The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
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Confrontation during the second night of protests over the Eric Garner case, in New York City.Credit James Lawler Duggan/Reuters
This is the third in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with Shannon Sullivan, a professor in the department of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. She is the author of “Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism.” — George Yancy
George Yancy: What motivated you to engage “whiteness” in your work as a philosopher?
Shannon Sullivan: It was teaching feminist philosophy for the first time or two and trying to figure out how to reach the handful of men in the class — white men, now that I think of it. They tended to be skeptical at best and openly hostile at worst to the feminist ideas we were discussing. They felt attacked and put up a lot of defenses. I was trying to see things from their perspective, not to endorse it (it was often quite sexist!), but to be more effective as a teacher. And so I thought about my whiteness and how I might feel and respond in a class that critically addressed race in ways that implicated me personally. Not that race and gender are the same or can be captured through analogies, but it was a first step toward grappling with my whiteness and trying to use it.
Many white people never acknowledge the benefits that accrue silently throughout their lives.
What really strikes me now, as I think about your question, is how old I was — around 30 — before I ever engaged whiteness philosophically, or personally, for that matter. Three decades where that question never came up and yet the unjust advantages whiteness generally provides white people fully shaped my life, including my philosophical training and work. Read more…
Here are the things I could have told you about rabbits before Evander and Greedy Panda came into my life: Bunnies are storybook creatures, runaway or velveteen. They wear blue blazers or consult pocket watches. They live in burrows or raid gardens and subsist on a diet of carrots. Rabbits are not pets any rational person would choose to have, especially not someone who lives in an apartment. Rabbits, I would have told you with much certainty, are not for me.
I’m home alone in Echo Park when my boyfriend, Justin, calls me. “You won’t believe what just happened,” he says. “We have rabbits!”
He explains that he and his brother have just rescued two abandoned bunnies that were hopping around in traffic in the middle of a busy boulevard on the west side. (I will soon learn that Justin slows down for any stray dog and keeps a spare leash and a bag of dog food in the back of his car to lure wandering canines to safety.)
Deciding to shack up, and then moving across the country to do so, will reveal the fault lines in any relationship.
My immediate reaction to the bunnies is not generous. “No rabbits,” I tell him. This is a complication we certainly do not need.
Justin and I dated for a year and a half in New York before we moved to Los Angeles, just three months before he picks up the bunnies. We are doing our best to settle in, but things are not easy. He has never lived with a girlfriend before and I have, perhaps, tried living with too many boyfriends too quickly.
In many ways we are quite similar, sharing a host of strange interests and obsessions and a roundabout approach to becoming reasonable and responsible adults with stable careers. (I am a novelist, he an independent filmmaker turned television writer.) But deciding to shack up, and then moving across the country to do so, will reveal the fault lines in any relationship. Read more…
Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.
When Ebola ends, the people who have suffered, who have lost loved ones, will need many things. They will need ways to rebuild their livelihoods. They will need a functioning health system, which can ensure that future outbreaks do not become catastrophes. And they will need mental health care.
Depression is the most important thief of productive life for women around the world, and the second-most important for men. We sometimes imagine it is a first-world problem, but depression is just as widespread, if not more so, in poor countries, where there is a good deal more to be depressed about. And it is more debilitating, as a vast majority of sufferers have no safety net.
Health care for all must include mental health care. It’s hard to believe but both Liberia and Sierra Leone have only a single psychiatrist. The Ebola crisis has exposed these countries’ malignant neglect of their health systems. People can’t get care for diarrhea and malaria. How will these countries take care of an epidemic of depression?
This isn’t really a medical question. We know how to treat depression. What we don’t know yet is how to make effective treatment cheap, culturally appropriate, convenient and non-stigmatizing — all needed to get treatment out to millions and millions of people. But some researchers are finding out. Read more…
On Dec. 3, 1864, Abraham Lincoln proposed putting God in the Constitution. Preparing to submit his annual address on the state of the union, the president drafted a paragraph suggesting the addition of language to the preamble “recognizing the Deity.” The proposal shocked his cabinet during a read-through. With his re-election secured and the political utility of such a move dubious, the most religiously skeptical president since Thomas Jefferson proposed blowing an irreparable God-size hole through the wall separating church and state. What was Lincoln thinking?
