Cfp: 8th Annual Meeting, California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race, University of Massachusetts, Boston, September 23-24, 2011.

The California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race announces a call for papers for its seventh annual roundtable. This roundtable brings together philosophers of race, and those working in related fields in a small and congenial setting to share their work and to help further this sub-discipline of philosophy. Philosophical papers are invited on any issue regarding race, ethnicity, or racism, and including those that take up race in the context of another topic, such as feminism, political philosophy, ethics, justice, culture, identity, biology, phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, metaphysics, or epistemology.

Submissions are especially encouraged from junior scholars and philosophers of color. We seek to foster a productive and intellectually stimulating environment for those working in philosophy and race. The Roundtable also aspires to bring together junior and senior scholars to develop and enhance constructive mentoring relationships.

Visit: http://www.caroundtable.webs.com/.

7th Annual Meeting, California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race, Northwestern University, October 8-9, 2010.

Update: Please note the changed URL for the conference website below. Original Post (February 3, 2010): Keynote Speaker: Larry Blum, University of Massachusetts, Boston. The California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race announces a call for papers for its seventh annual roundtable. This roundtable brings together philosophers of race, and those working in related fields in a small and congenial setting to share their work and to help further this sub-discipline of philosophy. Philosophical papers are invited on any issue regarding race, ethnicity, or racism, and including those that take up race in the context of another topic, such as feminism, political philosophy, ethics, justice, culture, identity, biology, phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, metaphysics, or epistemology. Submissions are especially encouraged from junior scholars and philosophers of color. We seek to foster a productive and intellectually stimulating environment for those working in philosophy and race. The Roundtable also aspires to bring together junior and senior scholars to develop and enhance constructive mentoring relationships. Papers should be no more than 30 minutes in length. Please attach a detailed (2-3 page) abstract, as an MS word.doc or .pdf file (please put your name on the file) to organizer@caroundtable.org. Subject heading should read: (your last name) CRPR 10 Submission. Submission Deadline: April 30, 2010. Organizers: Darrell Moore, Philosophy, DePaul University Mickaella Perina, Philosophy, University of Massachusetts, Boston Falguni A. Sheth, Social Science, Hampshire College Guest Organizer: Charles Mills, Philosophy, Northwestern University Please see http://sites.google.com/a/caroundtable.org/www/ for more infomation. For questions, please contact us at organizer@caroundtable.org.

"Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race," 40th Annual Philosophy Symposium, California State University, April 8-9, 2010.

THURSDAY April 8 8:30 am Reception 9:00–9:15 Welcome Address 9:15–10:45 “White Microtomy and Black Volatility: Where is my Body?” by George Yancy, Duquesne University 11:00–12:30 “Race Assimilation and Self-Evaluative Emotions” by David Kim, University of San Francisco 12:30–2:00 Lunch Break 2:00–3:30 “The Particularities of Race/Gender and the Philosopher's Body” by Donna-Dale Marcano 3:45–5:15 “Whiteness in a Rainbow Society” by Linda Martin Alcoff, Hunter College, CUNY FRIDAY, April 9 8:30 am Refreshments 9:00–10:15 Alumni Session 10:30–12:00 “Pride and Prejudice: Ambiguous Racial, Religious, Ethnic Identities of Jewish Bodies” by Gail Weiss, The George Washington University 12:00–2:00 Lunch Break 2:00–3:30 “Hometactics: On Belonging and Becoming” by Mariana Ortega, John Carroll University 3:45–5:15 “Materializing Race” by Charles Mills, Northwestern University Conference webpage: http://hss.fullerton.edu/philosophy/40thSymposium.html.

"Symposium on Joshua Glasgow, A THEORY OF RACE." SGRP (Fall 2009).

Glasgow, Joshua. A Theory of Race. London: Routledge, 2009. The SGRP has posted its Fall 2009 Symposium on Joshua Glasgow's book, A Theory of Race. Commentaries are by Michael O. Hardimon (UCSD), Sally Haslanger (MIT), Ron Mallon (U. Utah), and Naomi Zack (U. Oregon) with Joshua Glasgow's reply. Please have a look and post your comments! Download the symposium here: http://sgrp.typepad.com/sgrp/2009/10/symposium-on-joshua-glasgow-a-theory-of-race.html.

