Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:02.094)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Eyo Iwara, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University of Chicago. And we're talking about his article in Critical Philosophy of Race. I Understand That I Will Never Understand White Ignorance, Anti -Racism and the Right to Opacity. Dr. Iwara, wonderful to have you on today.
Eyo Ewara (00:23.138)
Thank you for having me, I appreciate it.
PJ (00:25.378)
So Dr. Iwara, why this article? What kind of led you to write this? What's the context for this and kind of the critical philosophy of race issue? Why? Why this article?
Eyo Ewara (00:36.014)
A few different reasons actually, some of them kind of scholarly and some sort of interpersonal. So at the kind of interpersonal level, I've always been really interested in the ways that anti -racism takes place, right? I think especially when I'm thinking about basically not only racism, but kind of any sort of prejudice. I think often what you're faced with are people who are well -meaning, who really want to...
say something helpful, do something helpful, be on the right side of history, whatever that ends up meaning. But the form that that takes tends to get a little bit less attention than just the sort of intention overall of fighting racism, fighting prejudice, fighting homophobia, et cetera. And so I've often been interested in what is it that you're accidentally saying at the same time as you're trying to articulate your sort of positive intentions here, right?
As you're trying to fight racism, what's going on alongside that in the background? And I'm really interested in that partially because I think that especially sort of in terms of broad narratives, the ways that we think about racism and the ways we think about race change over time. And we tend to be a little bit more attentive to those changes in how we're thinking about what race is or how we're thinking about what racism is and a little less attentive to the form that anti -racism takes and the way that it changes as well.
You know, all kinds of anti -racism are always going to respond to and push against a context, but they're still part of that context. And so, you know, they don't exactly fully escape the ways that we're thinking about race or racism themselves. And sometimes they can reproduce them, right? Just like sometimes some of the people who have meant to say the sort of kind, reassuring things to me have accidentally said things that are, let's say, gently problematic at the same time.
And at a sort of scholarly level, I've been interested in some figures who are really doing some of that work as well. So particularly I've been working a lot for the last, this is worrisome, about six years or so on the work of Sadia Hartman. And Hartman's work, particularly scenes of subjection, has been really key in black studies. And one of the things that she says in scenes, or that she sort of analyzes in scenes, are the ways that
Eyo Ewara (02:53.772)
like this anti -racism or anti -racist sentiment carries forward through, right, and as enabled by, let me rephrase that, the way that anti -racist sentiment is still suffused with kinds of racist sentiments, even as we move through time, even as we have these large moments like the abolition of slavery in America.
And she's really attentive to how it is then that we carry out these kind of afterlives of slavery, afterlives of forms of racism, even in practices that again are trying to overcome those prejudices or think that they are doing this kind of good work. So I've been really interested in this paper in some ways coming out of that kind of work, right? Thinking on the one hand about sort of how is it that anti -racism changes alongside the forms of race and racism? And how is it that we can think about anti -racism as carrying
racist sentiments forward still at the same time, kind of implicitly.
PJ (03:50.98)
Thank you. As you're talking about, it's kind of gently problematic to borrow your... I really liked that phrase.
PJ (04:04.76)
It seems, and you kind of deal with this in the article as well, that when we talk about anti -racist efforts, there is that, it doesn't mean that there isn't good being done, but we also have to be very careful about what's being put in place as well, or what's being re -entrenched. And so part of this goes to Charles Mill's political methodology that he was pushing.
Against ideal theory and pushing not ideal theory, right? Is that kind of a connection there? Am I on the right track that?
Eyo Ewara (04:35.246)
Mm
Eyo Ewara (04:39.822)
think that's a helpful connection definitely. When we talk about non -ideal philosophical work, we can't just say, well, what's going to happen in the best of all possible worlds? We have to look at how things are working in this one. And on the one hand, there's how things are working at the level of people's intentions. And then there's how those intentions get taken up and reinterpreted in the kind of complicated context that we're ever always actually working in, especially when we're talking about race and racism. There are all these other little threads of interpretation, of meaning.
of different practices we're carrying through and whatever we try to bring forward with a kind of anti -racist effort is going to interact with those and in ways that we often can't really predict in advance. Yeah.
PJ (05:23.736)
Yes, so, and as we're talking about, if we waited to be perfectly anti -racist, then we would never do anything anti -racist, right? Like when you're pushing into this conversation, it's going to carry and do the sorts of things. Yeah, am I tracking with you there? So it's not like, it's very important to just kind of continue the conversation and...
part of the problem sometimes can be people like well I'm marched good you know it's like right like that's also this is part of the problem it's like I mean this is a really old problem right people like well you have the Civil Rights Act all right sounds good you know like
Eyo Ewara (06:08.886)
or we're fine. Yeah, I think so. I mean, the first thing I always want to say is like, it's not that
I do this work either in this paper or I have a few other papers I've written on thinking about forms of anti -racism because I want to say like you should be perfect, everything should be right, right? Or because I want to criticize people who are out like in the street doing work, marching, protesting because somehow, right, they might have these kind of subtly racist orientations or they might do things that are gently problematic and that word itself can sometimes be used as this kind of policing method. So it's like, you didn't do things just right, so.
PJ (06:41.346)
Right. Right.
Eyo Ewara (06:41.774)
My goal isn't to do that kind of work, but it is to try to kind of enable a self -critique, right? If we waited to be perfect anti -racists before we like confronted racism, yeah, you're right, we would never do it, right? We'd never get there. But at the same time, that doesn't mean that just because we've tried or because we intended that everything is perfect and innocent, right? That we're just going to say, you meant well. We have to think about what it is that that work that we're doing also still does outside of our intentions.
There's a kind of Foucault line where he says, you know, like, often know what we do, and we often know why we do it. We don't know what it is that what we do does. We look at what's functioning in the world. And I usually think, you know, like, the goal, hopefully, is to be able to enable a little bit of self -critique, right? All of us, right, when we're trying to be good people know that we often don't do it perfectly and that we can do harm when we mean to do good.
