> On Sep 26, 3:43 pm, Mike yahoo.com> wrote:

>> http://chronicle.com
>> Section: Diversity in Academe
>> Volume 54, Issue 5, Page B4
>>

>>>From the issue dated September 28, 2007

>>
>> Black Women Seek a Role in Philosophy
>>
>> When the nation's black female philosophers meet for the first time
>> next month, the auditorium at Vanderbilt University will have plenty
>> of empty seats. Not because no one is interested in attending, but
>> because fewer than 30 black women are known to hold full-time jobs in
>> the discipline.
>>
>> The women - plus about a half-dozen black female graduate students -
>> are getting together for the first meeting of the Collegium of Black
>> Women Philosophers. The gathering will be part pep talk, part
>> networking opportunity, and part research seminar.
>>
>> "If you're a black woman, you cannot identify with the majority of the
>> people in the profession," says Kathryn T. Gines, a black assistant
>> professor at Vanderbilt who started the group. She is reminded of her
>> minority status every time she attends the annual meeting of the
>> American Philosophical Association: "How few our numbers really are
>> becomes very daunting when you're surrounded by a sea of graying,
>> white males with pipes and tweed coats."
>>
>> Some women are coming to the meeting in Nashville just so they can
>> meet other philosophers who look like them and who go against the
>> grain by infusing questions of race into their scholarship. "I spend a
>> lot of time being the only woman and the only black person," says
>> Jacqueline R. Scott, an associate professor of philosophy at Loyola
>> University Chicago. "Every once in a while it hits me, and I wonder
>> what I'm doing here."
>>
>> Philosophy is academe's oldest discipline, yetit wasn't until 1965
>> that it granted its first Ph.D. to a black woman - Joyce Mitchell
>> Cook, who earned her degree at Yale University. (She will be honored
>> at the Nashville meeting.) In philosophy, as in most fields, the best-
>> known thinkers have been white men. Unlike such disciplines as
>> English, history, and political science, however, contemporary
>> philosophy has not made much room for minority perspectives, black
>> scholars say. "It is still committed to the mainstream, traditional
>> lines of inquiry," says Ronald R. Sundstrom, an associate professor of
>> philosophy at the University of San Francisco, who is black.
>>
>> That has long cast women and minority scholars as outsiders. George
>> Yancy, an assistant professor of philosophy at Duquesne University,
>> remembers looking up "philosophy" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica when
>> he was young. "All the pictures were of white males," he says. "I
>> literally thought I was the only black person in the world who was
>> interested in philosophy."
>>
>> When Ms. Cook was at Yale, in the mid-1960s, she knew she was the only
>> black woman in her field. But "I didn't even think in terms of what
>> race meant or what gender meant," says the professor, who is now
>> retired from Howard University. Her advice for young black women
>> contemplating a career in philosophy: "If you don't feel you have to
>> do it, you shouldn't." An advanced degree in a theoretical field, she
>> remembers, set her apart from the rest of the black community.
>>
>> The American Philosophical Association does not even keep up-to-date
>> figures on how many of North America's approximately 10,000
>> philosophers are women or minority-group members. Some philosophers
>> see that as part of the problem. "We've been struggling for so many
>> years to get this data," says Sally Haslanger, a philosophy professor
>> at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She gathered her own
>> figures on women at elite institutions and will publish them next
>> spring in Hypatia, a feminist journal. Her research shows that at the
>> nation's top 20 philosophy departments, only 76 professors, or about
>> 19 percent, are female. Still, she doesn't know exactly how many of
>> those are African-Americans.
>>
>> "I used to count on one hand the number of tenured black women" in
>> philosophy, says Ms. Haslanger, who is white. Their scarcity means
>> that black women "are always solo in every context. They are a double
>> minority in the field."
>>
>> Brian R. Leiter, a professor of philosophy and law at the University
>> of Texas at Austin, publishes a well-read online ranking of philosophy
>> departments and tracks the comings and goings of people in the
>> profession. He probably knows of more scholars than anyone else in the
>> field. When The Chronicle asked him to name some black female
>> philosophers, only one immediately came to mind.
>>
>> The philosophy association says it will embark on a demographic study
>> of its membership next year. Anna Stubblefield, who heads the group's
>> Committee on Blacks and Philosophy, estimates that only about 100, or
>> 1 percent, of the 10,000 academic philosophers in North America are
>> black. Of those, she estimates, about 20 are female. Ms. Stubblefield,
>> who heads the philosophy department on Rutgers University's Newark
>> campus, isn't one of them. She is white. Vanderbilt's Ms. Gines, too,
>> has tried to tally the number of black female philosophers in academe
>> and says she has found a few more by word of mouth, putting the total
>> at 29.
>>
>> The number has been inching up lately, thanks mostly to the graduate
>> program at the University of Memphis, where Ms. Gines earned her Ph.D.
>> in 2003. The philosophy department there has made recruiting black
>> women a top priority. Faculty members and graduate students regularly
>> visit historically black colleges to try to interest undergraduates
