Looking Through Philosophy in Black by Mabogo Percy More

Author:Mabogo Percy More [More, Mabogo Percy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)
Published: 2018-11-28T16:00:00+00:00

International Philosophical Community

It was then these experiences as a black philosopher in an antiblack world that made Lewis’s ideas very appealing to me. While I was at Harvard, I ran into Lewis Gordon’s PhD thesis, which later came out as his first groundbreaking book, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Here was a black man from a better intellectual and educational background able to articulate the philosophical concerns I have had for years better than I could ever imagine myself doing. Both of us read a lot of Sartre and used him to understand our situation; hence the Sartrean concept of “Bad Faith” as the operative and guiding principle in an effort to understand our being-in-the-world. Both our worlds were epitomes of racial injustices relatively unequaled in the history of modern societies except Nazi Germany and Palestine. Because both of us were produced by an antiblack world, our philosophical position became structured by our existential milieu and hence our concerns about the existential dimension of racism. This was what I have been waiting for all these years! When I got back home from Boston (Harvard), I immediately wrote an email to him, and he responded just as quickly. Our intellectual and personal relations grew over the years. Since then, Lewis and I have appeared as presenters at the same conferences and contributors in the same books and journals many times. I have also contributed articles in Special Issue journals and book chapters focusing on his work.

Finally, Lewis and other prominent black philosophers from the Caribbean but teaching mainly at American universities (e.g., Paget Henry, Anthony Bogues, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Charles Mills, Patrick Goodin, Clevis Headley, and others) formed the Caribbean Philosophical Association (CPA) in 2002. The inaugural conference of the CPA, under the motto “Shifting the Geography of Reason,” was held in Barbados (2004), where I was one of the two keynote speakers. The subsequent CPA conferences that I attended were held at Concord University in Montreal, Canada (2006), University of the West Indies—Mona Campus, Kingston, Jamaica (2007), the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago (2012), St. Louis, Missouri (2014), Mexico (2015), and University of Connecticut (2016). As the conference title indicates, these philosophers are intent on shifting the geography of reason from the presumed place to another one. The aim is to refute “the hegemonic epistemic and axiological orders that privilege white as the sole inheritors of reason.” Doug Ficek, the current vice president of the CPA, celebrating the eleventh anniversary of the association, states that the organization created a genuine alternative to “an excessively skeptical attitude toward transformative ideas and projects through nurturing the actual work of the organization’s motto of ‘shifting the geography of reason’: exploring anew the people, places, and situations out of which distinct possibilities of living thought emerge, confronting intellectual barriers buttressed by linguistic differences and disciplinary divides, and supporting intellectual curiosity and talent regardless of age, institutional affiliation, or geographic home of the person who embodies it.” This is done by debunking racist myths about the superiority of whites and promoting an Africana philosophy.

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