“Philosophical Methods and the Pedagogical Realities of ‘Race’ “

Paul M. Zisman, Professor Emeritus

University of Mary Washington
Original 1995; Edited 2020

Introduction: Dewey’s Approach to Philosophy

In regard to Classical Philosophy, Dewey wrote: “Love of wisdom is
concerned with finding [metaphysics's] implications for the conduct of life,
in devotion to what is good.”1 Metaphysics seeks categories and stabilities
to arrest the precarious flux of experience. Its activity serves to create
fixities where there might have been waxing and waning. Control and
containment over the precarious aspects of life are sought so that life
might be lived according to absolute notions of the Good. Philosophy arose
to provide reflections and build systems to “mitigate the instability of life,
to introduce moderation, temper and economy, and when worst comes to
worst, to suggest consolations and compensations.” 2
Dewey’s critique of Philosophy, as an institutionalized practice, is its separation from
common experience. Philosophy should recognize itself as a purposeful human
activity to catch a hold of reality, fixing its unpredictability, so that it can
be used in the interest of a particular human group. A philosophy that is
not empirically based and which has pretensions of uncovering an eternal
Truth loses its connection with the vital and poignant experiences of a
people. At the root of philosophy, the love of wisdom necessary for
leading a good life, is an attempt to provide a sense of control over the
group’s destiny, to free a people from a reactive, survival mode and to
uplift them so that they can fulfill their expressive capacities.
A particularly poignant experience of a set of peoples began in the
15th century when the nation-states of Europe used their superior

1John Dewey, Experience and Nature (Chicago: Open Court Press, 1925), p. 51.
2ibid. p. 53.
technological capacity to colonize some peoples and enslave others. Their
aims served several interests: economic exploitation for the benefit of the
home nation, the sense of religious duty to Christianize the heathen, and
the expansion of territories to enlarge the control of a metropolis. These ,
exploitative forays, in any event, had the effect of dismembering
functional, cultural groups in many parts of the non-White world.
Especially in Africa, peoples of African descent were dispersed to the new
world in slavery, some of whose descendants in a later era would
immigrate to the colonizing center and became citizens. In a civilization
that underwrites philosophy, and has a strong religious tradition, the
question arises as to how philosophy would evolve in relationship to this
gross and untoward system of humiliation and domination of fellow
humans.
In what follows, I employ Dewey’s notion of the philosophical
method as that which seeks to define the Good, or relative goods, and
relate this to this lingering stigma of “race.” Dewey takes the
“experiences” of life as the object that provokes reflection on whether
these experiences are good or not, and whether they should be continued,
enhanced or discontinued. In this essay, I will sketch out in preliminary
and therefore rough fashion three “philosophies”, or ways of evaluating
experience. Experience can be evaluated according to instrumental reason,
secondly as cultural integrity, or thirdly existentially according to the
integrity of the experience itself. In this way I hope to move from the
modern emphasis on rationality, to the evolving concern with culture and
multiculturalism, and finally, to the most fundamental, again in a Deweyan
vein, to the existential quality of human experience in its particularities.
Each “philosophy” provides a different way to understand the experience
of colonized and subordinated peoples of African descent. The ordering of
the “philosophies” is significant. By moving from instrumental reason, to
cultural, and finally to experiential, a developmental plan is suggested
which moves from accepting racial categories as one of the fixities of life,
to understanding them as social constructions that can be used as a means
of resisting degradation, and finally to the non-cognitive level of
experience that is recognized by all humans: suffering and happiness. The
philosophical method of empiricism advocated by Dewey, then, becomes
instrumental in shearing away the connotations of “race”, and ultimately
the instrumental use of “race” for the benefit of the dominant classes, so
that persons learn to treat color as a purely esthetic dimension, shorn of its
essentialistic connotations.

“Race” and Education in the Philosophy of Reason

Classical roots.
A philosophy of reason is the hallmark of modern thought.
However, it is continuous with Plato and so it is instructive to
take a brief look at Plato’s Republic. Plato made the rational the only route
to the ultimate Form3, and so he tended to locate the essence of a thing as
the hidden, internal form inferred by reason. In the “Allegory of the
Metals”, Plato recognized the complex nature of individual natures,
individuals being alloys. Within the combination, however, one metal
would predominate and thus fit that individual to function in the division
of labor upon which a society bases its organization. It is noteworthy that
the predominating metal becomes apparent only after educational trials,
since within the educational process the power of the metals would reveal
3Francis MacDonald Cornford, The Republic of Plato (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1941), p. 218 (Book VI 507).