Outlaw, Lucius T. Review of Ronald Sundstrom's THE BROWNING OF AMERICA AND THE EVASION OF SOCIAL JUSTICE. NDPR (June 2009).

Sundstrom, Ronald R. The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice. Albany: SUNY Press, 2008. The United States is undergoing the most profound demographic changes in the country's history so that in a few decades, if not sooner, persons identified (and identifying themselves) as white and tracing their ancestry to Europe will have become part of the nation's racial and ethnic plurality, no longer its numerically dominant racial group. This historic development portends others equally historic and transformative, among these the gradual -- possibly even dramatic -- displacement of white people as the dominating group politically, economically, socially, even culturally. This is not what this nation-state's founders envisioned or intended. Formed out of colonies of settlers from Western Europe, the United States was a quite historic political enterprise, an experiment in representative federated democratic governance at the national level that preserved increasingly more participatory democratic self-government down the levels of state, county, town and country. However, equally foundational to this new experiment was a hierarchical social ontology ordered by philosophical anthropologies of valorized racial distinctions, confirmed and articulated by the very best of prevailing scientific understandings and legitimated by the very best of prevailing philosophical and theological speculations. In these very confident polity-ordering anthropologies and ontologies, the white race ranked highest, as the superior race that had the God-given burden of responsibility of serving as the vanguard of civilization and progressive, Christian history-making. The United States was thus deemed a sacred venture in state-craft; so, too, the predominance of the superior white race and the subordination or elimination of the weaker, inferior, colored races, whether through enslavement or annihilation. There was enslavement and genocide, and more. Two hundred plus years later, however, the Coloreds are on the threshold of predominating demographically. The United States, a nation-state by and for the white race, is going brown! . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16385.

Cfp: 6th Annual Meeting, California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race, Hampshire College, October 2-3, 2009.

The California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race announces a call for papers for its annual meeting. This roundtable brings together philosophers of race, and those working in related fields in a small and congenial setting to share their work and to help further this sub-discipline of philosophy. Philosophical papers are invited on any issue regarding race, ethnicity, or racism, and including those that take up race in the context of another topic, such as feminism, political philosophy, ethics, justice, culture, identity, biology, phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, metaphysics, or epistemology. Papers should be no more than 30 minutes in length. Keynote Speaker: Charles Mills, John M. Evans Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy, Northwestern University. Submissions are especially encouraged from junior scholars and philosophers of color. We seek to foster a productive and intellectually stimulating environment for those working in philosophy and race. The Roundtable also aspires to bring together junior and senior scholars to develop and enhance constructive mentoring relationships. Please submit a detailed abstract only (3-4 pages including brief bibliography), as MS word .doc or .pdf file to organizer@caroundtable.org. Subject heading should read: (Your last name) CRPR 09 Submission. Submission Deadline is April 1, 2009. Organizers: Falguni A. Sheth, Hampshire College Mickaella Perina, University of Massachusetts, Boston Gregory Velazco y Trianosky, CSUN

Early, Gerald L. "The End of Race as We Know It." CHRONICLE REVIEW October 10, 2008.

