European political philosophy and white supremacy: An essay in Afrikan philosophical hermeneutics

European collective narcissism expressing itself in the form of racism/white supremacy underlies the making of the Euro-modern world rooted in race war against Afrikans. The collective self-image of the Europeans has always served as a “pre-text” for imperialism and colonialism. Conquest and slavery are inhuman onslaughts which the Europeans embark on to shape the world in their racist and anti-black image. It is in this sense that the epistemological is the premise of the political. This brief essay attempts to respond to the following questions in their order, Why has racism been ignored as a theme in political philosophy despite its centrality to the last half millennium of global political history? and why should racism be studied as a fundamental theme in Political Philosophy?

The ignorance of racism as a theme in political philosophy is premised on multiple grounds. In terms of this essay this ignorance is premised on ontological, methodological, and epistemologico-metaphysical grounds which are not exhaustive but are inextricably intertwined. As far the ontological ground is concerned Mogobe Ramose (2002) encapsulates it through the phrase “struggle for reason”. At the very core of who is human in terms of the European definition of what it means to be human is reason. This is the Eurocentric and rationalistic philosophical anthropology undergirding the European “intellectual warfare” against Afrikans as epitomized by the Enlightenment project with its “white colour of reason”. This is how Ramose (2002:4) states it “The struggle for reason—who is and who is not a rational animal—is the foundation of racism”. And this racism is according to Ramose premised on “the questionable belief that ‘man is a rational animal’ excludes the African” (Ramose 2002:1-2). Charles Mills (1998) further substantiates our ontological ground by foregrounding the “ontology of persons and subpersons”. According to Mills the experience of racism by subpersons is excluded from (white) political philosophy because the core subject of this discipline just like in many others is the “Cartesian sum” by implication the white political subject and its experience. This is how Mills (1998:9) states it “The universalizing pretensions of Western philosophy, which by its very abstractness and distance from vulgar reality seemed to be all-inclusive of human experience, are thereby shown to be illusory. White (male) philosophy's confrontation of Man and Universe, or even Person and Universe, is really predicated on taking personhood for granted and thus excludes the differential experience of those who have ceaselessly had to fight to have their personhood recognized in the first place”. Mills (1998: 9) further states that “Western philosophy abstracts away from what has been the central feature of the lives of Africans transported against their will to the Americas: the denial of black humanity and the reactive, defiant assertion of it”. By excluding subpersons from the position of a theoretical subject because of racism (white) political philosophy also excluded their anti-racist theoretical formulations. Mills is referring to Black philosophy in the diaspora. The same “ontology of racism” applies in “conqueror South Africa” (Ramose 2018). While the underlying historical reason behind the ontology of racism in the diaspora which Mills is discussing is slavery, in “South Africa” is conquest since 1652 in unjust wars of colonization. The ontological ground for ignorance in the form of racism took the form of doubting the humanity of the Indigenous people conquered in the unjust wars of colonization by European conquerors who became white settlers through land dispossession. This doubt manifests itself through “the marginalization and ghettoization of African philosophy and the problem of racism” (Dladla 2017: 225). This is done by “South African” academic philosophy which is nothing but “colonial philosophy” (Dussel 2002: 11). This is how the epistemological and ontological grounds merge in white racism.

At the methodological level which is our second ground for ignorance is what Mills calls “conceptual whiteness” of philosophy. This whiteness is operative both in the diaspora which Mills is discussing and in “South Africa”. This whiteness is not just conceptual, but it is also demographic both in the diaspora and in “South Africa”. As Mabogo More (2004:150) states it “Academic philosophy in South Africa has always been the terrain of whites, particularly white males”. This is how Mills (1998:4) captures this “Thus there is a feeling, not to put too fine a point on it, that when you get right down to it, a lot of philosophy is just white guys jerking off”. Mills (1998:2) further states it “I suggest that a major contributory cause is the self-sustaining dynamic of the "whiteness" of philosophy, not the uncontroversial whiteness of skin of most of its practitioners but what could be called, more contestably, the conceptual or theoretical whiteness of the discipline”. This whiteness in terms of our methodological ground is related to racism as discussed above. This is because stripped of reason Africans and African Americans find their experiences being excluded from philosophy. And this is problematic because all theory and philosophy are premised on experience and context. This how Ramose (2002:4) captures it “Why did the teaching of Western philosophy in African universities fail for so long to address the concrete experience of racism in the continent in the light of philosophical racism? For too long the teaching of Western philosophy in Africa was decontextualized precisely because both its inspiration and the questions it attempted to answer were not necessarily based upon the living experience of being-an-African in Africa. Yet, the Western philosophers that the teaching of philosophy in Africa emulated always drew their questions from the lived experience of their time and place”. This methodological deviation eventuates in “The abstraction from the empirical which is its defining feature is generally taken to justify the ignoring of such real-world “deviations,” since the important thing is the concepts employed. The aspiration to the timeless and universal then rationalizes an idealized form of abstraction which, through its obfuscation of the distinctive political experience of people of color in modernity, makes the representative political individual European. Whiteness as racelessness becomes abstractness becomes philosophical representativeness” (Mills 2021:22).