PJ (07:18.466)
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Eyo Ewara (07:36.416)
And so part of the reason I think we have to study anti -racism with the same kind of force that we study racism, right, or that we study race, is because we want to be aware of how we might be doing harm when we're meaning well, right? And there is so much work that does tend to focus on the side of talking about racism itself, right? Or talking about what race is. There's way, way, more work about that than there is especially philosophical work trying to analyze anti -racism. You know, in this work on racism, you often get sort of
prescriptions of some kind or another, like here's how we might help address racism, here's how we could become better or worse. But we tend to start with analyzing racism as the phenomenon, right? Or the phenomenon, excuse me. And then, right, we'll give you a good philosophical account of how to deal with that thing out in the world. And that'll be our anti -racism. But I think it's important to start with anti -racism also as a phenomenon, also as something happening out in the world.
in which we're often participating when we're doing work on race and racism in the academy, and then to be able to say, like, OK, what's happening with that? And how might we still have some kind of critique from within?
PJ (08:42.304)
And part of what we've been talking about so far, you mentioned beforehand that you're familiar with Dr. Srivastava. You'd actually watched the episode. I hear a little bit, you said there might be some overlap there. Where is racism located? And so the classic story, mean, certainly the Hollywood story is that racism is located in the intentions. I feel racism. I harbor racists.
you know, feelings and these sorts of things. And that's definitely part of it. There are definitely people like that, but we also have to address these systemic things that at the level of action, at the level of systems. that was kind of Dr. Srivastava, like she's a sociologist she's doing. she's like, don't like, I want to look at it systemically and there's real power in that. And I think that's, is that a crossover there? I, am I reading that correctly?
Eyo Ewara (09:17.112)
Mm
Eyo Ewara (09:37.004)
I definitely think so, yeah. mean, right now, so I'm teaching a course in critical philosophy of race to my undergrads right now. And this week, we actually just read this piece by Lawrence Blum, who's a philosopher. It's a book called I'm Not a Racist But, which I think is a good book. And one of the things that I think he does well in that text is he'll talk about the history of the term racism and the ways that actually initially it is used specifically actually to talk about a belief system, right?
So not just one belief or another, but a kind of belief that there are disparate human groups, and that these are ranked hierarchically, and that they have both physical and non -physical traits attached to them. And if you believed that, then you were a racist. He'll even make a comparison to other isms. Racism was like liberalism. It's the idea that there are actually sort tenets that you have to hold onto explicitly. And then afterwards, particularly after this word is used to address
Nazi crimes and then becomes associated also with racism and segregation in America and with colonialism elsewhere, we start to start thinking about, what are the kind of underlying sort of attitudes and emotions and practices that are attached to this belief system? And that tends to be our focus, I think, still now, right? We think that it's about what's, you know, like in your heart or in your feelings or this thing that you hold onto. And then it's in the 60s that we start to get the language of institutional racism coming out of like Black
power, the text by Charles Hamilton and Stokely Carmichael, then later Kwame Ture. And then we get institutions as also being the site of racism, even if no one has particular feelings or there's no widely held belief about hierarchical groups or something like that. And I think part of what's difficult sometimes is that when we say racism, we often do think in different
elements of those, right? We might think about the beliefs, we might be thinking about the feelings, we might be thinking about institutions. And we're not always sure how to hold those things together. And actually, as the term has taken on these different kinds of objects, kinds of things that it could refer to, I think that that's also changed some of the ways that we think about what anti -racism could look like. If you think that racism is just a belief system, then what anti -racism looks like is addressing your beliefs, right? And that actually feels really
Eyo Ewara (11:57.848)
doable, right? You can see it's like you can be quite optimistic that like, yes, right, you believe that there are different groups, maybe that you believe are biologically distinguished. So I'll just address those beliefs, I'll dispel them, and then look, you're no longer a racist. But then if you start to believe that it's about feelings and attitudes, that starts to get a little more difficult because we're not always sure how well we are, how good we are at sort of purposely changing our feelings or our attitudes or our kind of unconscious biases.
And that was some of the work I saw really interesting in that interview is that we still often are attacking that, right? With a lot of like trainings that we do with a lot of the ways we focus on sort of self education. We think that the goal is going to be to change that. And there was maybe some hope about that for a while, but like you all talked about in that interview, I think we're becoming less and less sure that that does all it promised. And when we talk about institutions or even more broadly, sort of social structures, right? Those are changeable certainly, but we all know really well that
PJ (12:27.662)
Hmm
Eyo Ewara (12:56.406)
It's not easy to change those, and often they last for generations. And so in both of those sort of latter cases, it becomes a lot less optimistic, right? Or we become a lot less optimistic about whether we can overcome racism or whether anti -racism means just getting rid of it. And so I don't think that means that anti -racism goes away, but part of what I was looking at in this paper is that then you get different views about what anti -racism looks like, what its goals are. It's no longer going to be just getting rid of racism, like getting rid of a racist belief.
Now it has to be kind of combating its ongoing presence, right? And that's kind of what I'm looking at in the kind of slogan I look at in the piece.
PJ (13:33.784)
Yes, and I was actually that was I love that because that's where I was gonna go next is that you were addressing this slogan that showed up a lot held up by white people on signs or on their shirts I Want to make sure I say this right I I keep wanting to say nevertheless Bob like no one would ever put another nevertheless on a sign that says more about me than That's I doesn't say however, I thought it was always but I stand however I stand it is however. That's why I was like all right
Eyo Ewara (13:53.346)
I mean, often it says however, which is still a lot.
Eyo Ewara (14:01.869)
Yeah.