Recalling the meeting in his memoirs, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles wrote that the imprudent idea had been put in the president’s head “by certain religionists” – namely, the Covenanters. A tiny sect from Scotland that had resided in America since before the Revolution, they believed the Constitution contained two crippling moral flaws: its protection of slavery, and its failure to acknowledge God’s authority. With the Emancipation Proclamation poised to fix the one sin, they believed, why not correct the other? At their first meeting with Lincoln in late 1862 (it was much easier for citizens to get an audience with the president at the time), a group of influential Covenanters suggested doing just that.
In that first meeting, Abraham Lincoln was quintessentially Abraham Lincoln — by turns respectful, humorous and reflective. He regaled his guests with the rough-hewn ideas that became his second inaugural address. He observed that each side in the war prayed to the same God, read the same Bible and invoked divine favor against the other; perhaps, Lincoln suggested, the war would ultimately decide which nation God chose. Read more…
Before purchasing a house in Brooklyn, I did not know the term “tree pit.” All I knew was that our house came with a small square plot of dirt out front, with a skinny, scraggly tree, and that it was up to me to maintain or ignore as I saw fit. At first I attended to it. I dug shovelfuls of dirt out of the pit. I weeded and plucked out the city detritus — rubber bands, candy bar wrappers and always more cigarette butts. Then I filled the hole with freshly purchased dirt and planted around the tree six low vinelike plants that the woman at the gardening store had said were good for ground cover. When I was done I admired my handiwork and immediately went inside to sterilize my hands.
The ground cover lasted about three weeks. One day I arrived home to find it nearly all torn out. By a person who hated ground cover? By a dog? I would never know. Read more…
I’m a primary care physician, but with my young adult patients, I’m secretly a therapist, too.
When a new patient between the ages of 18 and 25 arrives at my office, he or she generally has a specific request: a physical exam as clearance for football season, a refill of an asthma inhaler, reassurance that a sore throat isn’t strep. These young men and women are healthy and don’t expect to be asked very much, or little beyond the usual waiting room questionnaire.
My job, as I see it, is not only to respond to any requests or questions, but also to ask them about the things 18- to 25-year-olds do: attend college (or consider it), search for employment, separate from (or return to live with) parents, find romantic partners, shrug off one-night stands, run out of money, feel confused or depressed or anxious, experiment with drugs and alcohol. Read more…
In January 1865, Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood traveled to Columbia, S.C. with the diarist Mary Chesnut and the family of his recent but fading love interest, Sally “Buck” Preston. After some pleasantries, the houseguests discussed the recent, horrific battles at Franklin, Tenn. and Nashville, fought in quick succession in early December. Hood had been the Confederate leader in both battles, and both times had lost thousands in bitter defeat. “My army is destroyed,” he mourned.
The attendees quickly shifted to a more jovial topic, but Hood simply sat, stared into the fire, and relived “some bitter hours,” according to Chesnut. One guest spoke of the emotional agony that appeared writ large on Hood’s face time and time again as he spoke of the “dreadful sight” of so many dead at the battlefield at Franklin.
Hood’s nightmare of shredded flesh and smoldering corpses commenced less than two months earlier in central Tennessee. On Nov. 30, 1864, as part of his strategy to go around Gen. William T. Sherman in Georgia and capture the Union-occupied city of Nashville, Hood sent nearly 30,000 men in a frontal assault against the Union commander John Schofield, whose forces were entrenched just south of Nashville in the town of Franklin. Read more…
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
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Credit Brian Snyder/Reuters
We will certainly hear it said many times between now and the 2016 elections that the country’s two main political parties have “fundamental philosophical differences.” But what exactly does that mean?
