“White” is of the utmost relevance to philosophy, and postmodern theory helps us to see why. I was once criticized for using the expression “true north.” It reflected my Nordo-centrism, my critic said, and my insensitivity to people who live in the Southern Hemisphere. Of course, no such thing had ever crossed my mind, but that points to the problem.

Well, here's how it starts:I reckon there must be at least two kinds of people...those who might continue to waste their time reading this, and those who perform triage at this point, realizing that life is short, and move on...Just for the record, it simply doesn't seem to be true at all that "'white' is of the utmost relevance to philosophy"...whatthehellever that is supposed to mean... In the face of crap like this, I find it annoying to have to note that race is a pretty important topic. In fact, it's important enough that it's probably a bit difficult to exaggerate its importance. And yet folks over in that academic quadrant routinely do so. Race simply isn't the end-all and be-all of human existence. It's an important topic. But, honestly, it's not that philosophically important. It's important politically, and in terms of policy. But it's not important from every perspective or in every discipline. It's not important mathematically. I'm led to believe that it's really not all that important to biology. And it's not that important philosophically either. But many philosophers are liberals and lefter-than-liberals, and such people love to gnash their teeth and rend their garments about race and sex... So here we are. And who knows? Arguments might emerge some day that show that we philosophers ought to be doing just that. But they don't exist now.The Caputo interview is long. I didn't make it very far into it. Philosophy, as you may know, is a sprawling kind of discipline, and to say the very least, someone like me has very little in common with someone like Caputo...someone who, for example, thinks that the distinction between geodetic north and magnetic north is fraught with "Nordocentrism"... (In fact, it's probably worse than that...it's probably just some whining about the use of the word 'true' in conjunction with the word 'north'...) Philosophy can be good, but bad philosophy is really, really bad. Bad philosophy is a confusion force multiplier. Sadly, this toxic soup of postmodernism etc., leftist politics, and an obsession with mere words has led many people in the humanities and social sciences down the rabbit hole. I can only urge others, in the strongest possible terms, not to follow them.