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themselves. In this way Plato sought to rationalize the correspondence of
societal function with a type of character suitable for performing its tasks.
In Plato we find the premises upon which is based tracking in a
meritocratic system, including the assumed fixity of the inner natures of
individuals. Cornford translates as “convenient fiction” what is often
rendered “noble lie,”4 an indication that Plato was engaging in the
legislation of values. Plato in his myth emphasized that all “men” were
from common stock, born literally of the earth, and therefore owed each •
other and their territory allegiance. •
Plato advocated the “fiction” of metals, even among the Guardians, as
way of gaining general acceptance for the divisions of labor in his republic.
We can assume that Plato justified what Nietzsche has called the “pious lie”
by his superior reasoning: the processes of reason generated the plan and
the social organization derived was reasonable. So the “philosophy” of
reason relies on the rational to evaluate the good of an idea or conduct
since Plato raises the rational to the highest rank of values, indicating that
one must develop this capacity above all others (but not so much,
according to Plato, to upset the balance between it and the spirit,
developed through physical education.5).
We cannot trace “racial” categories directly to Plato. In fact, there is
some evidence that Ancient Greeks and other peoples did not have the
concept of “race” at all, at least in terms of physical attributes signifying
moral essences.6 But we do identify the metaphysical impulse to
categorize social types and the ranking of these types. We also can
identify the valuing of reason and its later metamorphosis into
4Ibid., note 1, p. 106.
5Ihid. pp. 101-2 (Book III 411-12).
6Kwame Anthony Appiah, In Mv Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of
Culture. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 11.

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instrumentalism, which becomes important in considering modern liberal
philosophy and its attitude toward “race.” And we can further identify the
rationalization to introduce necessary fictions that allow the aristocrats,
oligarchs, or power elites, depending on the type of society, to define what
is good for the masses and thus to control them.
The Capitalist use of “race”
The orientation of Americans to blacks
grew directly out of the English experience and the evolution of different
moral statuses between the “races.” Winthrop Jordan, in an excellent
survey of English attitudes toward “Negroes”, reveals the moral
significance of the colors black and white in the English mind in the 16th
and 17th centuries: “Black was an emotionally partisan color, the handmaid
and symbol of baseness and evil, a sign of danger and repulsion.”7 White
reflected its opposite, “beinge coloures utterlye contrary”, signifying purity
and beauty, especially when complemented by red on the cheeks of a
women. The confrontation with black Africans elicited feelings of
repulsion to the ugliness and baseness of blackness and to the strangeness
of minor differences in the shapes of the lips and nose. Even before
Darwin, whose evolutionary theory was not published until the brink of
the Civil War, the association of the Negro with the ape was a strong in the
minds of the white populace, even surviving the findings of the scientists
of the times8
It was but a short step from the physical attributes to assert an
essence of blackness within Negroes. Jordon, referring to Puritans like
John Winthrop, who had not seen blacks and who practiced a system of
self examination, comments:
7Winthrop Jordan, “First Impressions: Libidinous Blacks.” In Ronald Takaki,
ed., From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, Second Edition), p. 42.
8Ibid.U p. 47.

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Given the charged atmosphere of (self-)discovery, it was scarcely
surprising that Englishmen should have used peoples overseas as
social mirrors and that they were especially inclined to discover
attributes in savages which they found first, but could not speak of,
in themselves.
A rapidly commercializing society in the colonies and the pragmatism
employed with regard to religious beliefs - fomented a justification for
relegating the transported Africans to an uncivilized moral register and
therefore benefiting from enslavement by those of a higher civilization.
We will trace out briefly how a Philosophy of Reason could be used to
rationalize enslavement.
American slavery and its demise are tied to capitalism, the
democratic institutions and the concomitant liberal doctrine to make free
market activity a moral crusade. Adam Smith paved the way for the rise
of the commercial class in his market theory of society. He followed in a
line of mostly Scottish philosophers who redeemed self-interest from its
association with sin. The self-interest of the individual initiates the drive
to satisfy personal needs through making a profit. In a market situation,
this is done by satisfying someone else’s needs. So the commercial man
soon learns that in order to satisfy his own self-interest he must attend by
necessity to the interests of others, thus creating an artificial altruism.9
The role of labor for Smith was that free men would sell their labor and in
turn use their earnings to participate in the market and contribute to its
growth.
The Platonic ephasis on rationality was narrowed in its scope in the
modern context and so debilitated morality. Capitalism, liberal philosophy
9Muller, Jerry Adam Smith in his Time and Ours: Designing the Decent Society
(New York: The Free Press, 1993).

6
and instrumental reasoning are self-reinforcing. Ross Poole makes a
persuasive case that capitalism encourages instrumental reason.10 Ross
begins by revealing how the moral underpinnings of market capitalism
eventually give way to utilitarianism, which unleashes narcissistic forces
that rolls over any credible moral outlook. He writes:
Utilitarianism feeds on the disjunction between individual motivation
and social consequence, and it finds, itself with little to say when
confronted with the problem of explaining why individuals might be
motivated by a concern for the general happiness.11
Kantian morality comes off only a little better: what better form of
morality could we have in a commercial society than . one that emphasizes
the importance of principles and contracts.
The liberal position, in Poole’s argument, is that individuals have the
right to choose their own values until such choices interfere with the rights
of others to choose. The working out of individual rights is governed by a
sense of fairness, or justice. Justice is structured into the legal system and
through rules and regulations of bureaucracies. In contrast, a true Kantian
justice, Poole asserts, resides in the way that individuals make choices.
Justice should be a component of their thinking and is governed by
reason.12 Two problems ensue from the liberal position. One is that such
an approach abandons any notion of the good, leaving it up to the
individual. The other is that as the society extends its freedom to different
competing cultural groups, the cohering role played by a traditional elite or
aristocracy fades and social solidarity through the social organization is
^Ross Poole, Morality and Modernity. (New York: Routledge, 1991), Chapter 2.
11Ml
-, p. 17.
12lbid., p. 71.