At least part of the schism between Republicans and Democrats is based in differing conceptions of the role of the individual. We find these differences expressed in the frequent heated arguments about crucial issues like health care and immigration. In a broad sense, Democrats, particularly the more liberal among them, are more likely to embrace the communal nature of individual lives and to strive for policies that emphasize that understanding. Republicans, especially libertarians and Tea Party members on the ideological fringe, however, often trace their ideas about freedom and liberty back to Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, who argued that the individual is the true measure of human value, and each of us is naturally entitled to act in our own best interests free of interference by others. Self-described libertarians generally also pride themselves on their high valuation of logic and reasoning over emotion.
The basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish and self-serving individual.
Philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel have emphasized that human beings are essentially social creatures, that the idea of an isolated individual is a misleading abstraction. So it is not just ironic but instructive that modern evolutionary research, anthropology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience have come down on the side of the philosophers who have argued that the basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish, self-serving individual. Contrary to libertarian and Tea Party rhetoric, evolution has made us a powerfully social species, so much so that the essential precondition of human survival is and always has been the individual plus his or her relationships with others. Read more…
In late November 1864, the Union troop transport Greyhound was steaming down the James River in Virginia from the Bermuda Hundred Plantation, where the army of Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler had been bottled up for weeks. Butler’s superior, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, had planned to send Butler due south toward Richmond, thereby trapping Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia between two large concentrations of Union troops. But Butler soon found himself in a stalemate against entrenched Confederate forces, far outside Richmond.
On Nov. 27, Butler and his guests, Rear Adm. David Dixon Porter, commanding the North Blockading Squadron, and Congressman Robert C. Schenck of Ohio, now back in political office after being seriously wounded at the Second Battle of Bull Run, boarded the Greyhound, which served as Butler’s floating command post, complete with a gilded saloon and a crew he had outfitted himself. Notably, the ship was unarmed, as was the crew, without “a pop-gun among them,” one observer recalled.
The three were discussing how best to close the port of Wilmington, N.C., the last important refuge of the blockade-runners in the Confederacy. Wilmington sat a few miles inland, reached by the Cape Fear River, whose mouth was defended by the formidable Fort Fisher. Read more…
Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.
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Fanta Niambaly, left, the president of the Banakoro village Saving for Change group in Mali, and Fatou Doumbia, a fellow member. Credit Rebecca Blackwell/Oxfam America
At a time when news about Africa has been dominated by Ebola, it’s worth observing that a highly encouraging change has been quietly spreading across the continent. Over the past five years, the number of Africans — mainly women — who have joined village-based savings and loan associations has soared to more than nine million. These groups are now operating in 40 countries in Africa. Globally, it’s estimated that 10.5 million people are members of formally trained savings groups in about 65 countries. (PDF) The big story about these groups, including their surprising success and emerging importance in development, comes from Africa.
What’s most significant about savings groups is that they are designed to be wholly managed by villagers themselves.
“A giant informal economic system is emerging invisibly,” said Jeffrey Ashe, a micro-finance pioneer and co-author of the book “In Their Own Hands: How Savings Groups Are Revolutionizing Development.” “We can think of it as the amoeba model of microfinance. It’s financial inclusion without financial institutions — and each group has the DNA within itself to self-replicate.” (PDF)
The story dates back to 1991, when a Norwegian, Moira Eknes, working with CARE in a remote part of Niger, found that village women needed ongoing access to savings and credit, but had few options. In West Africa, as in many parts of the world, locals had long participated in traditional rotating savings clubs (locally called tontines, generically known as Roscas).
Eknes helped the women develop a simple methodology that allowed them to transform the groups into a self-generating, self-managing form of microfinance suitable for their basic needs. The approach became known as the Village Savings and Loan Association (V.S.L.A.) model and it began to spread.
The growth was supercharged in 2008 when the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation injected more than $30 million of funding into the model. (PDF) Since then, CARE has brought the program to four million Africans. Catholic Relief Services and Plan International have each brought variants to more than a million people, and Oxfam America and Freedom from Hunger have scaled up an approach, called Saving for Change, to 650,000 members. More than a dozen other major international NGOs have advanced this work. Collectively, they aim to reach 50 million members by 2020.
