Must a person protest his wrongs? Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois debated this question at the turn of the century. They did not disagree over whether protesting injustice was an effective way to right it, but over whether protesting injustice, when one could do nothing to right it oneself, was self-respecting. Washington felt that it was not. Thus, he did not deny that protest could help ameliorate conditions or that it was sometimes justified; what he did deny was that a person should keep protesting wrongs committed against him when he could not take decisive steps to end them. By insisting on “advertising his wrongs” in such cases, he argued, a person betrayed a weakness for relying, not on his “own efforts” but on the “sympathy” of others. Washington’s position was that if a person felt wronged, he should do something about it; if he could do nothing he should hold his tongue and wait his opportunity; protest in such cases is only a servile appeal for sympathy; stoicism, by implication, is better. Dubois strongly contested these views. Not only did he deny that protest is an appeal for sympathy, he maintained that if a person failed to express openly his outrage at injustice, however assiduously he worked against it, he would in the long run lose his self-respect. Thus, he asserted that Washington faced a “paradox” by insisting both on “self-respect” and on “a silent submission to civic inferiority,” and he declared that “only in a . . . persistent demand for essential equality . . . can any people show . . . a decent self-respect.” Like Frederick Douglass, he concluded that people should protest their wrongs. In this essay I shall expand upon and defend Dubois’ side of the debate. I shall argue that persons have reason to protest their wrongs not only to stop injustice but also to show self-respect and to know themselves as self-respecting.
Knowledge, Human Interests, and Objectivity in Feminist Epistemology
This paper aims to defuse the hysteria over value-laden inquiry by showing how it is based on a misapprehension of the arguments of the most careful advocates of such inquiry, an impoverished understanding of the goals of science, a mistaken model of the interaction of normative and evidential considerations in science, and a singular inattention to the empirical facts about how responsible inquirers go about their business.
The Second Sex
Published in French in 1949, it is usually considered the foundational book of second wave feminism, characterized by a shift from the conquering of political rights of first wave feminism (franchise, basic emancipation) to a concern for general equality, at home, in the workplace, etc. Beauvoir’s (1908–1986) first question is the very definition of a woman, and her core ideas draw from phenomenology. She elaborates an existential account of being a woman: womanhood does not consist of fixed characteristics, but is a project carried out by a free agent in a material, collective situation, creating meaning through action in a given context. Understanding the category of woman as a collective construction and the result of a series of actions and representations allows for the re-actualization of the Marxist notion of alienation, where women are stranger to themselves, operating on values imposed by men rather than found in a lived practice. In two volumes, Beauvoir seeks to highlight both the cultural, historical and economical background of genders (“Facts and Myths”) and the “Lived Experience” resulting from it. Through a reading of Hegel, she rethinks gender categories as a dynamic and unequal process, and from there traces the possibility of a liberation from the perceived secondary character of women. Groundbreaking in feminist and continental philosophy, placed on the catholic Index of forbidden books, it remains a revolutionary work until today.
Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective
Academic and activist feminist inquiry has repeatedly tried to come to terms with the question of what we might mean by the curious and inescapable term “objectivity.” We have used a lot of toxic ink and trees processed into paper decrying what they have meant and how it hurts us. The imagined “they” constitute a kind of invisible conspiracy of masculinist scientists and philosophers replete with grants and laboratories. The imagined “we” are the embodied others, who are not allowed not to have a body, a finite point of view, and so an inevitably disqualifying and polluting bias in any discussion of consequence outside our own little circles, where a “mass”-subscription journal might reach a few thousand
readers composed mostly of science haters.
Black Skin, White Masks
Fanon (1925-1961) was born in the French West Indies and studied in France before moving to Algeria to join the independence struggle. In this text, originally published in French in 1952, he addresses the Black man’s condition, and more particularly his subjectivity and experience in the colonial context of the French West Indies and of France in general, also drawing parallel with North Africa and Indochina. Black Skin, White Masks is both a minute and complex description of the violence of colonization and a sketch of a liberation from its effects. A psychiatrist by training, Fanon investigates the psychological impact of both racism and colonization, with a strong focus on inter-subjective relations, including the intersection of race and gender relations. He uses a large variety of resources: philosophy (a critical reading of Sartre, an elaboration of Hegel’s slave-master dialectic, Leiris, Marcel, and contemporary linguistics) ; Marxism (materialism and alienation); psychiatry and psychoanalysis; the literary Négritude movement (Black Francophones writers who, starting in the 1930s, wrote about lived experience of blackness, displacement and colonialism). Its reception, though belated, has nevertheless made it one of the seminal works of postcolonial theory.
Can the Subaltern Speak?