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weakened.13 Poole goes so far as to say that “liberalism is diluted
nihilism”14 and that some form of communal standards must be developed
that avoids the authoritarianism of the communitarians.
We now arrive at a point where we can address the question of why
black peoples have been dehumanized for so long under a liberal regime of
human rights and freedom of choice. We can see that liberalism
emphasizes the possessive individual, and slaves were certainly important
possessions. In Virginia, for example, a man’s wealth often resided in his
slaves, making even Thomas Jefferson reluctant to deprive his family of its
wealth by manumitting his slaves during his life time. We can see that in
the early days of the republic notions of freedom were circumscribed to
certain segments of society. The forces of market capitalism conspired
with liberal philosophy to define rights in terms of capital interests. Yet
market capitalism and liberalism also conspire to yield dynamic forces
which generate social change, making the rise and fall of competing power
centers an aspect of modernity. Thus, the labor movement of the
Progressive Era and the Civil Rights Movement of 1950’s and 1960’s
challenged the traditional power centers and created countervailing forces.
Subsequent changes have occurred in the status of black peoples, allowing
some black individuals to gain access to institutions of higher education.
As a result, black attorneys like Thurgood Marshall, trained at Howard
University in the ‘30s, contested in courts the limited application of
liberalism through the legal system. Despite some concrete improvement
in the material and social condition of two-thirds of African-Americans,
racism still persists and the experience of blacks in America is always
13C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory oF Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to
Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), Chapter VI.
14Poole, p. 89.

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marked by degrees of humiliation. More recently, nevertheless, black
peoples in America and Europe have created a literature on social theory
that prompts a reconsideration of the Philosophy of Reason.
Reason against “race”.—A dilemma of the black intellectual is how to
regard the social category of “race.” Appiah, British educated but of
Ghanaian origin, sets out the dilemma:
Since what bound those African-American and Afro-Caribbean PanAfricanists together was the
partially African ancestry they shared, •
and since that ancestry mattered in the New World through its
various folk theories of race, a racial understanding of their
solidarity was, perhaps, an inevitable development...15
Appiah traces in the mid-19th century the footsteps of the African
American, Oliver Crummell, an early—perhaps the earliest—advocate of
Pan-African nationalism, from his native United States to his adopted
Liberia. Crummell brought with him the prejudices of his Western
education, and imputed to the indigenous Africans the same immoralism as
white observers did.
Africa is wasting beneath the accretions of moral and civil miseries.
Darkness covers the land and gross darkness the people. Great social
evils universally prevail...Licentiousness abounds
everywhere...Moloch rules...by the ordeal of Sassywood, Fetiches,
human sacrifices and devil-worship, is devouring men, and women
and little children.16
Appiah makes use of Crummell to point out that “racial” categories were
taken as an objective fact even for African nationalists. Crummell aspired
to a civilization for his Africa, wishing them to learn English and adopt
15Appiah, p. 6.
16Quoted by Appiah, p. 23.

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Christianity, and prophesizing a time when Africa would rise as an
influential civilization. Certainly Crummell was a “racialist”, according to
Appiah’s definition, for he held views that members of the same race
inherited a biological essence. And he held a belief in the low moral
condition of Africans. Yet he mostly described the nature of Africans in
psychological terms, in what we would refer today as cultural. So
Crummell, who was an amateur scientist among other things, was at times
actually very modern in seeing beyond moral essences associated with
races and adopting a scientific and cultural view.
Crummell begins to provide in the literature of black social theory a
conceptualization of Pan Africanism that moves away from biological
essentialism, even while holding to racialism. His ambiguity about the
reality of race reflects a double consciousness that has plagued many black
intellectuals, and perhaps most blacks. To illustrate Crummell’s inchoate
Pan-Africanism, Appiah quotes from his writings: “Races, like families, are
the organisms and ordinances of God; and race feeling, like family feeling,
is of divine origin.” A contemporary, Byden, referred to this “race feeling”
as the “poetry of politics”, which for Appiah indicates some transcendental
obligation among descendants of Africa who expect from each other
treatment “better than what moral duty demands of us”.17 Yet, when
Appiah appraises the evidence for a biological definition and cultural
definition of race, and exhausts these two lines of reasoning, he concludes:
“The truth is that there are no races: there is nothing in the world that can
do all we ask race to do for us.”18 The illusion of “race” was, and for the
majority still is, a necessary fiction perpetrated by “whites” in order to
dominate peoples of African descent. Nevertheless, intellectuals of African
17Appiah, p. 17.
18Ibid.. p. 45.

