Women, Race & Class

"Angela Davis is a political activist. She was born in Birmingham, Alabama and experienced racial injustice from a very young age. She has developed a life and career, both as an activist and a scholar, writing about racial and class injustice. She is also, famously, a commentator on prison abolition and the injustices of the criminal justice system, so particularly appropriate for this moment. She has a really wide range of interests and we could have chosen any one of her works, but one of the reasons why we chose this book specifically is because, as you see from the title, Women, Race and Class , it’s a really comprehensive analysis of those three core philosophical concepts. The book is primarily a historical analysis of the injustices faced by black women, starting with slavery and moving through history to more contemporary issues—for example around women’s reproductive rights. It’s a really important book because it looks closely at how these three ideas of gender, race and class overlap and how one-dimensional analyses of these concepts tends to cover up the injustices faced by black women. Black women tend to be at the centre of a lot of these injustices and it’s really important, particularly now, to look at how these concepts overlap and, through how they’re conceived, tend to reinforce and perpetuate those inequalities. That’s one of the reasons why we thought this was a particularly important book. Lisa Whiting: For me, there’s a distinction between purity and rigour and I think sometimes people tend mistakenly to equate the two. They tend to think because it’s interdisciplinary, because it draws on contemporary examples or historical injustices, that somehow is less analytically rigorous because it doesn’t fit within the traditional, analytic philosophical method. What’s really important in a book like Women, Race and Class is it demonstrates how drawing on historical examples is itself a form of analytical and empirical evidence, because by showing the ways in which these categories of identity have been exploited over time, it demonstrates that our analytical understanding of what these concepts mean can be and is limited. I would be hesitant about drawing it out as an argument about women in philosophy more generally, because obviously there are women who are at the top of their game in traditional analytic philosophy, but I do think it is important, in reconsidering who brings value to philosophy as a discipline, to understand that people are going to take different approaches and that in part might be due to their own ideas and beliefs and philosophical theories that they advance. “I went to King’s College London for my undergraduate degree in philosophy and we didn’t study a single woman philosopher in the whole time that I was there” Rebecca Buxton: Like Lisa, I wouldn’t want to generalize, but I do think you can conceptualize being able to do that kind of very abstract, purist philosophy as a kind of privilege. Many of these writers are discussing oppression that they themselves have experienced. There’s this tendency in philosophy, I think, to want to separate your own experiences from your philosophy, but I think we are now beginning to recognise mixing the two can be extremely valuable. Women, especially marginalized women, perhaps tend to draw on their experiences more, and we want them to do that in order to make our philosophy more expansive. Lisa Whiting: Definitely. It’s my and Rebecca’s specialisms, and it’s also true of this list. I’m much more drawn towards the political philosophy and applied ethics space. We haven’t not included women philosophers who specialize in epistemology and metaphysics because they’re not producing as good work, it’s just that our book, as you say, is somewhat skewed to our backgrounds and areas of interests. Rebecca Buxton: I should add that the Angela Davis chapter of The Philosopher Queens is available free online at the moment and we’re intending to leave that free for as long as possible. So, if people do want to find out a bit more about Angela Davis, that chapter by Professor Anita L. Allen is freely available."