Context and Complaint: On Racial Disorientation, by Paul C. Taylor
In “Content and Complaint,” Paul C. Taylor discusses how anglo-analytic philosophy, when it deals with race, is either wholly silent, or suffers from making matters disorienting by kicking up dust and complaining about not being able to see. He does this by focusing on Josh Glasgow’s arguments against W.E.B. DuBois’s Jim Crow test. Taylor takes issue with Glasgow’s account of history, by invoking Dewey and arguing that it is not just that a certain event happens in time that makes something part of a group’s racial history, but that it is the contextualization of that event in time that brings about a common racial history for a certain group.
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Paul C. Taylor is Associate Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies and Head of the Department of African American Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. His work focuses on race theory, aesthetics, pragmatism, and Africana philosophy. He is the author of a number of articles, among which include “Taking Post- Racialism Seriously: From Movement Mythology to Racial Formation,” The Du Bois Review 11:1 (2014) and “Evading Evasion, Recovering Recovery,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 25:2 (2011). The first edition of his book Race: A Philosophical Introduction was published by Blackwell in 2004. He is currently at work on a book titled Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics.
Paul C. Taylor, “Context and Complaint: On Racial Disorientation,” in “Philosophy and Race,” ed. Alexis Dianda and Robin M. Muller, special issue, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 35:1–2 (2014), pp. 331–51.