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descent and others who wish to move beyond this illusion are trapped by
its cultural power.
Schooling has played an essential role in the liberal scheme of
society. Just as in Plato’s Republic, modern society has to legitimize its
division of labor and its parceling out of prestige and power. Schooling has
represented a preliminary sorting mechanism to accomplish a meritocracy
based on credentials. As the antechamber to the labor market, schooling
separates the gold from the silver from the bronze so that individuals are
more likely to accept their lot in life. The market nature of society
provides a secondary sorting based on the individual’s capacity in
resources, connections and talent to establish market relationships and to
participate in the capitalist game. Given the corporate nature of postindustrial society, this
secondary sorting is in the vast majority of cases
played out within certain occupational stratum rather than among
individual entrepreneurs, contrary to the hype about free market.
The philosophy of reason renders the curriculum in utilitarian forms,
following Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia school of practical arts instead
of a Platonic pursuit of Truth or the Good. Schooling is a means to a
vocational ends, and only incidentally treats moral issues since liberalism
takes a hands-off approach to personal moral development. When
schooling is not practical, it becomes a leisure-class consumption to display
a status right, as described by Thorsten Veblen. Rationality is conceived
narrowly in educational training as solving of technical or narrowly posed
academic problems. Rationality is also transmitted organizationally as
students learn to function in a bureaucratic analogy of social organizations
destined to be the occupational settings of the majority of students.
As regards the “races” and education, in the colonial period and early
independence schooling was directed at elites. Blacks were not

11
systematically educated beyond craft apprenticeships. After the Civil War,
a de jure segregated system arose in the south and the north developed a
de factor segregated system based on residential segregation. Folk
theories about race prevailed in the treatment of blacks both in the sorting
process and in the curriculum. As the sphere of rights widened, the
curriculum changed to become increasingly morally neutral in place of its
outright biases. In places, a sympathetic, and honest treatment of blacks,
Hispanics and American Indians occasionally is found. Schools virtually
always take a “color blind” approach in dealing with “racial” issues. While
the culture insists on maintaining “racial” categories, the schools pretend
that they do not exist in their operation. The curriculum, however,
recognizes the categories, but assiduously avoids the implications of the
illusion of “race,” which most scientists maintain. Where positive action is
taken to eradicate “racism,” it will actively refute the myth of inferiority
but it will not refute the myth of “race” as a biological entity, or nor
disclose its use as a means of social control. Artificial integration has been
established in many places but only in a diluted form of the Gordon
Allport’s contact theory which maintains the belief that merely copresence in the same school
will diminish “racism.” Liberalism eschew
confrontation and so education under a philosophy of reason is flexible in
handling of “race” but not bent its dismantling as a social category.
“Race” and Education in the Philosophy of Culture
Culture prior to philosophy.—Blacks educated in Western schools all
over the world are studying the history and literature of the former
colonizers who dominated, and in the Americas enslaved, their ancestors.
Along the way they created the necessary myths to allow political and
economic imperialism. While educators have excised the current

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curriculum of obvious biases and distortions, liberalism pushes out of the
classroom full exploration of racisms moral implications in history and
literature. The moral implications of capitalism are never explored nor in
general are the social structures examined in terms of social justice. The
voices of black intellectuals have not yet entered into the mainstream
curriculum. The current multicultural movement does little to impart the
sense of struggle among competing groups, and the stakes involved. Neoconservatives demand a
multiculturalism that stresses common core
values, cultural literacy and communitarianism while the liberal side
recognizes the legitimacy of multiculturalism and even the “centric”
curricula as long as they are viewed as a means to an end, and not an end
in themselves.19
Such activity signals the emergence of a Philosophy of Culture. The
attempt here is to give some form to the transition in the thinking of
liberal philosophers. This is admittedly exploratory and presumes the
infusion of sociological theory into philosophy. We will take Richard
Rorty’s position as the prototype. Rorty in “The Priority of Democracy to
Philosophy” defends John Rawls’ notion of justice against criticisms that he
is both a Kantian in promoting an absolutist claim about rights and a
purveyor of instrumental individualism. For Rorty, Rawls epitomizes his
view in his assertion that justice needs no justification beyond “its
congruence with our deeper understanding of our ourselves and our
aspirations, and our realization that, given our history and the traditions
embedded in our public life, it is the most reasonable doctrine for us.”20
19See for example, Benjamin R. Barber, An Aristocracy of Everyone: The
Politics of Education and the Future of America (New York: Ballantine Books,
1992), Chapter 4.
20Rorty quotes Rawls, adding the italics, in Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy
to Philosophy.” p. 185.

