitation. Are the Black lettered
men and women not philosophers despite their recorded contributions to race
theory in the archives of Black intellectual history? Are they not philosophers
because whites and assimilated ethnics continue to ignore their relevance
in the discipline of philosophy? Or (and this is what I take to be the case),
are Black philosophers ignored because their thinking about racism would
delegitimize the trivial ramblings of American philosophies white American
figures to such an extent that once the writings of American philosophys idols
were compared to the voluminous scholarship of Black thinkers, American
philosophy would be confronted both with its current irrelevance in deal-
ing with questions of racism and the undeniable racist anthropology that its
revered heroes and heroines maintained?
While Pappas does admit in the history of philosophy racism has not
been considered a serious matter of philosophical investigation, because most
philosophers have not suffered racism in a close and intimate way (Dis-
tance, Abstraction 28), he nonetheless maintains that the white philosophical
tradition is more methodologically apt to deal with the problems posed by
dealing with racism. Though Pappas entertains the idea that the segregation
of American philosophy has inadvertently made Black philosophers better
prepared for the task of doing race theory, he also points the reader to the
dangers of such a reality whereby
an African American philosopher may be so personally caught up that
it does not allow him or her to have the required distance to engage
in a general inquiry and learn from how racism is manifested in other
contexts. This is possible, and it is similar to situations in our personal
lives in which we are so consumed by a problem that we need others to
help us think. (Distance, Abstraction 28)
By making the question of proximity the barometer of legitimate philosophi-
cal inquiry into race, Pappas reinforces a view in which white nonspecialists
52 the pluralist 5:1 2010

are empowered to determine the appropriate measures of Black specialists

in race theory. Because Pappas creates an ethical system of inquiry where the
appropriate balance between attachment and detachment must be main-
tained, he sets up a system where the actual social and institutional oppression
of Blacks and other people of color must be censored as not philosophical if
they violate the boundaries of the established proximity.
By leaving aside the question of how American philosophy can perpetuate
a standard of scholarship where the philosophers need only concern them-
selves with how we should think about how we think about racism, rather
than understanding how racism functions, or the ways that the material op-
pression of Blacks and other people of color constrains their ability to obtain
the privilege of maintaining philosophical distance, Pappas readily moves to
criticize the Black philosopher for being limited in his or her consideration
of the function of racism in other contexts. This argument against Black
thinkers is nothing new. In 1904, Du Bois remarked, Because I am a Negro
I lose something of that breadth of view which the more cosmopolitan races
have, and with this goes an intensity of feeling and conviction which both
wins and repels sympathy, and now enlightens, now puzzles (Du Bois, On
The Souls of Black Folk, 30405).
I find this short quotation by Du Bois an appropriate reply to Pappass
concern because it points out that the source of Black genius has always
been separate and distinct. What Pappas so conveniently forgets is that legal
segregation, which was only officially ended in America in 1954, made it
illegal for whites and Blacks to associate freely, so the intellectual history of
Black thought about racism was produced within the total consumption of
the race problem and yielded the brilliance of a W. E. B. Du Bois, a John
Edward Bruce, a William H. Ferris, a Kelly Miller, a Marcus Garvey, and a
Paul Robeson, repeatedly without the help of others. It is amazing that it
is now, when Blacks have the possibility of sharing the range of their thought
in white spaces, that Blacks may need the assistance of others to think clearly
about racism. While Pappas is adamant in alerting the field to the dangers
of the emotionally implicated Negro, he makes no effort to criticize the
plentiful supply of stolid whites claiming to study race who are unmoved by
the televised assassinations of young Black men, unprovoked by the margin-
alization of non-European descended peoples in philosophy, and inattentive
to the absence of non-European voices in American philosophy circles which
claim to be the chief proponents of plurality and diversity. Pappas is willing
to celebrate the possibility of whites understanding race without problematiz-
ing their current inability to comprehend or explore racism in their writings.
curry:How the Exclusion of Black Sources Affects the Field 53

