This is the 13th in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with John D. Caputo, who is the Thomas J. Watson professor of religion emeritus at Syracuse University and David R. Cook professor of philosophy emeritus at Villanova University. He is the author of numerous books, including “The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps” and “Truth.” His next book, “Hoping Against Hope,” will appear this fall. — George Yancy

George Yancy: I’d like to begin with an observation — maybe an obvious one — that the task of engaging race or whiteness in philosophy has been taken up almost exclusively by nonwhite philosophers. My sense is that this is partly because whiteness is a site of privilege that makes it invisible to many white philosophers. I also think that some white philosophers would rather avoid thinking about how their own whiteness raises deeper philosophical questions about identity, power and hegemony, as this raises the question of personal responsibility. I have found that it is often very difficult to convince white philosophers that they should also take up this project in their work — they tend to avoid it, or don’t consider it philosophically relevant. Do you agree?

Stop us and ask, ‘To what extent is everything you just said a function of being white?’

John D. Caputo: “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. We tend to say “we” and to assume who “we” are, which once simply meant “we white male Euro-Christians.”

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Postmodern theory tries to interrupt that expression at every stop, to put every word in scare quotes, to put our own presuppositions into question, to make us worry about the murderousness of “we,” and so to get in the habit of asking, “we, who?” I think that what modern philosophers call “pure” reason — the Cartesian ego cogito and Kant’s transcendental consciousness — is a white male Euro-Christian construction.

White is not “neutral.” “Pure” reason is lily white, as if white is not a color or is closest to the purity of the sun, and everything else is “colored.” Purification is a name for terror and deportation, and “white” is a thick, dense, potent cultural signifier that is closely linked to rationalism and colonialism. What is not white is not rational. So white is philosophically relevant and needs to be philosophically critiqued — it affects what we mean by “reason” — and “we” white philosophers cannot ignore it.

G.Y.: Do you think that this avoidance of race among white philosophers is rooted in fear?

J.D.C.: I think that racism arises from a profound fear of the other, and fear is not far from hatred. But my experience is that most philosophers, most academics, are quite progressive in their thinking about race and sexuality and politics generally and they are often active in progressive causes. My guess is that if they don’t write professionally about racism — I suspect it is often part of their teaching — it is in part because of a certain thoughtlessness, like my “Nordo-centrism.” I am not afraid of the Southern Hemisphere; it just didn’t hit me that this expression assumes “we” all live in the Northern one!



But I also think we have to take account of the professionalization and corporatization of the university, where our livelihood depends upon becoming furiously specialized technicians who publish in very narrow areas. Racism — like sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, religious discrimination, mistreatment of animals, environmental destruction, economic inequality — is a complex problem. All these problems demand to be addressed responsibly, and that requires expertise, a command of the literature, a knowledge of history, etc. No one can do all that, especially people trying to find jobs and later on get tenure and promotion, unless it intersects with their specialty in some pertinent way.

We all learned from Hannah Arendt a long time ago about the long arm of thoughtlessness, which she ventured to say reaches as far as the death camps.

It is usually the damage done by religious dogmatism that occupies my attention. So I am at least as guilty as other white philosophers. My own work has always involved theorizing the “other,” the claim made upon us by those who are excluded by the prevailing system, so I am always on the verge of mentioning race and even have race and other powers of exclusion in mind.

My shortcoming is that I lack the expertise to get down in the dirt with most of these problems; the advantage is that my work has a suggestiveness to a lot of people on the front lines in different life-situations, who grasp its application and tell me it helps them with their work.

G.Y.: Given that you claim above that white philosophers can not responsibly ignore the subject of race, what do you think must be done to get them — and the ways they understand philosophy — to change?

J.D.C.: More often than not I do not analyze race explicitly unless I am asked to; it’s only then I find there are new things for me to say. I guess that means that one solution is to do what you’re doing now — ask us! Interrupt us. Stop us and ask, “To what extent is everything you just said a function of being white?” There’s a fair chance we never asked ourselves that question. And get the courses that do raise this question into the curriculum.

G.Y.: You mentioned that most philosophers and most academics are quite progressive, but often slip into a kind of unintentional thoughtlessness. Still, the recipients of such thoughtlessness can suffer deeply. And even “progressives” can continue to perpetuate deep systemic forms of discrimination in problematic ways. Do you think that thoughtlessness can function as an “excuse” for not engaging more rigorously in combating various structures of systemic power?

J.D.C.: No doubt. We all learned from Hannah Arendt a long time ago about the long arm of thoughtlessness, which she ventured to say reaches as far as the death camps. Every time I am asked to say something about race — or the environment or sexism or these other issues we’ve mentioned — I feel like Augustine in the “Confessions” praying and weeping over his sins. In these matters I follow Levinas. When he analyzes ethics as an asymmetric relationship to the other — that means the other overtakes us, lays claim to us with or without our consent — he says a good conscience is fraudulent. This means our responsibility never ends and we can never say it has been discharged. It is when we think that things are fine that we are not thinking. It’s just when we say “peace, peace” that the lack of peace descends on us. We coast on the status quo and we need the unrelenting provocation of responsible intellectuals, artists, journalists and the media to remind us of our complacency about the suffering that is all around us.

