The taming of Black thought

Black philosophers now feature on Western curricula, but the European tradition diminishes their radicalism into reassurance

by Takeshi Morisato  BIO

The Arts of Africa gallery of the newly renovated Michael C Rockefeller Wing at the Met Museum, New York. Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images

is a lecturer in non-Western philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, UK. He is the editor of several journals on Japanese philosophy and the book series Thinking World Philosophies (2025-). He generally publishes books on Japanese philosophy in English and Africana philosophy in Japanese with some crossover in the area of Afro-Asian philosophy.

Edited byNigel Warburton

Who gets to decide what counts as philosophy? You might think that, if philosophers in the Western tradition read more Black and Asian philosophers, they would be more inclusive of other intellectual traditions. The first Black philosophy professor in Scotland, Tommy Curry, has argued that, on the contrary, consumption of minority thinkers could create devastating consequences for many fields of world philosophies, including Africana and Asian philosophy.

To explain this point, Curry termed this phenomenon ‘epistemic convergence’ in a series of articles in the 2010s. The idea itself can be traced back to W E B Du Bois’s idea of ‘double consciousness’, Frantz Fanon’s ‘sociogeny’, Huey Newton’s term ‘reactionary’, Steve Biko’s ‘Black consciousness’, and Sylvia Wynter’s adaptation of the ‘sociogenic principle’, to name but a few similar concepts. In line with this radical Black tradition, Curry argues that white academia has managed to integrate the same list of Black thinkers, not to critically challenge its traditional concept of humanity that has marginalised these thinkers, but rather to integrate them into the larger narrative that continues to justify and sustain its legitimacy. This creates the ‘interrogationist milieu’, where the historical works of people of African descent are constantly measured by the standards of white academia and, especially, in relation to its liberal ideology. They’re slotted into pre-existing narratives. Their radical challenge to any white-supremacist elements of the establishment is carefully redacted, revised, and integrated into the continuation of what we think of as the ‘proper’ form of philosophical thought in the history of Western philosophy. Their language – regardless of the fact that this language itself was, in many cases, forced upon them to speak about their lived experience in the process of describing their racialised (non-)being – is also paraphrased to avoid perceived offence (by, for example, not using the now archaic technical term ‘Negro’, which carried different connotations in the 1960s), softened through white analogy, or removed. This, Curry argues, creates a ‘methodological and derelictical crisis’ in our study of Black thought.

We could spend pages on each of the Black thinkers I’ve mentioned and their analyses of racism, but we can see the essence of what they were trying to say in an early article of Curry’s titled ‘On Derelict and Method’ (2011). Curry argued that the recent rise of liberalism in the modern academy has allowed us to examine and cite the works of Africana philosophy insofar as they highlight the ‘inadequacies of traditional European thought’. Africana philosophy, in other words, has begun to enjoy increasing validation for its critique of the Anglo-European past. But, because it comes with tacit prejudices deeply rooted in the very tradition it criticises, which still dictates the terms of what counts as philosophical discussions, the whole process of integrating Black thinkers into the traditionally white/Western-style academy ends up validating what European philosophy thinks of as the proper form of being human (or any other major conceptions in philosophy). In other words, by reading the works of Black thinkers, our faith in the white establishment and white philosophy paradoxically increases, and the potential impact of radical philosophy is softened and turned into a kind of ‘racial therapy’ for Western philosophers.

Curry suggests that we can detect this ‘European anthropological order of humanity’ in two mutually influential processes. On the one hand, we will try to avoid and soften the racist views of our past masters: Aristotle’s views on women and children; David Hume’s notorious racist footnote (and essay) about people of African descent and beyond; Immanuel Kant, G W F Hegel, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, too, all said terrible things about non-Western philosophies and their people. But we skip right over these sections as secondary to the primary importance of their rigorous philosophical thinking, regardless of the fact that these passages historically discouraged Western and Westernising people from taking non-Western philosophies and their (own) people seriously. None of these non-Western philosophers were encouraged to think about their philosophy on its own terms when reading Western philosophy. On the other hand, Africana thinkers who seriously challenged the dominant Western conception of what it means to be human or how to do philosophy are accommodated in our academic discussion in such a way that we continue this process of validating the white masters, and carry on doing philosophy in much the same way as those white masters did. It’s business as usual, and the non-Western-philosophy component gives some pretty ‘colours’ to the curriculum.

Du Bois is read as the Black Hegel, and Fanon as a Black Sartre, says Curry – and I would add that Wynter is also read as a Black Beauvoir (or as a fraction of Black feminism that works in tandem with second-wave feminism). Our contemporary study of Black thinkers is conducted by a great number of white(-masked) scholars, who do not specialise in the radical Black tradition, and end up unwittingly supporting the status quo. This validation process of Black thinkers, one that removes their sting, does not articulate the totality of their lived experience, but instead incorporates them as novelties in the Eurocentric canon of philosophy. It’s highly selective. They become novelties that somehow both compensate for and justify our profound faith in the correctness of the European intellectual tradition. This intellectual integration also makes the principle of ‘how much of the content can inspire white intellectuals’ the basic condition of what we are allowed to study as Black thinking in the academy. We want to read the parts of Black philosophy that help us critique and improve our interpretations of white thinkers,........

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