Do Black Lives Matter?

Do Black Lives Matter?

• #BLM is a movement against

  racially-motivated police

  brutality …

• drawing strength and numbers

  from the murder of George Floyd

  (2020) amongst many others.

• It was originally formed in the

  United States but now is

  increasingly worldwide.

• Amsterdam 2020 ->

Do Black Lives Matter?

• Obviously, #BLM is important politically and sociologically. And clearly:

  - Racism is wrong

  - Police brutality is wrong

  - And thus: racially-motivated police brutality is wrong

  • So what more can be said about the subject, except that the problem should be fixed?

  • The sociological/political problem raises a philosophical one. Do black lives matter for justice?

  - Why and in what way?

  - And compared to what?

  • The problem is an interesting one in part because liberalism answers: no.

  - Liberalism rejects that black lives matter, except insofar as all lives matter.

Do Black Lives Matter?

• Rawls dismisses all concerns about race as obviously irrelevant for justice:

  • “[In the original position] no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does any one know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength and the like …. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance. This ensures that no one is advantaged of disadvantaged in the choice of principles by the outcome of natural chance or the contingency of social circumstances”

• The liberal argument is simple:

  • All people must be treated with equal concern and respect.

  • Black lives don’t matter in particular, because all lives matter equally.

• Indeed, the essential principle of equal concern and respect – Kymlicka’s ‘egalitarian plateau’ – means that race can have no place in matters of justice. This is true also for multiculturalists:

• Race matters if attached to culture. But that’s because culture matters, not race.

  • This is Kymlicka’s multiculturalism position; also David Miller’s liberal nationalist positon.

• So black lives matter politically, but not philosophically.

  • Police brutality is simply an expression of society under non-ideal conditions

Do Black Lives Matter?

• But is this a satisfying answer? Yes and no.

• - Clearly all lives matter.

  • - But this doesn’t mean that race doesn’t also present a unique and enduring problem.

  • - So how might it matter philosophically?

• • Some questions we might raise:

  • - 1) What if race is mischaracterized as simply an ascriptive condition? (If a society cannot be color blind, the problem cannot

• be pushed away).

  • - 2) What if racism is better understood as an ideology, part of the language of society itself? Racism, then, is like the patriarchy (as in Hirschman) socially constructed but ever-present.

  • - Consequently, what if liberal neutrality legitimates domination?

    • because we cannot be neutral

• • This lecture aims to aims to take seriously these question. In what follows we will:

  • 1) Take a short walk through the subject of race in political philosophy

  • 2) Spotlight: Frantz Fanon

  • 3) Decolonize the curriculum

Race and the History of Political Though

• The original (ancient) bifurcation: civilization and barbarism

• • In Plato’s Republic, the question of war emerges. Socrates argues it is better to enslave barbarians than Greeks:

  • “How will our soldiers deal with enemies? … Which seems just, that Greek cities enslave Greeks; or that they … make it a habit to spare the Greek stock … ?” (469b-c).

  • The Greeks were civilized, and thus subjects of justice; barbarians were uncivilized, and could thus be enslaved.

• Aristotle’s Politics defends slavery, especially of uncivilized peoples (barbarians) who are unfit for freedom. He discusses different regimes and argues that Asiatic peoples are predisposed to despotic rule:

  • - “Barbarians, being more servile in character than Hellenes, and Asiatics than Europeans, do not rebel against a despotic government … because the people are by nature slaves” (1285a17-24)

• Race and the History of Political Thought

• This is not just an ancient problem, but also a modern one.

• The new bifurcation was between enlightened peoples (white, European) and unenlightened ones (mostly black/brown peoples in Africa and Asia).

• Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762) argued in favor of the maturity of states, and that some peoples are not ready for freedom.

  • - “For nations, as for men, there is a time of maturity that must be awaited before subjecting them to the laws” (II: 8).

• John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), argued that barbarian peoples can legitimately be ruled by despotism (opressive), as only civilized peoples can rule themselves:

  • naturally disposed to despotism until they are ready

    • - “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians… Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion” (81).

