http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 54, Issue 13, Page B9
From the issue dated November 23, 2007

CRITIC AT LARGE

Black Woman Philosophers Ponder 'The Price of the Ticket'
By CARLIN ROMANO

Nashville, Tenn.

Where were the white philosophers? At 9 a.m. on October 19 here at
Vanderbilt University's Bishop Joseph Johnson Black Cultural Center,
the building's "multipurpose auditorium" served a familiar purpose at
such designated campus spots: It provided a comfortable place to bring
African-Americans together to talk about something white colleagues
might also have found interesting.

At the outset of the inaugural conference of the Collegium of Black
Women Philosophers, a new group organized by Kathryn T. Gines, an
assistant professor of Africana and diaspora studies at Vanderbilt
with a secondary appointment in philosophy (The Chronicle, September
28), one could count 29 people in the room, only one of them white. By
10 a.m. the audience had grown to 41 black women, three black men, and
the same white male -- the last scribbling numbers and other
observations into a notebook.

Gines, in welcoming black woman philosophers from around the country,
mixed her thanks for the collegium's sponsors -- which included the
barely represented Vanderbilt philosophy department (apart from the
regular attendees and workshop presenters Kelly Oliver and José
Medina) -- with an explanation that she meant the conference to be "not
just a reaction" to the painfully low number of black women (between
30 and 40) in a discipline that produces some 11,000 members of the
American Philosophical Association, but "a positive place."

And it was. A positively eye-opening place. Could you wonder why
Jacqueline Scott, recently tenured at Chicago's Loyola University,
recalled that she'd asked herself when she entered graduate school,
"What am I doing in this field?"

Yet in her paper that launched the collegium, "The Price of the
Ticket: A Genealogy and Revaluation of Race," Scott opened two days of
feisty back and forth that often touched on her introspective graduate-
school query, one it seemed almost everyone in the room had asked
herself. It soon became clear that their answers differed. Some
emphasized mastering the discipline and its tradition. Others
recognized that they deferred to them in not always comfortable ways.
But a critical mass plainly aimed to alter the subject's ossified
corpus, its hermetic irrelevance to much contemporary intellectual
life, its bad faith in remaining a largely lily-white field.

Scott, a Nietzsche scholar, immediately galvanized the room by linking
her German thinker -- enthusiastically studied by the minority of
philosophers who teach so-called Continental philosophy, but largely
ignored by the field's science-worshiping analytic establishment -- to
two black writers white philosophers hardly discuss, W.E.B. Du Bois
and James Baldwin.

Provocatively, Scott acknowledged that many theorists of color want to
eliminate "race" as a category. She, by contrast, urged them not to
"throw the baby out with the bath water." Rather, she suggested they
try on Nietzsche's "thin" and "multifarious" view of race, which
avoids antiquated biological rigidities and holds that, she explained,
"We are all contaminated. We are all of mixed race."

Reactions came fast when she finished. Wasn't a thicker view of race
the fault of "sick people" who had instituted the "one drop" theory
for blacks? Why did some blacks attack Tiger Woods for describing
himself as "multiethnic"? A questioner suggested that a "thinner" view
of race could allow "blackness" to "cover more territory." Anita
Allen, the prominent University of Pennsylvania professor of
philosophy and law, wondered how "thinned out" blacks who accepted
"dynamic, malleable, artistic notions of race" would deal with racial
slurs.

Scott's paper resembled a mainstream philosophy talk in some respects.
She, like others present, had unquestionably internalized some norms
of the discipline. Her paper dealt with a great white male figure in
the canon. Her presentation also kept, stylistically, to convention.
No laptop to be fiddled with, no PowerPoint outlines, no background
poster of Friedrich for scenery. Visuals at a philosophy conference?
Not a chance. Black woman philosophers, like the rest, walk up to a
lectern and talk.

But in other key ways, Scott's session felt different. Philosophy, as
Scott remarked, "often doesn't do a good job of engaging the real
world." Here, though, people kept offering examples, such as Woods,
from that world. Another difference: Laughter kept breaking out, as
when one commentator sternly observed of racists, "It's them who need
to thin out!"

