climate

How the Property of Being a Football Player Emerges from the Properties of Being Male, Brown, and on a College Campus

I attend a private university on the West coast. I am majoring in philosophy.  I don’t look like a philosopher being that I am not white.  One day, while sitting in the department hallway, a philosophy professor walks past me and begins to stare.  Believing that he was impressed with the four books I was carrying, I quickly went over in my mind what smart thing I would say if questioned.  However to my surprise (or not) he asked if I was a football player.

I would have preferred that he kept it pushing.

The Angry Minority Student

I’m a late year graduate student in a mid-ranked department. By far the most distressing experience as a young philosopher of color is not ever feeling comfortable calling out fellow students or professors on racist or classist comments for fear of being labeled the “angry minority student”. I’ve heard grad students and prominent philosophers say the following to either myself or to other students-

  • “That’s so ghetto.”
  • “What language do your parents speak? Is it one of those ching chang chong languages?” -Amazingly said by a prominent philosopher of language!
  • “How old are you? You must be 15!” Said to a female Asian student.
  • “Have you heard of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy?” -Said by a professor, assuming I’m incompetent.
  • “Do you know what Gmail is?” -Same professor, assuming I’m incompetent.
  • “Don’t move to that area, it’s dangerous.” -Referring to an area with a large minority population.

It’s suffocating to be in an environment where you feel powerless to assert your true feelings, beliefs and experiences out of fear of alienating too many people. I only hope that after tenure I won’t have to care so much about being “nice” “polite” and “respectable” to have the slightest possibility of securing employment in the profession.

Performing Philosophers

I am a Latino philosopher, tenured at a major research university. My family has no academic heritage: I’m the first person in my extended family to graduate from college. I have struggled to develop the temperament to ask “good” questions at talks, because I was raised to listen to others and to treat “important people” with politeness and deference. I have always been embarrassed by the hostility of talks in academic philosophy, and in my first job was called out by a senior white male who said that I was too quiet in talks. I guess it made me look slow or stupid. My preference is to play down the performative aspect of question sessions and to save more probing questions for later when the spotlight is elsewhere. Yet I have learned to overcome myself and speak up, because my ambitions demanded it. Wanting the spotlight, self-promoting: these are clearly good things for ambitious philosophers in our present culture, and it seems to me that those come more easily to white philosophers (and in particular, to white male philosophers). Our current academic philosophical culture gives a considerable advantage to philosophers that have not had to fight against their heritage to perform like mainstream philosophers. I hope that we someday overcome this.

“Going Native”

I was wearing a black dashiki with yellow and red checkered designs down the middle. It was from Oaxaca. Young folks in Acapulco wear them. I have also heard these three quarter length arm shirts called guayabera’s by some folks in Acapulco. These shirts are not the guayabera short sleeve button up shirts with the collar as can be found in Puerto Rico. I was walking down the hall toward my office and a white ethnic male faculty member who was dressed in a suit and tie looked at me and said, “So you have gone native.”

Optics

I am of East Asian descent. My department chair has hinted that I should teach the Eastern Philosophy class, even though I have no background in the area either personally or professionally. He mentions to me that he’s looking for someone to teach the course on the heels of stating that it is best for a woman to teach feminist philosophy. The hint is clear. Obviously optics are more important than qualifications!

Referring to Historical Figures

As an Asian-American philosopher I have frequently experienced the following asymmetric attitude about discussing Asian philosophy in either an analytical or phenomenological context, that is, a context in which one brings up ideas from Asian philosophy in a discussion that is on a topic that is being discussed only from the perspective of analytical or phenomenological philosophy.

  • (a) As a person color, I bring up a point from Asian philosophy that is relevant to a debate in some field, such as metaphysics, epistemology, or philosophy of mind. I draw on the historical figure from Asian philosophy. I make the point analytical, in the sense of representing the idea as an argument for a position on the topic. But I also make it clear that the source of the idea comes from some specific school of, say, Buddhist philosophy. I do this in much the same way that one might bring up an idea from Aristotle in a contemporary discussion of perception that is not historical in nature.
  • (b) People seem to think that I am bringing it up because I am a person of color, and not because I think the idea is interesting and deserving of discussion. They appear to be thinking, “that person is making that comment only to draw attention to the issue of where an idea came from and who they are.”

This can be contrasted with the following, which I have observed:

  • (i) A person not-of-color makes a similar point — that is, makes reference to a philosopher from outside the analytical and phenomenological tradition in the context of debating a topic.
  • (ii) People do not think that the person is bringing it up for any reason other than that the point is important. They don’t think that the person is trying to show their inclusive thinking on the issue.

And this can be further contrasted against the following phenomenon:

  • (iii) A person not-of-color makes a historical point about a contemporary debate, such as in the philosophy of mind, by making reference to a historical figure from the Western tradition.
  • (iv) No one thinks that the reference to a historical figure from the Western tradition means anything other than the substantive point that it is.

