Discrimination and Disadvantage

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Damion Kareem Scott Redux

 

For this forty-fifth installment of the series, I have reposted the fascinating interview that I conducted with Damion Kareem Scott in December 2015. I know that readers and listeners of the series will be delighted to revisit this interview with Damion. The original post of the interview and comments to it are here.

I acknowledge that the land on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional territory of the Haudensaunee and Anishnaabeg, covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and directly adjacent to Haldiman Treaty territory. I offer these interviews with respect and in the spirit of reconciliation.

____________________________________________

 

Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the ninth installment of Dialogues on Disability, a series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.

My guest today is Damion Kareem Scott. Damion is an adjunct professor in Philosophy and Africana Studies at the City University of New York, a M.A. student in African American Studies at Columbia University, and a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at Stony Brook University. Damion is passionate about music and dance, though he doesn’t dance as much as he once did. Damion enjoys traveling and looks for ways to do so on the cheap. He also enjoys interacting with non-human animals, listening to music, and watching films and loves table tennis.

  

Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Damion! You have lived in various parts of the world and you speak multiple languages. So, why don’t we start this interview with your personal history? Please tell us about your background and what it is that brought you to Africana Studies and philosophy.

Sure. I was born in the Bronx, New York City, in the early 1970s. Both of my birth parents are Jamaican nationals who became naturalized U.S. citizens. My early years were characterized by a certain amount of trauma, deprivation, and violence, about which I won’t go into detail. In the mid-1970s, after my parents split up, my father moved back to Jamaica and took me with him. At that time, political violence and gang-related homicides were endemic in Jamaica. My family returned to the U.S. in the early 1980s, first migrating to Chapel Hill and, subsequently, to Dallas. I spent my Christmases and summers in Brooklyn and Miami. My exposure to a lot of difference conditioned some of my values.

These various geographies are crucially different in a number of ways. For instance, the American South was, and continues to be, a region rife with explicit and overt Anti-Black/White Supremacist racism. Dallas lacks population density. Due to these sharp differences of culture and demographics, my family and I experienced direct and targeted racial animosity and violence. This direct and overt racism is, of course, fully compatible with the “institutional” and “structural” manifestations of anti-Black, anti-minority racism in the northern U.S. that have become all-too-familiar aspects of much of contemporary North American culture; that is, one form of this racism reinforces the other form.

I became conscious of America’s racist/racialist obsessions as I started to come into my own as a person. In order to develop my self-identity, I had to deal with instances of violence. I was forced to learn how to defend myself and my sisters, both mentally and physically. That I had to think through, and against, issues of violence at a young age led me to develop a sharper, quicker, and more creative perspective, namely, a philosophical perspective. I would come home and ask how I should respond when some white kid called me a “nigger,” or a “Yankee” or a “foreigner with a funny accent.” I learned how to deal with things in a non-violent way. I fought physically only after all rational (albeit youthful) attempts at persuasion had failed.

Sadly, tragically, there were guns. As a teenager, I witnessed America’s culture of guns all around me, including the phenomenon of young people who came to glorify firearms through family traditions handed down to them, traditions that were anathema to my own familial and cultural values. Despite my loving, caring parents and siblings who had joined the ranks of the “diverse” suburban American middle-class, both nonracial and racially-charged instances of crime and violence happened all around us, as well as to us. I have repeatedly been the target of racial profiling by the police. On a number of occasions, police officers have trained their guns on me. Because of these combined circumstances, I started to think broadly about philosophical notions of personal identity and political solidarity, as well as about issues of race, ethnicity, and inclusive humanity. Little did I know that this thinking would develop into committed projects in academic philosophy and Africana Studies.

As I got older, I began to stand out in school academically. I went to a public high school, although it was a new “magnet” school staffed with caring and well-intentioned teachers. Eventually, I became a National Achievement/National Merit Scholar, winning several academic accolades. I matriculated at New York University in the early/mid-1990s, using a college scholarship (and some student loans!) as the ticket back to my my wider family here in New York. I intended to study physics, musical journalism, or dramatic writing; but I took a philosophy class in my first year and got hooked. I had read a few classics of African-American political and liberational thought in high school—The Prince, Soul on Ice, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X—but not really any other kind of philosophy. I enrolled in an Introduction to Ancient Civilization general studies class that had a large component on Stoic philosophy. Marcus Aurelius gave me a lot to think about, a lot to which I could relate. Although I declared as a dramatic writing and philosophy major, I dropped the dramatic writing double major as a junior and became a physics minor and philosophy major. I had become enthralled with analytical metaphysics at the juncture of philosophy of science.

As an undergraduate, I began my continuing engagement with a certain type of “Continental” philosophy, that is, logical reconstructive type of approaches to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and existential phenomenology, as well as Deleuze, Derrida, and post-structuralist interventions in language and ontology. Professor John Richardson at NYU helped me to formulate my thoughts coherently through engagement with historical figures in post-Kantian Continental Philosophy—especially Nietzsche and Heidegger—in relation to my prior, nascent phenomenology and conceptualizations of difference and deviance. Richardson really encouraged and motivated me to pursue an advanced degree in philosophy. Professors Ed Stein, Paul Boghossian, Marya Schechtman, Sigrun Svavarsdottir, Mary Mothersill, and Galen Strawson also made big impressions on me as an undergraduate. Thomas Nagel was a big influence on the shape of my developing philosophical ideas. He was an incredible teacher. From Nagel’s work and classes, I acquired a broad sense of analytical philosophy. His work seemed more far-ranging than most of the analytic philosophy that I had encountered, instilling in me a sense of how very unorthodox and minority positions could be clearly, yet rigorously, articulated, especially in the philosophy of mind.