>> early on. Since 2003 the department has turned out five black female
>> Ph.D.'s, and seven more are making their way through the program.
>>
>> Robert L. Bernasconi, a professor at Memphis, is largely responsible
>> for that. "We have four philosophers working on feminism, and I do
>> race theory, so this is a very natural place," says Mr. Bernasconi,
>> who is white. He adds that Memphis - a city in which the majority of
>> residents are African-American - is a natural place to begin trying to
>> offset the profession's racial imbalance.
>>
>> Like many of the black women who are earning doctorates in philosophy,
>> Sybol Cook Anderson took awhile to decide that was what she wanted to
>> spend her life studying. When she went to college in the 1980s, she
>> says, smart black women were pointed toward careers in medicine, law,
>> and engineering. "From my interactions with freshman students now,
>> that's still largely the case," she says. "Black students are guided
>> toward more-practical and more-remunerative fields."
>>
>> Ms. Anderson came to philosophy in a roundabout way. She first planned
>> on being a doctor, but after college she went to work for a defense
>> contractor and then became a continuing-education instructor.
>> Eventually she became interested in the history of ideas. She didn't
>> earn her Ph.D., from the Johns Hopkins University, until she was 42.
>> Now she is an assistant professor of philosophy at St. Mary's College
>> of Maryland.
>>
>> She teaches a course on the philosophy of love, which looks at
>> philosophical discussions of love, friendship, and sexuality since
>> antiquity. She is also working on a book on Hegel's theory of
>> recognition and the questions he posed about what it means to be a
>> person. Gradually, she says, she has mixed in some questions about her
>> own identity: How do oppression, sexism, racism, and classism
>> influence what it means to be an "authentic human being"?
>>
>> Many black women entering philosophy use it as a tool to address
>> questions about who they are and how they fit into the world. Samaiyah
>> Jones, a third-year graduate student at Memphis, says most of the
>> philosophy she does is very practical. "If I were not in philosophy, I
>> would be doing social work or nonprofit work," she says. "I'm not
>> interested in philosophy that isn't going to help us think about the
>> issues we face." For her, that means looking at "perfectionism in the
>> black community" and at the ways in which the ideas of W.E.B. Du Bois
>> and Frederick Douglass on "how we should shape the Negro" relate to
>> the progress of African-Americans today.
>>
>> Ms. Scott, of Loyola Chicago, is a Nietzsche scholar and has just
>> earned tenure. Most people reading her publications, she says, "will
>> not think, Oh, that's a black woman who's done that." But recently she
>> has started seeing applications to race theory in her study of the
>> German philosopher. "Nietzsche was an outsider to his culture but
>> trying to heal the culture," she says. "That's a stance many African-
>> Americans take."
>>
>> It can be dangerous to ask questions about race or gender when you are
>> a philosopher, says Mr. Yancy, the Duquesne scholar. Doing so, he
>> says, "disturbs the waters" and often isn't regarded as serious work.
>> "The mainstream philosophical journals aren't interested in what we're
>> doing," he says.
>>
>> That's one reason some people wonder whether the Nashville meeting is
>> a good idea. Carol M. Swain, a professor of political science and law
>> at Vanderbilt, says she understands that "there is a certain type of
>> research done by black scholars that isn't accepted by the larger
>> white academy." But she doesn't believe that "self segregation" is in
>> any scholar's best interest.
>>
>> "Encouraging black people to marginalize themselves by pursuing a line
>> of philosophy not accepted by the mainstream just reinforces the
>> stereotype that blacks can't do philosophy the way other scholars
>> can," says Ms. Swain, who is black.
>>
>> Anita L. Allen, a prominent professor of law at the University of
>> Pennsylvania who also holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, agrees that it is
>> dangerous to shun the mainstream. "I've met some women of color in
>> philosophy who want to only cite authors of color," says Ms. Allen,
>> who is black, "even if it means they won't get tenure or be taken
>> seriously."
>>
>> She says she expects the black women at the Nashville meeting to talk
>> about John Stuart Mill and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as much as
>> they talk about race. Besides, she says, the meeting is valuable
>> because nothing like it has ever happened before.
>>
>> "Every year for the last 25 years, I've gone to lots and lots and lots
>> of conferences," she says. "But I have never had the opportunity to
>> sit down with 20 African-American philosophers to figure out our place
>> in the discipline and talk about issues that are on our minds."

>
>
>
> S: Hmmm....this is a kind of article that has carefully laid
> statistics but actually enforces stereotype of 'black people'.
> Besides it somehow misses the larger picture...and it certainly misses
> what philosophy is all about.
> You don't become great philosopher based on your race certainly you
> become one based on your ideas and contribution to theories.
>
> And did you catch on that statement " professional racial
> imbalance' ??? It's very loaded and ridiculous! ...there were few in
> this article ...another one is that females can't identify with
> majority in profession (???) They are human being like everyone else
> sure they can. Question is do they or any in profession need to
> identify with majority? And why?
>
>