In our bull sessions, some of us would talk about jihad, or righteous war, against the whites. (It was all talk.) Some of us actually became Muslims (very few — we were Christians to the bone, despite our chatter about "the white man's religion") or joined some Eastern religious sect and adopted certain garb and mannerisms. Many of us wore wild Afros, making them wilder with blowout kits, and thought we were revolutionaries of a sort. After all, some of the black upperclassmen among us had seized buildings in protest, and a few even brandished weapons during the sieges. Looking at The New Yorker cover as a middle-aged, black baby boomer, far removed from any of the Orientalism and racial and political romanticism of my youth, reminded me of a certain kind of silliness, but it also, strangely, moved me deeply. The cover told the story of a rite of African-American passage that occurred at a particular time for the generation of blacks who would become the most successful in the history of the group, and the most integrated. The relatively difficult years that my generation endured integrating white institutions — difficult not in any material sense, but in the sense that we were not very well prepared academically or emotionally to cope with our surroundings (we were given more than we knew what to do with, so much that one felt simultaneously intoxicated by the riches and stressed to the breaking point by how alien it all felt) — made us clutch at any sort of feeble identity protection we could muster. We had to "act black" because, after all, that is why we were at the university in the first place: to provide diversity in the only way we knew how. Basically, entrapped in our excessive and youthful self-consciousness, our special sort of juvenile insecurity, we were trying, ironically, to show that we belonged, to protect ourselves from being considered "dumb niggers," or, even worse, "charity cases," the ragtag tail end of the American bourgeois elite. Some succeeded (by graduating). Many didn't. It is a modern story about integration in America — not the bloody civil-rights struggle of gaining access, but rather how people can sometimes be killed by kindness, paddled by paternalism, undone by philanthropy. I think back on it all as a remarkable form of self-hazing. . . . The presidential campaign of Barack Obama has raised the question of what happens to the black American meta-narrative of heroic or noble victimization if he wins. (Presumably nothing happens to it if he loses; the loss can be blamed on racism, as it will, in fact, be another example of victimization. White folks will always find a way to cut down a successful black man, to not let him get too far, is the common belief. That sort of black cynicism, expressed in different political and aesthetic modalities, underscores both the blues and rap. If Obama loses, he becomes, in black folklore, John Henry, the "natural" man with the courage to go up against the political machine. The moral of the tale, in politics as in life, is that the machine always wins.) . . . Many of us black professionals, members of the black elite, keep the embers of our victimization burning for opportunistic reasons: to lev-erage white patronage, to maintain our own sense of identity and tradition. In some respects, this narrative has something of the power in its endurance that original sin does for Christians. In fact, our narrative of victimization is America's original sin, or what we want to serve as the country's original sin, which may be why we refuse to give it up. We have used it shamelessly — especially those who are least entitled to do so, as we have suffered the least — hustled it to get over on whites, to milk their guilt, to excuse our excesses and failures. Being the victim justifies all ethical lapses, as the victim becomes morally reprehensible in the guise of being morally outraged. Being the victim has turned into a sucker's game, the only possible game that the weak can play against the strong with any chance of winning. Nonetheless, the narrative does a kind of cultural work that serves our purposes in some profound ways, and it may be good for the country as a whole in reminding everyone about the costs of American democracy, its fragile foundation, its historically based hypocrisy. The conservatives are right: Freedom isn't free, and the black victim narrative reminds us all of that. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i07/07b01101.htm.

5th Annual California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race, University of California, Berkeley, October 3-4, 2008.

Update (September 22, 2008): The programme and related information may now be found put here: http://www.caroundtable.org/. Original Post (April 5, 2008): The California Roundtable on Philosophy and Race announces a call for papers for its fifth annual roundtable, to be held October 3-4, 2008 at UC Berkeley. This roundtable brings together philosophers of race, and those working in related fields in a small and congenial setting to share their work and to help further this sub-discipline. Papers are invited on any philosophical issue regarding race, ethnicity, or racism, and including those that take up race in the context of another topic, such as feminism, political philosophy, ethics, justice, culture, identity, biology, phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, metaphysics, or epistemology. Submissions are especially encouraged from junior scholars and philosophers of color. We seek to foster a productive and intellectually stimulating environment for those working in philosophy and race. The Roundtable also aspires to bring together junior and senior scholars to develop and enhance constructive mentoring relationships. Registration is free but please register by email by April 30, 2008. Papers should be no more than 30 minutes in length. Please submit full paper or detailed abstract (2-3 pages), as MS word .doc or .pdf document to fsheth@berkeley.edu. Further information is here: http://www.californiaroundtablephilosophyrace.org/.

Derakhshani, Tirdad. "The Peril of Racial Paranoia." PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER August 21, 2008.

