97. BLACK HISTORY MONTH - On Tackling My Continuing Blind Spots
As it is Black History Month here in the UK I thought it would be worth remembering the most influential black philosopher in my own life so far - the young, black, A-level student of mine from about six years ago who asked me a simple question to which I had an embarrassingly limited answer: “are there any black philosophers?”
We were on a school trip and walking through a lovely university campus. The student was a really able philosopher, very passionate about the subject, and was thinking of studying it further at university, but was worried that the subject didn’t seem very welcoming to people who looked like him. I thought I would be able to answer his question confidently, having myself lectured on the philosophy of Steve Biko as part of a university course on Black Political Thought. I was able to give him some obvious names like Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, Cornel West and, of course, Steve Biko, but I realised that this selection of names was both fairly limited and all, in some way, connected to their work in issues of race and racism. What I was being asked was a far broader question: where were the black Platos? The black John Lockes and David Humes? The black Bertrand Russells? Philosophers of colour just working on problems in epistemology, in ethics, in metaphysics or linguistics and not having to define their professional work by the colour of their skin?
Which was not to say black philosophers who do work in areas specifically about race are not important. But what the student was asking really was whether the options available to him in philosophy as a young black man, were the same as the options available to his non-white classmates. Would he ever be able to be a philosopher, or would he always be a black philosopher?
He was also asking something else. If there were all these black philosophers out there - why was he only hearing about them now? Why weren’t they prominently featured in the curriculum of philosophy he had been studying at school, with me, on the courses I had designed for years?
And he was absolutely right. I had failed to include philosophers on our courses who actually looked like the students we were trying to inspire to be future philosophers. And I had done so because racism is structural as much as it is individual. I had designed courses which introduced our students to some of the “great” thinkers, and I had been guided in what “great” meant by two things: the thinkers they would need to know about for the A-level course we hoped they would be inspired to take, and my department’s own education about who was considered to be “important” in philosophy. We felt proud that our students were meeting Descartes, Bentham, Mill and Kant in their early years rather than embarrassed that the thinkers they were encountering were all, in the main, white men. (And yes - that they were all men was just as problematic as that they were all white). Meanwhile on the A-level course in those days there were even fewer women on the course than there are now (since 2017 the AQA included a handful of women onto its reading list, but still not enough of them). There are still, even after the 2017 revisions, no people of colour on the AQA A-level course and too many “great” thinkers who are there who have unapologetic racism staining their intellectual legacies.
I felt that I had let this student - and the many others not brave enough to ask me his question before - down badly, and since then have worked to try and diversify the curriculum where I can, even if it means having to go off-curriculum at GCSE and A-level to do so (hence the birth of “Philosophy Unleashed” lessons). Even then, it is still not enough. And it is still not enough because I myself, or my colleagues, continue to have a huge blind-spot in this area. Not in our personal desire to include more black philosophers onto our curriculum, but in our practical ability to do so because our own philosophical education was already so lacking in diversity. In my own experience I managed to study A-level philosophy, a Bachelors degree, a Masters and a PhD without ever being formerly taught about any black philosophers outside of the context of responses to and resistance to racism…and even that was few and far between, on a specific module about black thinkers. While I continue to try my best to better educate myself, it is an ongoing journey and one I am able only to do in rare moments of freedom away from the demands of day-to-day teaching. In a world where GCSE and A-level results are the main professional currency, and where those qualifications lack diversity, to keep on top of what I have to teach it is not always possible to keep on top of what I want to teach. So I include what I can, I add and subtract each year, but it is a slow process. And that slow process would not have even begun had I not been shaken out of my blind-spot by that particular student.
Intellectual blind-spots, you see, shape the reality in which we exist. They are blind-spots because we do not see them. If my education about what “philosophy” is only includes white men, then it becomes very hard to notice the lack of women and people of colour because you have essentially been trained not to notice their absence. philosophy just is white men. Instead of understanding that the choices about who counts as a “philosopher” and who doesn’t has much baggage and prejudice, discounting the amazing work of so many outside of the designated criteria, we are simply told that these particular people just so happen to be the ones history has remembered, simply because their ideas are so great. The “great men” approach to teaching the history of ideas injects that subtext into every name we see repeated on course papers and reading lists: they are remembered, the canon, because they must be uniquely special in some way. An illusion of meritocracy where the cream rises to the top and it just so happens that the cream is always coming from the mind of another white male. It is only by expanding our definition of the philosopher, and seeing the philosophy that comes from elsewhere, beyond the traditional canon, that we realise that the story that begins with white men in ancient Greece and ends with white men in Western universities is a story of wilful exclusion. Women and people of colour ignored. Entire traditions of thought erased. A selective lie.