PJ (14:04.1)
I understand that I will never understand however I stand. Yeah, that is a mouthful. So, which of course is following the police murder of George Floyd and the 2020 demonstrations. And so, you're looking at that and you give us in your paper, you give like three different definitions of what you call white ignorance, which is this whole idea of
Eyo Ewara (14:04.183)
You
Eyo Ewara (14:09.901)
Yeah.
PJ (14:33.632)
I understand and then you're interpreting, will never, that I will never understand. I will never understand. then, forgive me, I wasn't entirely clear because it seemed like there could be some overlap or maybe they were the same thing. Is there a fourth type of ignorance that you kind of talk about or is it just that the fourth, like there's the idea of opacity kind of overlaps with the third one?
Eyo Ewara (14:56.174)
I think that's less a kind of ignorance overall. in the piece, I talk about white ignorance, which is this term that I'm taking from Charles Mills. He has a piece from 2007 called White Ignorance. And even in that piece, Mills pointed out that there actually, this is a long tradition of believing that race and racism affect our epistemic action and our epistemic access.
PJ (14:58.754)
Yeah.
Eyo Ewara (15:22.872)
How I live, how I'm positioned in a society that is of racially differentiated is going to affect maybe both the beliefs that I hold, but also the kinds of contact I can have with people or with problems in the world. And so that shapes what I know. And the sort of longstanding belief is that in many ways, whiteness, not being a white person in some sort of biological sense, but being positioned as white in a given society or in our society.
right, can cause epistemic limitations, can sort of make it so that there are things that you don't or can't know. But what I try to unpack in the piece is, well, what exactly it is that people claim that they can't know, right? So one, I think that idea in general, that whiteness or that race affects our epistemic access, that's kind of spread, I think, into the mainstream pretty quickly, right? I think talk about whiteness, right, especially, or about sort of racial ignorance, that's pretty common now.
And at the same time, I think it's not always clear what we think it comes from or what it is. So in the piece I say, in Mills, I think that there are three different things that he can be talking about. Sometimes I think he talks about white ignorance in terms of the idea that because of how whiteness operates, white people might not be able to see themselves well, right? That there are ways that we end up not being able to have.
adequate access or white people end up not having adequate access to what they're doing, creating delusions about how your own action works, right, things like that. The second sense that I talk about is that it might create sort of limitations in what white people know about the world, right? There might be facets about dispossession or how political structures work or different communities that the white people just don't end up knowing, right? And then the third is this claim that
Well, white ignorance might mean a kind of ignorance about people of color, right? That there's specifically things about what it's like to be a person of color, what racism is like, that white people don't know, right? And so in the piece, I'm trying to figure out, what is it that Mills is saying? I end up thinking that he actually uses the term white ignorance to refer to all three of those. And that he often thinks that they're kind of connected, right? It's because maybe, or at least in part because,
Eyo Ewara (17:44.364)
white people maybe don't see themselves well because of whiteness, that then they maybe aren't able to see their relationship to the world well, and also maybe not able to see people of color well. And I think that this is part of why, for Mills in the white ignorance piece, he's still also kind of hopeful. Because Mills will say that the reason we study white ignorance is because we want to be able to overcome it. That at least some people, in some circumstances, will be able to overcome it.
And I think this is partially because he thinks that, well, most of us believe that we can overcome some of our ignorance about ourselves, right? And if you can overcome some of the ignorance about yourself, then maybe that will mean that you are a little less ignorant about the world and maybe a little less ignorant about people of color. What's interesting to me in the slogan is that the slogan doesn't share Mill's optimism, right? It's that I understand not just that I don't understand, but that I will never understand, right?
And my assumption, especially in the space that it's being said, is that what they're talking about there is that they want not one's own, bless you, one's ignorance about oneself, right? And I don't think it's just ignorance about the world, but I think they're saying that like, I understand that I will never understand people of color in some important way. And that is, I think, a really big difference, right? When you've said like, nope, like, I won't get it, I won't know.
PJ (18:46.69)
You
PJ (19:12.624)
And that's tied. So you come at it and talk about it like, let's think about it in the nicest way possible, the most charitable way possible. Then you're like, let's talk about how this could be problematic. One of the problematic ways, I'm sorry, most charitable way of what they're trying, what you say that it probably means is like this idea of demanding that, well, educate me, right? Like it's like.
This right to opacity, this right to... There's a couple things that for me make sense of this. I grew up, the majority of my childhood was in Wisconsin, an hour and a half north of Green Bay.
Eyo Ewara (19:57.41)
Ciao
PJ (20:01.238)
I remember when a lot of this discourse first started, was like, should, you know, you should, a lot of it was like, you should talk to black people, you should get to know black people. And I was like, this is not like, like, that's not happening. Like, I don't know. I don't know if you've been an hour and a half north of green bay in Wisconsin, but there's not like, this is like, it's very, very white. and so.
You know, it's just like one of those things where I was like, and so I remember and fortunately like common sense overruled, but like, you know, we moved to Chicago. I went there to go do my masters and I was like, okay, so now I'm around black people and I was like, that seems really weird to like walk up to black people and be like, hey, will you be my friend? Cause I need a black friend, right? Like this is like, and that's not fair. And I know you like you've literally, we're talking about like the...
the gently problematic. It's like, honestly, it's a little more than gently. Like I was like, this is like, that's not fair to anybody. Be like, hey, I don't want to be racist. Obsolve me, right? Like this is like, and so, you know, there's the right to opacity, which is like, hey, educate me. But there's also like the right to being left alone, you know, if that makes sense. Is this, am I like, am I just, I don't know.