Jackson, John L. Racial Paranoia: the Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness. New York: Basic Civitas, 2008. Update: See Jackson, John L. How Not to Read Racial Paranoia. CHRONICLE BRAINSTORM September 8, 2009. Extract: I just read a short review of my book in the magazine Color Lines. The reviewer, Julianne Ong Hing, tries to argue that I mistakenly privilege a psychological reading of racism over a structural one. However, she then goes on to claim that “by keeping it light” (a euphemism, I think, for not writing the book more polemically), I ignore “the deeper psychological impacts of a lifetime of racial micro-aggressions.” She claims that I emphasize “personal interactions as the crux of the racial impasse plaguing U.S. society in the 21st century.” This is the heart of her critique: “The realm of personal relationships may be the most accessible for folks to begin to discuss race, but too often the conversation stops at the personal, as it does in this book. Jackson misses the point by equating the frustrations of people of color with those of whites. There are sharp differences between a group that’s imprisoned at disproportionately high rates and one that is not, between a group whose members own the vast majority of the country’s wealth and the groups with the highest poverty rates. Jackson does a disservice to his readers by limiting his analysis to the “he said-she said” between people of color and whites without delving into the structural roots of racism that permeate our daily interactions and our social, political and economic institutions. Even though Jackson acknowledges larger, structural racisms and recognizes the danger of his argument, he nevertheless persists.” This is a reading of the book’s argument that Hing brought with her to its pages. Of course, that’s part of why race and racism are such thorny issues. We are all already tangled up in some ideologically sticky webs of our own (and others’) spinning when it comes to this topic. We are on the defensive, overly sensitive to the potential of Trojan-horsed attacks — or of the other side’s cold-blooded disinterest. . . . Original Post (September 5, 2008): Jackson, an associate professor of anthropology and communications at the University of Pennsylvania, says African Americans live with the suspicion that they encounter racism constantly in their daily lives - though they can't always prove it. They see subtle signs of contempt in a simple look, a gesture, a remark, a nod of the head by white men and women who otherwise seem very friendly. . . . Jackson insists that racial paranoia is more than a feeling or psychological state: It shapes the way people relate to each other across the racial divide. "People aren't just being hypersensitive," he says. "Paranoia defines the organizing principle . . . of how racism functions in American culture today." Nor is racial paranoia limited to one race, Jackson adds. "White folks also are constantly paranoid," Jackson says. In their case, the paranoia is "about the accusation of being called racist." . . . Read the rest here: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/magazine/20080821_The_peril_of_racial_paranoia.html.

Malik, Kenan. "Identity is That Which is Given."

Malik, Kenan. Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate. Oxford: Oneworld, 2008. Excerpt: We’re All Multiculturalists Now observed the American academic, and former critic of pluralism, Nathan Glazer in the title of a book. And indeed we are. The celebration of difference, respect for pluralism, avowal of identity politics - these have come to be regarded as the hallmarks of a progressive, antiracist outlook and as the foundation of modern liberal democracies. Ironically, culture has captured the popular imagination just as anthropologists themselves have started worrying about the very concept. After all, what exactly is a culture? What marks its boundaries? In what way is a 16-year old British born boy of Pakistani origin living in Bradford of the same culture as a 50-year old man living in Lahore? Does a 16-year white boy from Bradford have more in common culturally with his 50-year-old father than with that 16-year old ‘Asian’? Such questions have led most anthropologists today to reject the idea of cultures as fixed, bounded entities. Some reject the very idea of culture as meaningless. ‘Religious beliefs, rituals, knowledge, moral values, the arts, rhetorical genres, and so on’, the British anthropologist Adam Kuper suggests, ‘should be separated out from each other rather than bound together into a single bundle labelled culture’. ‘To understand culture’, he concludes, ‘we must first deconstruct it. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=338. Other long excerpts may be found here: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5425/ and http://newhumanist.org.uk/1809. A review may be found here (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/strange-fruit-by-kenan-malik-859393.html).

Lawson, Dominic. "Review of Kenan Malik's STRANGE FRUIT." TIMES June 22, 2008.

