CHAPTER 10

The Whiteness

of Political Philosophy

I

got my PhD from the University of Toronto in 1985, which (to my
alarm) puts me in the category of really senior African American phi-
losophers in the profession working on Africana philosophy, junior only
to such pioneering figures in the field as Leonard Harris, Howard McGary,
Al Mosley, and Lucius Outlaw, all 1970s graduates, and a few early 1980s
graduates like Robert Gooding- Williams, Tommy Lott, and Cornel West.
As I have recounted in greater detail elsewhere, I originally went to gradu-
ate school in philosophy in the hopes of exploring the issues of race and
imperialism then being hotly debated in my native Jamaica.^1 Not finding
any appropriate philosophical frameworks in a white field in an all- white
department in a white Canadian university without even a black studies
program to assist me, I  decided to do a dissertation on Marxism instead.
So in a sense, my 1990s turn to race in my work was a return, a coming
back to what I  had originally wanted to do. Since by many conventional
measures— publications, recognition, visibility— I have succeeded, it
might be illuminating to reflect on what this “success” is worth, and the
changes I  have seen, as well as the changes I  have not seen, in academic
philosophy over this period and what they say about the profession. My
conclusions are, unfortunately, somewhat pessimistic. I  now believe that
what has been self- satirizingly described as the “long march” through the
academy for campus radicals wanting to transform their disciplines will be
much longer and harder for blacks seeking to establish Africana philoso-
phy than for theorists elsewhere. Whiteness has become— in effect, if not
de jure— more structurally central to the very self- conception of the field
than in other subjects, so that by pursuing this agenda one is, in a sense,