Eyo Ewara (21:10.936)
you
Eyo Ewara (21:25.207)
it
Totally makes sense to me. mean, the right to opacity is one of the things that I bring up in the paper. And I think it's actually an attempt to articulate kind of exactly what you're saying, right? And to push back against that kind of problematic behavior. So it's a term that comes from the work of sort of philosopher, poet, theorist, Edouard Glissant. And Glissant talks about the right to opacity as saying, well, there often is something kind of acquisitive or extractive about the ways that we try to demand
understanding from people, right? He's thinking especially in sort of a colonial context where we demand that everyone become understandable to us, that they become clear to us, that they explain themselves to us. And in explaining themselves to us also, suddenly we could hear translate themselves into our terms, right? Understand themselves only in terms that we will also understand, right? And Glissant says in the Poetics of Relation that against that kind of move, against the way that
Even for him writing in French, the comprend, understand has pain, right? To take or hold, right? To grasp. Against that grasp that people are trying to get on you, right? You can demand the right to opacity, to not become transparent, to not be understood, right? And that this is something that he thinks is really important, especially in these kinds of spaces, right? Where like, someone's gonna come up to you on the street, right?
You don't have to make yourself understood to them. You don't have to tell them anything. You don't have to be clear. There is a kind of right to opacity that you can exercise there. I think there's lots of interesting contexts this comes up in. I have a PhD student working at Loyola with me on the right to opacity in people with disabilities. So for example, people will often demand that people with disabilities are going to tell you everything about them, everything about the nature of their disability in order to get any kind of respect. Her name is Ria Ianni. Her work is great.
Eyo Ewara (23:18.06)
But this is the kind of move that I'm interested in here where, you know, if we recognize that there is something uncomfortable about that demand for understanding or the demand for transparency, and we understand that there's often strange power dynamics that suffuse how we come to demand, other people become clear to us, how we come to know. And like a charitable reading of the claim that I understand that I will never understand might be someone sort of acknowledging that they don't have the right to
like reach in and grasp all the things about you, right? They're sort of acknowledging your right to opacity. And I think there's something that could be kind of nice about that, right? There's a way in saying, I will never understand because I will never intrude into your life that way. I will never try to like pick apart your whole world so that I can fully understand it because there's something a little weird about that move. And so it's possible, it might be like an over -read here.
that people putting those signs up are saying, like, it's not about me having to fully understand you this way in order to respect you, right? The slogan says, however I stand. And that's kind of great. Like, again, relative to even the things that we've already talked about, right? We said, if I have to wait till I'm a perfect anti -racist before I fight racism, then I'll never do it, right? And someone's making this claim might seem like, well, I don't have to understand. I don't have to know everything about you. It might be bad to try to know everything about you.
But I can still respect you and I can still see that there's something wrong here and I can still stand up against it.
PJ (24:49.444)
So
PJ (24:55.236)
I was talking to someone and I only keep speaking of opacity. So they had a traumatic childhood and I was mentioning some of the guests I was having on and like, you're talking about race a lot on your podcast. And I was like, yeah, today I'm going to be talking about the right to opacity. And they're like, what is the right to opacity? You know, like, I like, didn't even say it. They're just kind of looked at me and I was like, we've been able to share kind of what you've gone through.
How would you feel someone came off the street and walked up to you, you know, to take it outside? like this is like in some ways a very human right. Like for like, if someone came up to you and it's like, Hey, I heard that you had a really rough childhood. Can you tell me about that? Like, the look that I got back, was like, wow. Okay. That, translated very quickly. Like they were immediately like, that would be annoying. Yeah. I would not. I'd be like, get away from me. You know, and I'm like, that's the, that's like, and
Eyo Ewara (25:33.452)
Okay.
Eyo Ewara (25:52.386)
What later?
PJ (25:55.01)
And I think partly, and I'm just curious, and I'm not, this is not in any way like a critique or anything. I think it's an expansion of you're talking about. Because of the context of George Floyd, there is that idea of like when you sit with somebody who is mourning, you don't say, like if someone's loved one passes, you don't say, I get it. You know what I mean? You just sit with that person.
Eyo Ewara (26:24.78)
Yeah.
PJ (26:25.516)
Is that also like kind of an expansion there?
Eyo Ewara (26:29.74)
I love that. I really like that as a way to talk about the right to opacity, right? Because one of the things that we can think of when we think about the right to opacity isn't just someone coming off the street and demanding that you tell them everything about your identity or something like that. It can also be a right to behave in ways that maybe another person doesn't understand, and yet still receive respect. And we know that, especially when people are grieving or mourning.
I don't have to understand the content of your grief, right? To be able to recognize that whatever your behavior is, it sort of is taking place in the language of that grief, right? Which I don't speak and I don't need to speak to respect it, right? And I think most of us know that, at least a little bit, you know? That there's a kind of right to opacity we might exercise there. And especially if people ask us about ourselves even in those moments, sometimes we might sit them like, well,
I don't fully understand what's happening with me. Why would I have to fully understand what's happening with me so that I can appease you?
PJ (27:31.608)
Yeah, and I think we've all been in positions where we have been grieving something and then someone else comes in to help and if you become, all of a you're having to make sure that they feel okay about helping more than you dealing with the actual situation.
Eyo Ewara (27:47.493)
yeah, yep, yep. I have been that person fully. I could acknowledge that totally.
PJ (27:51.614)
Yeah, that's true. That is true. There's nothing worse than being in the middle of conversation and you're like, no, they're helping me.
Eyo Ewara (27:59.724)
Yeah, right. Well, there is something that like Glissant thinks, I mean, especially when it comes to our understanding, right, that this is actually because we live in a culture that demands transparency, right? There's a kind of compulsory transparency. We want everyone to be able to become understandable to us. And we think that when we're being good, we're demanding understanding, right? Like that to try to understand you is the beginning of all ethical interaction with you, right? That everything will get better if we just understood each other. And
pushback there is like one that understanding is also yeah definitely not true. Well, first that like you have to be accessible to me and in being accessible to me that's the sort of basis of our ethical interaction and that's a little creepy and two like I mean I just don't think that's true right I think that partially because I used to really actually be a big like on the understanding team that understanding was gonna solve everything and over time I think I just realized like well
PJ (28:30.902)
It's not true.