What white scholar(s) in American philosophy has centralized and introduced

the works of Black philosophers comparable to the work of Leonard Harris?
What white scholar has revealed the historical philosophical works of Black
figures to the extent of John McClendon, or rediscovered the works of Blacks
with doctorates in philosophy like George Yancy? Why is the first question
about racism in American philosophy about the legitimacy of Black phi-
losophers approach to the problem, when the most obvious question seems
to be why whites who claim an area of specialization or research interest in
race have not contributed anything remotely comparable in significance to
the work of these Black philosophers over the last several decades? Why is it
the obligation of Blacks and other non-European descended people to con-
stantly point out to white American philosophers the racism of Dewey, the
colonialism of Royce, and the exclusionary practice of pragmatist thought?
How is it that diversity becomes the burden of the underrepresented in an
American philosophical community that claims pluralism?
By simply continuing to proclaim American philosophys potential to
deal with racism as proof of the fields ability to contribute to race theory,
American philosophy permits whites, who are willing to gesture toward
a capacity to speak about race, to be recognized as legitimate race theo-
rists. In organizational meetings, peer-reviewed journal articles, and at the
general level of visibility, American philosophy permits whites pursuing a
budding interest in the concept of race to be respected and recognized as
having a specialization in race theory. Under this current practice, many
scholars interested in exploring the themes of racism (marginalization, si-
lencing, power, etc.) are taken to be authoritative, regardless of their for-
mal education in the histories of oppressed peoples in the United States,
or a functional knowledge of the development of white supremacy within
Americas geography. Because this problem is reified at an institutional lev-
elsince the demographic underrepresentation of Blacks and other non-
European descended peoples in philosophy at large, but especially in Ameri-
can philosophy, is so greatBlack scholars and the interdisciplinary stan-
dards of rigor dealing with questions of racial identity and racism are not
routinely applied to philosophical works in the discipline claiming to be
race theory. The unspoken consequence of indiscriminately judging these
interests whites have in marrying the alleged racial stances Dewey, Royce,
Addams, and other heroes of American thought to race theory is that it forces
the field to censor the theoretical insights of Black intellectual traditions
when they are contrary to the current white liberal consensus of the day or
incompatible with the personal liberal orientation many white American
54 the pluralist 5:1 2010

philosophers hold regarding American racism. This censoring dynamic is

so pervasive that even well-known and prominent social theories like Black
Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Black Marxism are deemed irrelevant
American philosophical traditions, despite their concomitant rise at the
turn of the century with American pragmatism and liberal progressivism.
Simply put, the enforcement of the rules that determine how scholars can
philosophically engage raceor the ethics of disdain, which consequently
determine the scholars awarded the status of race theorist in American
philosophical circlesarrest the rigorous development of race theory in the
discipline. The purposive enforcement of this etiquette problematically
sustains the ideo-racial apartheid of the discipline, since the community con-
sensus has agreed that there is not a need to acquire new knowledge about
racismonly a need to reproduce axiomatically what whites currently think
their traditions have already said about the race problem.13

Overcoming Ideo-Racial ApartheidToward a Rigorous

Engagement with Race Theory in American Philosophy
By ignoring the obviously problematic associations in white philosophers
intellectual genealogies that commit them to anti-Black racism, white suprem-
acy, and the endorsement to varying degrees of Black inferiority, American
philosophy perpetuates an exclusionary practice of apartheid. This ideo-racial
apartheid, whereby the Blacks are ideologically excluded from being rel-
evant theorists of racism in American philosophy, sustains the watered-down
scholarship regarding race exposed by the work of Leonard Harris over three
decades ago. Repeatedly, the work of Harris has exposed the limitation of
the American philosophical tradition. While Harriss work is mostly identi-
fied with his article Believe it or Not or the Klu Klux Klan and American
Philosophy Exposed and explorations of Alain Lockes philosophy, his work
throughout the late seventies and eighties explored the theoretical conse-
quences of continuing the practice of racial apartheid. In Philosophy in Black
and White, The Characterization of American Philosophy: The African
World as a Reality in American Philosophy, and Philosophy Born of Struggle,
Harris outlines very relevant struggles that place African American thought
within the bounds of the American philosophical camp. Despite including
two of the most exhaustive bibliographic indexes on African American phi-
losophy in Philosophy in Black and White and Philosophy Born of Struggle,
rivaled only by John McClendons The Afro-American Philosopher and the
Philosophy of the Black Experience: A Bibliographic Essay on a Neglected
curry:How the Exclusion of Black Sources Affects the Field 55

