Across Black Spaces by George Yancy

Author:George Yancy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781538131633
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2019-12-12T16:00:00+00:00

The field of philosophy is saturated with the “aspirational ideals” of whiteness. Philosophy, after all, was deemed a field of high intellectual endeavor (read: white), not the sort of activity that Black people were thought capable of engaging. The idea of a Black philosopher was seen as a “square-circle,” a contradiction in terms, blatantly foolish. After all, to engage in philosophical reflection is to assume a critical perspective. Black people, however, were constructed as intrinsically devoid of subjectivity, interiority, and perspective. In short, so it was believed, there was no here from which Black people made sense of themselves and their world. Baker, however, indefatigably negotiated his way through the labyrinth of white racist oppression and ideology and managed to receive the PhD in philosophy from Yale University as early as 1903. Contrary to the African-American historian Kennell Jackson’s claim that Carter G. Woodson “was the first Black of slave parentage to earn a doctorate in the United States,”9 Baker earned his doctorate nine years before Woodson, who received his PhD in 1912 from Harvard University.

In an article, printed in around 1896, which covered Boston University’s announcement that Baker was “the first colored man to be elected a commencement speaker from any department, and is worthy of the honor,”10 Baker was pressed to give a synopsis of his life. He recalls:

My mother taught me my letters, although I well remember when she learned them herself. My first reading lesson was the second chapter of Matthew, the Bible being the only book we had. I never read a bad book in my life which is one of the blessings I got by being poor. I began to attend the common schools at eight and learned to love books passionately. I used to read through my recesses. Evenings I read the Bible to my parents and grandparents, while they listened with weeping eyes, thankful that I had received the great blessing of being able to read.11

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