224. LIP SERVICE - On the Difficulty of Transforming What is Entrenched
Regular readers of Philosophy Unleashed will probably have noticed the lack of Black History Month content this October? It is not because I have changed my position on the importance of diversifying and decolonising the philosophy curriculum and canon. Nor have I changed my position on the importance of recognising Black history during Black History Month. Indeed, in my classroom this October, I have purposefully got students engaging with the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah on identity, and highlighted the work of other Black philosophers on my bookshelf.
However, this year’s Black History Month did make me take stock about where we are in philosophy classrooms with expanding the canon more generally. In my own, limited, endeavour to sort out my blindspots and bring Black, and other excluded voices, into my philosophy teaching, I feel a sense of personal frustration that it all still seems all too little, and the impact almost imperceptible. I wondered why it has felt so difficult to do, even with a concerted effort?
I thought about my struggles to incorporate new thinkers into schemes of work and resources over the last five years, and how, despite my best intentions, it still remains all-too-easy to defer to traditional names around key issues when planning new courses with insufficient time to read widely and plug the massive gaps which still exist in my own subject knowledge. I thought about how colleagues you share courses or classes with also need to have time to learn deeply about thinkers they, too, were never formally taught before, because if they don’t they will naturally fall back on the traditional canon when talking with their students. And I thought about how students can so easily fall back into old ways they haven’t even been taught, and which counter-programme the very effort you are going to of widening their canon of names, simply due to their reliance on Googling things or asking ChatGPT when outside of your lessons, and those systems deferring to the cultural norms.
And, of course, I thought about how slow the exam board has been to expand their own A-level syllabus and make it more appropriately diverse, and how, no matter how many additional names and faces I include in my own individual classroom, the emphasis on external examination in British education will always make whatever is in the formal exam syllabus take priority in students’ minds over anything beyond the syllabus which we may teach them.
It made me consider that perhaps the biggest issue, specific to philosophy, in diversifying away from traditional canons, is that often it means having to reframe — or ditch entirely —traditional debates to incorporate the new perspective. Yet the reframing, or even rejection, requires at least some baseline understanding of the initial area of dispute for the reframing to make sense. With limited time in the timetable, the decision is then often forced onto us to teach the baseline issue first, as it is logically prior, and more likely to be needed for external exams, without there being time for reframing or rejecting it later. We are incorporating Black thinkers into a conversation still dominated by the loud and over-indulged voices of white European men. It is hard to pivot, or completely change the conversation without confronting the loudest voices and giving good reasons for them to sit quiet. As Noam Chomsky once said, speaking about how difficult it is to introduce new perspectives into general media discourse once a narrative is in place: “Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines that everybody else is saying, or else you say something which in fact is true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune”. But that very process is a trap which gets us spending more time listening to the same old ideas at the expense of voices which remain excluded as we try to articulate a justification for their inclusion instead of simply including them.
Related to this is the other significant issue for philosophy as a subject in particular: for obvious reasons, many historically excluded Black philosophers deal with issues in political philosophy which schools are reticent to teach, or even explicitly prohibited from teaching, given ongoing “culture wars” backlash about “wokeness” from parents and other interested parties. If we are unable to have an honest discussion about structural racism in the classroom because the very idea of such a thing has been deemed too controversial for children to be told about, it is hard to introduce thinkers who are responding to the many issues such structural racism throws out and producing thought in a context which assumes (rightly) as a starting point such structural racism exists. Indeed, the obstacles I am talking about here which are in the way of effectively diversifying and decolonising the philosophy curriculum in schools are a perfect example of structural racism, and why such diversification and decolonisation is needed in the first place. As Audre Lorde so famously put it: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. Yet schools, as reproducers of the dominant culture of any given society by design, are the very definition of “the master’s house” and it is they which are giving students their useless tools. It is unsurprising, therefore, that even our best attempts at expanding the canon through philosophy in schools remain fundamentally lacking.
In other subject areas, slotting in the “hidden figures” of excluded Black history is a less controversial job than it is in philosophy. The Black mathematicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, writers, linguists, and, of course, historical figures excluded for so long can be fit comfortably into what is already being taught with a generalised narrative of vague racist exclusion. We can add their names to the others already taught without much need to rethink what is already being taught. But Black philosophers, being philosophers — and historically excluded ones at that — frequently (and understandably) offer as their excluded work uncomfortable critiques of the culture and institutions which excluded them.
We see something similar in History’s reticence to reframe the entire project of Empire as something intrinsically negative. To do so — a philosophical perspective on Empire; an ethical one — is to cross some institutionally expected line of compliance to national myths, and so instead the discussion tends towards certain aspects of Empire being criticised, and positives weighed against negatives as an abstract academic exercise, is a more accepted approach to the sticky issue of how to reframe our country’s bloody colonial history for easy digestion in the classroom. Better to focus during Black History Month on the less controversial: the unsung contributions of Black soldiers in World Wars where it is already agreed who the good guys and bad guys are, or of the work of Black abolitionists in liberating themselves from slavery, previously overshadowed by white saviours.
I guess philosophy’s lack of progress when it comes to more wider diversification of its canon, certainly in my own experience of trying to do so through creaking institutions such as exam boards, professional organisations, and schools, is just another reason why Black History Month remains so important. An annual opening — albeit just a crack — in which to stick a foot in the door without asking for permission and reiterating that there really is a problem here which has still not been properly addressed. A time to take stock, as I have, and recognise that there is still a long, long way to go. And a time to reignite conversations so frequently drowned out by the crushing everyday noise of a system so inherently oppositional to ideas of radical change.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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