Later papers also demonstrated, sometimes with extraordinary force,
the fresh light shone on topics by speakers other than what Donna-Dale
Marcano, an assistant professor of philosophy at Trinity College,
called the "white young boys" who populate philosophy. (A handful of
white listeners did eventually join the audience.) Sybol Cook
Anderson, an assistant professor of philosophy at St. Mary's College
of Maryland who at age 42 earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at Johns
Hopkins with a dissertation on Hegel, riveted listeners with her
struggle to understand a classic philosopher who would have viewed her
as doubly inferior for being both black and a woman. (Among Hegel's
views in this area: The difference between men and women is like the
difference between animals and plants, and non-Europeans can't rise to
the same level of "spirit" as Europeans.)

"What can a racist and sexist have to say to us about difference?"
Anderson asked. Much, she thinks, though she's accepted that Hegel's
worst writings are not a matter of his having "a bad day." For
Anderson, "We don't have to be stopped by Hegel when we can use Hegel
to correct Hegel."

Yet it was Marcano, in her "Re-Reading Plato's Symposium Through the
Lens of a Black Woman," who most electrically stirred two opposed
impulses in the auditorium: a bent for natural, no-holds-barred talk
in the vernacular versus a sense of traditional philosophy's
propriety, its dignity, what you might even call its noncorporeal
chastity.

Stating that a black woman might be conventionally viewed as "least
likely to be considered the conveyor of philosophical wisdom," she
likened the black woman to, in Plato's famous dialogue, Alcibiades,
the dashingly handsome political leader who admits in Symposium to a
failed attempt to seduce Socrates.

According to Marcano, Alcibiades challenges the traditional white male
philosopher's reverence for Socrates, the endless questioner and
pursuer of abstract and eternal truths "who never reveals himself" and
"refuses to be human." In elaborating on what she meant, Marcano got
personal. From her earliest days as a student, she confided,
philosophy aroused her physically.

"I blushed like someone was whispering sweet nothings in my ear,"
Marcano exclaimed to oohs and aahs, and a few looks of disapproval. "I
really thought I was having an orgasm. I was in heat." But academic
philosophy, in its relation to black women, "refuses to know us as its
lover." Stay in the field long enough, Marcano warned, and "somehow
your body drops out."

That's why, she continued, as both laughs and head shaking grew, she
sees Plato's Symposium not as an apotheosis of Plato the thinker over
Alcibiades the sensualist, but as a dialogue that forces the reader to
confront different activities in life, and perhaps choose allegiances.
Reading Symposium properly, Marcano advised, means "removing the
glasses where Socrates is already the hero." Like Alcibiades, Marcano
contended, black women should barge into philosophy "raucous, loud,
and drunk, with wine and eros, so that our presence can never be
suppressed."

The mix of reactions, like the wide assortment of voices and
approaches, undermined any notion that black women in philosophy speak
monolithically. Wasn't Marcano self-defeatingly projecting images of
black female sexuality at odds with the event's cerebral ethos? Or was
she seeing elephants in a room where Socrates could see only capital-L
Love? The diverse responses to Marcano's talk also raised the issue
implied in the title of Scott's paper: What was "the price of the
ticket" for black women winning their place in philosophy?

Would they also have to adopt the worst artificial language games of
the mainstream discipline -- the tentative, Anglophilic diction ("I
think, perhaps, that what I want to say here is ... ") aimed at
implying that one both studied at Oxford or Cambridge and is terribly
thoughtful? Or the opaque jargon, the pathetic ventriloquism that
always demands an authoritative citation instead of straight talk?

The collegium offered moments of such fealty to tradition, too. One
speaker stated, apropos of a late French "master of thought," that
"Lévinas has the best articulation of an alterity that gets to be an
alterity."

At the close of the conference, Gines declared an open-mike session
and invited participants to share their thoughts about how to
institutionalize the gains of their first meeting. Good cheer ruled.
After the Vanderbilt professor of philosophy Lucius Outlaw spoke,
Gines remarked, "I have a slight hesitation about giving a man the
last word at this conference, so if anyone has something, even for 30
seconds. ... "

They did. For far more than 30 seconds. Scott raised the idea of
having the collegium regularly in different cities.

"I love the notion of Paris," she announced with a big smile.

It's plain the collegium's tug of war between tradition and a bold new
path will continue.

Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic
for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at
the University of Pennsylvania.