My fortunate selection for, and attendance at, two Rutgers Summer Institutes for Underrepresented Groups in Philosophy during the 1990s—first as a student mentee and subsequently as a graduate student mentor—also greatly influenced my philosophical development. The institutes enabled me to learn about the specifically academic aspects of the burgeoning field of Africana Philosophy that I now love. I had returned to academia after roughly a decade away from it because of a shift in my lifestyle due to both the onset of degenerative joint disease and economic hardship. Since my return, I have had the pleasure to work with such fine scholars as Professors Ann O’Byrne, Megan Craig, Ed Casey, Peter Carevetta, Marcellus Blount, Stephen Gregory, Harvey Cormier, and Robert-Gooding Williams.

CFP: Decolonisation: Shaping and Re-shaping Reality, King's College London, Mar. 9-10, 2019 (deadline: Dec. 15, 2018*)

 

Call for Papers

Decolonisation: Shaping and Re-shaping Reality 

KCL Minorities and Philosophy Conference,
King's College London,

March 9-10, 2019
Deadline: December 15, 2018*

 

KCL Minorities and Philosophy welcomes submissions of abstracts for its conference in March 2019.

We invite undergraduate and postgraduate students from UK universities to submit abstracts on subjects related to the theme of  "Decolonisation – Shaping and Re-shaping Reality." Submissions from international students are also welcomed, however, we will not be
able to fund international travel.

This conference aims to open up questions and provide a platform for critical analysis concerning the underlying assumptions, ideologies,
narratives, social structures etc. that are rooted in white colonialism, which have shaped (and continue to shape) reality for a multitude of people. The aim is to re-tell stories where white heterosexual upper-class men are no longer the protagonists, and to think critically about ways to re-shape our present reality in efforts towards decolonisation.

Possible areas include (but are not limited to):
- Metaphysics
- Epistemology
- Philosophy of Race
- Political Philosophy
- History of Philosophy
- Continental Philosophy
- Philosophy of Language
- Philosophy of Science

We accept submissions from students in a wide-range of disciplines, such as history, geography, anthropology, languages, as well as medicine and the nature sciences.

Abstracts should be no longer than 500 words.
Please submit abstracts in PDF format by 15th December 2018 to: 
[email protected]

Please include a separate document in your email with your name and institutional affiliation. We invite you to include any information you would like us to know about yourself, e.g. age, gender, ethnicity, disability, etc.

Conference website:
https://www.facebook.com/kclmap/

*Note: the official conference poster on the Facebook page for the conference indicates that December 20, 2018 is the deadline for submission. 

 

posted by Shelley

A Gimlet Eye: The Journal of Controversial Ideas and Jonathan Anomaly’s “Defending Eugenics” (guest post)

 

A Gimlet Eye: The Journal of Controversial Ideas

and Jonathan Anomaly’s “Defending Eugenics” 

 

Guest post

 

by

Alison Reiheld*

 

On November 12, a slew of articles hit the internet announcing the formation of Journal of Controversial Ideas, a future journal that will be dedicated to, well, publishing cross-disciplinary controversial ideas and specifically ideas too controversial to be published elsewhere or which, if published elsewhere, would subject the author to threats. That authors might be threatened because of the content of their articles led the editors of the prospective journal (including Peter Singer) to explicitly decide in advance to allow pseudonymous publication.

While philosophers who pay attention to the blogosphere and social media have good reason to worry about the viciousness enabled by anonymity and a total lack of accountability (see Twitter, the metablog, the metametablogs, etc.), anonymity can also protect serious and careful valuable contributions to the profession, as with the “What Is It Like To Be A Woman In Philosophy?” blog and countless other instances. Perhaps the editors, if acting in good faith, hope that peer review and editorial oversight will provide accountability and ensure that the abuses of pseudonymity are curtailed while the benefits of it are in full effect.

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Tom Bartlett warned of a coming backlash to the journal itself and not just to the kind of content that it wishes to print (“Cue the Outcry”).  Why might there be such a backlash? And would it be justified? The tone of “Cue the Outcry” implies that it would not. Whether it would, depends on the new JCI’s editorial procedures, which ideas they find “controversial” enough to merit publication in their journal, whether these ideas include both conservative and liberal ideas, and a whole host of other factors.

My concerns about the journal stem from the kinds of work that authors elsewhere have painted as persecuted. As soon as I heard of the announcement of the journal, I thought in particular of the work of philosopher Jonathan Anomaly, who often says that it is unjust for his talks to be protested, that he receives hate mail in response to his publications, and that the American Academy is badly broken because of the way people respond to his work and the work of others who advance controversial ideas.

I want to propose in this post that some claims are indeed deeply problematic by their nature; thus, it is right and proper to subject them to greater scrutiny than other claims and perhaps to hold them to a higher standard. This discrepancy would make it appear that the former claims are being unjustly discriminated against, when in fact this is not the case. One such claim is that colonialism was morally good and is justified, a claim made in an article published in Third World Quarterly in 2017. Another claim is that we ought to have formal eugenics programs. This latter assertion is one of several interlocking claims advanced by Anomaly.