In sum, I have experienced a certain kind of asymmetry in attitude or attention. It roughly goes like this: It isn’t okay as a person of color to bring up examples from outside the Western tradition when there is a discussion about, say, the nature of consciousness. But it is okay to do it if you are not a person of color, and it is furthermore okay for anyone to make reference to a Western historical character, such as Aristotle, in the context of a contemporary discussion.

I wonder if I am alone in feeling this asymmetry.

Our Family Tree

Before I made my final decision about where to attend graduate school, the philosopher then in charge of recruitment at one university called to inform me that he had just recruited an African American woman, in case that was of interest to me. (I am an African American man.) I did eventually choose that department, but for a different reason.

The next year, at a bar with philosophy graduate students, I was introduced to a white woman from another department. She was delighted to learn that we had the same surname, and she proceeded to tell me a little about “our family history,” which, she said, she herself had learned from a famous American novelist, who also has the name, and whom she had recently met. She told me that before coming to the United States, “we” were Irish gentry, but originally British—and so on. There did not seem much point in explaining how most African Americans, myself included, came into our surnames.

The night before a job interview at the Eastern APA, one of the placement officers from my own department told me that I would be “a great diversity hire, if only we hired our own.”

People, This is Embarrassing

I wanted to note that reading one paragraph from an earlier post was spiritually rejuvenating. It made me feel less suffocated, and less alone. Thank you for publishing it.

 “Several of my closest friends are academic philosophers, yet I find the culture of academic philosophy off-putting.  Philosophy is not as imaginative, dynamic, timely, publicly engaged, worldly and inclusive as it could or should be.  Other disciplines have left philosophy in the dust.  I prefer being around historians, lawyers, artists, sociologists, nanoscientists—almost any other group.  Among philosophers I feel especially self-conscious.  I cannot be myself.  For example, I attended an analytic philosophy symposium in a major philosophy department a few weeks ago.  The audience was 90% male.  98% of the audience was white.   Most of the white women seemed extremely smart but guarded and intellectually artificial. (Did they care about what they were talking about?)  Some of the older men used inappropriate examples. (Really? Did he say that?)  I felt out of place and decided to skip the event dinner.”

 I am lucky to have a humane, deeply intelligent, no-bullshit advisor; without her I would have left the profession years ago, feeling like an utter failure. With her, I am more confident in thinking that it is the profession that is failing: it is unimaginative, narrow-minded, and arrogant. Its dominant culture is one that celebrates and rewards the very ways of thinking that I, naively, thought that philosophy is supposed to guard against. Should I choose to leave the profession now, it’ll feel like immigrating to a land of opportunity.

I won’t share particular anecdotes because the problems are systemic. It is comically absurd the level of ignorance that I have encountered about race and gender in the field. I don’t even mean ignorance about philosophy about race and gender (that is a whole separate and important issue), I mean simply the ways in which race and gender exist as salient properties in the lives of people who are not white, and not male. It’s not cute to deny the existence of these things because you hold some obscure metaphysical principle – yes, I realize how much explanatory power your account has. It’s not cute to insist that your favorite political theory can handle issues of race and gender because those properties are just as arbitrary and as morally insignificant as hair-color or the length of one’s toes – yup, I’m aware that your view doesn’t rely on positing any spooky properties!

People, this is embarrassing.

Finally: it’s just plain rotten to then place the epistemic burden on those whose entire lives are shaped by these categories to prove their existence or importance to you, or to react to the anger or disappointment of these people as though it is insane, or irrational. We’re already being erased by your project, and our voices are getting hoarse.

Circling the Wagons

I am a woman of color, full professor, so I don’t know if this had more to do with being a woman or not being white.

I was invited to give a paper at a conference.  The panel was made up of all white males, except for myself.  I gave the paper and it went very, very well.  The paper was very well attended and the audience was excited about my work.  Later on many graduate students, several from Ivy League programs, came to speak with me; they were very exited about my work.  The other men (Professors) on the panel were very uncomfortable with this, somehow drew these graduate students away from me and towards them, and made a circle from which I was completely excluded.  They were letting them know that it was definitely not ok to talk to the brown woman.  Later on I received an e-mail from one of the white men panel participants, which was sent out to everyone.  It noted just how wonderful everyone’s paper was, except mine.  It noted that mine was a disgrace.  

I was mortified, and since then I have not attended another conference.  No one came to my defense.  The person who put the conference together asked me if I had a response, that was all.  As I hate to send out mass e-mails and clutter people’s inboxes, I really did not want to do so, but I reluctantly sent out a defense that was as professional as possible, sticking only to the philosophical issues at hand.  I’d like to say that this was the only time something like this has happened at conferences, but unfortunately I cannot.  Bad things like this have happened before, but I am just getting older and more tired.  What is the point, if this is what to expect?  (The paper, by the way, was accepted for publication at the most prestigious journal in this area.)