racism
Tag“On The Brink of Collapse”: The Philosophical Society of South Africa
The Philosophical Society of South Africa (PSSA), a professional association of philosophers “representing the interests of the academic philosophical community in Southern Africa,” is “on the brink of collapse over allegations of racism,” according to the Mail & Guardian. At its annual meeting last month, the organization’s president, Vasti Roodt (Stellenbosch), an..
Reconsidering Implicit Bias
At the time of this post, bibliographic philosophy database PhilPapers has 1,975,719 entries. Of these, only 74 works seem to be about “implicit bias”—subconscious bias concerning, for example, race, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexuality. One might think, then, that the idea of implicit bias hasn’t been of much importance in philosophy. Yet, while there is n..
Cosmopolitan Racism, Trump, and Philosophy (guest post by Bharath Vallabha)
The following is a guest post* from Bharath Vallabha, former assistant professor of philosophy at Bryn Mawr College.
“Trump is actually much more aligned with the dominant norms of academic philosophy in America than with the KKK”
Police Shootings of Blacks in the U.S.; What Can Philosophers Do or Say in Response?
News from the past week:
- July 5th, 2016:Â Police officer shoots and kills Alton Sterling, a black man, while he was seemingly pinned to the ground, unable to move.
- July 6th, 2016: Police officer shoots and kills Philandro Castile, a black man, after he was pulled over for a broken tail light.
- July 7th, 2016: Five police officers killed by sniper fire durin..
Student Faces Tribunal for Calling Philosophy Professor “Racist”
Busi Mkhumbuzi, an undergraduate at the University of Cape Town (UCT), reports that she has been “summoned by the Student Tribunal” (part of the university’s apparatus for addressing offenses committed by students) for spreading “racist and defamatory remarks” about UCT philosophy professor David Benatar. Mkhumbuzi says she has called Benatar “racist, ableist and se..
The Ethics of Honoring
The recent wave of student protests in the United States have focused on a range of issues related to the status and treatment of racial minorities and other vulnerable parties on campus. One issue that has come up on several occasions are the ways in which universities have decided to honor various historical figures—for example, by naming buildings after them, o..
Missouri Philosophy Issues Statement on Controversy over Racist Incidents (two updates)
The University of Missouri’s governing board is holding a meeting this morning to decide how to respond to calls by students and others for its president, Tim Wolfe, to resign. The calls for Wolfe’s resignation follow a number of racist incidents at the university over the past few months and are a response to the perceived lack of a satisfactory response to these i..
Microaggressions and Academic Freedom
Any characterization of the United States as “a melting pot,” for example, is classified in widely used training materials as a microaggression signaling a refusal to acknowledge the role that race plays in American society. The same goes for saying “Everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough” or “I believe the most qualified person should get the..
Philosophers on the Charleston Massacre
About 9 p.m., the Bible study concludes. As the group prepares to share a concluding prayer, Roof suddenly stands, pulls out a .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol and says he has come to kill black people. He shoots the Rev. Pinckney first, at near point-blank range. Simmons tries to protect the pastor, a father of two young children, but Roof shoots him multiple time..
Police Violence, Race, and…?
By now most of you will have heard about the two most recent publicized incidents of police killing unarmed black men in the United States. (Warning: the following videos are very disturbing.)  One was a shooting that took place in South Carolina:
The other, even more horrifically, was the allowing of a police dog to maul to death a New Jersey man who had alread..
Students Object to Philosophy Prof’s Facebook Post About Gaza
Andrew Pessin, professor of philosophy at Connecticut College, is at the center of a controversy at Connecticut College regarding offensive speech for a Facebook post he wrote in August, 2014. In the post, reports Inside Higher Ed,
Pessin describes the situation in Gaza as one in which “a rabid pit bull is chained in a cage, regularly making mass efforts to escap..
New Site for Discussions of Discrimination & Disadvantage
Discrimination and Disadvantage is a new blog developed by Thomas Nadelhoffer (College of Charleston) and Kevin Timpe (Northwest Nazarene U.) for discussions about the philosophy of discrimination and disadvantage, as well as of discrimination and disadvantage in the philosophy profession. As they put it in their mission statement,
In recent years, philosophers h..
Habermas on the Return of Exiled Jewish Philosophers
In an essay at Tablet Magazine, Jürgen Habermas describes the impact of Jewish philosophers and sociologists who returned to Germany after the Holocaust. An exceerpt:
On the present occasion I cannot make a contribution to exile research, but only sift through some recollections from the unreliable perspective of a contemporary witness. After their return to the ..
Another Explanation for Philosophy’s Whiteness
In most philosophy classes the religious traditions of the Middle East and Asia are in the periphery as the other to philosophy – the impulses to conformism and irrationality which are to overcome by the self-reflection and rationality of philosophy. But regarding philosophy Africa is treated as the other to the other, as being the birthplace of human beings but not..
The Moral Psychology of Racist Brutality
Kate Manne (Cornell) writes in The Stone in The New York Times that the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, and the events that have occurred in its wake, suggest that a traditional understanding of racism is mistaken:
One possibility is that people are treated brutally because those who mistreat them fail to grasp their common humanity — or, similarly,..
The History of Racism in Philosophy
Christoph Meiners (1747-1810), a philosophy professor at the University of Göttingen and prolific scholar, initiated “a successful campaign to exclude Africa and Asia from the history of philosophy.” In turn, Wilhelm Tennemann (1761-1819), the most important Kantian historian at the turn of the 19th century, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (who observed that “real..