Topic in Philosophy and Black Studies, contemporary American philoso-

phers have yet to incorporate any significant portion of the conversations
about race outlined by Harris and McClendon over thirty years ago. Conse-
quently, the current works in American philosophy about race and difference
remain dogmatically driven by the need to ignore how the African American
experience exposes American philosophys inability to answer what Harris
called its legitimation crisis, or its calling into question its practical util-
ity and normative status (Legitimation Crisis 60), and continue to assert
without substantive proof that the racist ideas of its heroes and their narrow
methods of transformative social change do in fact contribute to the lives of
the racially oppressed.
Despite Harriss interventions in philosophy, the extent by which race,
class, and gender have been encountered in historical Black works and Black
intellectual traditions is simply awesome. Michelle Mitchells Righteous Propa-
gation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruc-
tion, for example, an extensive survey of the intellectual encounters that the
gambit of Black thinkers had at the turn of the century over the question of
race, convincingly demonstrates that the traditions and conceptual apparati
that Black thinkers were using at the turn of the century far surpassed the
ideas of both American pragmatists and idealists. By actively redefining the
anthropological basis of race distinctions, Mitchells work documents that
Black thinkers had already developed ideas of radical social transformation
that whites would not discover until the mid-1920s. David McBride, in his
article entitled Africas Elevation and Changing Racial Thought at Lincoln
University, 18541886, argues that Black thinkers were teaching and orga-
nizing around the reclamation of African civilization and defining the terms
of their own humanity almost two decades before white liberal progressive
began accepting the idea that Blacks were capable of learning. While white
philosophers were figuring out ways to maintain their philosophical copy-
right on white supremacy, Black thinkers like Antenor Firmin, who wrote
The Equality of the Human Races, and Louis Joseph Janvier, who published a
pamphlet entitled LEgalite des Races, had been sending these aforementioned
treatises on the equality of races to corresponding members of the American
Negro Academy here in the United States (see Moss 7981).
During the same period, Black Americans were producing works on social
agitation and labor that systematically refuted the alleged superiority of the
white race. T. Thomas Fortunes Black and White: Land, Labor and Politics
in the South, for example, had such an impact on his peers that his social
philosophy earned him recognition by Washington and Du Bois as being
56 the pluralist 5:1 2010

among the premier social thinkers of his time.14 Other Black journalists like
Ida B. Wells (see Wells), John E. Bruce (see Bruce), and Henry M. Turner
(see Turner) were theorizing about lynching, emigration, and race develop-
ment as a function of whites historical myths of superiority and not natural
biology; meanwhile Arthur Schomburg, under the auspices of the Negro So-
ciety for Historical Research, began his work reconstructing his Puerto Rican
heritage in a project that stands before us today as the Schomburg Center
for Research in Black Culture.15 Other lettered men, like Kelly Miller (see
Miller, Race Adjustment; Out the House of Bondage; Appeal to Conscience), and
Alain Locke (see Locke) sought to apply contemporary anthropological stud-
ies to race theory, while lettered women like Anna Julia Cooper (see Cooper)
worked toward a more nuanced consideration of genders role in racial uplift
ideology and redefined the philosophical orientation of educating the race.
By 1913, William H. Ferriss The African Abroad had already interpreted a
philosophical system built on American idealism that fundamentally altered
Black Americans approach to conceptual analyses by looking at the implica-
tions of applying the genetic method to Blacks history.
Ultimately, our attempt to understand the continued exclusion of African-
descended people from the American philosophical community, despite the
career-long efforts of our elders, means that we can no longer appeal to the
ameliorative suggestion of white philosophers ignorance. As the term ideo-racial
apartheid immediately suggests, what we are in fact dealing with is a deliberate
social program by which historic Black figures are determinedsolely on the
consensus of whites interested in preserving the integrity of their heroes and
heroinesto be irrelevant to how whites should understand racism, imperialism,
and the colonial economics of the United States. Thus, what we are dealing with
is not only the exclusion of Black thinkers, but an actively enforced dogma that
maintains that the (white) American philosophical tradition contains in itself
all the thought one need appeal to in order to deal with human problems. As
W.E. B. Du Bois reminds us, the title to the universe claimed by White Folk
is faulty (Souls of White Folk 30), white supremacy is sustained
by emphasis and omission to make children believe that every great soul
the world ever saw was a white mans soul; that every great thought the
world ever knew was a white mans thought; that every great deed the
world ever did was a white mans deed; that every great dream the world
ever sang was a white mans dream. In fine, that if from the world were
dropped everything that could not fairly be attributed to White Folk,
the world would, if anything, be even greater, truer, better than now.
(The Souls of White Folks 3031)
curry:How the Exclusion of Black Sources Affects the Field 57

