The Center Must Not Hold: White Women Philosophers on the Whiteness of Philosophy (review)

There have been many books on the philosophy of race and race relations in recent years, among them George Yancy’s Black Bodies, White Gazes (2008), Shannon Sullivan’s collection Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (2007), and her earlier Living Across and Through Skins (2001). Yancy’s work in particular has had an enormous impact on academic philosophers hoping to grasp how the black percept is “scripted” in the white imaginary, and his newest collection, The Center Must Not Hold, stands to extend his influence. It engages in a critical conversation with white women philosophers who discuss the seeming whiteness of philosophy and how race operates in academic spaces. Yancy’s introduction contends that it is necessary for white people to admit how their racial selves have been complicit in enjoying an “unearned power and privilege” (xvi). Thirteen articles follow in which white women scholars take Yancy’s cue and explicitly address the issue of white privilege in the domain of academic philosophy.

Barbara Applebaum’s “White Ignorance and Denials of Complicity: On the Possibility of Doing Philosophy in Good Faith” focuses on her reaction to theories of race among white philosophers who believe that they have knowledge of the racial Other while maintaining their ignorance, or “ignore-ance” (4), of people of color. In “Reading Black Philosophers in Chronological Order,” Audrey Thompson argues that an individual’s race should finally have little bearing on her ability to do research on African American experience. She explores how groups of black students may sometimes fracture internally when considering racial issues in the classroom, unable to examine blackness “without necessarily troubling their own relations to [it]” (45).

Alison Bailey, in “On Intersectionality and the Whiteness of Feminist Philosophy,” claims that feminist philosophy would be enriched by the philosophical inquiries of women of color, and their writing about their experiences and communities, defining intersectionality as a useful strategic tool for examining white authority in feminist scholarship. Lisa Heldke, in “The Man of Culture: The Civilized and the Barbarian in Western Philosophy,” contends that the concept of “the Man of Reason,” which she prefers to call “the Man of Culture” (78), has always shaped the discipline of Western philosophy, defining its foundational whiteness. In “Whiteness and Rationality: Feminist Dialogue on Race in Academic Institutional Spaces,” Crista Lebens criticizes how white feminists have failed to engage the concerns of women of color, and how this failure suggests that ideas of rationality are shaped by whiteness.

In “Appropriate Subjects: Whiteness and the Discipline of Philosophy,” Alexis Shotwell proposes that all white feminists involved with antiracist struggle should become “troublemakers” (127), thus transforming the terrain of philosophy. In “Color in the Theory of Colors? Or: Are Philosophers’ Colors all White,” Berit Brogaard claims that since the desired objectivism of a philosophical theory ignores ethnic and gender differences, it implicitly attributes deficiencies to nonwhite people. Shannon Sullivan, in “The Secularity of Philosophy: Race, Religion and the Silence of Exclusion,” asserts that philosophy’s silence on the importance of religion in the lives of people of color makes for “the silence of exclusion,” one of “the racialized effects of secularity” (162). Susan Babbitt, in “Philosophy’s Whiteness and the Loss of Wisdom,” interrogates why philosophy is culturally white, and demands that philosophy be taught in a way that would allow students to grasp that philosophies of other cultures matter.

Lisa Tessman’s “Against the Whiteness of Ethics: Dilemmatizing as a Critical Approach,” proposes that the discipline of philosophy never takes seriously the problems of African Americans because black experience is always associated with “subpersonhood.” She suggests that coming to terms with racial abuse in unequal societies means examining blacks’ dilemmas, patterns of which highlight social inequalities. Cris Mayo, in “The Whiteness of Anti-Racist White Philosophical Address,” initially warns that any attempt to philosophize against racism is partially complicit with white supremacy. Yet she concludes that antiracist philosophy remains the only...