 

ZOOMING IN ON A CONTROVERSIAL IDEA

 

...our imaginative visions are central to our understanding of the world. They are not a distraction from our serious thinking but a necessary part of it. And—what is perhaps more surprising—many of the visions that now dominate our controversies are ones which look as if they were based on science, but are really fed by fantasy… many of the favourite fairy-tales of our age—the myths that actually shape our thoughts and actions—are ones which owe their force to having appeared in scientific dress. —Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By, xii-xiii

 

In 2018, Monash Bioethics Review published an article by Anomaly called “Defending Eugenics: From Cryptic Choice to Conscious Selection.” The article is part of a thematically unified research program that Anomaly has developed over the years in which he treats procreation/reproduction as a public good, considering group traits and individual traits as relevant to who should have children. This research program includes, but is not limited to, his 2017 article “Race Research and the Ethics of Belief” in Journal of Bioethical Inquiry and his 2014 “Public Goods and Procreation,” also in Monash Bioethics Review. Related articles include Anomaly’s 2018 “Public Goods and Education” forthcoming in a Rowman & Littlefield anthology on Philosophy and Public Policy. Anomaly develops an interlocking set of claims across this research program which, I believe, I have roughly described as he himself would say is correct. The following are my summaries of the claims made in each of these four articles:  

CLAIM (1) FROM “PUBLIC GOODS AND EDUCATION”: While education is a public good, social intervention in public education and intellectual development is often pernicious and government involvement in social factors affecting intelligence is thus often ill-advised, even in the form of public funding for education, vouchers, and especially stipulation of what should be learned.

CLAIM (2) FROM “RACE RESEARCH AND THE ETHICS OF BELIEF”: We rightly worry that any legitimation of claims that certain racial groups are better or worse at certain tasks due to physiology will lead to bias and oppression that can cause harm. But the harm principle is a bad reason not to believe something to be true if there is evidence that it is, and it is an especially bad reason to refrain from looking for any such evidence. “[I]f we allow ourselves to believe a proposition that is contrary to the available evidence, we may end up acting in ways that harm other people as well as ourselves” (Anomaly 2018, 293). Racial groups are genetically real, not just socially constructed, and research into race and shared racial traits should not be inhibited. What’s more, doing such research could help to explain racial prejudice. For instance, Anomaly argues that Ashkenazi Jews simply are, based on scientific evidence, smart and have heritably high IQ scores. Perhaps, Anomaly proposes, the best explanation for how Jewish folks became targeted for their success is that such success is indeed biologically group-based. Acknowledging racial differences as biological and real and heritable, rather than socially constructed, could serve to undermine racial bias, as well as lead to benefits in the treatment of health conditions that occur in some groups more than in others.

CLAIM (3) FROM “PUBLIC GOODS AND PROCREATION”: Economists are wrong when they view children as private goods that parents create for fun, companionship, help in old age, etc. Rather, children are public goods because “they can have far-reaching effects on the genetic composition, cultural trajectory, and general welfare of future people.” (172) Because the benefits of public goods are consumed in common and widely dispersed, and procreation and parenthood are public goods, we are justified in influencing reproductive behavior. While there should be a presumption in favor of procreative liberty, “nearly all of us would prefer—to the extent that it is possible—to create a world in which future people flourish. This will apparently involve preserving (or increasing) the prevalence of traits that can be thought of as public goods.” (179) We should at least use social norms to nudge people to make eugenic reproductive choices. The state could even provide free or reduced cost fetal or parental genetic screening and, with caution, even some restrictive interventions into reproductive choice such as parental licensing and, in some cases, temporary sterilization for the very unfit—”especially if their pathological behavior has a strong genetic component” (184)—which can be reversed in case of a mistaken judgment of lack of fitness. We would be “preventing probabilistic rather than actual harms.” (ibid.) Social efforts to influence reproduction should extend from genetically bad traits, to poor parenting by extremely irresponsible people, to people who might turn out to be poor parents (thus the word probabilistic). We also ought to think of future people as doing probabilistic harm, of “risks that prospective children post to other people.” (ibid.) Anomaly says that this is fairly extreme and that these options should be preserved, but that we should be wary of using coercive state intervention to achieve collective goals. Thus, the “most promising and least intrusive way of preserving the genetic basis of valuable traits may be genetic counseling and—once our understanding of genetics improves—subsidies for those who wish to use embryo selection or, under certain conditions, genetic engineering to enhance their children.” (185) This kind of “voluntary” eugenics should be supported.

CLAIM 4) FROM “DEFENDING EUGENICS…”: Anomaly begins his article by explicitly stating that he wishes to “reclaim the spirit of authors like Francis Galton and Charles Darwin,” and that his defense of eugenics will not commit us to endorsing state-sponsored coercion nor to genetic determinism. He argues, furthermore, that “virtually every trait that influences our personality and our likelihood of living a good life—including intelligence, health, empathy, and impulse control—has a substantial genetic component.” Reacting to the history of Nazis and the Holocaust, and American eugenics, by rejecting the genetic basis of race and other groupings of traits is, he notes, an “understandable over-reaction” to the cruel and racist policies of early and mid-twentieth century eugenicists. One of the problems facing societies is that people who have higher IQs, more education, and higher income have fewer children later in life, especially in developed countries with social supports and opportunities for ambitious and intelligent women. (The trend of successful career women having pets instead of children or adopting children is bad for the gene pool in the long run, and a form of pathological altruism, one example that Anomaly gives of “dysgenic trends in developed countries.”) Anomaly proceeds to defend a series of “plausible” moral principles laid out in the famous case of Buck v. Bell, including preventing the harm that future children of certain people might do to others and society. If we are cautious of state authority and more concerned with individual liberty, we can use these principles as the basis of a “liberal eugenics.” He defends access to contraception (on the grounds that it allows women to choose more carefully who fathers their children), access to genetic education, and genetic counseling through public financing of independent providers in a competitive market, access to genetic engineering as enhancements come on board, and a system of incentives and penalties including parental licensing. He also defends parental licensing on the grounds that traits like impulse control, health, intelligence and empathy have significant genetic components and so unrestricted reproduction entails many “parents who are unwilling or unable to take care of their children” and who “[pass] along an undesirable genetic endowment.” A fair parental licensing scheme would involve criteria that “are effective at screening out only parents who impose significant risks of harm on their children or (through their children) on other people.” If informal sanctions work, they are preferable to coercive laws, but they often fail to work well. While public policies cannot create a genetic utopia, changing reproductive norms can go some way towards making us better at choosing whether to have children and which kinds of children to have. After Anomaly advances this long argument in which he advocates numerous policies and endorses specific views about which traits are desirable, he closes with the following claim: “I concede that I may be wrong about any of the measures I’ve considered. Sometimes the best policy is not to have one."  