Malik, Kenan. Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate. Oxford: Oneworld, 2008. Malik seeks to develop a more interesting version of the debate — between those who say we should all be judged indiscriminately as equals, and those who believe that ethnicity within western society should be treated as something discrete and special, with members of minority races being judged by different standards, according to their “culture”. As Malik observes, the latter view — sometimes called “multiculturalism” — is now associated entirely with the left, even though the notion of separate racial cultures and separate legal frameworks is something we would have associated in the past with the far right — notably apartheid South Africa. Such a parallel will scandalise the supporters of the multicultural ideal but Malik has a point, to this extent at least: the consequences of drawing these “cultural” distinctions can be vicious. . . . Malik dredges up some foul examples from across what one might once have been allowed to describe as “the civilised world”: in 2002, a 50-year-old Aboriginal man was given a 24-hour prison sentence for raping a 15-year-old girl. According to the (white) Australian judge, because the girl was an Aborigine, she “knew what was expected of her. It’s very surprising to me that he was charged at all”. The prevailing official attitude in cases such as these suggests not just an underlying racism masquerading as cultural sensitivity, but also a deep lack of confidence in the values — sometimes called Judeo-Christian — on which western society is supposedly based. It represents a failure of cultural nerve on a colossal scale. Strangely, Malik does not attempt a thorough explanation of what has caused this collapse of confidence. There is the odd reference to the loss of faith in western civilisation stemming from the first world war — and that’s it. It is especially strange that Malik — who was born in India — does not examine in any detail the phenomenon of post-colonial guilt, which surely lies behind this disfiguration of the middle-class social conscience. The view has taken hold that because, in the 19th century, we settled in their countries and behaved as if we were still in our English villages, ignoring local sensibilities and rituals, so the descendants of those whom we once ruled should be able to lead their lives in England exactly as they would have in rural Pakistan. Thus, the Archbishop of Canterbury, as well-meaning a character as you will find, advocates official recognition of sharia law as a way of making Muslim immigrants feel more at home in the United Kingdom. On a more sinister note, you have the West Midlands police menacing Channel 4 for broadcasting a programme that revealed the violent nature of what passes for theology in some of our mosques. If a Church of England vicar had said that homosexuals should be thrown off cliffs, his critics would not be told that to publicise his sermons was an unforgivable risk to “community relations”; but “anti-racism”, as it has evolved, makes exactly this racist distinction. . . . Read the rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_reviews/article4164438.ece.

PUB: James, Michael. "Race." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY May 28, 2008.

The concept of race signifies the grouping of individual humans by some set of perceived physical characteristics, often called “phenotypes,” which are thought to be inherited through some blood-born factor. Which specific set of perceived, shared physical characteristics constitute a race varies historically, geographically, socially, and politically. Indeed, there is no biological or genetic foundation for the grouping of individual humans into a racial group. Instead, humans themselves choose (consciously or unconsciously) which physical characteristics constitute a racial group. Consequently, racial groups are presently thought to be social constructions, or a category created not by biological nature but by human invention. However, from its origins in the early modern era until the twentieth century, race was not considered a social construction but a real, biological distinction transmitted from one generation to the next. Thus, racial identity was thought to be something fixed and imposed genetically. As a result of this biological conception, racial groupings are typically thought of as discrete, meaning that the boundaries between them are determinate. Where one racial group ends, a distinct other racial group begins. If human phenotypes are simply considered to be gradual variations in things like skin color, hair texture, or bone structure, then one cannot really speak of distinct human races. Rather, such differences would simply reflect variations in physical traits, such as the variation between very straight versus very curly hair. To speak of race, then, requires classifying humans into discrete groupings based upon a set of putatively inherited physical characteristics. Note that the discrete character of racial groups holds even when we speak of “mixed race” people, since this term implies that a “mixed” individual has ancestry from two or more discrete racial groups. Determining the boundaries of discrete races has proven to be the most vexing problems for those thinkers who sought to classify humans according to race, and led to great variations in the number of human races believed to be in existence. Thus, some thinkers categorized humans into only four distinct races (typically white or Caucasian, black or African, yellow or Asian, and red or Native American), and downplayed any phenotypical distinctions within racial groups (such as those between Scandavians and Spaniards within the white or Caucasian race). Other thinkers, drawing boundaries around different physical traits, classified humans into many more racial categories, for instance arguing that those humans “indigenous” to Europe could be distinguished into discrete Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean races. The ambiguities and confusion associated with determining the boundaries of discrete racial categories has over time provoked a widespread scholarly consensus that that race is socially constructed, while advances in the understanding of human genetics has undermined scholarly belief in the biological foundations of discrete races. However, significant scholarly debate persists regarding the relationship between racial groupings and social or political processes. For instance, some scholars suggest that race is inconceivable without racialized social hierarchies, such that racial identities are always organized so that some races are portrayed as superior while others are inferior. In addition, scholars dispute whether racial categories are defined only by members of superior racialized groups or whether subordinate groups themselves contribute to and maintain racial categorization. Finally, there is some controversy as to whether some real genetic differences may validly be used to categorize individual humans into breeding populations, even though these categorizations do not fit the socially constructed racial groups that may be recognized within any given society. . . . Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/race/.

