In 1814, Baron de Vastey wrote in The Colonial System Unveiled: “When Europeans came to the new world, their first steps were accompanied by crimes on a grand scale, massacres, the destruction of empires, the obliteration of entire nations from the ranks of the living”. Jean Louis Vastey was a Black Haytien man born in 1781, who assumed the role of an administrator in Hayti after Jean-Jacques Dessalines freed the island from European rule. The Haytien Revolution, which was fought from (...) 1791 to 1804, is the origin of Black theories of liberation from the nineteenth century. The possibility of freedom was not found in the rhetoric of American democratic proclamations, as many authors have asserted, but... (shrink)

in early 2019, the josiah royce society arranged two Author Meets Critics sessions on Tommy J. Curry’s Another white Man’s Burden: Josiah Royce’s Quest for a Philosophy of white Racial Empire. The first was held in New York City, at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting. The second was at the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, in Columbus, Ohio. The sessions were vibrant and well-attended. With the exception of a few tendentious questions at (...) the close of the second meeting, however, our sessions lacked the element of controversy that is customary in discussions of racism in the history of philosophy. The panelists and the audience alike rather... (shrink)

Tommy J. Curry’s Another white Man’s Burden presents a rigorous intellectual history of Josiah Royce’s essays on race. Curry explains the several arguments that Royce made on this topic between 1900 and 1908, and he situates these within Royce’s social philosophy and some contemporaneous literatures on racism. The result is a comprehensive theory of cultural assimilation informed by an idealist metaphysics. Royce, namely, disdained segregation and rejected biological accounts of racial difference. But Royce scholars have wrongly taken these observations, Curry (...) argues, as evidence that their hero held progressive views on race. Royce rather began from the premise of Anglo-American cultural superiority, and... (shrink)

Despite the recent rise in articles by American philosophers willing to deal with race, the sophistication of American philosophy's conceptualizations of American racism continues to lag behind other liberal arts fields committed to similar endeavors. Whereas other fields like American studies, history, sociology, and Black studies have found the foundational works of Black scholars essential to "truly" understanding the complexities of racism, American philosophy-driven by the refusal of white philosophers to acknowledge and incorporate the foundational works of Black scholars at (...) the turn of the century, as well as the relevant insights of contemporary race theorists-remains in a very real sense underdeveloped .. (shrink)

-/- Winner of the 2020 Josiah Royce Prize in American Idealist Thought, presented by the Josiah Royce Society, for demonstrating the extent to which Josiah Royce’s ideas about race were motivated explicitly in terms of imperial conquest. -/- Another white Man’s Burden performs a case study of Josiah Royce’s philosophy of racial difference. In an effort to lay bare the ethnological racial heritage of American philosophy, Tommy J. Curry challenges the common notion that the cultural racism of the twentieth century (...) was more progressive and less racist than the biological determinism of the 1800s. Like many white thinkers of his time, Royce believed in the superiority of the white races. Unlike today, however, whiteness did not represent only one racial designation but many. Contrary to the view of the British-born Germanophile philosopher Houston S. Chamberlain, for example, who insisted upon the superiority of the Teutonic races, Royce believed it was the Anglo-Saxon lineage that possessed the key to Western civilization. It was the birthright of white America, he believed, to join the imperial ventures of Britain—to take up the white man’s burden. To this end he advocated the domestic colonization of Blacks in the American South, suggested that America’s xenophobia was natural and necessary to protecting the culture of white America, and demanded the assimilation and elimination of cultural difference for the stability of America’s communities. Another white Man’s Burden reminds philosophers that racism has been part of the building blocks of American thought for centuries, and that this must be recognized and addressed in order for its proclamations of democracy, community, and social problems to have real meaning. (shrink)

With increasing awareness of social pluralism and a greater number of academic institutions committing to it, "diversity" figures heavily in contemporary academic contexts of the United States. This essay is a philosophical interrogation of diversity and intends to reveal certain undertheorized dimensions of the concept. Attending to these dimensions can potentially refashion an institutional space such that it is better able to sustain diversity on a long-term basis. While my analysis speaks directly to institutions of higher learning in the United (...) States, aspects of it might prove to be relevant to similar institutions in other contexts. This philosophical conversation hopes to provoke larger theoretical and... (shrink)