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The emphasis on the cultural context removes Rawls from a metaphysical
position, and thus makes the political ideal of justice prior to its
philosophical justification. Rorty thus breaks the philosophical habit of
finding universal premises, or theories of human nature, upon which to
base political and moral beliefs. This pragmatic stance follows from
Dewey’s insistence that no reality exists prior to its construction by
individuals engaged in social life and that therefore experience precedes
reflection and philosophy. For Rorty, ihe basis for human rights does not
depend on their universally residing in human nature as inalienable rights
but “something relatively local and ethnocentric—the tradition of a
particular community, the consensus of a particular culture.”21
A philosophy of culture makes the culture prior to the reflections of
the intellectuals. Returning to Dewey22, if philosophy seeks wisdom, and
wisdom is determining the relative good, then philosophy must not stray
too far from its subject-matter: the complexities of the initial experience.
Dewey wants to demonstrate that philosophies are not honest about their
own derivations. Since all philosophy involves some selective
discrimination and elaborates a justification for a particular choice, then it
is a type of experiment in selection. The elaborated justification can
obscure the origins of the choice in the experience of the philosopher who
is bound up in his or her historical and sociological milieu. If practical
individuals by necessity make a first-degree interpretation of their
empirical sense-data, then philosophers make second- and third-degree
interpretations as they reflect on the primary interpretations and justify
their interpretations. Dewey’s critique of Philosophy is not that reflections
are its activities, but its self-deception about assumed but unacknowledged
21Ibid.., p. 176.
22Dewey, Experience , p. 37-8.

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prior selections of the first-degree interpretations of one’s given culture.23
Philosophers, then, are those who find justifications and explanations for
certain strands of meaning, or embedded meanings, at times employing
antinomies (literally, “against the norm”), in a culture. A Philosophy of
Culture, then, is the recognition of the cultural basis of philosophy and its
metaphysical categories, like “race”.
Education and cultural creativity.—To promote the transition from an
era of reason to one of culture, intellectuals and artists of African descent
are self-consciously creating literature and philosophies to counter the
damaging effects of neo-colonialism. During the colonial period in Africa,
cultural dominance was exercised by the colonial school.24 Ngugi, a Kenyan
author, cites three types of literature in Africa: 1) the oral tradition, 2)
Africans writing in European tongues, and 3) Africans writing in their own
language. Ngugi, already a recognized and respected author in English,
began writing in his native Gikuyu in 1978. He discusses the impact of
English as the language of instruction in his childhood Kenya:
Literary education is now determined by the dominant language
while also reinforcing that dominance. Orature (oral literature) in
Kenyan languages toppled...At Makerere I read English: from Chaucer
to T. S. Eliot with a touch of Graham Greene....Thus language and
literature was taking us further and further from our selves to other
selves, from our world to other worlds.25
23Dewey , Experience , p. 52. Dewey makes reference to culture in the more
restricted conception of anthropology , but I believe it stays within his
intentions to make the equation between culture and experience as mediated
perceptual activity .
24Ngugui Wa Thiog’o, Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cutlural Freedoms
(Portsmith, N. H.: Heinemann, 1993). P. 51.
25 Ngugui Wa Thiog’o, Decolonizing the Mind (Portsmith, N. H.: Heinemann,
1986), p. 12.

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Ngugi’s relentless logic reveals how the dominant language, as the
embodiment of culture, infiltrates into the mentality of colonized peoples
and with it the values of the colonizers. The process of mental domination
is necessary for the economic and political domination. If colonization has
as its aim to generate wealth, which it did for the English, or to enlarge the
cultural center of a European metropolis, which it did for the French, then
education, or what the French call “assimilation”, is the crucial vehicle.
Through education the dominant language replaces the others, and
language shapes the mental processes and thus becomes a valueorientation in itself. Colonialism,
in essence, is the process of cultural
humiliation by gaining control, as Ngugi declares, of the “tools of selfdefinition in relationship to
others”:
For colonialism this involved two aspects of the same process: the
destruction or the deliberate undervaluing of a people’s culture, their
art , dances, religions, history, geography, education, orature and
literature, and the conscious elevation of the language of the
colonizer.26
The lingering effects of colonialism is called neo-colonialism, and for Ngugi
the same process of transvaluation continues. While some of the obvious
prejudices have been eliminated, European cultural intrusions in the neocolonies remain
pervasive. The presence of a Western-oriented media, the
imposition of nation-states with boundaries and bureaucratic apparatuses
incongruent with the conceptions and pluralities of the African peoples, the
Western education model in schooling, and the globalization of Africa are
quite threatening to indigenous cultures. For Ngugi, language is a primary
means to counter the Westernization of Africa and “to move if you like
26Ibid.. p. 16.