What shall we make of these claims? At first glance, it might seem that claim (1) is entirely distinct from claims (2), (3), and (4). After all, taken together, the latter set of claims clearly pertains to genetic traits of groups, judging groups’ merits based on their genetics, and intervening in reproductive choice based on genetic merits. Let us take some basic background from disability studies.

Is Eugenics Too Controversial for Mainstream Bioethics Journals?

 

In my previous post, I asserted that the impetus and rationale for the prospective Journal of Controversial Ideas are the production and publication of eugenic discourse. I also asserted that the biopolitics and governmentality of extant bioethics journals and the subfield of bioethics itself have paved the way for the unfettered production and publication of eugenic discourse in the future journal. 

I suspect that my claims in this regard met with considerable skepticism in some corners of philosophy. Thus, I want to suggest that skeptical readers and listeners consider the following. 

Recently, the Monash Bioethics Review published an article authored by Jonathan Anomaly entitled "Defending Eugenics." The claims that Anomaly makes in the article are as pernicious as the title of the article suggests, targetting disabled people, nondisabled people of colour, nondisabled poor people, nondisabled Indigenous people, and nondisabled Jewish people, among others, promoting the ideas of eugenic selection, procreative beneficence, and so on. 

Anomaly reportedly had a difficult time getting the article published. Nevertheless, the article found a home at the Monash Bioethics Review, on whose editorial board Peter Singer and Julian Savulescu serve, along with other bioethicists who espouse claims that have direct or indirect eugenicist implications. Singer has of course a long affiliation with bioethics at Monash University and Savulescu works at the Uheiro Centre at Oxford University that I mentioned in yesterday's post. I implore skeptics of yesterday's post to put together the pieces of this situation.

The claims that Anomaly makes in the article have not gone unnoticed. I have copied below the text of a letter that The Australian Critical Race & Whiteness Studies Association has initiated in response to the publication of the article. The letter is posted to google docs here where you can add your signature: 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSejAtoxqUzYPpzofNoabxPIW_bit78cV7FiYPeHmlpLhy8HdQ/viewform?fbclid=IwAR1sL3A-D_g69gLRDiZf9lo2jCBPXk4ch34IQEvX_L9UkHFamd4bAUe-bUc

_______________________________________________________________

 

The Australian Critical Race & Whiteness Studies is asking our members and supporters to sign the letter below to the editors of the Monash Bioethics Review on the publication of an article entitled 'Defending Eugenics'. Signatures may be added at the bottom of the letter.

Jonathan Oakley and Michael Selgelid
Editors in Chief, Monash Bioethics Review
Monash Bioethics Centre
Menzies Building
20 Chancellors Walk
Clayton Campus
Monash University
VIC 3800

Sydney, 14 November 2018

Dear Professors Oakley and Selgelid,

We are writing to you as the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association to express concern about the publication in the Monash Bioethics Review of an article entitled ‘Defending Eugenics’ by Jonathan Anomaly.

In our view, this article normalizes a practice that has been, and continues to be, associated with the discipline and punishment of racialised people since the 19th century when it was first suggested by Francis Galton, a ‘race scientist’ whose ‘spirit’ the author wishes to ‘reclaim’ in the interests of reducing the ‘consequences of people reproducing at random.’

The author attempts to avoid the charge of racism by arguing that the virtues of eugenics should not be tempered by the ends to which these ideas were put by the Nazis during the Holocaust. There are a number of problems with this proposition which we would like to outline:

1. It is impossible to dissociate an idea from the context in which it emerged and the practices which it led to. The very idea of manipulating the population in order to attempt to facilitate a ‘eugenic utopia’ comes to fruition within the context of European colonialism, and the increased power of European states to quantify and manage populations. The main targets were the poor, the disabled and those considered racially ‘inferior’.

2. Anomaly’s discussion of the Holocaust attempts to avoid racism by making the argument that it was ‘dysgenic’ to eliminate the Jews as ‘arguably among the most intelligent and productive people of the twentieth century.’ Such an argument, while attempting to avoid racism, still operates with racially essentialist terms by generalizing about all Jews; it is notable too that Jews of colour are omitted from Anomaly’s claims.