Because ideo-racial apartheid acts as a regenerative project that both perpetu-

ates white supremacy and socializes the consensual acceptance of its presence
in the discipline, the only accurate response to this institutionalized practice
is its end. Since this consensus is in fact an expression of the groups apriori
judgment against divesting the disciplines overwhelming whiteness, our ef-
forts must move away from trying to convince whites of the importance of
Black figures to strategies that rupture the roles to which American philoso-
phy confines Black thinkers.
For those philosophers truly interested in the actual development of race
theory in American philosophy, we must actively assault the standards that
American philosophy uses to exclude works on Black theories of race and rac-
ism from their conferences, from their peer-reviewed journals and from their
private academic circles. Furthermore, we must speak out and write about
the caricatures of race scholars and race scholarship offered to us as proof of
diversity in the fieldthat scholarship that only refers to Black thought as
a means to absolve white philosophy of its racist past. And finally, we must
make a conscious effort to struggle with the intellectual depth and integrity of
Black thoughts about racism despite its status in the field. Because Black men
and women throughout our history had a real-world and active engagement
with the economic, social, psychological, and cultural effects of American
racism, we are not trying to extend their thought to problems they did not
encounter. Unlike white philosophers in the American tradition, many of
whom actively supported white supremacy, Black thought does not have to be
repaired and creatively interpreted as fiction to deal with material problems.
In reading and working through Black texts, philosophizing moves beyond
the fluffy rhetoric aimed at making whites better people and connects our
thinking about racism to the historical conditions that continue to inspire,
in humanity, its resistance against inequality.

Concluding Thoughts
Whereas the previous strategy that Black philosophers have used toward
American philosophy has focused on the need to include African Ameri-
can philosophy as a means to better round out the field, I hope this brief
essay shows that American philosophy does not yet have sufficient rigor to
substantially engage the social problems it claims justify its existence as a
particular approach to philosophy in general. Instead of allowing American
philosophy to pick and choose isolated works from Black authors, like Du
Bois, that epistemically converge with their established Eurocentric philo-
58 the pluralist 5:1 2010

sophic standards, as proof of the burgeoning racial diversity of the field, Black
philosophers should require and maintain standards of interpretive rigor that
demand the philosophical approaches toward our thinkers to be understood
in totality and within the cultural genealogy of their own thought.16 Given
the resistance of American philosophy to move beyond its heroes and hero-
ines, even when investigating social problems that would seem to demand
the voices of nonwhites, the most relevant question to ask now becomes
whether or not American philosophys approach to race theory can truly be
said to understand, much less reflect on, the problems it claims make its philo-
sophical perspective valid. In short, American philosophys persistent retreat
to the thoughts of historic white thinkers, and its valorization of works by
contemporary white philosophers, narrowly read and unfamiliar with Black
philosophy, makes American philosophy, in its present state, unable to rec-
ognize the actual themes of racism, much less contribute to race theory.