PJ (28:37.345)
Mm
Eyo Ewara (28:54.168)
You know, understanding one doesn't solve everything. And two, like the actual practices that attempt to get there are often like intrusive, they can be problematic, they can be issues like, and they seem to always aim for like a final point where if I fully understand you, then whatever makes you specifically you, whatever part of you that I didn't get that didn't make you just like me will become clear and will be just like each other. And maybe that's just not the case. And maybe that's actually where ethics has to start with the fact that there is something that's gonna be radically different from me that I won't radically get.
and I have to understand how to deal with that more than I have to understand what it is.
PJ (29:28.74)
So I'm a little annoyed because it's sitting on my shelf and I haven't read it yet. But I have the interaction between Gadamer and Derrida and then Gadamer's own reflections on it sitting on my 2B Red shelf, is, let's not act like I'm about to read it anytime soon. Like 2B Red is like way too long. So, but, and obviously this is just an article, but as I was sitting there and you're talking about the right topacity,
Eyo Ewara (29:48.459)
I hear you.
PJ (29:58.366)
discussions of things like interiority, that, and I obviously, like I think we're like way past like what people carrying the signs are necessarily thinking about, right? But the right to interiority and the right to historicity, like this idea that Gadamer talks about a lot, you know, as I was reading, obviously that's where my mind's going to go. I've read quite a bit in Gadamer. So for instance, like an artwork changes in its identity over time as it
carries its history with it. Like it starts out as decoration, but then it ends up being a national piece in a museum, right? Like it becomes something different as it moves from context to context. And each context, it carries more meaning with it. So whenever, like you can never fully explain something because it's always gaining more, if that makes sense. And so even if, for one, there's the accessibility thing where it's like, if we talk about the fusion of horizons, that we can share a similar viewpoint at least, like there's the one of like,
hey, you need to come over to my horizon, is, okay, that's probably nice, but even if you go to the other person's horizon, your journey will be different. And part of this is, I think of Jean -Baptiste Vico's critique of Descartes, he's like, your philosophy is terrible for teaching children, right? Like, and it's like, so when you think about like kids, it's like,
Eyo Ewara (31:02.701)
Yep.
Eyo Ewara (31:14.158)
Hmm.
PJ (31:23.064)
what they experience becomes the standard that they then have to either work on that standard or they evaluate everything after. yeah, yeah. so like, if, mean, so there's that, and I should remember the name of the book by don't, there's the guy who dyed his skin so that he could be, he could experience life as a black man.
Eyo Ewara (31:30.198)
Mm -hmm. yeah, there you go. Yeah.
PJ (31:47.394)
Okay, so right, but it's like, but you didn't grow up that way, right? And this is something you got to choose to do, right? And that's totally, that's something totally different, if that makes sense, right? Like it's like, like this idea that like someone could go into a white person, go into a black neighborhood. And even like if they spent so much time learning, it's not the same as living with it every day growing up because your childhood is very formative in a way.
Does that make sense? And so it's gonna always be unique.
Eyo Ewara (32:18.327)
It does.
I think it's both unique and we can think that like you're not only the uniqueness to you, but also that there's going to be sort of group specificity in certain ways. Right. And I think that is actually part of what underlies the slogan. Right. I think we have a greater and greater sense of this. And actually it's funny. I do mention Gadamer really briefly in the, in the text because I'm professor Linda Alkoff, who you also say you interviewed, uses Gadamer to actually push against some of the way that claim gets deployed. Right. Because I think that there she'll use the ways that Gadamer says,
PJ (32:29.24)
Yes.
Eyo Ewara (32:50.382)
You know, I might come from within a horizon or a community of experience that you've never had, right? And I could say like, maybe you will never have lived in the same way that I have, but presumably that doesn't mean that we'll never be able to understand each other because he says, you know, horizons themselves do change in this ways. And maybe we could develop a language over time that would let us communicate to each other, right? And I think a lot of people sort of start with the first move that we live within different horizons and then just sort of leave it there, right?
PJ (33:20.12)
Also problematic. Yeah, sorry.
Eyo Ewara (33:20.192)
And yeah, and that's the kind of concern is, know, for me, one of the things that's always important, again, when we're thinking about how anti -racism works, is to think about how anti -racism works in context, right? And this is another thing that I pull up from someone like Hartman, right? That we have to think about, well, what's the kind of background vision of race that's suffusing that anti -racism? So, you know, one of the problems that can come up, even if people are trying to say, want to exercise the right to opacity, right? That they might say something like, well,
On the one hand, either I think that you just could never be understood by me, right? That there's a kind of way that your horizon is one I'll never get into. Or they'll say like, you know, I respect that whatever you are is not what I am and I'm not going to try to get into that horizon. Is it sometimes it can have these sort of uncomfortable echoes with especially ways that people have thought of POC at different points in history, right? So often there's been this idea that, you know, like European whiteness is the space of reason, right?
and everything that is properly understandable, and that people elsewhere are kind of irrational or emotional or basically can't be properly understood because they're inherently unreasonable. And there is a kind of weird way that this echo can follow through even when people mean well, right? They might say something like, I understand that I'll never understand. And in that space, they think something like, because your world is so radically different than mine.
And that could be respectable, but it could also say something like, think that you're in some ways almost like an alien to me, right? And there's something a little concerning about that, right? And a little dehumanizing by accident, right? Or I could say, I never understand, right? I understand that I'll never understand. And part of what happens there is you're also saying, though, that you can still interpret what's happening with other people against whatever they themselves are saying or doing, right? You've accepted that there's a kind of, in glissant, there's a distinction between a kind of
ontological opacity, the way that we are in some ways never going to be fully transparent, and a kind of political and ethical right to opacity, the way that I exercise this resistance to people making me transparent or understandable. And it can become really easy to just assume that what's happening is that there is this ontological opacity for people of color, particularly for Black people, right, that we don't make sense or can't make sense, and therefore to sort of lose the sense of agency happening there.
