Alcoff Yancy_Philosophy's Lost Body and Soul - NYTimes

2/5/2015 Philosophy's Lost Body and Soul - NYTimes.com

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THESTONE

PhilosophysLostBodyandSoulByGEORGEYANCYandLINDAMARTNALCOFF FEBRUARY4,20153:30AM 111Comments

ThisisthesixthinaseriesofinterviewswithphilosophersonracethatIamconductingforTheStone.ThisweeksconversationiswithLindaMartnAlcoff,aprofessorofphilosophyatHunterCollegeandtheCUNYGraduateCenter.ShewasthepresidentoftheAmericanPhilosophicalAssociation,EasternDivision,for201213.SheistheauthorofVisibleIdentities:Race,Gender,andtheSelf.GeorgeYancy

GeorgeYancy:What is the relationship between your identity asa Latina philosopher and the philosophical interrogation of race inyour work?

LindaMartnAlcoff:Every single person has a racial identity, atleast in Western societies, and so one might imagine that the topicof race is of universal interest. Yet for those of us who are not white or less fully white, shall I say the reality of race is shoved in ourfaces in particularly unsettling ways, often from an early age. Thiscan spark reflection as well as nascent social critique.

The relationship between my identityand my philosophical interest in race issimply a continuation through thetools of philosophy the pursuit that Ibegan as a kid, growing up in Floridain the 1960s, watching the civil rightsmovement as it was portrayed in themedia and perceived by the variousparts of my family, white andnonwhite. I experienced schooldesegregation, the end of Jim Crow,and the war in Indochina, a war thatalso made apparent the racialcategories used to differentiate peoples, at enormous cost. It was

Linda Martin Alcoff



To imagine all of ourwild diversity inembodiment to beirrelevant required abad faith that can beseen throughout thecanon: racist asides andridiculous theoriesabout women alongsidegenericpronouncements aboutjustice and beauty andthe route to truth.

clear to me from a young age that we were the ones with no valuefor life, at least the life of those who were not white.

My sister and I came to the southern United States from Panama asyoung children, and had to negotiate our complex identities (mixed-race Latina and white) within a social world where racial borderswere being challenged and renegotiated and, as a result, ceaselesslypatrolled and violently defended.

G.Y.:So, given these earlyexperiences, were you drawn tophilosophical questions of racialidentity?

In philosophy I was drawn to topics ofknowledge (epistemology) andmetaphysics, never ethics, which mayseem odd given this background. Butthe issue of metaphysics raisedquestions about how we name what is,and the issue of epistemology raisedquestions about how we know what wethink we know. Hence, these sub-fields opened the way for me toconsider the contestations over reality as well as over authority. Ofcourse, the received canon in philosophy was both useful andinfuriatingly silent on the topics I was most interested in: bodiesshowed up little, and difference was routinely set aside, and yet thedebates overmereological essentialismand other conceptsillustrated the possibility of multiple right answers and of a socialand practical context silently guiding the debate. Quine was invogue and his ideas about contingent rather than necessary ways toname what is was a short step from the political analysis ofdominant ways of naming that I was interested in.

For many years my personal and my philosophical life were lived asparallel tracks with little overt interaction. I went todemonstrations, and then came home to finish my Heidegger



homework. I glanced across the fence now and then, but did notattempt serious philosophical engagement with race until I hadpublished enough that had nothing to do with race or gender orLatin American philosophy to establish a foothold in the profession.Tenure set me free, and I immediately began a project on themetaphysics of mixed-race identities.

G.Y.:You mentioned how questions of embodiment were nottreated in any substantive way in your early philosophical training.Why is it that the profession of philosophy, generally speaking, isstill resistant to questions of embodiment and by extensionquestions of race?

