G.Y.: You mentioned Adrian Piper. As you know, she was the first African-American woman tenured philosopher in the United States. I recall asking her about some of the obstacles that black women face in philosophy, and she was rightly critical of what she saw as a racist and sexist perception of black women in philosophy as “maids or prostitutes.” Do black women in philosophy continue to be stereotyped in such denigrating ways?



A.L.A.: Adrian Piper and I were colleagues at Georgetown University in the late 1980s and close friends for longer. I shared with her my stories of denigration, which may have contributed to what she said to you.

My dissertation chairman was Richard Brandt. Once after I had earned the doctorate and was meeting with him, he stood over me, lifted my chin toward him and remarked that I looked like a maid his family once employed. Around the same time, early in the Ronald Reagan administration, an effort was made to rid Washington of the sex trade and shops that flourished along the 14th Street corridor a few blocks from the White House. I worked in nearby McPherson Square at the National Endowment for the Humanities and, as a volunteer at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. One day I was walking near my office with a white male friend, a philosopher at an Ivy League university. We were stopped by the police, who profiled us as a hooker and john. I had to answer questions and show ID.

Is the denigration of black women philosophers a thing of decades past? Are we beyond being asked to fetch coffee for department chairs and worse? Regrettably, no. In October 2017 a very senior Harvard-educated white male philosopher, whose wife is also an academic, wrote to me seeking feedback on an op-ed he hoped to submit to The New York Times or The Washington Post. He did not like my feedback. He ended an email lamenting his failure to get anything more than “duncical shit” as feedback on his work by letting me know that he had recently imagined seeing my face in the photographs he used in masturbation! Incredible, right? I wrote back to explain why I was offended and to sever ties. I assume that if such a thing could happen to me, some very, very serious harassment and racism must be happening to young women in the field.

G.Y.: Each of those experiences are degrading, Anita. But concerning the third one, though, he could have kept that to himself. Why would he feel the need to tell you this? Was it about control and dehumanization? Was it impunity on his part? I think that we also need to keep in mind that he is white and that he shared it. This does not escape the history of white men and the racist depiction of black women as “Jezebels.”