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This is the sixth in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with Linda Martín Alcoff, a professor of philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She was the president of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, for 2012-13. She is the author of “Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self.” — George Yancy

George Yancy: What is the relationship between your identity as a Latina philosopher and the philosophical interrogation of race in your work?

Linda Martín Alcoff: Every single person has a racial identity, at least in Western societies, and so one might imagine that the topic of 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 our faces in particularly unsettling ways, often from an early age. This can spark reflection as well as nascent social critique.



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The relationship between my identity and my philosophical interest in race is simply a continuation through the tools of philosophy the pursuit that I began as a kid, growing up in Florida in the 1960s, watching the civil rights movement as it was portrayed in the media and perceived by the various parts of my family, white and nonwhite. I experienced school desegregation, the end of Jim Crow, and the war in Indochina, a war that also made apparent the racial categories used to differentiate peoples, at enormous cost. It was clear to me from a young age that “we” were the ones with no value for life, at least the life of those who were not white.

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

To imagine all of our wild diversity in embodiment to be irrelevant required a bad faith that can be seen throughout the canon: racist asides and ridiculous theories about women alongside generic pronouncements about justice and beauty and the route to truth.

G.Y.: So, given these early experiences, were you drawn to philosophical questions of racial identity?

In philosophy I was drawn to topics of knowledge (epistemology) and metaphysics, never ethics, which may seem odd given this background. But the issue of metaphysics raised questions about how we name what is, and the issue of epistemology raised questions about how we know what we think we know. Hence, these sub-fields opened the way for me to consider the contestations over reality as well as over authority. Of course, the received canon in philosophy was both useful and infuriatingly silent on the topics I was most interested in: bodies showed up little, and difference was routinely set aside, and yet the debates over mereological essentialism and other concepts illustrated the possibility of multiple right answers and of a social and practical context silently guiding the debate. Quine was in vogue and his ideas about contingent rather than necessary ways to name what is was a short step from the political analysis of dominant ways of naming that I was interested in.

For many years my personal and my philosophical life were lived as parallel tracks with little overt interaction. I went to demonstrations, and then came home to finish my Heidegger homework. I glanced across the fence now and then, but did not attempt serious philosophical engagement with race until I had published enough that had nothing to do with race or gender or Latin American philosophy to establish a foothold in the profession. Tenure set me free, and I immediately began a project on the metaphysics of mixed-race identities.

G.Y.: You mentioned how questions of embodiment were not treated in any substantive way in your early philosophical training. Why is it that the profession of philosophy, generally speaking, is still resistant to questions of embodiment and by extension questions 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 can explain human experience of all sorts. And the ultimate aim, of course, is not description but prescription: how can we come to understand ourselves better, to know better, to understand our world better, and to treat each other better? Worthy goals, but they are usually pursued with a decontextualized approach, as if the best answers would work for everyone. To get at that meta-level of generality, some aspects of one’s context need to be set aside, lopped off, cut out of the picture, and this has traditionally meant the concrete materiality of human existence as we actually experience it in embodied human form.

This is just a way of saying that the body had to be ignored except in so far as we could imagine our bodies to be essentially the same. And to achieve that trick of imagination — to imagine all of our wild diversity in embodiment to be irrelevant — required a bad faith that can be seen throughout the canon: racist asides and ridiculous theories about women alongside generic pronouncements about justice and beauty and the route to truth.

I call it bad faith because, on the one hand, nearly all the great philosophers divided human beings into moral and intellectual hierarchies even while, on the other hand, they presumed, from their consciously particularist space, to speak for all. Hence, methodologically, the problem for philosophy is how to speak for all when one does not, in fact, speak to all. And the solution is to enact a doublespeak in which one justifies not speaking to the mass of humanity at the same time that one imagines oneself to be speaking for the human core which exists in all of us. The body, and difference, is simultaneously acknowledged and disavowed.

This is why philosophers such as Bartolomé de Las Casas in the 16th century and W.E.B. DuBois from even his early writings in the 19th century are such powerful figures: They each explore their own specificity and its impact on how they view the world and others, even to how they formulate moral questions. They model a discourse that can become part of a general dialogue in which others can have a voice as well.

