TEACHING PHILOSOPHY 

Students in my classes learn that they must dismantle antiblack humanism if they are to intervene in cis-hetero patriarchy. Course materials invite them to examine the color-line as a black/not-black binary that is also a not-human/human distinction, with consequences for how we understand sex, gender, and sexuality. Posing the problem of racism as a problem for humanism prompts questions like: what if black lives haven’t matter because black life cannot matter? What if humanism, which emerged from the mouths of cisgender white men (about cisgender white men) never intended to know and cannot give us a language with which to understand black humanity? Students additionally query sex, gender, and sexuality as visual markers of racial-species difference, asking, How might the knowledge that not all persons are human change the study of (and our claims to) sex, gender, and sexuality?

My interactive lectures, which colleague Jeff Richey (Asian Studies, Berea College) describes as a unique “blend of discipline and improvisation [that] is both enviable and deeply necessary,” privilege the study of media content and forms, including television and film media, new and viral media, and art mediums. Students learn that antiblack humanism is not just a political project, but also a cultural pedagogy and psychic structure. To ease their anxiety around ‘mastery’ of course materials, I sometimes use PowerPoint slides, incorporating examples from students’ daily lives (i.e., on campus or on social media) as fodder for class discussions. Doing so allows me to build momentum around difficult philosophical concepts that meaningfully describe how social structures betray individual intentions, in ways that are immediately relevant. I explain these concepts from multiple angles both because doing so follows in the practice of trans-disciplinary feminism, and because I find that doing so facilitates students’ understanding not just of what a term means, but also and importantly how each term clarifies, in different personal and (as) political contexts, the hierarchical operations of human world-making.

The pessimism of my approach is not antiblack; rather, it is anti-world. It invites students to imagine and enact what might exist outside of the human’s frame, in what Fred Moten describes as the “elsewhere and elsewhen” of our freedom dreams. My objective is to prompt students to interrogate their affective and material investments in human world-making; especially, in the taxonomies that organize and structure our human world and how one knows and names and feels the self within its terms. Because self-reflection is critical, I ask students to interrogate the way that they think in the first place. This approach follows in the tradition of women of color femme(inist) re/visions to (white) feminism, including critiques by Berea College’s own late, great bell hooks. hooks’s femme(inist) writings privilege theory over data. They encourage us to stay with the trouble of theory; to read theory with our bodies, affects, and senses rather than the Enlightenment myths of rationality and reason. I ask students to mine their felt experiences for knowledge about how the world works and their place in it; reminding them that this ‘data’ can be used to conjure a way out of the historical muck and mire that humanism tells them to pull themselves out of (with their bootstraps), offering nothing but white mimicry as a shovel. Instead of teaching students to create their own shovel, they learn from black femme(inist) theories and praxes how to flatten the trench entirely.