notes
1.I would like to thank Greg Pappas for his comments and support of this article
before going to print, and his willingness despite our differing perspectives to recognize
the need to critique American philosophys engagement with race and racism. I would
also like to thank Dwayne Tunstall and James Haile for their support in reading earlier
drafts of this material. I also would like to thank Randy Auxier for his comments on an
earlier draft.
2.According to Barbara J. Fields,
racismthe assignment of people to an inferior category and the determination of
their social, economic, civic, and human standing on that basisunsettles funda-
mental instincts of American academic professionals who consider themselves lib-
eral, leftist, or progressive. It is an act of peremptory, hostile, and supremelyoften
fatallyconsequential identification that unceremoniously overrides its objects
sense of themselves ... That is why well-meaning scholars are more apt to speak of
race than of racism. Race is a homier and more tractable notion than racism, a rogue
elephant gelded and tamed into a pliant beast of burden. Substituted for racism,
race transforms the act of a subject into an attribute of the object. And because race
denotes a state of mind, feeling, or being, rather than a program or pattern of action,
it radiates a semantic and grammatical ambiguity that helps to restore an appearance
of symmetry, particularly with the help of a thimblerig that imperceptibly moves
the pea from race to racial identity. (48)
For a recent take on how this distinction affects critical race theory, see Tommy J.
Curry, Will the Real CRT Please Stand Up?
3.I want to clarify what it is that I mean by race theory throughout this essay. For
many scholars interested in race, concentrating on how we define race, what is meant
by the term, and to whom it applies is of common concern. While I recognize this is
a long-standing practice of doing race, I find that it lends itselfto scholars with no
curry:How the Exclusion of Black Sources Affects the Field 59
training or knowledge of the history of race in America, or racism against African
descended peoples or other non-European peoplesto being appropriated within the
problematic confines of white thought. For those doing race or interested in race,
racism is never really at issue, since these scholars can simply take an integrationist, or
colorblind position that holds that the core of racism is misunderstanding the appli-
cation or identity of race. Conversely, I understand race theory to be the conscious
engagements with the conceptual accounts of racism as it functions within America
and beyond its borders as colonialism. Encountering racism as a historical and cultural
phenomenon alongside the cascade of white supremacy and the economic exploitation
of nonwhites appears to be the dominant analysis that African-descended people in the
United States and throughout the Diaspora have used when considering both their racial
identity and their unfortunate historical circumstances. Thus, race theory, is the name
I give to the conceptualization of how racism functions in America and throughout the
Diaspora and the active theorization of racisms effects and origins in relation to those it
oppresses.
4.The reaction that Black scholars had in the 1970s to the history of white social science
is important to get a grasp on the ineffectiveness of antiessentialist and environmental
theories coming out of the early 1900s. See Joyce A. Ladner, The Death of White Sociology
and Robert Guthrie, Even the Rat was White.
5.It is important to note the difference between Spencers Lamarckian view of evolution
proposed in his 1864 work Principles of Biology, which advances the idea that offspring
inherit the cultural and physical adaptations of their parents, and what Dewey claims
to be Darwins position. This view of Spencers work is advanced by John Dewey in an
essay entitled, The Philosophical Work of Herbert Spencer.
6.It is also interesting to note that Edward Blydens African Life and Customs included
significant reference to Finots 1901 work. This is at least concurrent with the dispersal of
Boass ideas with American Black intellectuals.
7.It is also necessary to point out that the two essays that Deweys famous 1909 speech
refers to are latent with the same inferences as the Boasian paradox. Prof. Livingston
Farrand argues that while we may not know what the differences in the mass of Black
brains and white brains mean regarding the mental development of different races, we
must not fall into the similar error on the other side and deny with equally indefensible
dogmatism that such differences as do exist have no significance and can be left entirely
out of account (18). Prof. Burt C. Wilders position is no better when he asks, Shall
we now deny civil and political rights, and educational and industrial opportunities, to
men merely because they are black, because the average weight of their brains is a little
less, and because a certain region of the brain may be more frequently less developed,
when two thousand of their fellows, nearly half a century ago, could manifest not merely
the highest kind of physical courage, but as high a kind of moral courage, as has been
chronicled in the history of the world? (54).
8.It is also important to point out the diversity of Black reactions to Mecklins 1914
work. W. E. B. Du Bois for instance, in a book review entitled: Another Study in Black,
argues that Mecklins work is not valuable, while the Southern Workman (Hampton
Universitys editorial), skeptical of Mecklins pessimism, believed the work to be a fair
statement of facts.
9.For an explanation of how the NAACP came to represent the winning strategy in
the Civil Rights Movement, see Steve Valocchi, The Emergence of the Integrationist
Ideology in the Civil Rights Movement.
60 the pluralist 5:1 2010
10.For a discussion over the use of the NAACP as an anti-Washington machine by
Oswald G. Villard, see Elliot M. Rudick, Booker T. Washingtons Relations with the
NAACP. For an historical treatment of the NAACPs connection to progressivism, see
August Meier and John Bracey, Jr., The NAACP as a Reform Movement, 19091965.
For Du Boiss view, see his chapter entitled The NAACP, in his Autobiography.
11.Thanks to Dwayne Tunstall for sharing Goodenows 1977 work with me.