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

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

Latin American philosophers have had to justify their prerogative, and their ability, to contribute to normative debates over the good, the right and the true.

It is inevitable that these social realities will find some manifestation in white-majority (or even exclusively white) philosophy classrooms. This is especially so given the fact that philosophy curricular requirements almost never include course topics that might enhance students’ knowledge or capacity to reflect about these realities. So it should be no surprise that the work (teaching and scholarship) produced by a white-majority philosophy profession manifests, in general, an assumed entitlement to rights and resources, comfort and attention, access to space, and deference. They assume the ability to access all knowledge, and resent (and resist) theories that might restrict that access, on the grounds, for example, that one’s identity and experience play a formative role in what one can understand on some matters. They assume the right to dominate the space — literal and figurative — of philosophical thought and discussion. They assume the right to have attention and they assume this is nonreciprocal: others should be reading their work even while they neglect to read the work of nonwhites. I am speaking in gross generalities that will be unfair to numerous individuals, but the patterns I am describing are, I suggest, familiar to marginalized philosophers.

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

L.M.A.: The philosophies developed in the colonized world during the emergence of European modernity have not had the luxury of such universalist pretensions or obliviousness. Philosophy in Latin America is very diverse, but one can discern a running thread of decolonial self-consciousness and aspiration. Thinkers from Europe and the United States persist even today in dismissing Latin American philosophy, and as a result, Latin American philosophers have had to justify their prerogative, and their ability, to contribute to normative debates over the good, the right and the true. But this has had the beneficial result of making visible the context in which philosophy occurs, and of disabling the usual pretensions of making transcendent abstractions removed from all concrete realities.

All of the great thinkers, from Simón Bolívar to José Martí, José Carlos Mariátegui, José Vasconcelos, Leopoldo Zea, Che Guevara, and Enrique Dussel, have had to develop philosophical arguments within a contextual consciousness ever mindful of colonialism’s effects in the realm of thought. Since the social identities — racial and ethnic — of their contexts were made grounds for dismissing claims to self-determination or original thought, each of these thinkers engaged with the question of Latin American cultural, racial and ethnic identities and histories. It’s a rich tradition. Knowledge requires self-knowledge. Philosophy’s lack of diversity in North America has compromised its capacities for both self-knowledge and knowledge.

Sonia Sotomayor’s claims about the link between identity and judgment brought vitriol, but her view is a common-sense one most everyone accepts.

G.Y.: Your very last point raises issues of standpoint epistemology — the idea that one’s social identity is sometimes relevant to what one notices and how one makes judgments. I’m thinking here in terms of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s comment that her experience being a wise Latina woman would help her to reach better legal conclusions than a white male. My sense is that there still exists within America the assumption (inside and outside the academy) that Latino/a voices and black voices are biased/inferior voices. Yet, both within and outside of the academy, it seems that there is a positive relationship between “racialized” identities and the production of knowledge. I think 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 American thinkers have had to theoretically reflect about the intellectual and political effects of their geographical location and ethno-racial identities, and the way everyone who is not white in North America has had to engage similar questions just as a necessity of survival in a white supremacist society. So as a result, outside of white-dominant spaces, the set of debates and discussions about such topics is much richer, older and more developed, especially in the African-American philosophical tradition, than anywhere else. Knowledge is not an automatic product of the experiences engendered by different identities, I would suggest. But there is more motivation to pursue certain kinds of knowledge, and one often has willing and able interlocutors in one’s immediate home and community environments who are comfortable with such topics and have reflected on and debated them. And it is also true that simply the experience of being nonwhite provides a kind of raw data for analysis.

Sotomayor received so much vitriol for her claims about the link between identity and judgment that she was forced to renege on them in order to be appointed to the Supreme Court. But the view she expressed is quite a common-sense view most everyone actually accepts. Of course it is the case that our differences of background and experience can affect what we are likely to know already without having to do a Google search, and these differences also influence what we may be motivated to find out. There is a wealth of empirical work on jury selection that bears this out, and the members of Congress and lawyers grilling Sotomayor knew this literature. But there is a taboo on speaking about the epistemic salience of identity in our public domains of discourse, although it is a taboo that primarily plays out only for nonwhites, women, and other groups generally considered lower on our unspoken epistemic hierarchies.

