Introduction

WHITES HAVE A WAY OF speaking from a center that they often appear to forget forms the white ideological fulcrum upon which what they say (do not say) or see (do not see) hinges. In short, whites frequently lie to themselves. For example, a respected white philosopher-mentor of mine, upon finding out that I was passionate about pursuing issues in African-American philosophy, advised: “Make sure that you don’t get pegged.” I quietly thought to myself: “Pegged? I’m doing philosophy!” It immediately occurred to me that the introductory course in philosophy that I had taken with him some years back did not include a single person of color. Yet, he did not see his own philosophical performances-engagements with European and Anglo-American philosophy-as “pegged”; he simply taught philosophy qua philosophy. Such a philosophy only masquerades as universal. Philosophy is always already performed by bodies that are sexed, gendered, and culturally coded in some fashion, and is always already shaped by prior assumptions, interests, concerns, and goals that are historically bounded and pragmatically contextual. His advice carried the normative implication that focusing on African-American philosophy came with a penalty: “If you want to be considered a ‘real philosopher,’ don’t focus on something as marginal as so-called African-American philosophy.”

There are many pegged contemporary Kantians and Platonists, but since Plato and Kant are “real” philosophers, concentrating on their systems makes one a “real” philosopher, though pegged. So, it was not an issue about being pegged so much as it was an issue about being pegged as someone doing something as marginal and “insignificant” as African-American philosophy. He apparently failed to see the historical and cultural particularity of his own (white) philosophical preoccupations and normative assumptions, thus rendering my philosophical concerns a mark of disgrace and self-imposed limitation. Like whiteness, his investment in Anglo-American and European philosophers went unmarked. Once thematized, historicized, and analyzed, however, perhaps he would come to understand the hidden normativity of his assumption: “The only real philosophy is done by white men; the only real wisdom is white male wisdom.”