G.Y.: You’ve argued that true religion or prophetic religion engages the real, involves a process of risk, especially as it demands, as you’ve said, serving those who have been oppressed, marginalized, orphaned. Etymologically, religion comes from “religare,” which means to “bind fast.” I wonder if that process of binding fast is with those who are the strangers, the orphans, the unarmed black men recently killed by police, women who are sexually objectified, the poor, etc.

The great scandal of the United States is that it has produced an anti-gospel, the extremes of appalling wealth and poverty.

J.D.C.: Yes, it is, of course. In the gospel Jesus announces his ministry by saying he has come to proclaim good news to the poor and imprisoned and the year of the Jubilee, which meant massive economic redistribution every 50th year! Can you imagine the Christian right voting for that? The great scandal of the United States is that it has produced an anti-gospel, the extremes of appalling wealth and poverty. But instead of playing the prophetic role of Amos denouncing the American Jeroboam, instead of working to close that gap, the policies of the right wing are exacerbating it.

That has been felt in a particularly cruel way among black men and women and children, where poverty is the most entrenched and life is the most desperate. The popularity of such cruel ideas, their success in the ballot box, is terrifying to me. The trigger-happy practices of the police, not all police, but too many police, on the streets of black America should alert everyone to how profoundly adrift American democracy has become — attacking the poor as freeloaders and criminals, a distorted and grotesque ideological exaggeration of freedom over equality. The scandal is that the Christian right has too often been complicit with a politics of greed and hatred of the other.

To be sure, younger evangelicals are becoming critical of their elders on this point, and I am trying to reach them in my own work, and there are also many examples of prophetic religion, like the Catholic parish in a North Philadelphia ghetto that I wrote about in “What Would Jesus Deconstruct?” The secular left, on the other hand, won’t touch religion with a stick and abandons the ground of religion to the right. So both the left and the right have a hand around the throat of prophetic religion.

G.Y.: You raise a few important issues here. I wonder what it would look like for a white police officer to see an unarmed black man/boy through the eyes of prophetic religion. On an international stage, I imagine that both Palestinians and Jews would begin to see one another differently, where each would feel the deep ethical weight of the other.

J.D.C.: Prophetic does not mean the ability to foretell the future. It means the call for justice for “the widow, the orphan and the stranger,” the affirmation that the mark of God is on the face of everyone who is down and out, and a prophetic sensibility requires walking a mile in the shoes of the other.

I remember years ago, the president of a local college (in the Quaker tradition) took a year’s leave of absence to work as a trash collector. I think you are hitting on an irreducible element in the phenomenology of “alterity,” the very nub of it: Were I there, there would be “here.” That is a simple thought whose depth we never plumb. In my own work I cite it frequently to criticize the idea of “the one true religion.” We have seven grandchildren and when the last one was born I remember thinking that a little black child was also being born that day, as dear and innocent as our granddaughter, who was going home to a desperate situation where the odds will be stacked against her. We begin with an originary natal equality and then we crush it. “Switched at birth” stories, like Mark Twain’s “The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson,” have a deep ethical and political import. Were I there, there would be here. That should transform everything.

G.Y.: On June 17, 2015, a white male shot and killed nine people in the historic African-American Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Baptist Church in Charleston, S.C. There was no apparent capacity on the part of this white male to walk in the shoes of the other, to envision black life as anything other than disposable.

At a certain point in my career I decided to let my heart have a word.

J.D.C.: Exactly. This was a white man declaring these lives not merely worthless but, still worse, a threat to the “natural order” — what form of oppression does not hide behind the “natural order?” — of the supremacy of the so-called white race. There is a qualitative difference here. This was not the result of a split-second miscalculation or a misunderstanding by a policeman in a tense situation. This was a ruthless execution. Here the other does not overtake me but lies beneath me, contemptible and abject. This is pure hatred of the other.

G.Y.: Staying on the theme of walking in the shoes of the other, can you speak to the recent revelation regarding Rachel Dolezal passing as black? Do you see this as a genuine dwelling with the other or as a form of appropriation?

J.D.C.: I can only assume her intentions were good but I think she was misguided. You can’t be an “intentional” victim, adopt it freely, because that means you are always free to walk away from it if the going gets rough, take a few weeks off for a holiday, or just you change your mind. So it ends up making a mockery of the oppressed — the biting edge of oppression is that is not of your own choosing! People who try to walk a mile in the shoes of the other, to live among and dedicate their lives to working with the oppressed, are also sensitive to the fact of their own privilege. They know they can never truly identify with them. They understand this paradox but it doesn’t paralyze them. This problem also comes up in Christian theology — God intentionally assumed our mortal condition but it wasn’t an inescapable plight visited upon the divine being without its consent.