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towards a pluralism of languages as legitimate vehicles of the human
imagination.”27
The revaluation of culture, however, is not that straightforward,
according to Appiah. The African nativist clearly recognizes the “pseudouniversalism” of Western
philosophy: “What they truly object to-and who
would not?—is Eurocentric hegemony posing as universalism.”28 Yet
contemporary African literature is written in the languages of the
colonizers “...that is readily identifiable as the product of schooling—and
schooling that is fully available only to an elite...”29 Appiah goes on to
assert that the belief that the majority of African “ ‘peoples’ have held onto
an indigenous national tradition, that only the educated bourgeoisie are
‘children of two worlds’ “ is shear sentimentality. In truth the popular
culture generated by the masses, like the masses all over the world, the
nouveau African music and language, for example, is filled with “dazzling
eclecticism,” as are so many modernist artistic expressions, and not
indigenous to any national or ethnic culture. What certain Africanist are
offering as indigenous culture suffers from the same universalistic fallacy
as Western cultural chauvinism: they take a particular form and foist it off
as being African when Africa is a mosaic of a 1000 languages and cultural
forms. African intellectuals, in their enthusiasm to claim an identification
with the Volk , the popular masses, overreach in adopting indigenous
garments and language, which graphically identifies their actual isolation
from the people. Appiah draws on the Martinique psychiatrist Frantz
Fanon, who died in 1961, for insights into the colonized mind: “Intellectuals
betray this estrangement by a fetishistic attitude toward the customs,
27Ngugi, Moving the Center, p. 10.
28Appiah, Mv Father’s House, p. 58
29Ibid.

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folklore, and vernacular traditions of their people, an attitude that, Fanon
argues, must, in the end, set them against the people in their time of
struggle.”30 The problem, Appiah continues, is that “the constructed nature
of the modern African identity (like all identities) is not widely enough
understood”. British colonial officers, along with “that curious creature, the
government anthropologist” identified native traditions and
institutionalized them, creating national myths out of their inventions.
Appiah quotes Ranger:
The invented traditions of African societies--whether invented by
the Europeans or by Africans themselves in response-distorted the
past but became in themselves realities through which a good deal of
colonial encounter was expressed...those like Ngugi who repudiate
bourgeois elite culture face the ironic danger of embracing another
set of colonial inventions instead. 31
In the case of Ngugi, he is writing in his native language, but its written
form was created by missionaries and the colonizers. Appiah extends the
argument to the notion of Africa itself “as something more than a
geographical entity” is a European invention. Pan-Africanism is the
appropriation, then, of an imperialist concept.
Culture, like literature, is a significant source of identification for
individuals since it provides individuals with the semiotic basis of their
identity formations. In a Philosophy of Culture, however, it is not an issue
that the intellectual is also inventing culture as the colonizer. After all, a
culture is composed of constructed forms, as Appiah implies when he says
all identities are inventions. The issue is who controls the identity
formation process and to what uses is that identity put . So it is to Ngugi’s
3°Ibid.. p. 61.
31Ranger, quoted by Appiah, ibid., p. 61.

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credit that he is taking control of his cultural sources of identity. He is
providing the linguistic means for an ethnic group in Kenya to define itself.
“Race” and Education in the Philosophy of Experience
Experience as prior to culture.—Schooling, given its culturetransmitting function, becomes
contested territory when the dominant >
culture is challenged. The cultural contest is not only over superficialities:
Africanists feel that their very identity, their very existence, is in jeopardy
when they do not have the ability to define their cultural sources. The
dilemma for the Philosopher of Culture is to find a solution different from
the split between private and public which Rorty proposes. It is not
sufficient that a colonized peoples, like African-Americans, be given the
right to transmit their culture in the private sphere because the public
sphere curriculum, as the culture of the dominant group, is too powerful in
its ability to alienate and humiliate subordinated peoples. Africanist
intellectuals want to move from a position of resistance of the dominant
culture to creative self-assertion in their own right.
The goal of cultural self-assertion is confused, according to Appiah’s
elaboration of Werner Sollors’ observation, by the false equation of cultural
expressions, which are multivaried in the African American community as
well as the new African nations, and the illusion of the racial bond.
Indeed, the common experience of racialized peoples does suggest a
compact among them, and this should be identified and recognized.
However, the wholesale equation of this compact with culture totalizes the
separate and particular forms of Afro-ethnic cultures. The role of
schooling also becomes confused and difficult since minor differences are
treated as having great cultural import, as if that feature epitomizes the
culture. Often there is a lack of distinction between what is cultural