Luckily that student persevered with philosophy despite us failing him. Today he continues to study, and work in, philosophy. But his story is one which reminds us that the narrative of exclusion in philosophy is not merely historical. Many of the other young black men and women who didn’t ask the question he did (and which they shouldn’t have needed to ask) and didn’t see themselves represented when they looked to this thing called “philosophy” for answers simply did their philosophy somewhere else. In departments of Social Science, of Geography, of Sociology, Law or Politics. Black philosophers, or any other philosophers of colour, like female philosophers, trans philosophers, and non-binary philosophers who felt excluded from philosophy, didn’t stop philosophising just because the discipline made them feel unwelcome. Just as excluded people always have, they simply did their philosophy elsewhere. Philosophy’s loss, until it does better at its blind-spots and sees how much it is missing.
An example: a few weeks ago, Philosophy Twitter was abuzz with sadness at the passing of philosopher, Charles W Mills. As I read all the kind words and sad condolences, I became acutely aware of a few important things.
1) I had not ever heard of Charles W Mills.
2) Charles W Mills had written a groundbreaking work of philosophy specifically on social contract theory and race, and
3) my own work on anarchism includes extensive thought about the social contract device. Before writing my book, which includes historical overviews of social contract theory and was proof read, edited and reviewed by academics, I had studied social contract theory extensively at university. As well as being a core part of my PhD thesis (itself reviewed and defended in an academic viva) I had written a Masters thesis on the social contract and just war theory (also defended). My BA degree in politics and philosophy saw the social contract be taught to me across two different academic departments. Charles W Mills wrote his book in 1997. I began my university education in 2001. At no point in the nineteen years of learning, teaching, going to conferences, writing, being reviewed and publishing my book had any one of the many, many academics who saw my work and commented on it ever said “have you read Mills on social contract theory?”
That is a big blind spot. One I hope to rectify. I bought Mills’ book after reading his obituary. But how many other thinkers are students of different ages not hearing about because their own teachers were taught similar curriculums with hidden, unnoticed, blinkers on?
Kimberlé Crenshaw gave us the important idea of intersectionality - how different oppressions and social identities can overlap and multiply the obstacles and oppressions and individual faces. So, for example, a black woman or gay Asian man might have different intersections of issues than a black man or straight Asian man. The prejudices and discriminations towards one’s ethnicity intersects with those surrounding your gender, or your sexuality, etc. too. Hence a white woman may not experience racism, but the impact of misogyny and sexism will still make her experiences vastly different from her ethnically identical straight male counterpart despite their shared racial identity.
I mention this because blindspots are not limited to issues of race. Some students this week asked me why LGBTQ+ inclusivity is so difficult to teach for some people, and why school curriculums are not already inclusive in that respect. They were shocked when I pointed out to them that between 1988 and 2003, under “Section 28” laws in the UK it was forbidden to teach about same sex relationships or anything LGBTQ+ in British schools. They had never heard of that. But more importantly they, and I, hadn’t thought about the impact of that even for teaching today. Because while I personally wasn’t taught anything about LGBTQ+ people in school, I knew LGBTQ+ in real life and it was discussed openly at home. I got my education anyway, and continue to try and educate myself. For me, teaching at a time when Section 28 is no more, it is not so difficult to make LGBTQ+ people a usualised part of my curriculum, because it is a usualised part of my every day life. But for other teachers my age, and younger, educated during the time of Section 28, there is actually no guarantee, if they are not LGBTQ+ themselves or chose to educate themselves, that they know enough about it to be able to speak with any knowledge. If, for example, your biology teacher, or PSHE teacher, was educated at a time when there was no LGBTQ+ education, what training have they had, if any, to be able to discuss safe sex for same-sex partners? Or answer a question about what a trans student may be going through, specific to trans experience? Just as a philosopher never taught about the world of philosophy beyond the minds of white, Western men, will be ignorant of the wealth of ideas beyond their limited understanding of what is out there, an educator never educated about this entire group of people may not even be aware of how little they know.
In short, we all need to do better. Look for our blindspots, and keep educating ourselves. It’s a daily practice and there are a lot of different blindspots. Trying to plug the gaps in my philosophical knowledge on non-male philosophers, I may neglect to fill the gaps on non-white philosophers, or LGBTQ+ philosophers, or philosophers outside of academia, or from other parts of the world. But every little helps. Know what you don’t know. As it’s Black History Month, and in the spirit of the Black Supplementary Schools movement I first heard about from Kehinde Andrews in his excellent Resisting Racism, I therefore recommend you try and ensure you educate yourself this month and read something by a black philosopher you should have heard of but haven’t because of your teacher’s inherited blindspots. I am going to finish reading Mills on The Racial Contract, as well as reading Adam Elliot-Cooper’s recently published history of Black Resistance to British Policing. What are you going to read? And if you are a teacher - how are you going to add it to your curriculum in a bid to decolonize and diversify what we teach young people and further diminish the damaging legacy of our own intellectual blind-spots?
Author: DaN McKee
My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE and from all good booksellers.