Eyo Ewara (35:43.468)
No, no, sometimes maybe I'm just not sharing with you, right? And for reasons.
PJ (35:48.43)
Yeah. And so first off, it's not about not marching, right? And these people can march. So at the level of intentions, which you want to be careful about, statistically, you have thousands and thousands of white people marching. There's at least some of those white people who probably are very comfortable being in the march, or maybe they're uncomfortable, but would not be comfortable with a black person in their kitchen.
because they have that alien, right? I'm not saying all of them. I'm not saying, like, there has to be at least one or two who'd be like, this may, you know, they're like, they might not even say it, but you can tell they get like uncomfortable, right? Is that, I mean, as we talk about like the ways that it can evolve past or the ways that it can kind of carry these other meanings, if that makes sense.
Eyo Ewara (36:39.234)
Yeah, I think so. I think, again, you know, like those people could be sort of anti -racist in their intentions and in their beliefs, right? At the same time, some of the beliefs that they might hold might still be a little, like, racist in a different way, right? Again, because of thinking about you as totally alien, that discomfort might not be hatred, right? It might not be, like, disgust or anything like that. It might really be that they think that you are so radically different that they don't know what to do with you. And so...
PJ (37:08.537)
Right.
Eyo Ewara (37:08.974)
Sometimes there's something almost again that is an attempt at a kind of respect taking place there, right? An attempt, you you mentioned Derrida and Gadamer, so I'm gonna feel a little better mentioning some Levinas and say, you know, attempt at an acknowledgement that you are other to me, that there is a kind of radical alterity to you. But the problem is the conditions under which that takes place.
It's not that I'm recognizing your radical alterity because you are just another human being whose story I will never fully understand or whose being I never can translate into my own terms. It's that you're a Black person, right? And I think that about Black people in general. And again, that is part of what has suffused a lot of the ways that Black people have been subject to actively violent and sort of controlling treatment before. Because I don't know what you are saying or I don't think that you could ever express to me.
what's going on or what's wrong. I think that I have then the sort of duty to step in and act for you, right? I don't understand is what the slogan says, but I know what to do. And that's a little scary. I don't understand. You could never tell me, but I know what I should do still. And that's a little, you know.
PJ (38:16.462)
Sorry.
PJ (38:24.312)
Yeah, and so again, it's not that that particular action, it is interesting to see how those slogans stick in the popular mind and then reinforce different behaviors later, which is kind of, I love this line, and let me see if I can find it, because I wrote down an abbreviated version that you quoted Foucault on, and I think that's kind of like the main,
PJ (38:54.884)
I can't find it, of course. So, I found it, I found it, of course. My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as the thing is bad. Sorry, it took so long. So can you talk a little bit about that? And I think we have been talking about that, but I think that really kind of, there's a reason you capstone with that, right?
Eyo Ewara (38:58.54)
I have a suspicion.
Eyo Ewara (39:18.626)
Yeah, I mean, partially just because I end up saying that phrase almost every week of my life. Foucault is really good when he's good, you know, and that's strong one. Yeah, I think that often again, when we're doing the kind of criticisms, especially of people who are well -meaning like this, the assumption is something like I'm saying, ooh, like, you you're saying these things in the slogan that might have this meaning and therefore you are bad, or therefore that's inevitably what you actually secretly mean, or.
PJ (39:26.912)
Yeah.
Eyo Ewara (39:46.424)
there will inevitably be these terrible results to doing that. Maybe not, right? It's not that these are inherently bad things. But again, we don't know, again, it is that we do, what it is that what we do does. Everything could be dangerous. Everything could take on a different function than the ones that we anticipate. And the hope that we're just gonna be sort of insulated from that by our intentions.
is to me a bit naive and is to me an attempt to actually get away from the sense of responsibility that I think should follow from trying to actually be involved in doing that work. know, like you can't just say, well, I tried or well, it's good or it's bad, right? What I did was good or even just what I did was bad. And these are the right things to say and these are the wrong things to say. Because what's that issue is like, well, how is this actually going to function? How is it that our world around us is continually changing and that we're reshaping it?
And how is it that it's going to start looking as the world keeps changing, right? This is why I think studying anti -racism is so important. It's not that anti -racism is bad, but that like every other practice, we don't know what work it's going to potentially do. And in that sense, it's kind of dangerous, right? And the goal then is to be as self -aware as we can be about what's involved, about the potential ramifications, because we might accidentally be doing something that revives a racist image.
by accident and maybe undermines other kinds of anti -racist work. Two things that I think of that I think are good sort of historical examples. One is one that's from Hartman and in scenes of subjection, she'll talk about this guy Rankin and he's an abolitionist, right? He is writing a letter about the sort of horrors of slavery and the horrors of the slave coffle. And he in the letter imagines himself and his family in the place of the enslaved.
And one of the things that Hartman points out is, do you notice how, you know, especially when black people have been considered for her fungible, right? So sort of empty, replaceable, valuable, only relative to their use, that here, right, he's still kind of doing that same work of inserting himself into that place, inserting himself into the place of real living people, so as to do a certain kind of work for himself, to sort of imagine this sort of like terrible passion that they're undergoing and to like improve his own moral standing, right?
Eyo Ewara (42:08.888)
So black people here become tools again, right? And also become sort of pitiable creatures that we should take care of. There's a similar work that happens in like, there's a piece of kind of Weddward medallion that's quite famous that says like, am I not a man and brother? That shows an enslaved person sort of putting their hands up towards sort of heaven. And this was used again as an abolitionist tool, particularly in England. But one of the critiques is that again, this image, which is supposed to be an image that's gonna
encourage people to be sympathetic towards enslaved people, encourage them to support abolition, still presents that enslaved person in ways that they are sort of subservient to white culture, white people who they are begging in the same way they're begging heaven. It still actually uses a kind of like somewhat like caricatured image of a black person to do this. So it sort of pushes into some kinds of stereotypes. And that's what's recirculating at the same time as this anti -racist sentiment is being projected.