L.M.A.:In my view this is primarily a methodological problem.Philosophers of nearly all persuasions analytic, continental,pragmatist aim for general and generalizable theories that canexplain human experience of all sorts. And the ultimate aim, ofcourse, is not description but prescription: how can we come tounderstand ourselves better, to know better, to understand ourworld better, and to treat each other better? Worthy goals, but theyare usually pursued with a decontextualized approach, as if the bestanswers would work for everyone. To get at that meta-level ofgenerality, some aspects of ones context need to be set aside,lopped off, cut out of the picture, and this has traditionally meantthe concrete materiality of human existence as we actuallyexperience it in embodied human form.

This is just a way of saying that the bodyhadto be ignored except inso far as we could imagine our bodies to be essentially the same.And to achieve that trick of imagination to imagine all of our wilddiversity in embodiment to be irrelevant required a bad faith thatcan be seen throughout the canon: racist asides and ridiculoustheories about women alongside generic pronouncements aboutjustice and beauty and the route to truth.

I call it bad faith because, on the one hand, nearly all the greatphilosophers divided human beings into moral and intellectual



Latin Americanphilosophers have hadto justify their

hierarchies even while, on the other hand, they presumed, fromtheir consciously particularist space, to speak for all. Hence,methodologically, the problem for philosophy is how to speakforallwhen one does not, in fact, speaktoall. And the solution is to enacta doublespeak in which one justifies not speaking to the mass ofhumanity at the same time that one imagines oneself to be speakingfor the human core which exists in all of us. The body, anddifference, is simultaneously acknowledged and disavowed.

This is why philosophers such as Bartolom de Las Casas in the16thcentury and W.E.B. DuBois from even his early writings in the19thcentury are such powerful figures: They each explore their ownspecificity and its impact on how they view the world and others,even to how they formulate moral questions. They model adiscourse that can become part of a general dialogue in whichothers can have a voice as well.

G.Y.:Yes. I understand your point about methodology and badfaith. Speak to how this presumption to speak for others, to placeunder erasure our diversity of embodiment, is something that islinked specifically to whiteness, especially within the context of ourfield, which continues to be dominated by white males.

L.M.A.:Entitlement is a core feature of white subjectivity, asnumerous works by sociologists such as Joe Feagin document.There is a sense of entitlement to rights and resources, comfort andattention, access to space and to deference, or being grantedpresumptive credibility until proven otherwise. Entitlement isalways complicated and modified by class, gender, religion andsexuality; poor whites, for example, learn early on to defer toothers. But white people as a whole, or as an imagined grouping,are the presumed paradigms of rights-bearing American citizens.And this seeps into ones consciousness.

It is inevitable that these socialrealities will find some manifestationin white-majority (or even exclusively



prerogative, and theirability, to contribute tonormative debates overthe good, the right andthe true.

white) philosophy classrooms. This isespecially so given the fact thatphilosophy curricular requirementsalmost never include course topicsthat might enhance studentsknowledge or capacity to reflect aboutthese realities. So it should be no surprise that the work (teachingand scholarship) produced by a white-majority philosophyprofession manifests, in general, an assumed entitlement to rightsand resources, comfort and attention, access to space, anddeference. They assume the ability to access all knowledge, andresent (and resist) theories that might restrict that access, on thegrounds, for example, that ones identity and experience play aformative role in what one can understand on some matters. Theyassume the right to dominate the space literal and figurative ofphilosophical thought and discussion. They assume the right tohave attention and they assume this is nonreciprocal: others shouldbe reading their work even while they neglect to read the work ofnonwhites. I am speaking in gross generalities that will be unfair tonumerous individuals, but the patterns I am describing are, Isuggest, familiar to marginalized philosophers.

G.Y.:In what way has Latin American philosophy challenged suchbad faith and the proclivity to be so methodologically narrow?

L.M.A.:The philosophies developed in the colonized world duringthe emergence of European modernity have not had the luxury ofsuch universalist pretensions or obliviousness. Philosophy in LatinAmerica is very diverse, but one can discern a running thread ofdecolonial self-consciousness and aspiration. Thinkers from Europeand the United States persist even today in dismissing LatinAmerican philosophy, and as a result, Latin American philosophershave had to justify their prerogative, and their ability, to contributeto normative debates over the good, the right and the true. But thishas had the beneficial result of making visible the context in whichphilosophy occurs, and of disabling the usual pretensions of makingtranscendent abstractions removed from all concrete realities.



