So, I’m not the world’s biggest fan of philosophy as a discipline, and that’s because easily three-quarters of the philosophy grad students I have met have been big jerks, in a very particular kind of humorless way and personally judgey way (“You shouldn’t eat that,” one of them said when we were out to dinner in a group and I ordered duck. “Why?” I said. “Duck is dirty and fatty,” he said. “Yes,” I said, “that’s why I like it.” And dude, nobody’s interested in your opinion of my meal, so shut it.). that has led me to suspect that the discipline either attracts/selects for that kind of big jerk, or that it manages to turn perfectly innocent people into that kind of big jerk, or, perhaps, that I just have had bad luck in the philosophy grad students I have met. I can say that they have all been male philosophy grad students, almost all white male philosophy grad students, and that may well be a part of it. But I digress.
Nonetheless, despite my personal prejudices (if you are going to spend any part of your comment castigating me about how philosophers are really awesome people and how dare I punch down at them, or something, skip it and relax; philosophers are not an oppressed group), I found this interview in the NYT the other day about the philosophy of liberalism and its dependence on racism to be fascinating (let me hasten to say that nobody who has read Engels on the Irish, for example, could possibly say that radical leftism is not similarly based on racism). I do think it’s more important in the context of the US to understand the relationship between liberalism and racism because the US is a nation-state that is more or less based on liberal philosophies that largely can’t bear to hear any indication that such philosophies might be fallible (What did the founding fathers intend? Well, who gives a fuck what a bunch of rich slave-owning gentile white men intended? I’m not convinced they were bearing my best interests in mind.).
Falguni A. Sheth, an associate professor of philosophy and political theory at Hampshire College. She is the author of Toward a Political Philosophy of Race:
The charge of “misapplication” of liberal theory is, I think, a desire to see selectively — to see only the best possible articulation of liberalism. But liberal frameworks are fundamentally predicated on violence or on rationalizing its effects, such as the conquest of “terra nullius,” of justifying enslavement, or the privation of rights to “idiots,” “savages,” “women.” … While we can make corrections to “ideal” liberal theory, these corrections are at base additive. They don’t fundamentally restructure the foundation of liberal society — namely the promise of universal and equal protections alongside a systematic impulse to violence in the name of “civilizing” the heathens, or for the purposes of maintaining “law and order.” At base, this is what the killing of Michael Brown, and the ensuing encounters between the police and protesters in Ferguson, Mo., have exposed: peace, safety, recognition of one’s humanity, law, order, rights will be doled out — or withheld — only in terms that allow those in authority, those with wealth, to remain comfortable. Consider the recent Supreme Court decision to allow restrictive voter ID requirements in Texas — which hurts the poorest citizens. But — and here’s the kicker — until we confront the repeated incidents of dehumanization as systematic, and not just a proliferation of accidental violations of humanity, we won’t be able to address or challenge the fundamental flaw of liberalism: the “compatibility” between the promise of universal protections for some groups, and violence for others.