5th Annual Ida B. Wells Philosophical Conference, Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis, October 28-29, 2011.

Keynote Speakers:

Yolonda Wilson, Ph.D., Duke University
Kris Sealey, Ph.D., Fairfield University

We welcome submissions in all areas of philosophy and particularly papers that illuminate African-American experiences. The IBWPC is dedicated to furthering discussion of philosophical issues that arise from the African-American experience, as well as provide a context in which undergraduates and graduates can be encouraged in their philosophical aspirations.

Advisor: Dr. Bill E. Lawson
Coordinators: William Allen and Alfonso Giscombe

Contact: William Allen
Email: wsallen@memphis.edu

Save Philosophy at Howard University.

The Department of Philosophy at Howard University is in danger of being shut down. The administration is poised to fold this BA and MA degree granting department into an interdisciplinary program offering only core and service courses. This will mark the end of the only graduate degree program in philosophy at an HBCU; it will weaken the university’s commitment to the kind of humanistic self-examination that underwrote the US black freedom movement; and it will repudiate the legacy of philosophy at Howard, a legacy forged by the likes of Alain Locke, one of the central figures in the Harlem Renaissance. Please help us encourage Howard’s president to strengthen philosophy rather than abolish it.

For more information, visit the SAVE PHILOSOPHY AT HOWARD website here: http://savehowardphilosophy.wordpress.com/.

McWhorter, John. "What Should African American Students Learn?" THE NEW REPUBLIC October 1, 2009.

My point is that the typical African-American Studies department holds front and center a particular lesson: that racism is more influential in American life at present than one might initially think, and always has been. Urban history? Blacks were penned into segregated districts and then factory jobs available to modestly educated men were moved to China. Politics? Radicalism has been most interesting, whether or not it was the source of most black success. Performance? Most resonant in how it Spoke Truth to Power. Is that all we are? Is that all we have been? Is it irrelevant to cover how black people have triumphed against the obstacles? Especially since so many have trumphed that today there are more middle class black people than poor ones? Is the main relevance of the fact that we have a black President--ahem!!!!--that his election didn’t mean, as if anyone thought it did, that there did not remain some racist idiots here and there? It’s time that African-American Studies departments let go of the sixties imperative to defend blacks as eternal victims of racism. Black people can do their best even under imperfect conditions--and if that reality is irrelevant to an African-American Studies curriculum, then we must question the value of said curricula to those whom they purport to speak up for: real people in this real world. . . .

Carter, Jacoby Adeshei. "Review of Lewis R. Gordon's AN INTRODUCTION TO AFRICANA PHILOSOPHY." NDPR (November 2008).

Gordon, Lewis R. An Introduction to Africana Philosophy. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. An Introduction to Africana Philosophy begins, as any text with that or any similar title should, with a discussion of the difficulties of firmly fixing an accurate conception of Africana philosophy. It is Gordon's aim to introduce Africana philosophy as a modern philosophy, where the modern period is inaugurated by the discovery of the "new world" and the institution of the Atlantic Slave Trade and continues on to the present. Gordon presents the reader with a veritable Who's Who of intellectuals who have made some contribution to Africana philosophy from antiquity to the present day. The result is a comprehensive, yet nuanced, account of how and by whom central themes in Africana philosophy have originated and been developed over time throughout the diaspora. For the most part, Gordon's book gives a comprehensive account of the wide ranging field of Africana philosophy while also providing a close look at its instantiations in particular thinkers and select geographic regions. Gordon makes an effort to pay attention to the emergence and development of central themes in various parts of the diaspora though, on the whole, the book is heavily weighted in favor of discussions of African American and Afro-Caribbean philosophy over African philosophy. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14705.

Johnson, Violet. "'What Then is the African American?' African and Afro-Caribbean Identities in Black America." JOURNAL OF ETHNIC HISTORY 28.1 (2008)

In his examination of status ascriptions in American society, sociologist Everett Hughes illustrated the rigidity and power of blackness as a designation for all peoples of African descent in the United States: "membership in the Negro race, as defined in American mores and/or law, may be called a master status–determining trait. It tends to overpower, in most crucial situations, any other characteristics which might run counter to it." This 1945 study provides the pivot—the master status—around which the present discussion revolves. From the beginning of voluntary black immigration in the late nineteenth century to the present, this master status has been at the center of the history of black foreigners in the United States. Much of this history is shaped by a complex set of ambivalent processes marked by the immigrants' understanding of, acquiescence to, and outright challenge of the master status. The determination not to let this phenomenon overpower their nonracial distinctiveness has led immigrants of African descent to embark on, in Erving Goffman's term, "presentation of self," through which, individually and collectively, they have presented themselves as "the other" in black America. The diverse and complex outcomes of this presentation of the self have, in turn, contributed to the ethnicization of black America—in short, the creation of ethnic groups within a racialized American ethnicity, thus shattering the erroneous, even if enduring, notion of a monolithic black America. The "othering" of black immigrants and their children, self-consciously and by others, questions the master status in important ways that get to the core of who is African American. This interrogation has been crucial since the early twentieth century, when, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois and other American-born black leaders challenged the legitimacy of Jamaican Marcus Garvey as a black American activist. It gained significant momentum with the phenomenal increase of the foreign black population at the close of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. The emergence of Barack Obama, a biracial American with a white mother and a Kenyan immigrant father, has provided the single most glaring illustration of the sharper attention to the black immigrant factor. During the 2004 U.S. Senate race in Illinois, black Republican Alan Keyes remarked about his Democratic opponent: "Barack Obama and I have the same race—that is, physical characteristics. We are not from the same heritage. My ancestors toiled in slavery in this country. My consciousness, who I am as a person, has been shaped by my struggle, deeply emotional and deeply painful, with the reality of that heritage." The "Obama heritage" debate gained new life with the senator's announcement of his candidacy for the 2008 presidential race. Immediately, some people began to ponder the implications of the first black American president tracing his blackness not to ancestors who experienced American slavery but directly to ancestors in Kenya, instructively, an African country that was not even a source of supply for the Atlantic slave trade, which laid the foundations for the native-born black community. From soul food restaurants to hairdressing and barber salons, Obama's authenticity as a "real African American" was put under scrutiny. The outcomes of developments around Obama's candidacy, which are bound to provide useful insights for future analysis, are unfolding: the endorsement by Oprah Winfrey, arguably the most influential black icon of contemporary America; Obama's surprisingly sound victory in predominantly white Iowa; and his postracial politics. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jaeh/28.1/johnson.html.