3. Anomaly clearly believes in race differences, arguing that it was only the ‘the racist direction the eugenics movement took in the United States and Germany’ that led scientists to ‘deny that races exist.’ It is our contention that it is impossible to disentangle the belief that the human population can be divided into so-called races from the injustices that continue to be associated with that belief. And in the specific case of the article, it is impossible, to argue that races exist while claiming that one’s proposal to introduce eugenics into policy making is not racist.

4. Eugenic practices of the type discussed by Anomaly in the paper, are still in practice. The author believes that the language of eugenics was merely used to mask the ‘morally abhorrent policies and pseudo-scientific claims’ of the Nazis. However, eugenics principles were applied much more widely than that. In our context here in Australia, the Eugenics Society of Victoria was in operation until 1961 (https://theconversation.com/eugenics-in-australia-the-secre…). The practice of removal of Aboriginal children, which is still ongoing, reaching unprecedented levels today, has its roots in eugenics as its ultimate aim was the control of the Aboriginal population (https://www.theguardian.com/…/australia-fails-to-curb-child…). The practices of forced sterilisation are still in use against Indigenous women in Canada for example (https://www.cbc.ca/…/pol…/sterilization-indigenous-1.4902303). Dorothy Roberts has documented the extent to which the US welfare system has been restructured to inhibit the reproductive freedoms of poor Black women (https://penntoday.upenn.edu/…/revisiting-killing-the-black-…). Therefore, the policy proposals, presented by Anomaly, to improve what he calls the troubling ‘current demographics of Western countries’ are not mere hypotheticals.

5. In fact, Anomaly makes clear what troubles him when he remarks that pronatalist policies put in place by the Swedish state have resulted in higher births among those of Somali origin rather than ‘native-born Swedes.’ He also makes reference to ‘impulse control’ as hereditary, an argument also made by the conservative US publication, The National Review, which argued that Black children had less impulse control than white children, thus justifying their exclusion from school (https://www.nationalreview.com/…/more-distortion-ed-depart…/). Therefore he cannot claim that racism does not motivate his argument.

At a time when so-called ‘race realism’ is booming, despite being thoroughly debunked by the great majority of scientists (https://www.theguardian.com/…/the-unwelcome-revival-of-race…), the scholarly community must take responsibility for the ideas it endorses. There are serious questions to be answered about how an article that proposes that ‘future people would be better off if people with heritable traits that we value had a greater proportion of children’ passed peer review. It is our view that there is absolutely no way of separating the notion of there being ‘more valuable heritable traits’ from the fact that modern western societies have associated value with whiteness, abled-bodiedness and prosperity to the detriment of racialised people, the disabled and the poor.

We seem to have entered a phase in academia and public life where debate for its own sake has trumped any commitment to the principle of protecting those most vulnerable and creating the conditions for a more just society for all. As critical race scholars who are only too painfully aware of the practices to which ideas of race have been put, we suggest that it is never the time for an article that defends eugenics to be published in a reputable international scientific journal.

We hope that you will consider this letter and take the necessary steps to address the processes of peer review that led to this misguided decision.

Yours sincerely on behalf of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association

Alana Lentin
Associate Professor, Western Sydney University and ACRAWSA President (2017-19).

 

 

posted by Shelley

Citation Practices: More About Power Than You Think They Are

 

The number of citations that a philosopher's work gets is taken into account in the hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions of many philosophy departments. In addition, repeated citation of a given article can establish a new direction in the discipline, a new style of doing philosophy, or some other novel trend in philosophy. Furthermore, frequent citation of a certain philosopher’s work can elevate the professional status of the given philosopher and the area of study in which the philosopher works. In other words, the citation practices in which individual philosophers engage can, and usually do, have cumulative effects. To put it another way, citation practices on the micro-level produce systemic and profession-wide effects, many of which have significant and lasting consequences.

Some of the most significant and enduring systemic effects of citation practices comprise the reproduction, in various forms, of the status quo in philosophy with respect to the exclusion or marginalization of some philosophers, including disabled philosophers, and the exclusion or marginalization of certain areas of inquiry in philosophy, including philosophy of disability. Thus, marginalized philosophers and privileged philosophers who aim to eliminate the current asymmetries in the profession increasingly scrutinize citation practices in the profession: Who gets cited? Where do they get cited? By whom do they cited? Who hasn’t been cited? Which body of work has been obscured, ignored, and disregarded?

In short, a growing number of philosophers have become cognizant of the political character of citation practices, asking, among other questions, whether philosophers who have engaged in sexual misconduct, or make racist and antisemitic claims, or endorse policies that violate the civil rights of LGBTQ people, should be promoted through the citation and use of their work.

To date, most of the inquiries into citation practices have been concerned with the gendered nature of current citation practices in philosophy, demonstrating  the ways in which epistemic authority and professional recognition more often accrue to (white) male philosophers than to women philosophers and how the conferral of this epistemic authority and esteem affects hiring and promotion practices, reproduces biases in the profession, and even ultimately encourages women to leave the profession.

Although these critical inquiries into citation practices have helped to throw into relief the irreducibly political character of epistemic authority and esteem in philosophy, I want to argue nevertheless that critical inquiries about citation practices need to go beyond their current focus on who gets cited, how often they get cited, and in what venues, in order to examine how citation takes place, how it is done, and why a certain philosopher gets cited. For I maintain that even seemingly ameliorative citations can reinstate asymmetrical relations of power if they are done in careless or inappropriate ways.

My Journey In Our Struggle (guest post)

 

My Journey In Our Struggle* 

 

Guest Post

 

by  

 

Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, Ph.D.**

 

 

It began, for me, in an inpatient psychiatric unit. I had been sectioned.

