Continuing on Black Skin White Masks (1952) with guest Lawrence Ware. We've reached the most influential chapter (five), "The Fact of Blackness" (also translated as "The Lived Experience of the Black Man"), where Fanon describes how negative images of blackness in society fix the identity of black folks, trapping them in perpetual self-consciousness, and how Fanon himself Continue Reading …
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Ep. 210: Frantz Fanon’s Black Existentialism (Part One)
On Black Skin White Masks (1952). How does growing up in a racist society mess people up? Fanon was born in the French-colonized Martinique and educated as a psychoanalyst in France where he studied under Merleau-Ponty, among others. The book was proposed (and rejected) as Fanon's dissertation, and claims to be a "clinical study," though it explicitly avoids spelling out its Continue Reading …
Ep. 52: Philosophy and Race (DuBois, Martin Luther King, Cornel West)
On W.E.B. DuBois's "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" (1903), Cornel West's "A Genealogy of Modern Racism" (1982), and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963) and "The Black Power Defined" (1967), plus Malcolm X's "The Black Revolution" (1963). What kind of philosophical lessons come out of the history of black oppression in America? Historian and Continue Reading …
Episode 162: James Baldwin on Race in America (Part One)
On the film I Am Not Your Negro and the essays "Notes of a Native Son" (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963). Baldwin is a go-to figure at this point in discussions of race; his essays, stories, and speeches provide a key touchstone in discussing how racism has warped our culture. So, how do we translate his testimony into philosophical theory? When he talks about the Continue Reading …
Episode 161: White Privilege (Peggy McIntosh, Charles Mills, et al) (Part One)
Is the rhetoric of "White Privilege" just the modern way of acknowledging historical and systemic truths of racism, or does it point to a novel way for acknowledging injustice, or does it on the contrary obscure these insights by involving confused claims about group responsibility and guilt? We are rejoined by guest Lawrence Ware to discuss several sources, some less formal Continue Reading …