Our epistemologico-metaphysical ground is concerned with the fantasies of “white reason” regarding the nature of reality. We know that “the colour of reason” (Eze 1997) behind (white) political philosophy is white. On the premise of this whiteness this reason has portrayed the world essentially in Eurocentric terms. This Eurocentrism is the overarching framework within which the ignorance of racism is located. It is this Eurocentrism which propels the “will to ignorance” underlying the sidelining of racism in (white) political philosophy. This Eurocentrism eventuates in the exclusion of the historicity and situatedness of the Afrikan experience of racism by centering the existence and humanity of the Europeans as if is the human existence as such. This is how Tsenay Serequeberhan (2019:5) states it “Kant conflates his empirical concern for differing “peoples” (i.e., races, nations, etc.) with the credo that posits European history as the mandatory, or requisite, transcendental “meeting point of all particular histories”. For, it is from the perspective of “the history of enlightened nations” that world historical developments are considered and only in terms of the self-understanding of these very nations”. This of course results in the “over-representation of Western man” (Wynter 2006) as the foundation of (white) political philosophy. This is how Emanuel Eze (1997:117) substantiates this absurd hubris of “white reason” which “uncritically assumed that the particularity of European existence is the empirical as well as ideal model of humanity, of universal humanity, so that others are more or less human or civilized ("educable" or "educated") as they approximate this European ideal”. This is the “self-fetishization of Western thought” (Baudrillard 1975).

Racism should be studied thematically in political philosophy. There are numerous grounds for this proposition. But for the purposes of this essay, we will address two of these grounds, namely the epistemic and political. With regard to the epistemic ground the thematic reason to study political philosophy is “conceptual decolonization” as formulated by Kwasi Wiredu in the pursuit for epistemic justice and sovereignty. Conceptual whiteness and racism are intertwined as already posited above. This necessitates a need for conceptual decolonization as far as the victims of the violence of this conceptual whiteness is concerned. This conceptual decolonization of course will entail the foregrounding of the experience and epistemologies of Afrikans and Afrikan Americans as the premise of theory and concepts. In other words, because (white) political philosophy is premised on white experience and ideal theorization of and by the “Cartesian sum”, conceptual decolonization following Charles Mills (1998 and 2021) will entail the centering of the subpersons and real theorization. This will entail political philosophy focusing on the persistence of white supremacy and racism as far as the reality of Afrikans and Afrikan Americans are concerned. This is how Mills (2021:23) captures it “Decolonizing Western political philosophy will require an acknowledgment of the transcontinental dimension of the thought of Western political theorists, the general complicity of the tradition with the colonial project, and the existence of opposing voices within that tradition. Such central categories as personhood, society, sovereignty, obligation, property, civilization, the rule of law, were all historically operationalized by different rules for Europeans and populations of color, and the white political subject cannot stand in racelessly for the global political subject of modernity”.

However, this conceptual decolonization as posited by Mills is an integrationist one. The reason being that it is premised on the logic of exclusion, namely the exclusion of the experience and subpersonhood of Afrikan Americans and the abstraction from their reality of racism through ideal theory. It posits some kind of epistemic justice in the form of redeeming (white) political philosophy by including those who are excluded. Despite its validity in terms of foregrounding the thematic study of racism (for instance Racial liberalism) in political philosophy its political outcome is premised on the African American Civil Rights movement thrust of assimilation into mainstream America. Tommy J Curry (2009:3) proffers a different version and alternative by stating that “Unlike many philosophical works on race that demand a more enriched and critical conversation with whites about race, CRT is adamant about its radical activism, which challenges not only the idea of white privilege but the property rights that whites maintain. Unlike the more apologetic investigations of race in philosophy, which thrive by its constant attempts to draw whites into thinking about race, CRT’s racial inquiries are driven by the actual function of racism in American society—not the anti-racist re-socialization of whites”.

In conqueror South Africa (Ramose 2018) the epistemic ground for thematically studying racism is in line with the practice of contemporary African philosophy. This is how Serequeberhan (2019:1) states it “It will argue this point by articulating what it takes to be a central concern of contemporary African philosophy, i.e., the systematic undermining of Western hegemonic narratives...” Serequeberhan (2019:15) further states that “The aim, of such a “reading” would be the systematic dismantling of the symmetry of concepts/biases and theoretic constructs/presuppositions that have legitimated the subordination of Africa and the world beyond Europe. I have elsewhere referred to this as the “critical-negative aspect” of the discourse of contemporary of African philosophy. A thinking aimed at releasing us from the residual burden of Europe’s self-deluded “thinking” of itself as the center of the universe”.

The call for conceptual decolonization as a struggle against epistemicide which was brought about by conquest since 1652 in the unjust wars of colonization in “South Africa”, entails the foregrounding of African philosophy as the main philosophy to be studied. The experience, concepts and theories of the Indigenous people conquered in the unjust wars of colonization will predominate as opposed to being merely included and distorted in the process by “colonial philosophy”, namely “South African” academic philosophy and its white settler practitioners and their native informants. This is because as More (2004:153) states it with regard to “South African” academic philosophy “Both philosophical traditions – the Anglo-Saxon and the Continental – therefore, in varying degrees, may have been used to provide justification for racial and cultural discrimination before official apartheid in 1948 and during apartheid in the years that followed”. It is in this sense that in a dialectical manner the foregrounding of African philosophy is the operationalization of the African philosophy of liberation. This is in order to liberate Afrikans and African philosophy from the deadly and narcissistic white philosophy of white supremacy.

The political ground is premised on the historical and political fact of global white supremacy. Thus, the study of racism entails the pursuit of a Black philosophy of liberation in terms of a “philosophy born of struggle” in the diaspora. White settler colonialism in “South Africa” as an expression of global white supremacy necessitates the pursuit of an African philosophy of liberation to liberate both African philosophy and the African people from racism/white supremacy in the so-called “post-apartheid era”. Thus, in conclusion the study of racism entails the study and practice of liberation to destroy the political philosophy of white supremacy and white supremacy itself.

Masilo Lepuru
An African philosopher and founding director of the Institute for Kemetic and Marcus Garvey Studies (IKMGS).

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