The Philosophy of Black Lives Matter

Political movements usually have written policy documents, describing their ideologies and relating them to standpoints in political philosophy. Philosophers wishing to investigate their ideas have no lack of written sources. When Christopher J. Lebron, a philosopher at Johns Hopkins University, decided to write a book about Black Lives Matter, he soon discovered that this movement was different. Its young, non-hierarchical organization has produced many demonstration banners and placards, but few if any ideological tracts. “As a trained political philosopher”, he said, “I had no way of directly engaging the movement given its short life. The Black Power generation had in the sharp and brave tome penned by Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton, Black Power, a published manifesto and theoretical edifice. In contrast, no such text exists to provide the philosophical moorings of #BlackLivesMatter” (Lebron, 2017, p. xiii). Instead, Lebron chose to write a book on the movement's historical background and the ideas it has inherited from its predecessors. This resulted in a volume that provides an unusually interesting record of the historical continuity of experiences and political thinking that form the background of current events. Sadly, this history begins with a quarter-millennium of slavery, based on the capture and forced transatlantic transportation of about 600,000 Africans to be sold to white “owners” in Northern America. Slaves were subject to legally condoned violence, in many cases killings. Female slaves were systematically raped by white slaveholders. These assaults were so common that they have left a strong imprint on the DNA of Afro-Americans (Kayser et al., 2003; Zakharia et al., 2009; Micheletti et al., 2020). After slavery was abolished in 1865 – at least formally (Blackmon, 2008) – large-scale deadly violence against Black people continued in the form of lynchings, a form of domestic terrorism largely aimed at deterring Black people from exercising their right to vote. There was considerable police participation in lynchings and other violence against Blacks (Taylor, 2013; Teague, 2018), and perpetrators of these acts of terrorism were often acquitted by white juries (Tetlow, 2009). The use of “black” as a predicate of the moral mandate the slogan represents is not meant to suggest that black lives matter more than others. Rather, it claims that in point of fact, across American history, black lives have not mattered very much but are nevertheless morally owed equal standing, so the polity must be reminded of the basic fact that instead of not mattering, black lives do matter. American democracy cannot claim for itself the title of a liberal, well-ordered democracy so long as blacks are so often killed with impunity by private citizens and state agents, or as long as they earn lower incomes simply because of their skin color, or as long as their children receive substandard education because of their ancestors. (Lebron, 2017, pp. 143–144) But Lebron's focus is on the intellectual roots of Black Lives Matter, which can be found in the writings of “the forefathers and foremothers of black American social and political thought on an urgent claim: that black Americans are humans, too” (2017, p. xiii). His focus is on eight activists and thinkers. The first of them is Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), a born slave who fled to freedom in 1838 and became a highly influential abolitionist writer and orator. Douglass was a master at using the American constitution as an argument against slavery and oppression and disclosing the hypocrisy and intellectual sloppiness of the pro-slavery and anti-equality arguments. As Lebron (2017, p. 19) notes, he “compelled whites to take account of their actions and attitudes in comparison to the values they claimed to uphold”. There is a remarkably strong continuity between Douglass's incisive criticism of the incoherence of the pro-slavery claims and the argumentation of civil rights defenders in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The general government is willingly powerless to send troops to protect the lives of its black citizens, but the state governments are free to use state troops to shoot them down like cattle, when in desperation the black men attempt to defend themselves, and then tell the world that it was necessary to put down a “race war”. (Wells, [1893] 2012, p. 170) In 2020, Ida Wells received a rare posthumous Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for “her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching” (Anonymous, 2020). Lebron discusses two of the authors of the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic and cultural movement of the 1920s: the poet and novelist Langston Hughes (1901–1967) and the author, filmmaker and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960). He focuses mostly on their literary texts, showing how these texts connect personal life experiences under discrimination with wider issues of oppression and resistance. Sometimes social ideas are best expressed in literary form. There are strong connections between anti-racism and women's liberation, both historically and in terms of ideas. Frederick Douglass was a proponent of women's suffrage, and Ida Wells a prominent suffragist. But Lebron pays special attention to two female Black activists who had a particularly strong emphasis on the rights of women. One of them is Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964), who lived a remarkable life as a scholar, educator and activist. She was born into slavery and died a couple of months before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed. She managed to get an education, fighting for her right to take advanced courses officially reserved for men, and she was one of the first two Black women in the US to take a Master's degree (in 1888, in mathematics), and the fourth to defend her PhD (in 1925, in French history). The entry on her work in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy recognizes her “clearly articulated insights about racialized sexism and sexualized racism” as well as “her foundational contributions to feminist philosophy, standpoint theory, and epistemology, as well as critical philosophy of race and African-American philosophy (including African American political philosophy)” (Gines, 2015). Lebron (2017, p. 144) focuses on her political thought, emphasizing “her point that racial equality cannot be genuine if black women are not central and equal partners in articulating what needs to count as racial justice”. This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is the grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change ... Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change. (Lorde, 1981, pp. 8–9; Lebron, 2017, p. 67) I'm not talking about friendship. I find it pretty difficult to like people like Bull Connor ... but I think you can love where you can't like the person because life is an affectionate quality. (Lebron, 2017, pp. 117–118) I often feel I should hate them, or loathe them. Maybe some of them deserve precisely that sort of response, or what philosophers call that sort of reactive attitude. But it is a tragic truth of our almost-but-not-yet great democracy that embracing the resentment and hatred solves nothing and leaves everything about the very nature of these poor people's poor moral senses unexamined. (Lebron, 2017, p. 155) Lebron's starting-point was a political movement with no official policy decisions, let alone ideological documents. By digging into its history he shows us that it is founded on a rich tradition of ideas, many of which are philosophically significant and worthy of further exploration. From this we can draw at least two important conclusions for political philosophy and political theory. First, political philosophy has to be historically informed. Since political actions and ideas are deeply rooted in history, political philosophy cannot be conducted as if history and social embedding had no impact on the ideas it studies. The Black Lives Matter movement is an excellent example of this, since its very name and purpose can only be understood against the background of centuries of oppression and brutal violence. Second, political philosophy has to refer to a wide range of sources of political thought. Philosophically interesting ideas on policies and political action often have their origin outside of academia. This applies not least to ideas that originate in the strivings of the disadvantaged and oppressed. The intellectual achievements of people like Frederick Douglass and Ida Wells are impressive on all counts, but in particular against the background of how even basic education was withheld from slaves in the slaveholding states. They represent a rich tradition of political thinking that academic political philosophy cannot afford to neglect. Black lives matter. And so does Black political philosophy

Ideology · Manifesto · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · White (mutation) · History · Law · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Race, History, and American Society

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