Many of you have probably seen the excellent “Ferguson Syllabus” created by Sociologists for Justice, which has been circulated widely over the last several days and which provides a collection of research articles used to inform the arguments and positions represented in their Statement on Ferguson. I strongly encourage you to keep circulating that document, and to use Sociologists’ for Justice suggested hashtag #socforjustice when you do.
If you work in academia but outside of a Sociology Department, as I do, I suspect you’ve thought to yourself how helpful it would be if a corresponding syllabus were produced and circulated for your own discipline, as I have. (Would that it were the case that professional Philosophers could agree on something like a”Statement on Ferguson,” but I’m not holding my breath for that!) Below, I’ve attempted to BEGIN the construction of a “Ferguson Syllabus” for the discipline of Philosophy. The list of materials I have here is, of course, non-exhaustive and incomplete, so I welcome any amendments or additions from readers who specialize in Philosophy, Political Theory, Critical Race Studies and the like.
Just leave your suggestions in the comments section to this post, and I will do my best to amend this draft version of a “Ferguson Syllabus for Philosophers” in a timely manner. I’ve listed only books here– no articles– because an emphasis on primary material is the prevailing custom in the (somewhat limited) area of Philosophy in which I work. But I’ve also included a separate list of anthologies that include many, if not most, of the seminal philosophical works in race theory and (broadly speaking) Enlightenment/democratic theory. As anyone who has ever attempted to construct a “new” syllabus knows, crowdsourcing via social media–or just regular old flesh-and-blood social networks– is a tremendous help when one finds oneself up against the daunting challenge of teaching new material (or teaching familiar material in new ways). I invite you all to help in this endeavor.
Following the lead of Sociologists for Justice, I will ask that you use the hashtag #philosophersforjustice when you share this syllabus on Facebook, Twitter or other social media.
Primary Readings (Monographs):
- The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
- Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon
- The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois
- The Racial Contract, Charles Mills
- Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis
- The Colonizer and the Colonized, Albert Memmi
- Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self, Linda Martin Alcoff
- The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire
- Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, John Rawls
- The Colonization of Psychic Space, Kelly Oliver
- Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice, bell hooks
- Race: A Philosophical Introduction, Paul Taylor
- The Epistemology of Resistance, José Medina
- Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, Patricia Hill Collins
- Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault
- Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault
- Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed The Movement, Eds. Kimberle Crenshaw et al
- Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze
- Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race, Charles Mills
- The Idea of Race, Eds. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott
- Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, Eds. Jean Stafancic and Richard Delgado
- Race, Ed. Robert Bernasconi
**UPDATE**
Supplementary Readings:
(The following texts are collected from readers’ suggestions in the comments selection below. I will continue to update this section as more titles are submitted.)
- Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Saidiya V. Hartman
- Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Karen Fields and Barbara Fields
- Look, A Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics, Robert Gooding-Williams
- Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy, Ed. Joy James
- On The Postcolony, Achiille Mbembe
- The Reorder of Things: The University and its Pedagogies of Minority Difference, Roderick Ferguson
- Justice and the Politics of Difference, Iris Marion Young
- In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process, Leon Higginbotham
- Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics, George Yancy and Janine Jones
- The Condemnation of Blackness, Khalil Muhammad
- Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America, Ladelle McWhorter