The Color of Change in Continental Feminist Philosophy

The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) was the first philosophy conference I attended along with my graduate peers. I gave thanks to the universe that at least everyone dressed better than what I had seen at the American Philosophical Association (APA) as a terrified undergraduate guest during a hire—and that the maleness of the philosophical milieu called the APA would recede for a few days.

As silly as these two factors may sound in engendering an increased comfort level with philosophical spaces, it really made a difference. There was a uniform that appeared to pervade the philosophical milieu against which my presence in fashion, comportment, and body fell short. It was at SPEP that I found myself able to take up becoming a philosopher; it was among the feminist here that I could begin to think and take up the question of race. For me, it was always easier to talk about race among the Continental feminists than in the larger population of SPEP. But it was also during this time, as it seems to me now, that race as a relevant and important philosophical topic was beginning to flourish in Continental circles, and thus SPEP as a whole appeared much less hostile than the APA venue, though not wholly without hostility to the exploration of race.

However, in the years as I moved out of graduate school research and into the reality of an academic career, I found myself extremely discouraged once faced with the “reality” that I fought so hard to obtain. The reality that any old town in the United States and thus any old job in the United States would not and could not satisfy quality of life concerned me. The way that race unwittingly factored in my colleagues’ assistance in finding and determining good neighborhoods in which to live could no longer be obscured by my social network in graduate school. I found that my ivory tower sensibility in which junior academics could wear jeans and T-shirts didn’t work in my small liberal arts institution because being a woman, more specifically, a black woman, required high heels and courage enough to take up space and authority in order to not be undermined in the classroom, especially when it came to grading. Indeed, I also came to realize that my presence in the Continental feminist circles, though pleasant, sustained the gaps in my life. As with the neighborhoods, restaurants, and institutional events that I attended with colleagues, everything was white.

I became increasingly aware that my Continental feminist colleagues could talk about race but only in the abstract. I was living at the intersections of identities that were so easily discarded in theories rejecting the role of experience; that argued without nuance that identities, especially racialized ones, were burdensome; that railed against identity politics especially around the politics of race, even as their whiteness, straightness, and economic privilege stayed intact, leaving not only their identities intact but also their worlds, which to me seemed to change very little in the transitions of their academic careers. What I mean by this is that by virtue of the norms of heterosexuality, whiteness, and upper-middle-class values prevalent in most academic institutions, the difference and extent of intentional effort required to meet my needs for community, friendship, and love far exceeded the intention and effort of most of my colleagues and graduate school peers. In my own struggle to negotiate class, race, and sexuality in unfamiliar terrains proved emotionally and mentally tiring, making the vicissitudes of an uncertain career even more difficult.

Depleted, isolated, lonely, and without the kind of support I needed, I noticed that Continental feminists did not utilize the work of women of color in ways that illuminated the histories of intellectual work of the women of color in the United States. Women whose political concerns mapped out and analyzed various positionalities and critiques in a country with an unabashed, if barely, concealed race, gender, and sexual hierarchy and whose collective historical work highlighted the strain, difficulties, and disagreements of living in...