 

Why do I begin narrating my journey at this milestone?

•    I survived. Not all of us do. I live and work "In The Wake," to borrow an idea from Professor Christina Sharpe, of those persons racialised as black, so often mentally ill, who come into contact or into the custody of the state and die.

•    I had nothing to lose. I no longer feared, nor even gave a fuck, as throughout my life till that point I had, about wealthy white men’s expectations of me. Compared with depths of despair I had seen, they paled into insignificance.

•    We need to destigmatise disablement—by acknowledging it in our society and by acknowledging the factors that determine it. We speak about the social determinants of good health, but not the colonial determinants of ill health. So, in one way, this is a story about how my participation in the decolonial social movement brought me back to health. In another way, it is a story about how my participation made my health much worse. There are decolonial determinants of ill health. A lesson I want you to take from my testimony is that our social movements, if they are to be decolonial, need to be the sort of spaces that we don’t have to take a break from, because they make us ill and, indeed oppress us, but rather the sort of spaces in which we dwell and grow. I’m calling, as Patrisse Cullors Khan has, recently, not for each of us to take on the unilateral burden of self-care, but rather for us all, in our shared struggle, to share the responsibility of collective care.

After a period of time, I was permitted to leave the unit, only on the condition that I went straight back to Britain. The instructions of the consultants struck me like the words of the Go To Jail card in the board game Monopoly: “Go directly to Jail. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200.”

Why did my release from detention and my return to Britain feel like I was going to jail? When, back in 2007, I left Britain, for what I thought was for good, I knew then that I didn’t or, better yet, could never comfortably, belong in Britain. I knew then I had involuntarily to make my life in another country. How, then, do you then rebuild a life where you’ve been continually told you don’t belong?

Well, I did this through my participation in our struggle. Allow me, therefore, to mention three moments in my participation in the student-led social movements of the second decade of the twenty-first century. I’ll give each moment a name:

     1        Getting Inside

     2        Dismantling His House

     3        Bringing It Home

I’d like to mention how and why I got into each and some successes and some roadblocks that each has presented.

1  Getting Inside: Building an Ebony Tower in Britain & Why Isn’t my Professor Black?

Born, as I was, in the summer uprisings of 1981, seemingly nothing had changed, when I turned thirty, during the summer uprisings of 2011. I came of age, while witnessing my country repeating its racialised history. Witnessing this, of course, from afar, from America, from the Academy. What frustrated me was that the most public and repeated explanation of this repetition, coming from British academia, was that, supposedly, “The whites have become black.” I wanted more and I wanted better from the British academy, and I supposed that this would be got if we built the sort of cadre of Black public intellectuals who had been my mentors and sponsors in the USA.

To this end, I convened Building an Ebony Tower in Britain, one hundred academics in online conversation and a meeting of 30 Black academics, in July 2012, in Birmingham. This was the background to our campaign, two years later, in March 2014, asking "Why Isn't My Professor Black?"—A question framed by capitalising upon the neoliberal distortion of public education that makes the consumer king, and turning that on its head. Six academics: three persons racialised and gendered as black women, Professor Shirley Tate, Dr. Lisa Palmer, and Dr. Deborah Gabriel, and three persons racialised and gendered as black men, Dr. William Ackah, Nathan Edward Richards and myself, spoke in a sold-out, live-streamed, virally shared panel encouraging, exhorting, and empowering our students to pose this question to the people in power and equipping our students with critical explanations to answer it.

It was phenomenally successful, but, in retrospect, it was a false friend. The reasons to avoid constructing our campaign in terms of the #blackprofessor are threefold and this challenge had a direct implication for how we decided to revise our approach.

• first, persons racialised as neither black nor white (for example persons racialised as Chinese) tended not to buy into it. In this way, #blackprofessor consisted in survivors of euro-imperialism dividing themselves, on white hegemony's behalf, so that, thereafter, white hegemony might more easily rule over them all. We should, instead, be seeking a solidarity of the Global Majority.

• second, black inadequacy has long been under the white academic microscope and the discourse of #blackprofessor did not adequately free itself from, or depart from, that. On the contrary, it elicited and encouraged explanations that placed the emphasis on black lack of required desire, black lack of required cultural capital, and black lack of required intellectual capital. “Lack of black” was explained as “black lack."

• third, the colonial white power structure, as Kwame Turé/Stokley Carmichael and Charles V Hamilton argued, on the one hand, tends to welcome individualising analyses of racism, whilst, on the other, tends to shut down analyses that are institutional. Individual is to Professor as Institutional is to Curriculum.

Most of all, I think the problem with the framing of these two social movements is that their demand could be satisfied merely by getting (some or more of) us inside The Master’s House. Our ultimate goal should not be to get inside The Master’s House—still less should our ultimate goal be to occupy a turret of that house, to lock ourselves aloft and aloof from our communities of origin, like some Black Rapunzel. Our goal should be to Dismantle it.

 

2 Dismantling His House: Why Is My Curriculum White? & Rhodes Must Fall (in Oxford) 

This was a shift from faces to voices.

From demanding Black faces in high places, to exhuming voices from hidden histories.

We had exposed the who of the Curriculum: who, in it, produces and teaches knowledge. This is not just the professors, but the students, the tutors, and the epistemic authorities on the programme—all of whom are predominantly

•    Anglican

•    Anglophone

•    Enabled by society

•    Wealthy

•    Gender-conforming men

•    Racialised as white.

But that's just one aspect of the curriculum.