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

During the Sotomayor kerfuffle, Jon Stewart helpfully played back clips of all the congressmen who played up their veteran status in their political campaigns, and even Supreme Court nominees who talked about their own modest class backgrounds as relevant to their appointment to the court. It is only accepted for whites, and white men in particular, to use their particularity to augment their epistemic authority in this way, to generate a heightened trust in their judgment, almost never for others to do the same.

This is itself an interesting issue to explore. Why can the mainstream media acknowledge the positive epistemic contributions of white particularities but no others? I believe the answer is that it would simply be too dangerous to the social status quo. Admitting the relevance of diversity to knowledge would require too much social change at every level and in nearly every social institution.

Some believe that capitalism will solve this problem with its natural tendency to maximize profit over all other considerations, such that if racism and sexism thwart product development, capital will promote inclusion. I am skeptical of this. For one thing, capitalism profits too much from racism and sexism to let go. And secondly, the need of corporations to diversify their management pool has more to do with the need to manage effectively a diversity of low-paid workers than anything else. And if racism and sexism help maintain the disempowered and underpaid conditions of those workers, 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 real engagement with the question of how our unspoken epistemic hierarchies have distorted our educational institutions, research projects, academic and scientific fields of inquiry and general public discourse across all of our diverse forms of media. And then we could pursue a thorough attempt at solutions. Philosophers working in many domains — concerning epistemology, the social ontology of identity, moral psychology, the philosophy of science and others — could contribute to these efforts, but philosophy must first direct such efforts internally.

G.Y.: Lastly, what do you say to those philosophers of color who might feel the pain of rejection, especially because, for them, their racialized identities are so important to their philosophical practice/projects? And, more generally, what advice do you have for our profession in terms of challenging those “unspoken epistemic hierarchies.”

L.M.A.: Our profession continues to be an inhospitable climate for philosophers of color working on race, so the first thing to do is to acknowledge this. Some significant progress has been made, it is true, and there are a few high profile individuals, but one can no more imagine that these individual successes show that the climate is now open and fair than we can imagine that Oprah’s and Beyoncé’s successes prove that all is fine for black working women. Too many philosophers still operate with depoliticized notions of “real” philosophy and consider both feminist and critical race work suspect because they are politically motivated rather than concerned 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 don’t believe that if we just do serious and good philosophical work that its merit will shine through. To believe that, one would have to believe that philosophy is a true intellectual meritocracy, that philosophers are immune from racism and sexism and implicit bias, and that longstanding framing assumptions about the depolitical nature of philosophy will not skew judgment.

A better solution lies in working multiple strategies: 1) carving out, and regularly nurturing, those spaces — journals, professional societies, conferences — in which all who are interested in the sub-field of critical race philosophy can develop our work within a constructively critical community; 2) developing our understanding of the sociology of the profession, in other words, the extent, causes and effects of its demographic challenges and hostile climate. We need to develop this understanding in a philosophical way, that might include, for example, new and more realistic norms of epistemic justification and argumentation that can provide some redress for our non-ideal context of work; 3) doing as much as we can to widen and strengthen the stream of young people of color who make a choice, an informed choice, hopefully, to try their hand at philosophy. The burden is on the marginalized and our allies to do this work. What else is new?

But what I would also say to young philosophers is that this is actually a great time to join the discipline. We have the beginnings of a critical mass, a beachhead, with multiple conferences now each year, several organizations such as the Society for the Study of Africana Philosophy, the Caribbean Philosophical Association and the California Roundtable on Race. There is a new journal, Critical Philosophy of Race, as well as some receptivity in existing journals. And there is a growing community of frankly rather brilliant people busily working to advance our collective understanding of race, racism and colonialism. Also, there are many students in undergraduate classrooms receptive to these questions. The margins are flourishing and growing. In this sense, it is a positive moment.

This interview was conducted by email and edited. Previous interviews in this series 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.