Sonia Sotomayorsclaims about the linkbetween identity andjudgment broughtvitriol, but her view is acommon-sense onemost everyone accepts.

All of the great thinkers, from Simn Bolvar to Jos Mart, JosCarlos Maritegui, Jos Vasconcelos, Leopoldo Zea, Che Guevara,and Enrique Dussel, have had to develop philosophical argumentswithin a contextual consciousness ever mindful of colonialismseffects in the realm of thought. Since the social identities racialand ethnic of their contexts were made grounds for dismissingclaims to self-determination or original thought, each of thesethinkers engaged with the question of Latin American cultural,racial and ethnic identities and histories. Its a rich tradition.Knowledge requires self-knowledge. Philosophys lack of diversityin North America has compromised its capacities for both self-knowledge and knowledge.

G.Y.:Your very last point raises issuesof standpoint epistemology the ideathat ones social identity is sometimesrelevant to what one notices and howone makes judgments. Im thinkinghere in terms of Supreme CourtJustice Sonia Sotomayors commentthat her experience being a wise Latinawoman would help her to reach better legal conclusions than awhite male. My sense is that there still exists within America theassumption (inside and outside the academy) that Latino/a voicesand black voices are biased/inferior voices. Yet, both within andoutside of the academy, it seems that there is a positive relationshipbetween racialized identities and the production of knowledge. Ithink that this question also speaks to the reality of race as lived.What is your view on this?

L.M.A.:One can make an analogy between how Latin Americanthinkers have had to theoretically reflect about the intellectual andpolitical effects of their geographical location and ethno-racialidentities, and the way everyone who is not white in North Americahas had to engage similar questions just as a necessity of survival ina white supremacist society. So as a result, outside of white-dominant spaces, the set of debates and discussions about such



RELATEDMoreFromTheStoneReadpreviouscontributionstothisseries.

topics is much richer, older and more developed, especially in theAfrican-American philosophical tradition, than anywhere else.Knowledge is not an automatic product of the experiencesengendered by different identities, I would suggest. But there ismore motivation to pursue certain kinds of knowledge, and oneoften has willing and able interlocutors in ones immediate homeand community environments who are comfortable with suchtopics and have reflected on and debated them. And it is also truethat simply the experience of being nonwhite provides a kind of rawdata for analysis.

Sotomayor received so much vitriol for her claims about the linkbetween identity and judgment that she was forced to renege onthem in order to be appointed to the Supreme Court. But the viewshe expressed is quite a common-sense view most everyone actuallyaccepts. Of course it is the case that our differences of backgroundand experience can affect what we are likely to know alreadywithout having to do a Google search, and these differences alsoinfluence what we may be motivated to find out. There is a wealth ofempirical work on jury selection that bears this out, and themembers of Congress and lawyers grilling Sotomayor knew thisliterature. But there is a taboo on speaking about the epistemicsalience of identity in our public domains of discourse, although itis a taboo that primarily plays out only for nonwhites, women, andother groups generally considered lower on our unspoken epistemichierarchies.

During the Sotomayor kerfuffle, JonStewart helpfully played back clips ofall the congressmen who played uptheir veteran status in their politicalcampaigns, and even Supreme Courtnominees who talked about their own modest class backgrounds asrelevant to their appointment to the court. It is only accepted forwhites, and white men in particular, to use their particularity toaugment their epistemic authority in this way, to generate aheightened trust in their judgment, almost never for others to do



the same.

This is itself an interesting issue to explore. Why can themainstream media acknowledge the positive epistemiccontributions of white particularities but no others? I believe theanswer is that it would simply be too dangerous to the social statusquo. Admitting the relevance of diversity to knowledge wouldrequire too much social change at every level and in nearly everysocial institution.