19
resistance and what is cultural assertion, overlooking the political
implications of certain cultural features. When culture becomes the victim
of pedagogy in this manner, then the cultural curriculum becomes as
unreal to the students as any arbitrarily selected curriculum.
The attempt under the influence of a Philosophy of Experience is to
suggest a shift in focus from the culture to the origin of culture, experience.
Actually, reading Appiah and his candid .expositions of the contradictions
of the African intellectuals compels us to move in this direction. He ends
his book with a description of his experience in the double consciousness
which impacts so greatly on marginal peoples. His intellectual journey
ends with a description of a very concrete and gripping event: his father’s
death. The title of his book, In Mv Father’s House, refers to the exact
translation of the Ashante abusua , which is the matrilineal clan, and so
“house” indicates the clan. His father was head of an important abusua in
Ghana, notwithstanding his British education, his Christianity, his English
wife, and his Pan-Africanism. The ordeals of his funeral was something
that involved many people of the abusua, and given his father’s national
prominence, many high placed Ghanaians as well. To highlight postcolonial complexities of
identity, Appiah lists his father’s many identities:
an Asante, a Ghanaian, an African, internationalists, and along another
track, a Christian and Methodist, not to mention his required participation
in clan rituals based on animism and folk beliefs.
A complication arose in making arrangements for the funeral. It was
made public that Joe Appiah left instructions in his last testament for a
Methodist burial, not a traditional abusua one. Now, as leader of the
matrilineal abusua , this angered his sister and the other protectors of the
abusua. Appiah writes that he his world split apart as he, the eldest son of
the abusua chief, suddenly found himself embroiled in a classic post
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colonial conflict between the traditionalists and the Western educated. It
got to the point, when rumors of a possible kidnap of the corpse begin to
fly, that he and his family went to seek the judgment of the King of the
Asante people. When Appiah erupted in frustration and anger at the court
proceedings, he walked out on the king in an unintentional display of
disrespect. At the pleading of his relatives he returned to the court and '
genuflected with the others to ask the king’s forgiveness. A court official
proclaimed, with some dramatic effects: “Of course, we should beat him
with rods of iron until he bleeds. But then...he is our child, and we would
only have to tend his wounds.”32
Other events led the Westernized Appiah to participate in a magic
ritual to counter the threat of spells, or juju, that might occur, despite his
unbelief. Appiah saw the conflict as a clash between the abstract rights
associated with fairness, which his father as a Ghanaian barrister and
British trained attorney represented, and the “African values of
community” expressed as “keep looking for compromise”, which Appiah
often says is the equivalent for bowing to the clan. But Appiah
nevertheless again found himself drawn into the emotional web of the
clan. During the mourning rituals of his abusua , and when the coffin was
readied for the Christian burial, he draped over it his father’s finest kente,
the traditional symbol the “house”. A surprise visitor was the Chief of
State, Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings. Appiah detached himself from the
service for a moment to take cognizance of the gathering. It registered on
him the “multiplicity of our lives in a post colonial world”, for there were
his British mother, the nativistic members of his abusua, priests of several
Christian denominations, the Chief of State and his royal party, members of
the legal bar and other politicians.
32Appiah, p. 187.

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What Appiah demonstrates in his critical insights into the dilemmas
of the African intellectual, and in this closing chapter on a post-colonial
funeral, is that the experience is primary to cultures. I would like to
equate what Appiah suffered and celebrated with , what Dewey refers to as
returning to the empirical sources. While Appiah as a Western trained
philosopher finds no credibility in his reflections in the juju rituals, he
nevertheless felt the hostility of his aunt and imagined dreaded
consequences. In those moments, the reality of the magic was experienced
in the emotional climate surrounding the rituals. A Deweyan philosophic
understanding is that Appiah responded not to the spells themselves, nor
to the magic, nor to the belief system that gives credibility to juju, but to
the concrete details and feelings constituted in the complex whole which
gave Appiah an experience. A Deweyan experience encompasses the
primary response in pre-linguistic, felt responses in addition to the
cognitive interpretations of these responses. The imputation of magic
spells is a secondary overlay, the generation of culture, to the primary
empirical complexity. The role of magic here is the same as the role of
philosophy: to provide some justifications for interpretations and their
actions.
Experience cannot free itself from the clutches of culture. But a
philosophic method based on critical empiricism can isolate the function of
culture. This method insists on treating equally the entire experiential
complex, the initial non-cognitive perceptions and the added cognitive
activity that provides reflective understanding. The “whatness” or
“thatness” of the experience is taken as the subject-matter, or object, and
refers to whatever comes into cognizance. This is always a jumble of
sensory impressions and interpretative overlays. Reflection necessarily
simplifies and universalizes this complexity in order to fixate on certain

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points in a flux of material.33 This is a necessary condition of operating on
the external and internal environments. It is reflective activity that
should be done. What Dewey objects to, and which would be defeated by
his critical empiricism, is that the scene of the original creation is forgotten.
The simplification and the resulting “knowledge” is taken as independently
existing apart from the experience to which it was originally reflecting. -
Dewey insists on always returning to the. sources of reflection and
philosophy, and to take philosophical explanations as denotative of an
experience, and to retain in mind the subject-matter to which theory
points. For the original subject matter is not the cognitive category which
carries its on valuations, it is the whole of the perceptual apprehension as
it presents itself in concrete contexts.
Yet an experience is more than this primary apprehension, it is also
the evaluative interpretation. Certain initial valuations, depending on how
the experience has been simplified (and necessarily distorted), form the
basis of philosophy, the love of the wisdom required for a virtuous life.
For the reflective individual, this means that the empirical aspects of the
experience, and its valuations, must be coordinated within the refinements
of the philosophy. Another words, it is not simply that valuations arise
from the perceptual subject-matter, but that the reflections feed back into
experience to act as a filter, bringing certain aspects to the attention of the
individual beholder and suppressing others.
“Race” as a valuation does not pass the empirical test. In racializing a
group, an accidental characteristic, color and some other minor physical
features is selected out and overloaded with moral judgments and
expectations. This valuation initially served the purposes of dominant
Europeans. It rationalized their use of peoples to generate wealth and
33Dewey, Experience and Nature. Chapter 1.