Wellington, Darryl Lorenzo. "History, Amnesia and the N Word." DISSENT MAGAZINE Winter 2008.

• The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why by Jabari Asim (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) 239 pp $26
• Nigger: the Strange Career of a Troublesome Word by Randall Kennedy (Vintage, 2003) 208 pp $12.95 paper

THE SUBJECT is small—a word. Yet the subject contained within the subject is immeasurable: racism American-style. It isn’t always a good idea to reduce vast social dimensions to a pithy cognomen—all the great “isms” are finally irreducible—but there are special cases, and when Jabari Asim asks us to examine American racism (particularly racism against black Americans) through the lens of a single word, it’s remarkable how much history he squeezes into the text. . . Read the rest of the review here: http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=998.

"Toronto's Afrocentric School," Editorial, STABROEK NEWS February 7, 2008.

Last week the Toronto District School Board decided to approve a new school in which the "knowledge and experiences of peoples of African descent [will be] an integral feature of the teaching and learning environment." The school, which will be funded by taxpayers, has been proposed as one way of curbing the alarming drop out rates among the city's black students - one study suggests that as many as four out of every ten black students fail to graduate from high school. The decision has been met with a chorus of disapproval from radio talk show hosts and editorial writers across Canada. These have generally branded the idea of a separate school as a form of 'segregation' and argued that it directly contradicts modern Canada's steadfast refusal to yield to easy ethnic, cultural and religious divisions. Many critics are adamant that public money should not be used to undermine a wider sense of national identity, and they warn that the precedent could encourage further fractures within the country's large immigrant population - half of Toronto's 5.5 million residents are foreign born. Some have also questioned the idea that black students are being failed by the school system at all. A BBC report quotes a former university professor with experience of youth outreach and employment programmes saying that in one particularly problematic working-class neighbourhood, "Out of the 100 or so families I worked with … I would say 80% of the families were non-supportive of their children's education. When you'd go into a lot of the houses, there was a lot of yelling and arguing. There were lots of latchkey kids." If that pattern holds true for the wider Afro-Caribbean population, it is not easy to see what difference a new Afrocentric school would make. There are simpler objections too. Just a few decades ago, black Americans risked life and limb to integrate themselves into a hostile white education system. They did this, presciently, because they understood that a successful education in difficult circumstances is best measured by the progress one makes within the dominant culture. Communities that seek the comfort of an education among their own kind may spare themselves the stress of competition and cultural confrontation, but they also lose the knowledge that allows their rivals to keep outperforming them in the marketplace of ideas. Black America understood this in the segregation years. For all the deficiencies in their curricula, white schools still offered the best route to certification in the wider society. Multicultural societies are always vulnerable to racial insecurities. What is not clear is how well these insecurities are resolved by the supposedly changed contexts of racially-sensitive education. Take, for example, the undeniable neglect of the great Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture. In most mainstream historiography, Toussaint and his comrades appear briefly as leaders of a 'slave rebellion' that distracts Napoleon for a while during the momentous period in which he agrees to the Louisiana purchase. C.L.R. James's wonderful account of the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins, and an increasing body of modern scholarship, have shown that the reality was certainly quite different. Without Toussaint's extraordinary political and military leadership, the French army - which the Americans feared was unstoppable - would have been free to give its full attention to the struggling new republic in the north. In other words, without the bewildering success of self-educated former slaves against a professional army that had overrun most of Europe, there may well have been no America. The whole episode deserves far more attention than it has yet received, as does the political skill of their leader, a man who wished to live independent of French control but was also a proud inheritor of the culture and values of the French Enlightenment. L'Ouverture wanted freedom as much as anyone else, but he never wished to discard the glories of France that his education had allowed him to share. In this sense he perfectly embodies the tensions of modern Caribbean identity, and the many hesitations we all have about the turbulent pasts that have formed us. Learning more about the Haitian revolution would no doubt be part of a school curriculum that focused on "the knowledge and experiences of peoples of African descent," but what use would such knowledge be if one remained ignorant of the French and American revolutions that made Toussaint's achievement so remarkable? We are all involved says the poet, none of us can retreat to our pasts any more. Our reality is too entangled with other peoples and other cultures for us to make sense of ourselves in isolation. However noble its intentions, an education based on cultural separation will always end up proving itself too self-limiting to be of lasting value. (Thanks to Mark McWatt; the editorial is here: http://www.stabroeknews.com/index.pl/article_editorial?id=56538593.)