Some believe that capitalism will solve this problem with its naturaltendency to maximize profit over all other considerations, such thatif racism and sexism thwart product development, capital willpromote inclusion. I am skeptical of this. For one thing, capitalismprofits too much from racism and sexism to let go. And secondly,the need of corporations to diversify their management pool hasmore to do with the need to manage effectively a diversity of low-paid workers than anything else. And if racism and sexism helpmaintain the disempowered and underpaid conditions of thoseworkers, capitalism wins both ways.

If we were to acknowledge the relevance of identity to knowledge,the solution would not be simplistic diversity quotas, but a realengagement with the question of how our unspoken epistemichierarchies have distorted our educational institutions, researchprojects, academic and scientific fields of inquiry and general publicdiscourse across all of our diverse forms of media. And then wecould pursue a thorough attempt at solutions. Philosophers workingin many domains concerning epistemology, the social ontology ofidentity, moral psychology, the philosophy of science and others could contribute to these efforts, but philosophy must first directsuch efforts internally.

G.Y.:Lastly, what do you say to those philosophers of color whomight feel the pain of rejection, especially because, for them, theirracialized identities are so important to their philosophicalpractice/projects? And, more generally, what advice do you have for



our profession in terms of challenging those unspoken epistemichierarchies.

L.M.A.:Our profession continues to be an inhospitable climate forphilosophers of color working on race, so the first thing to do is toacknowledge this. Some significant progress has been made, it istrue, and there are a few high profile individuals, but one can nomore imagine that these individual successes show that the climateis now open and fair than we can imagine that Oprahs andBeyoncs successes prove that all is fine for black working women.Too many philosophers still operate with depoliticized notions ofreal philosophy and consider both feminist and critical race worksuspect because they are politically motivated rather thanconcerned only with truth. The result is a lot of micro-aggressions,as well as general neglect of the emerging scholarship.

I am not optimistic about convincing the mainstream. I dontbelieve that if we just do serious and good philosophical work thatits merit will shine through. To believe that, one would have tobelieve that philosophy is a true intellectual meritocracy, thatphilosophers are immune from racism and sexism and implicit bias,and that longstanding framing assumptions about the depoliticalnature of philosophy will not skew judgment.

A better solution lies in working multiple strategies: 1) carving out,and regularly nurturing, those spaces journals, professionalsocieties, conferences in which all who are interested in the sub-field of critical race philosophy can develop our work within aconstructively critical community; 2) developing our understandingof the sociology of the profession, in other words, the extent, causesand effects of its demographic challenges and hostile climate. Weneed to develop this understanding in a philosophical way, thatmight include, for example, new and more realistic norms ofepistemic justification and argumentation that can provide someredress for our non-ideal context of work; 3) doing as much as wecan to widen and strengthen the stream of young people of colorwho make a choice, an informed choice, hopefully, to try their hand


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at philosophy. The burden is on the marginalized and our allies todo this work. What else is new?

But what I would also say to young philosophers is that this isactually a great time to join the discipline. We have the beginningsof a critical mass, a beachhead, with multiple conferences now eachyear, several organizations such as the Society for the Study ofAfricana Philosophy, the Caribbean Philosophical Association andthe California Roundtable on Race. There is a new journal, CriticalPhilosophy of Race, as well as some receptivity in existing journals.And there is a growing community of frankly rather brilliant peoplebusily working to advance our collective understanding of race,racism and colonialism. Also, there are many students inundergraduate classrooms receptive to these questions. Themargins are flourishing and growing. In this sense, it is a positivemoment.

Thisinterviewwasconductedbyemailandedited.Previousinterviewsinthisseriescanbefoundhere.

GeorgeYancyisaprofessorofphilosophyatDuquesneUniversity.Hehaswritten,editedandcoeditednumerousbooks,includingBlackBodies,WhiteGazes,Look,aWhite!andPursuingTrayvon

Martin,coeditedwithJanineJones.

Alcoff Yancy_Philosophy's Lost Body and Soul - NYTimes

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