• = Arguments like these can easily be used to justify colonialism

Spotlight: Fanon

• Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

• Fanon (1925-1961), was a colonial subject of French Martinique, and was a practicing psychiatrist (in addition to being a philosopher).

• He begins with the fact of colonial oppression and domination – race as erasure.

  • - Structural inequality (including and especially in language) – similar starting point as Hirschmann.

  • - This leads to psychosis and alienation.

• The problem isn’t purely biological, it is the interplay between biology and

• sociology:

  • - “The effective disalienation of the black man entails an immediate recognition of social and economic realities. If there is an inferiority complex, it is the outcome of a double process: primarily economic; subsequently, the internalization – or, better,

    the epidermalization – of this inferiority … It will be seen that the black man’s

    alienation is not an individual question … Society, unlike biochemical processes,

    cannot escape human influences. Man is what brings society into being. The

    prognosis is in the hands of those who are willing to get rid of the worm-eaten roots

    of the structure” (4-5).

Spotlight: Fanon

• This sociological observations lead to a moral conclusion:

  • Forces of structural imbalance, erasure, and self-alienation destroy the black psyche and lead to psychosis - the

  colonized predicament:

  • “Every colonized people – in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle” (9).

• What to do? One answer: psychological transformation

  • “The juxtaposition of the white and black races has created a massive psycho existential complex. I hope by analyzing it to destroy it” (5).

  • “What I want to do is help the black man to free himself of the arsenal of complexes that has been developed by the colonial environment” (20).

• Another answer: violence

  • “From the moment the Negro accepts the separation imposed by the European he has no further respite, and ‘is it not understandable that thenceforth he will try to elevate himself to the white man’s level? To elevate himself in the range of colors to which he attributes a kind of hierarchy? … We shall see that another solution is possible. It implies a restructuringof the world” (Fanon 1952: 65)

Spotlight: Baldwin

• James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)

• Baldwin (1924-1987) was an American novelist, activist and critic.

• He had a different perspective: the problem wasn’t just the history of

  (colonial) violence, but of the ideology of white innocence.

  • also asks abt being white

• “I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I

  know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they

  have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do

  not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical

  concerning destruction and death … But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime” (5-6).

  • whiteness means nothing because its never been interrogated

• This white innocence suggests: (its easy to say racism is wrong, so are hands are clean )

  - Past racism is gone (slavery is over)

  - We have atoned for the sins of prior generations

  - We now believe racism is wrong

  - We are innocent

• Conceptually: white innocence sounds a lot like liberal neutrality

  • speaks abt the right language that racism is bad

Spotlight: Baldwin

• James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)

• Further: White innocence places the burden of acceptance on blacks.

• “There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it” (8-9).

  • it has replaced the moral burden into blacks

• In short: the solution is to see race, to understand it – not to pretend it doesn’t exist

  • we can only become free from racism from facing it head on

• This is the opposite of liberalism:

  • We will only become free, if we become free from racism.

  • We will only become free from racism, by facing it head on.

  • The means both: freeing blacks from racism, and whites from the ideology of innocence

  • “The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks – the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind … We, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation – if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, our men and women” (97).

• NOTE: Baldwin’s “in the mind” is reminiscent of Hirschmann & Taylor

Liberalism revisited

• • Was Rawls right?

  - If so, race is just a social problem not a philosophical problem.

  - But if racial hierarchy is embedded in language and culture as Fanon suggests, and shared history as Baldwin suggests,

  perhaps it cannot be so easily willed away.

• What can we do to correct socially constructed facts? (without violence)

  - Hirschmann: change language

  - Fanon: change psychology

  - Baldwin: open the black box of history

  - #BLM: Embrace social movements

• So what to do?

  - One solution: change the way we teach ideas.

  - In other words: decolonizing the curriculum.

  - Which is part of why we need to teach Fanon & Baldwin (and so many others) in the first p