Gladwell, Malcolm. "None of the Above: What IQ doesn't Tell You about Race." NEW YORKER December 17, 2007.

One Saturday in November of 1984, James Flynn, a social scientist at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, received a large package in the mail. It was from a colleague in Utrecht, and it contained the results of I.Q. tests given to two generations of Dutch eighteen-year-olds. When Flynn looked through the data, he found something puzzling. The Dutch eighteen-year-olds from the nineteen-eighties scored better than those who took the same tests in the nineteen-fifties—and not just slightly better, much better. Curious, Flynn sent out some letters. He collected intelligence-test results from Europe, from North America, from Asia, and from the developing world, until he had data for almost thirty countries. In every case, the story was pretty much the same. I.Q.s around the world appeared to be rising by 0.3 points per year, or three points per decade, for as far back as the tests had been administered. For some reason, human beings seemed to be getting smarter. Flynn has been writing about the implications of his findings—now known as the Flynn effect—for almost twenty-five years. His books consist of a series of plainly stated statistical observations, in support of deceptively modest conclusions, and the evidence in support of his original observation is now so overwhelming that the Flynn effect has moved from theory to fact. What remains uncertain is how to make sense of the Flynn effect. If an American born in the nineteen-thirties has an I.Q. of 100, the Flynn effect says that his children will have I.Q.s of 108, and his grandchildren I.Q.s of close to 120—more than a standard deviation higher. If we work in the opposite direction, the typical teen-ager of today, with an I.Q. of 100, would have had grandparents with average I.Q.s of 82—seemingly below the threshold necessary to graduate from high school. And, if we go back even farther, the Flynn effect puts the average I.Q.s of the schoolchildren of 1900 at around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded. . . . Read the whole article here: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/12/17/071217crbo_books_gladwell?printable=true. (Thanks to Egberto Almenas for this and related links.)

Metcalf, Stephen. "Dissecting the IQ Debate: a Response to Liberal Creationism." SLATE December 3, 2007.

In response to James Watson's remarks concerning the intelligence of blacks, Slate's William Saletan wrote a series of pieces on race, IQ, and genetics. In his first post, Saletan wrote: "It's time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true." One's to-do list reflects a balance of perceived likelihoods. Is preparing for the congenital mental inferiority of blacks more like budgeting for retirement, or buying asteroid insurance? Caveats and wiggle words aside, the impression left by Saletan's piece is that it's more like, say, a prudent response to rising sea levels. To drive the point home, Saletan suggested a historical parallel: Liberals made angry or defensive by the possibility that blacks (as a group) score lower on IQ tests than whites (as a group) for genetic reasons are like Christians made angry or defensive by the theory of evolution. Thus the headline "Liberal Creationism." Saletan's analogy implies that the conflict over race, intelligence, and genetics is a conflict between science and superstition. It's not; it's a conflict between science and science. Worse, even when Saletan shades his rhetoric carefully, the reader is left with the impression that science—hard, empirical disinterested science—is trending to a hereditarian explanation for the IQ gap, and that bad or weak science—really a kind of wishful, mushy, quasi-superstitious scientism—is on the side of an environmental or cultural explanation. If you explore the subject in any depth, or even just click through to some of Saletan's own links, you find the opposite is closer to the truth. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=1700945566886988248.

Saletan, William. "Created Equal." SLATE November 18, 2007.

Last month, James Watson, the legendary biologist, was condemned and forced into retirement after claiming that African intelligence wasn't "the same as ours." "Racist, vicious and unsupported by science," said the Federation of American Scientists. "Utterly unsupported by scientific evidence," declared the U.S. government's supervisor of genetic research. The New York Times told readers that when Watson implied "that black Africans are less intelligent than whites, he hadn't a scientific leg to stand on." . . . Read the rest here: http://www.slate.com/id/2178122/entry/2178123/. (Thanks to Egberto Almenas for the link.)