And that's, again, not to say that the thing is bad. Maybe it does help achieve abolition. But it's dangerous because it sort sows new seeds of harm at the same time.
PJ (43:19.512)
Yeah, and I think part of this is I want to make sure I'm communicating what I got in your article over and over again. It's like, you're not saying like, this is a great case in point. Don't stop being abolitionist, right? Like that's not that, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. But yeah, like be aware of what you're, yeah.
Eyo Ewara (43:32.43)
I'm not very good that yet.
PJ (43:43.96)
I was gonna go somewhere different, that was, we ended up in a different space. I'm okay with that. I think part of this, do you mind talking a little bit about kind of the ebb and flow of social movements and how it's hard to know what's going to stick and what's not going to stick? just like, what I'm hearing is continual work. I think that's probably, like people want to do the thing and be done.
And they certainly want to listen and then fix it. And they don't want to listen again.
Eyo Ewara (44:16.45)
I think definitely, and I mean, I'm not sure if this speaks exactly to the ebb and flow of social movements per se, but I do think that, you know, for the most part, this is a strong generalization, I'm gonna acknowledge it's a strong generalization before I say it.
People often want to participate in sort of social movements against oppression in ways that still allow them to sort of maintain a lot of their existing worldview, right? And they're usually willing to push just to the point where it might really radically transform some of how they think or some of how they see the world. Some people are willing to do that kind of work, but often again, what you want to do is you want to pick up whatever tool or practice that will make it seem like you're doing some work, but not all the work, right?
And that's perfectly normal. I understand. I also want to go about my day a lot of the time. But what's difficult is that it's especially in those moments where we're going to take up this practice or the slogan or this approach to things that we'll maybe not notice some of the things that we're incorporating at the same time. So I think about this a lot insofar as I think there's been a lot of talk about how we live in a moment where there's a lot of care given to the exact.
sort of words that we use or the ways that we talk particularly about historically oppressed groups in one way, shape, form, or another, right? Like you don't want to say this word, you want to this word. You don't want to say that word, you want to say this word. And I think that is good because often the words genuinely do harm. But what's really interesting to me is that like that approach that says like you will have to talk a different way often really ends up leading to the way that we teach people very quickly what to say and what not to say and not what it means.
or why you shouldn't say it, why you shouldn't think what that first word meant. So this came out of some work I've done on, or a talk I gave once about homophobia as a good example. People will tell you, do not use that slur. But they won't tell you, well, and what is it that you think about human sexuality? And where is that tied into the things that you think more broadly about what a good life is, for example? And we don't want to push that. So you still believe the same thing the slur kind of said. You just might now think that that belief, right?
Eyo Ewara (46:24.728)
could be seen in a slightly more positive light, and you know not to say the word that was associated with it. But you've just given it a new label. And I always worry about those kinds of moves, because again, I think something kind of similar can happen in these moments of anti -racism. You say, no, we should not treat black people badly. At the same time, your view of what black people are and the nature of what racial difference might mean, social, cultural, or if you still believe in some kind of inherent racial difference.
That doesn't get addressed, right? All the things around it get addressed, but the real issue was in the belief itself or in the underlying, maybe if not something so explicit as a belief, but the underlying kind of orientation you have there. And why? Because that's probably much more deeply tied into your broader sense of what the world is like and who you are. And it's a lot easier to just say things differently. Does that make some sense? I worried that I rambled a bit.
PJ (47:20.078)
Yeah, no, that was great. And this is me just asking this honestly. This is something.
So most of the people that I hang out with are not academics, right? They look at this podcast and they're kind of like, that's just PJ doing PJ things, right? And so one of the things that happens with this, you need to say this and not that, in kind of the common culture, not academic culture, right? People will really agree about the big words, right? And then,
Eyo Ewara (47:57.475)
Mm
PJ (48:01.514)
It feels, I could tell, like I'm talking to academics and I can see why they're saying not to say certain words, but the words keep changing, right? And academics spend all day talking about this and thinking about this and learning about this. They're paid to do that. And so for the average person, like what ends up happening, and it seems in two ways it shuts down the really important conversations. One is,
Okay, as long as I say the right words, I'm good. I don't have to change the underlying beliefs, which you kind of addressed. And the other one is then you have people who like, who may actually be on board or be willing to change. But then they're like, like, I don't, I just don't listen to that stuff because it's going to change in two years anyways. And you know, like, it's just like, and I'm not sure what the right, you know, I understand that like academia has to go through this, but sometimes it's like, well, these people are, are immoral for not like.
Eyo Ewara (48:45.272)
Mm -hmm.
PJ (48:57.91)
not using the right words. And it's like, they can't think about this stuff six hours a day. They don't sit in a classroom. know, like, I don't know, does that make sense? So it shuts down conversation in two ways, if that makes sense.
Eyo Ewara (49:05.134)
It does make sense.
It does. think, and I think two different things about that, right? I think on the one hand, yeah, like sometimes I'm like, I mean, especially if you like teach students, right? And especially I teach students about race and racism. One of the things that we do in my class would be like create a classroom agreement. And I always like that every class students basically bring this up where they say, like, let's not pile in on each other for not knowing the right kinds of words or saying the exact right thing the first time, because the goal isn't to like say like, I have just the right vocabulary. The goal is for all of us to like learn. And so the hope won't be that like, you don't know.
exactly the right thing to say, therefore I will judge you and decide that this is wrong, right? Because that does, like you said, shut down the conversation, right, in a really deep way. And I think also, you know, like sometimes the goal will be at different points in time strategically just to get people there, right? Again, do I think that everyone has to like stop and take down their banner because it likes that I understand that I will never understand before they come? No, I don't.