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territory for themselves. But given the liberal doctrines associated with
democratic societies, the racist rationalizations contradicted the highest
values of the civilization. So the legal norms were revised and
governments no longer sanction in the public domains racial humiliations.
Nevertheless, the social category remains as an unofficial form of social
control and economic humiliations. The project of Africanists at this point
is not to dismantle the category, it is too strongly embedded in too many
cultures, but to revalue it. “Simply put,” Appiah summarizes, “the course
of cultural nationalism in Africa has been to make real the imaginary
identities to which Europe has subjected us.”34 At the cultural level,
Africanists are moving away from cultural resistance to cultural
transformation as a creative act of self-identification. They reject the
empirical effects of the social category and so are working to change its
valuation, and thus change its actual impact in experience. This is Dewey’s
philosophical method in action.
I believe these operations of the Africanists can go further to lay the
foundations for a general post-modern cultural transformation. If the
influential members of the dominant cultures follow the philosophical
experience of blacks, they will find away out of the cul-de-sac of
modernist nihilism. The primary experiences of pain, suffering, pleasure
and joy are non-metaphysical human universals. For blacks, the common
pain and suffering at the hands of a racist colonizers and slave owners
creates a common bond that goes beyond their localized cultural and
philosophical differences, as discussed in the section of a Philosophy of
Culture. Such primary responses are pre-linguistic and bind together Black
people, as Gilroy asserts. Black music exemplifies the “ineffable, sublime,
34Ibid.. p. 62.

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pre-discursive and anti-discursive elements in black expressive culture.”35
Music plays the same role as Ngugi’s return to writing in his native
language cited above. But it reflects in its sorrow and happiness the precultural responses to
humiliations and release. Blacks in their mutual
recognition of suffering find a solidarity beyond their language and
culture. By extension, we can imagine in a global village a time when
different peoples will recognize such primal human responses in each
other’s variegated cultural expressions. And from the lessons of Africanist
solidarity perhaps we can find a non-cultural and non-reflective, and
therefore non-essentialistic, universal solidarity.
Empirical multicultural education.—A Philosophy of Experience
demands attention to primary responses and their relationship to
curriculum. Empirical pedagogy follows Dewey’s dictum that “there is
something immediately and non-cognitively present in experience so that
it is capable of being pointed to in subsequent reflection...”36 A Montessori
or Piagetian education begins with concrete experience and uses this as a
basis for reflection and curriculum development. In an Information Age
where technology takes us further and further away from concrete
experience, it becomes more important to build up experience in this
manner. Computer education is still important, but it needs robotics and
programming activities where results can be seen. The learner initially
has to learn to trust his or her senses and obtain an understanding of
knowledge as conceptual and referential. Given the history of Black
peoples, we can see the political implications of non-empirical education.
It is authoritarian and dogmatic, and certainly deprives individuals of
36Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 120.
36Dewey, Experience and Nature , p. 21-22.

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confidence to trust in their own perceptions of things. It leads to
distortions that serves the interests of dominant groups. An anti-racist
education must begin on the sure footing of the basic ground of experience.
In terms of multicultural education, this has several implications.
The curriculum must not present culture as some sort of given, as some
historical artifact that forever marks the nature of a people. Native
American culture is usually presented in. this way: teepees, hogans, and
sweat lodges. Even a sympathetic curriculum conveying, for example, the
tragedy of the Trail of Tears in the forced transference of Eastern tribes to
Oklahoma can easily slide into romanticism. The basis for multicultural
education must therefore be critical cultural studies: the function of
culture, its universality, and its reactive and creative components, and its
relationship to the empirical ground and the charismatic legislation of
values. The cultural forms themselves should be presented as solutions to
concrete problems, and should be analyzed for their cogency. The
sanctification of cultural forms should be eschewed and displaced by
understanding their transient character in response to changing
environmental conditions or political internal ones. Rituals can be enacted
and dramatized so that learners can feel at least a hint of their emotional
import in the lives of people. They should learn that cultural forms often
exhaust their original purposes and continue on as formalism carried by
the weight of traditions. If they nevertheless carry ritualistic meaning for
a people, they function to create solidarity among them and renew their
ties to a common history.
The goal of multicultural education should be to help the student
focus on the creative aspect of culture to extend upon primary human
experiences. Beneath the weird costumes and exotic dances, and the
strange food, and different physical features of people, should be an

26
appreciation of the core structure of experience. The goal should be to see
through the differences as ultimately superficial and to find solidarity in
the common struggles and celebrations of peoples everywhere. Empathy
certainly is necessary and should be stressed. But equally as important is
the creative responses to the common human circumstances of being born,
growing up, the need for food, shelter and emotional nurture, the need for
creative expression and construction, but - also sickness, growing old, and
dying. In short, an empirical back-to-the basics. Particularly in Western
cultures that have so successful distracted us from these basics, and
created a conspiracy of denial about these facts of life intruding into our
own lives, we need to relocate them as sources of our cultural forms.
Multicultural education should be an education to break out of the capsule
of culture into the light of their common sources of experiences for all
peoples.

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