In this talk given in 1983 at the University of Illinois, Spivak (b. 1942) criticizes a Western understanding of the political subject by examining how Third World subjects are perceived within Western discourse. She studies the way Western representations prevent the subaltern woman from making her own voice heard. Her critique depends on a definition of the subaltern, the “Other,” who is paradoxically both constituted and erased by Western theories, and is neither heard nor answered, leading Spivak to question their very possibility to speak. She specifically uses the history of British colonialism’s relation to the Hindu practice of sati, the ritual self-immolation of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre, which was read by the British as barbarism and deprived of the social signification it holds. Spivak highlights the contradictions of the so-called “civilizing mission” of colonialism, showing how women’s rights have been used by colonialism against the subalterns themselves, thereby robbing them of their own voices. Drawing critically on French theory (Derrida, Althusser, Deleuze, Foucault), Marxism (Marx, Benjamin, Gramsci) and other postcolonial scholars (Said), this landmark essay mobilizes historical documentation alongside critical theory to produce a seminal work of political and social philosophy. At the same time, Spivak offers a meta-philosophical enquiry, pointing to a major bias in the very constitution and discourse of the discipline.
Strategic Ignorance
I want to explore strategic expressions of ignorance against the background of Charles W. Mills’s account of epistemologies of ignorance in The Racial Contract (1997). My project has two interrelated goals. I want to show how Mills’s discussion is restricted by his decision to frame ignorance within the language and logic of social contract theory. And, I want to explain why Maria Lugones’s work on purity is useful in reframing ignorance in ways that both expand our understandings of ignorance and reveal its strategic uses. I begin with Mills’s account of the Racial Contract, and explain how it prescribes for its signatories an epistemology of ignorance, which Mills characterizes as an inverted epistemology. I briefly outline his program for undoing white ignorance and indicate that retooling white ignorance is more complex than his characterization suggests. Making this argument requires an abrupt shift from the white-created frameworks of social contract theory to Lugones’s system of thinking rooted in the lives of people of color. So, the next section outlines Lugones’s distinction between the logic of purity and the logic of curdling and explains its usefulness in addressing ignorance. With both accounts firmly in place the third section demonstrates how the Racial Contract produces at least two expressions of ignorance and explains how the logic of purity underlying the Contract shapes each expression in ways that limit possibilities for resistance. I don’t mean to suggest that the social contract theory’s love of purity invalidates Mills’s work, only that this framework limits prospects for long-term change by neglecting the relationship between white ignorance and non-white resistance. The final sections explain how people of color use ignorance strategically to their advantage , and argue that examining ignorance through a curdled lens not only makes strategic ignorance visible, but also points to alternatives for retooling white ignorance.
Necessary Propositions
I should like to make a few comments on a recent article on necessary propositions by Mr. Norman Malcolm. Not so much because of anything specifically said by Mr. Malcolm as because his article expresses a prevalent view. Mr. Malcolm rejects what may be called the ‘metaphysical’ view of these propositions, viz. that they describe a special realm of necessary facts known by a kind of interior ‘looking’ called intuition or self-evidence. But the main concern of his paper is to reject also the later positivist view that they are ‘really’ verbal…, that they are rules of grammar or commands to use words in certain ways.
The Cycles of Heaven and History: Some Notes on Approaching Historical Immortality and the Project of Reconciliation from a Look at Nineteenth Century Straits Chinese Philosophy
The pluralism of The Shadow of God invites us to also consider ‘non-Western’ ways of ‘coming to terms with the world’ in historical immortality and the project of reconciliation. I offer two methodological notes for any such undertaking. The first note elaborates on Rosen’s point that ‘“non-Western’ cultures have been heavily influenced by Western ones—even in their opposition to the West” by examining the forgotten Straits Chinese philosopher, Tan Teck Soon, in the context of fin-de-siècle British colonial Singapore. The second note concerns a commitment to anthropocentrism in such considerations and how it might condition our search for ‘non-Western’ ways out of the ‘spiritual situation of the West’, even if we are to find ‘non-Western’ cultures uninfluenced by ‘the West’ such as the early Daoist text of the Zhuangzi, which Tan based his version of historical immortality and attempt at the project of reconciliation upon
Public Artifacts and the Epistemology of Collective Material Testimony
Many artifacts that are part of the public landscape—including monuments, memorials, murals, and many viewing towers, arches, gardens, public sculptures, and buildings—are designed to communicate knowledge. It is common to describe such public artifacts as speech, and also to describe them as transmitting knowledge of one sort or another. But the claim that these artifacts can be knowledge-transmitting speech is not typically developed as the complex claim in philosophy of language and social epistemology that it is. I will argue that such public artifacts can be testimony. This raises several philosophically important questions: How can public artifacts be speech, and more specifically, how can they testify? Whose testimony are they? To whom and about what are they testifying? And what is the epistemological status of this testimony—when should it be trusted? Surely if public artifacts can testify, then they can also mislead; it would be strange for them to be a form of testimony that is always trustworthy. Taking seriously their status as testimony means taking seriously as well the ways in which they can communicate false or unentitled claims. I hope that the idea that public artifacts not only communicate but testify is prima facie plausible; it certainly seems like monuments, memorials, and public artworks, for instance, tell us things, and that they can tell the truth or lie to us.