Obviously not, right? At the same time, think I feel a little bit of a back and forth here, and this is part of what I think is a kind of sort Foucault in the background of the paper, is that, I mean, the idea that...
It's only academics who do this constant working and reworking of the ways that we think about things ethically. I think that can sometimes be a little off because I think about any actual relationship I have with a person in the world, right? I might get it wrong, right? And we hope that we hit a point with my relationships where I'm pretty stable and I know not to push this button or cross that boundary, but...
Eyo Ewara (50:40.768)
Actually, like my relationships with people, am always shifting and reshifting how to engage with them because people themselves shift and reshift. And I can't just say like, well, like they're going to change again in two years. So like, I don't know, I'm not going to try to like deal with them well now. I'm not going to try to learn now. I think we know that our ethical lives do require some kind of like ongoing change, right? And ongoing self critique. But I think that some of the way that this sort of ends up working out where it's something like you're a bad person because you did the wrong thing.
That seems silly, right? At the same time, it's just, think, reasonable to expect that, like, as time changes, we talk differently, we think differently, we interrogate ourselves. Like, doesn't mean being perfect, because no one is, right? And it doesn't mean that it might not change again. Sometimes we try something ethically that, like, doesn't work out super well, and we change our minds about that practice later. But it does mean, like, that we have to be open to that kind of self -critique. And that means, I think, both on the side of people, like, you know, being told these new vocabularies, and also the side of people who've decided that they want to, like,
push them, right? Like, there's ways that that's clearly not working all the time and that we have to be critical of.
PJ (51:45.976)
Yeah, absolutely. I don't want to overstate what I said earlier. I appreciate you were very gracious the way you handled that. I think in a lot of what we're talking about is the process and the work that goes into fusing horizons, right? Like into understanding each other. And the point is that we look at that as a good thing and that that process is incredibly messy, right? That's what you're talking about, like all the different ways, like even apart from discussions of race, like...
No one has like this like perfect accord in any relationship where it was just like, well, we understand each other. Peace. You know what I mean? It's like, like, yeah, you know, like.
Eyo Ewara (52:20.846)
Hold on, right? Let's figure it out. I mean, I understand why that's rough too, because we want to not, we want to think that, especially if we've done some work, that we've maybe hit a point where like, no one will think that we're a bad person or we want to have some kind of stability in our sense about what's right and wrong because that orients the choices that we've made, right? And the problem is like, that's just maybe not being a person, right? Like it's...
You know, this is the part of me that is a certain kind of philosopher, right? Where I would go, well, yep, but you live in a world of uncertainty and change. whoops, right? It's, get it, but, and I think about racism, part of the difficulty, you know, the Bloom book that I mentioned I'm teaching to my students and my students, I think to their credit have a lot of issue with this concern. But one of the things he mentions is, you know, the idea of being called a racist, particularly often carries a lot of weight. And so people I think don't want to necessarily, right?
PJ (52:51.78)
Hahaha!
Eyo Ewara (53:14.914)
have to be called a racist over and over again. At the same time, there's a kind of funny way where the slogan goes in the other direction, where people have sort of accepted the idea that, they're never going to get over the racism. And a funny way, that's actually just as, it doesn't look quite similar, where they've said, I've accepted it so I don't have to look at it. Some people say, well, everyone calls me a racist. It's such a bad word. It keeps changing. Like, I don't really care. I don't want to deal with this anymore. On the other hand, people might say, well, racism, we live in a world that's so suffused with it. Yes, it is bad.
But once I've accepted that fact, then well, like, well, there's nothing to be done because I live in a world that's effused with racism. And neither of those approaches really lets me say, like, well, actually, right, like, it is bad. It might be a little everywhere. That doesn't mean I can get rid of it. I will have to change. And that work will happen over and over again. And that's rough, right? But it's maybe where we also need to give each other at least a little bit of grace in the ways in which we're always going to be trying and failing. And we have to be encouraging people to have that kind of like.
In pedagogy, we'll talk about it a growth mindset, where the goal isn't to get things perfectly right, but the goal is to do better.
PJ (54:20.868)
So one, thank you so much for coming on. You've been incredibly gracious. It's been a joy talking to you. As we kind of wrap up here, I want to be respectful of your time. So I just wanted to ask, what is one particular aspect of this that you would, or one particular practice you tell people to do throughout this week after listening to this episode? What's something you tell them to meditate on?
Eyo Ewara (54:47.84)
a question. An easy takeaway from a philosopher, always rough.
PJ (54:52.982)
It's always the hard, like I can't tell you, like over half the people I interview, they're like, that's the hardest question by far.
Eyo Ewara (54:59.704)
Definitely, no doubt. I think maybe really basically is the recognition going forward that all anti -racist practices will always take place within a context that is still suffused with racism. And so I think basically one of the things, if there was something to take away, is to be aware that our good intentions, right?
And even our taking up of contemporary, sort of popular approaches are never going to be totally innocent because we don't live in a totally innocent world. And I think if I was going to say, here's something to take away from that, that's just the case, which means we'll often have to think and rethink about what our anti -racism looks like. But also that's OK. That's the goal is that we do that kind of work. So remember, when you say something anti -racist, you're saying it against, but still out of a racist context.
right, which still shows you the way that we live. But two, remember that just means that we've always got to keep working back and forth through that context to try to do better, to come back to some of the sort of Goddom or hermeneutics. It's a hermeneutic circle, right? Like we're not getting out, we're not getting to a perfect space, but we are going to be able to interpret and reinterpret, think and rethink what's going on. Is that OK? It's not maybe a problem.
PJ (56:15.3)
That's a great way. No, that was a great answer. Dr. Iwara, wonderful to have you on today. Thank you.
Eyo Ewara (56:21.72)
Thank you so much, I appreciate it again.