G.Y.: Is there a version of philosophy that “binds us” philosophers to the real, one that requires risking our necks for the least of these?

J.D.C.: That is the attraction of postmodern philosophy to me, which is a philosophy of radical pluralism. It theorizes alterity, calls for unrelenting sensitivity to difference, and teaches us about the danger of our own power, our freedom, our “we.” I think that philosophy is not only a work of the mind but also of the heart, and it deals with ultimate matters about which we cannot be disinterested observers. So at a certain point in my career I decided to let my heart have a word, to write in a more heartfelt way, which of course is to push against the protocols of the academy. That is why I advised my graduate students, only half in jest, that it would be too risky for them to write like that, and safer to wait until they were tenured full professors!

Related More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series.

Furthermore, we do not merely write, we teach. Teaching means interacting in a fully embodied and engaged way with young people at a very precious moment in their life — when they are most ready to hear something different. Here philosophy professors brush up against what I consider the religious and prophetic quality of their work, even if they resist those words. Our work is a vocation before it is a form of employment.

Of course, this is possible in any philosophical style or tradition, but this is the special attraction of “Continental” philosophy for me. This style of thinking erupted in the 19th century with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who wrote with their blood, as we say, and the young Marx, and stretched from phenomenology to post-structuralism in the 20th century, and came to a head under the name of postmodernism, the affirmation of difference and plurality in a dizzying, digitalized world. This tradition speaks from the heart, speaks to the heart.

I came to philosophy through religion and theology and as a result philosophy has always had a salvific and prophetic quality for me. It has always been a way to save myself, even as in antiquity philosophy did not mean an academic specialty but a way of living wisely. This is all threatened today by the professionalization of the university, of our teaching and our writing.

G.Y.: The 20th century French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard claimed that postmodernism involved a resistance toward and critical questioning of metanarratives — “big stories” like the Enlightenment, the march of scientific progress, or the supremacy of the West, that legitimate nations or cultures. I think postmodernism has tremendous value in terms of critically engaging racism. Yet metanarratives are also powerful, and resistant to being undone. Besides encouraging white people to become more thoughtful, how do we do the deeper ethical work of dwelling near one another, recognizing our shared humanity?

J.D.C.: “Emancipation” is a prophetic call that never stops calling. If we take it as a meta-narrative, then we run the danger of being lulled into a myth of progress, and we have seen how successful the right has been in reversing progress in civil rights and fair elections. But if I am dubious about meta-narratives, I am not dubious about prophetic action, which lies in singular sustained acts of resistance.

I have several times used the example of Rosa Parks. She did not one day, out of the blue, refuse to give up her seat and move to the back of the bus, nor was she even the first one to do that. What she did that day was another in a long line of acts of resistance, but this one worked. This one “linked” as Lyotard would put it. It set off a citywide bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., which was led by a young pastor no one ever heard of who ran a local church, a fellow named Martin Luther King Jr. The rest is history — a history the right would like to undo. So Rosa Parks did the right thing at the right time in the right place. She set off the “perfect storm” — for racists!

I have a hope against hope not in meta-narratives but in singular actions like that. Singular, but consistent and resolute.

G.Y.: Lastly, do you think that we need more prophetic voices in the world? What sort of Bildung or educational cultivation might help to generate more prophetic voices as opposed to those voices that appear to be seduced by power and narrow thinking?

J.D.C.: The prophetic voices are often the voices of obscure people who have no idea they’re prophets, who produce changes they never dreamed possible. So massive changes, structural changes, tend to be a function of mini-changes, singular deeds of singular people. We require a massive change in a culture of greed and selfishness, where the concept of the “common good” is moribund, never even mentioned.

One place this change should be focused is the children, investing in the schools, lifting up a generation of desperately disadvantaged children in the ghettos, which I think is the best shot we have to break the cycle of poverty. There is no better place to experience the prophetic call of the other than in the face of a child in need, no better way to “dwell near” the other, as you put it.

Right now, with electoral districts gerrymandered against the poor, and with the unchecked flow of right wing wealth into political campaigns, the electoral process that is supposed to address these problems has been profoundly distorted and corrupted. Right now, I fear it will take a generation to correct that. But the whole idea of prophetic action is that it is precisely when we are sure that things can never be changed that a woman refuses to sit in the back of the bus and the whole world changes. I also have hope in contemporary systems of communication. If we can keep them open, otherwise invisible individual acts of resistance — and oppression — become visible. That will keep the future open. That is our hope against hope.

This interview was conducted by email and edited. Previous interviews in this series (with Linda Martin Alcoff, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Charles Mills, Falguni A. Sheth, Peter Singer and others) can be found here.

George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Duquesne University. He has written, edited and co-edited numerous books, including “Black Bodies, White Gazes,” “Look, a White!” and “Pursuing Trayvon Martin,” co-edited with Janine Jones.