At UCL, we further exposed the what and the how of the curriculum: what gets to be produced and taught as knowledge and how that teaching and learning is conducted and assessed. This is both the choice of topics, resources, examples, or case studies, and the teaching methods and learning activities.

At Oxford, we took this to another level by exposing the where of the curriculum: the campus environment in which this activity of producing, teaching, and learning knowledge is expected to take place. This is the rooms and buildings, the signs and statues, and the local area, taking into consideration the accessibility of these spaces, both physically and socially.

At each institution, I harnessed the fact that I was employed by the institution and had somewhat more access to institutional resources to make these resources available to activists among the students and in our communities.

I conceived the question "Why Is My Curriculum White?" in summer 2014 as a correlative, as a corrective, as an antidote, to the question I thought such a false friend, yet keeping the twist on the idea that the consumer is king. With cash from UCL, I tasked a group of student activists, who had emerged during the previous campaign, with designing a video to explain and answer this new question.

That video went viral.

However, whereas the video was deeply decolonial, many of the responses to it have not been! The new question has been approached as if the answer were not obvious. Your curriculum is white because it is the product of colonialism. Yet we still see efforts to “diversify” the curriculum and plug a Black gap in attainment. We need, as Kavita Bhanot has argued, in "Media Diversified,” to "Decolonise, Not Diversify." And this gap is not a gap in attainment, but a gap in belonging—who gets to belong in colonial space.

I drew upon the lessons I had been learning, outside and alongside the university, in co-productive conversations in communities of practice in Brixton and in Tottenham, and I convened a meeting of student activists in Oxford, in May 2015, where I argued that, given our location, we have a special responsibility for stoking from the metropolitan centre the flames of revolution at the colonial periphery.

The statue of Cecil Rhodes had just fallen, or rather, been dismantled, at the University of Cape Town. This had inaugurated a wider conversation about the who, the what, the how, and the where of the colonial curriculum. There was a statue of Rhodes in Oxford. Yet, there was no wider conversation about the colonial curriculum. We had an opportunity to amplify the voices of our siblings in South Africa by bringing their struggle—our struggle—into the belly of the beast.

During that academic year, I navigated several opportunistic infections, some of which required surgeries. In 2016, having survived four, month-long pneumonias, I was diagnosed with AIDS. My time since has primarily been spent convalescing from illness and adapting to disablement, which I was required to do, by, yet again, returning home. Why did Birmingham, a place, a shit-hole, the arse-end of nowhere, from which I had run all my life, keep pulling me back home?

Reviewing the Reviewer

 

My book, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), was published on November 22 of last year. Yet the book has not been reviewed in The Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (NDPR). Nor has Jennifer Scuro’s book, Addressing Ableism: Philosophical Questions Via Disability Studies (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), been reviewed in NDPR, despite the fact that it was published in October of last year. Nor, furthermore, has Melinda Hall’s book, The Bioethics of Enhancement: Transhumanism, Disability, and Biopolitics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), published in November of 2016, been reviewed in NDPR.

As one of the most prominent online publishing venues in philosophy, NDPR does not, it seems, feel compelled to solicit reviews of books that are authored by disabled philosophers or that address philosophy of disability. Indeed, NDPR seems to do an inadequate job of publishing timely reviews of books by members of underrepresented groups in philosophy, of soliciting reviews from members of underrepresented groups in philosophy, and of soliciting reviews on books that consider marginalized areas of philosophy.

Although neither my book, nor Jen’s book, nor Melinda’s book has (yet?) been reviewed in NDPR, over the course of the summer I began to see NDPR reviews online of books by male colleagues that were published only a few months ago.

So, I decided to take a quick look at whose books are reviewed in NDPR, who acts as a reviewer for NDPR, which publishers’ books get reviewed in NDPR, and what areas of philosophy the books that are reviewed in NDPR cover.

A quick look at NDPR reviews for the past 2 months suggests that roughly 3 times more books authored by men are reviewed in this prominent online publication than are books authored by women. In addition, roughly 3.5 times more male philosophers act as reviewers of books for NDPR than do women philosophers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, furthermore, a preponderance of the books reviewed in NDPR in the last 2 months were published by either Oxford University Press or Cambridge University Press.

Yesterday, I posted the results of this quick review of NDPR on my Facebook page and in the blog’s Facebook group, indicating that I intend to do a more careful and systematic examination of the NDPR in the coming weeks, an examination that scrutinizes whose books get reviewed in NDPR, who serve as reviewers for NDPR, which areas of the field NDPR reviews tend to cover, and how long it takes for some books to be reviewed in NDPR.

I will report the results of this study on the blog in due course.

 

posted by Shelley

Philosophy and Decolonization in South Africa

 

In an earlier post, I drew attention to conflicts within the Philosophy Society of South Africa (PSSA) that have arisen due to efforts on the part of philosophy students and faculty in South Africa to decolonize philosophy curricula and increase the number of black faculty and students in philosophy departments, as well as to improve leadership representation within the PSSA itself.

In the Discrimination and Disadvantage Facebook group today, Daniel Brunson posted an article from Quartz that provides updated, more comprehensive, information about the struggles within philosophy in South Africa. Entitled "Philosophy is the New Battleground in South Africa's Fight Against Colonialism," the article by Olivia Goldhill focuses in particular on Tony Shabangu, a black lecturer and Ph.D. student in the philosophy department at the University of Johannesburg, and David Benatar, a white professor and the chair of philosophy at the University of Cape Town, the latter of which has, in many respects, been at the centre of these uprisings.

