Aesthetic evaluations of human bodies have important implications for moral recognition and for individuals’ access to social and material goods. Unfortunately, there is a widespread aesthetic disregard for non-white bodies. Aesthetic evaluations depend on the aesthetic properties we regard objects as having. And it is widely agreed that aesthetic properties are directly accessed in our experience of aesthetic objects. How, then, might we explain aesthetic evaluations that systematically favour features associated with white identity? Critical race philosophers, like Alia Al-Saji, Mariana (...) Ortega, Paul C. Taylor, and George Yancy, argue that this is because the perception of racialized bodies is affected by the social structures in which they are appreciated. The aim of this paper is to propose how social structures can affect aesthetic perception. I argue that mental imagery acquired through the interaction with aesthetic phenomena structures the perception of non-aesthetic properties of bodies, so that aesthetic properties consistent with racist stereotypes are attributed to individuals. (shrink)

In this article I present a discussion about the purpose of education of, for and with black, working class, young women within an inner-London, twenty-first century college, and explore the complex and imperfect ways that educational purpose translates into educational practice. I discuss the respective value of two contrasting discourses of education that operate in this college: firstly, a neoliberal discourse of education and educational success; secondly, a critical tradition of education, as traced through the work of Paulo Freire, feminist (...) critics of his work and, ultimately, the work of bell hooks. I argue that a neoliberal rhetoric surrounding education, and the ways it translates into the practice of educating, plays a particular role in Black British, working class girls’ continuing educational marginalization. I thus articulate a more liberatory approach to teaching and learning with young, black women, drawing specifically on a hooksian vision of education as it emerges primarily through the work of, Ruth Nicole Brown and Stephanie D. Sears. Within these discussions, I explore dance as a potentially liberatory pedagogic practice, and articulate a possible approach here as an, always imperfect, embodied pedagogy of hope. (shrink)

The growing field of feminist disability studies explores how human bodies are interpreted through cultural values and expectations surrounding physical and mental ability. This paper contributes to and expands upon this conversation by examining how the ideal of “able-mindedness” functions to maintain racial divisions and inequalities through attributions of cognitive and psychiatric disability to bodies of color. Drawing upon contemporary examples from popular social media, public policy, and academic discourse, the author shows how racialized and nonnormatively gendered bodies are identified (...) and interpreted through norms of able-mindedness and used as markers against which the ideal of the able mind is upheld. This “discourse of pathology” operates insidiously within academic theorizing by remaining largely invisible because it tracks our deeply ingrained assumptions about the undesirability of cognitive and psychiatric disability. The author argues that because of the entanglement of race with disability, so long as the normalizing and privileging of the ideal of able-mindedness goes unchallenged and we maintain the myth that there exists a normal mental state, both racism and ableism remain very much alive, including within the academy. (shrink)