John Dewey’s willingness to endorse a remedial form of education for African American students offers us a rare glimpse of the racial assumptions underlying Dewey’s educational philosophy. By considering a variety of clues — Dewey’s silences on racial equality, his understanding of race and racial progress, and his respective prescriptions for European American and African American students — Frank Margonis offers in this essay a speculative case suggesting that the visionary child‐centered education for which Dewey was most well‐known was intended (...) for European American students and not African American students. Because of the racial assumptions operative in Dewey’s educational philosophy, Margonis suggests, Dewey’s fundamental conceptions of the “student” and “classroom community” would best be abandoned by educational philosophers hoping to write philosophy that serves all students. (shrink)

The American philosophical tradition is often portrayed as a genteel tradition that is committed to democracy and the incremental expansion of democracy through suasionist means. In an attempt to complicate this narrative, the author articulates the basic features of Leonard Harris’s insurrectionist ethics, then attempts to locate this insurrectionist ethics in the work of Henry D. Thoreau. It is argued that this insurrectionist ethos is a fecund addition to the American philosophical tradition and that insurrectionist character traits and modes of (...) comportment offer appealing resources to those faced with oppression and hegemony. (shrink)

African-American/Africana philosophy has made a name for itself as a critical perspective on the inadequacies of European philosophical thought. While this polemical mode has certainly contributed to the questioning of and debates over the universalism of white philosophy, it has nonetheless left Africana philosophy dependent on these criticisms to justify its existence as “philosophical.” This practice has the effect of not only distracting Black philosophers from understanding the thought of their ancestors, but formulates the practice of Africana philosophy as “racial (...) therapy” for whites. By making the goal of Africana philosophy the transformation of the white racist to the white non-racist, Africana philosophy takes up a decidedly political (integrationist) agenda. Making this agenda the guiding ethos of Africana philosophical praxis censors both the Africana thinkers available to study and the interpretation of the figures deemed “fit” for study. Thus I conclude a culturalogic approach is the best way to delineate between the political and methodological in Africana philosophy. (shrink)

The recent pop culture iconography of the Critical Race Theory (CRT) label has attracted more devoted (white) fans than a 90s boy band. In philosophy, this trend is evidenced by the growing number of white feminists who extend their work in gender analogically to questions of race and identity. The trend is further evidenced by the unchecked use of the CRT label to describe (1) any work dealing with postcolonial authors like W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon or (2) the (...) role postcolonial themes like power, discourse, and the unconscious play in the social constructionist era. While this misnomer may seem practically insignificant, the artifice formerly known as CRT in philosophy—more adequately labeled “critical theories of race”— has been axiomatically driven by the political ideals of integration and by a revisionist commentary that seeks to expand traditional philosophical ideas, such as reason, history, and humanity, which were previously closed off by racial borders, to people of color. This “revision in the name of inclusion,” however, is not without its consequences. In order to incorporate the experiences of those who suffer under the weight of modernity and are marred by the burdens of racism into the narration of Continental and American philosophy, the theoretical perspectives in Critical Race Theory that deny the legitimacy of philosophy’s diversity agenda must necessarily be excluded.In particular, this recent move to recognize the study of race as a category of philosophical relevance has resulted in the outright denial of the nationalist and revolutionary fervor contained in the intellectual history specific to the Critical Race Theory movement started by the works of Derrick Bell.2 Instead, this new movement favors narratives that inculcate the ideals of a post-racial humanity and racial amelioration between compassionate (Black and white) philosophical thinkers dedicated to solving America’s race problem. (shrink)