Here is an excerpt from the Quartz article: 

 

Why We Can’t Promise That a Feminist Space Will Be a Safe Space (guest post)

 

 

Why We Can’t Promise That a Feminist Space Will Be a Safe Space

 

Guest Post

 

by

Tracy Isaacs*

 

 

This post is a modified version of a blog-post that I recently wrote for Fit Is a Feminist Issue (a blog that I co-founded in 2012 with my colleague and friend Samantha Brennan) in the aftermath of a nasty discussion that broke out among feminists on the blog’s Facebook page. Without going into too many details, a meme was posted that upset people who felt it was “unfeminist.” They got angry and raged at the post and the blogger who posted it and subsequently deleted it, with an admission that it was a mistake for her to have posted it, an apology for posting it, and a request that if, in the future, people have concerns about the content of her posts, they kindly be nice about how they raise these concerns. In short, this blogger asked that, in the future, she be given the benefit of the doubt.

The unpleasantness of the comment thread surrounding both the original post and the apology post, to which I, in attempts to defend my co-blogger/friend, contributed in regrettable ways, led me and regular contributors to our blog to reflect upon the extent to which we can cultivate a community that feels comfortable and supportive to all who enter it. One of the sticking points was the request in the apology for people to try to “be nice” when they’re upset about our blog's content.

A common refrain to which the authors at Fit Is a Feminist Issue like to return is that we embrace "big tent feminism,” a feminism that tries to make space for everyone. That's a lofty goal, I know. It sounds wonderful. But can it be done? One of my favourite (and one of the most difficult) questions in feminism is this: "Is an inclusive feminism possible?" I use the question as a thematic frame for most of my teaching in feminist philosophy and women's studies, as a way to push students in my classes to think about inclusivity and intersectionality, not just as theoretical ideas, but in their actual material practices.

It's hard. We struggle. People get defensive. Misunderstandings develop. Hurt feelings. Anger. Difficult conversations. People are called on their privilege and need to look at that. People are afraid to speak for fear of offending, excluding, of saying the wrong thing on a multitude of other levels, of sounding closed when in fact they are open, hurting others' feelings, and having people be upset with them. Sometimes we find ourselves at an impasse. We have to agree to disagree or be stuck. These difficult conversations all occur in the context of feminism, where the majority of students are already there with respect to the broad strokes of it.

Although I do my best to manage the discussion in my classroom, to push it forward or in a different direction if any of the above takes place, to take the emotional temperature in the room and keep an eye on who might be falling silent, I can't promise a totally "safe space" where no one will ever feel shitty, be offended, get hurt, or say the wrong thing.

Because, guess what? Feminists disagree amongst themselves sometimes. We see things differently.

Who's Knocking On Our Door Now?

 

Because my thinking about social force relations has been formatively influenced by Foucault’s arguments about the constitutive and pervasive character of social power rather than by the juridical understanding of power that most philosophers on the left hold, my thinking about relations of power that circulate in philosophy (as well as throughout the university at large) likewise departs from how most of these other philosophers understand "the politics” of the profession and discipline.

You may recall that juridical understandings of social power generally conceive it as a battle between adversaries. In the terms of juridical conceptions, that is, power is construed as the possession of an authority, group, or institution which is exercised from above as a prohibition or subtraction of the freedoms of others. To make a long story short, on juridical conceptions of power, social change is thus generally understood in organic, evolutionary, and teleological terms rather than conceived as produced through multiple contingencies, the products of multiple conflicts, intentional and nonsubjective, yet unpredictable, without a pre-determined end-point.

Insofar as other philosophers on the left hold a juridical understanding of social power, they therefore generally also hold some organic view about change within the profession. Indeed, many philosophers who assume an organic understanding of how forms of power operate in philosophy seem to justify certain exclusionary institutional, epistemic, pedagogical, and other dimensions of philosophy on this basis. About a year ago, for instance, a prominent philosopher said this to me: “Disability’s time is coming. Right now, we are focused on trans issues.” On the view of this philosophical gatekeeper, the institutional and epistemological roots of philosophy extend according to an organic growth that must not be overburdened with the demands of a multitude of constituencies. Wait your turn. Maybe next year.

David Chalmers recently articulated another rendition of this (gatekeeping) teleological understanding of philosophy when he stated in a comment on the Daily Nous blog that the PhilPapers Foundation will (now) reconsider its assumptions about disability and their effects because critical philosophical work on disability has now garnered enough attention in the profession to warrant such reconsideration. Chalmers’s remarks came in response to a comment that I posted to Daily Nous earlier that day, a comment that comprises a list of my publications from 2013 to June of this year in which I critically interrogate how disability is positioned in the various databases of the PhilPapers Foundation.

I am cautiously pleased that the PhilPapers Foundation (and the feminist philosophers who help to run it) has finally decided to take my criticisms of its databases seriously and to regard philosophy of disability more generally as a serious philosophical endeavour.

I want to point out, however, that when rectification of institutional and epistemological suppression of critical philosophical work on disability is represented in the way in which the PhilPapers Foundation has construed it, indeed, when institutionally and professionally privileged philosophers construe rectification of past epistemic injustices against disabled philosophers of disability and other marginalized philosophers as a form of organic, or natural, progression or concession, the deleterious professional, social, economic, and material effects that this suppression has imposed upon these disabled philosophers of disability and other marginalized philosophers are effectively covered over and will likely remain ignored and unaddressed.

 

posted by Shelley