12.It is also interesting to point out that these scholars have largely ignored William
Fontaines reading of Royce in Josiah Royce and the American Race Problem, which
sees Royce as being useful to race precisely because of his assimilationist philosophy.
Additionally, it is noteworthy to point out the ways by which Josiah Royce was deeply
entrenched into the evolutionary theories of his time. Unfortunately, I cannot claim these
insights as belonging totally to my historical acuity. John S. Hallers work Outcasts from
Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority 18591900 was one of the earliest works
to describe in detail the relationship that Josiah Royce had to Joseph LeConte, Louis
Agassiz and the Berkeley School of Sociology. Given that Hallers book was published in
1971, it is reflective of the lack of rigor when dealing with race questions in American
philosophy. The association between Royce and LeConte needed to be more fully inves-
tigated.
For a more fully developed description of LeContes influences on Josiah Royces so-
ciological perspectives, see Standford M. Lyman, LeConte, Royce, Teggart, Blumer: A
Berkeley Dialogue on Sociology, Social change and Symbolic interaction. Given the
philosophical significance that Royce places on LeContes tutelage, I have taken up the
relationship between Josiah Royce and Joseph LeContes evolutionary idealism in a paper
presented at the 2010 Central APA entitled On the Dark Arts: Problematizing Royces
Assimilative Arts as a Response to LeContes The Race Problem in the South (unpub-
lished manuscript). In this paper, I argued that it is intellectually irresponsible for American
philosophy to claim that Josiah Royce is in fact against racism when his philosophy of
loyalty and his idealism are, by his own admission, based on the evolutionary idealism of
Joseph LeConte and Anglo-Saxon cultural purity. For an example of a white author criti-
cally evaluating these connections, see Marilyn Fischers Locating Royces Reasoning on
Race (unpublished manuscript). Dr. Fischers work is a foundational investigation that
does not take for granted the racist milieu of the times. While there are certainly deeper
implications to the associations outlined in her piece, her essay is a welcome voice in a
conversation that should have happened decades ago, well before Royce was adopted as
the poster child of Negro friendly philosophy.
13.This account is also closely related to how I understand epistemic convergence,
or the case by which Black thought, to be recognized a legitimate theory, must converge
with established white traditions and methods of inquiry. I find this theory to have
significant explanatory power regarding why some Black thought (or even Native Ndn
thought) is excluded from philosophy when it does not converge or align with the
ideological or methodological positions of white disciplines. For example, I take this
to be a major reason why W. E. B. Du Boiss Hegelianism, humanism, and democratic
multiculturalism, allegedly from his early works, is emphasized above his Pan-Africanism,
Communism, and separatism from his later works. Insofar as Du Bois contradicts and
epistemically diverges from the established traditions of the white canon, those works
must be censored through labeling them as nonphilosophical or political works.
14.For the collections of T. Thomas Fortunes papers, see Shawn L. Alexanders,
curry:How the Exclusion of Black Sources Affects the Field 61
T.Thomas Fortune: the Afro-American Agitator. For a historical treatment of Fortune, see
Emma Thornbroughs T. Thomas Fortune: Militant Journalist.
15.Arthuro Alfonso Schomburgs work has been inadequately appreciated in American
philosophy. As a scholar, he not only demonstrates a novel philosophy of history, but was
also a living testament to the diversity of an Afro-Puerto Rican identity. While much of Latin
American philosophy continues to praise the connections that Latin American theorists have
with white pragmatists, Schomburg is a perfect example of the Afro-Latin presence within
American philosophy. For Schomburgs discussion of a Black philosophy of history, see
Arthur Schomburg, The Negro Digs Up His Past, and Racial Integrity.
The recent expansion from American philosophy toward a philosophy of the Ameri-
cas cannot continue to exclude the role that Africans have had in not only the revolu-
tionary tenor of Latin America, but also the philosophy of liberation they have inspired
throughout the Caribbean, most specifically in the Antilles.
16.American philosophy continues to read Du Bois as a liberal multiculturalist, despite
his proclamations against integration in American Negroes and Africas Rise to Freedom
and in his Address to a Black Academic Community. It is also interesting to point out
the incongruency of American philosophys claims to Du Bois on the basis of his 1903
work Souls of Black Folk. In a 1904 book review of his 1903 work entitled On The Souls
of Black Folk, Du Bois says:
The Souls of Black Folk is a series of fourteen essays written under various circum-
stances and for different purposes during a period of seven years. It has, therefore,
considerable, perhaps too great, diversity. ... On the other hand, there is a unity in
the book, not simply the general unity of the larger topic, but a unity of purpose in
the distinctively subjective note that runs in each essay. Through all the book runs
a personal and intimate tone of self-revelation ... In its larger aspects the style is
tropicalAfrican. This needs no apology. The blood of my fathers spoke through
me and cast off the English restraint of my training and surroundings. The resulting
accomplishment is a matter of taste. Sometimes I think very well of it and sometimes
I do not. (Du Bois, On The Souls of Black Folk 305)
It is interesting to see the clarity with which Du Bois approaches his previous work, but
what is most important here for philosophical discussions is how Du Bois clearly and
deliberately argues that the book be understood as a work of African style, unquestion-
ably distanced from the current interpretations of his work that bind him within the
very European constraints that Du Bois himself claims the blood of his fathers allowed
him to cast off.

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