the WhIteNess of PoLItIcaL PhILosoPhy ( 187 )race)^16 — were really working centrally and currently on race and/ or
Africana philosophy.
Fast forward now to the 2014– 15 ranking of the schools in the top twenty-
five positions (thirty departments in total). In the intervening five years,
some people have moved around and retired, and there have been some
new hirings. But the count is still (despite the larger number of departments
included) only fourteen black philosophers: New York University: Kwame
Anthony Appiah; Princeton: Delia Graff Fara; Rutgers: Howard
McGary; Michigan: Derrick Darby; Yale: Christopher Lebron (primary
appointment in African American Studies); Harvard: Tommie Shelby;
Stanford: Kenneth Taylor; Columbia: Robert Gooding- Williams (joint
position with African American Studies), Michele Moody- Adams, and
Elliot Paul; CUNY Graduate Center: Frank Kirkland and Charles Mills;
Chicago: Anton Ford; UC San Diego: Michael Hardimon. The number
of people who work on race and/ or African American philosophy is now
eight: McGary, Shelby, Kirkland, and Hardimon, as listed above, but now
in addition Darby (social and political philosophy, race, philosophy of law),
Lebron (ethics, political philosophy, race), Gooding- Williams (social and
political philosophy, African American, nineteenth- century European,
aesthetics), and Mills (social and political philosophy, African American,
Marxism, race). (Appiah, the highest placed black philosopher in the coun-
try [indeed the world] is, of course, well known for his work on race. But
from the beginning his project has been the discrediting of race as a cat-
egory, and his work in recent years has shifted to issues of cosmopolitan-
ism and liberal theory, though admittedly he did recently publish a set of
lectures on Du Bois and identity.)^17
So the total number of black philosophers is the same, while the number
working on race and Africana has increased by just three. And it should
be noted that of these eight philosophers in the top thirty departments,
one of them, McGary, as a 1970s graduate, will presumably be retiring in
another few years, possibly followed by Kirkland. So unless there are some
new hirings, this is still only a handful, if a slightly larger one. That is not to
say, of course, that there are not many very good black philosophers mak-
ing contributions at other institutions. But insofar as in any discipline the
top departments tend to establish the norms for what is considered impor-
tant and cutting- edge philosophy, one can easily see that Africana philoso-
phy is going to be marginalized for a long time to come simply by virtue
of these numbers.^18 Lucius Outlaw, one of the pioneers in establishing the
field in the first place, is now at Vanderbilt, but he taught for most of his
career at an undergraduate institution, Haverford College, and he too is
likely to be retiring soon. Lewis Gordon, one of the most active and prolific
Africana philosophers— by some estimates, the central figure in the field