Philosophy and Racism

Philosophical racism and ubuntu: In dialogue with Mogobe Ramose

“…9 Ramose bases his indictment of Locke's philosophical racism on Bracken's more abstract epistemological argumentation. Bracken (1973;1978) focuses on the nominalism of Locke's empiricist theory of knowledge. Empiricism denies the existence of essences in reality, so that 8…”

“…Bracken, on whose authority Ramose bases his verdict, does not make it sufficiently plausible that the third interpretation of Locke's attitude to slavery is better than the other two. Bracken concedes that he only demonstrates that Locke's theory of knowledge may facilitate racism, not that it is inherently racist (Bracken 1978).…”

Tropical Hermeneutics: Fragments for a Historical Narrative: an Afterword

“…Courtesy of the contributions made by such writers as Richard Popkin (1974;, Harry Bracken (1984), David Goldberg (1993), Sandra Harding (1993) and Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (1997), the dimensions of what has been called 'the racial economy' of western scholarship have begun to be exposed. Thus we find, for example, Kant -who wrote an essay "On the different races of man" in 1775 -insisting in his posthumously published lectures on Physical Geography, that in "the hot countries the human being…does not…reach the perfection of those in the temperate zones" and that "all inhabitants of the hottest zones are exceptionally lethargic" (quoted in Eze, 1997:63, 64).…”

Nicknaming as a Mode of Black Resistance

“…All these philosophers made either explicit or implicit reference to complexion in an attempt to provide the intellectual basis for White superiority and pave way for colonization and exploitation of Africans. Locke argued that skin color is a nominally essential property of men (Bracken, 1978). This means that skin color (Charles, 2003, p. 716; Hall, 2005) is important in the identification and naming of important qualities of human beings.…”