Corey Barnes

The paper explores Alain Locke's views on Black American art. I look at what he thought constitutes Black American art and what he took good Black American art to achieve. As for the former, I examine two ways of looking at Black American art: (1) as defined by artists' expression of the emotional state or inner lives of Black Americans, and (2) as defined by certain formal qualities of the work itself. I show that Locke melded these two positions together in a unique way. In my discussion of what Locke took good Black American art to achieve, I engage (1) with his general theory of value, (2) with his thinking on aesthetic and artistic values more specifically, (3) with his metaphysics of race, before addressing his thoughts on what constitutes Black American art simpliciter, and on what it achieves when it is good art.

The fifth chapter elucidates Locke’s value theory, which was the second of Locke’s two-part response to racism. In describing Locke’s account of value, I first discuss what Locke considered the appropriate start-points for investigations into value. Locke thought that an appropriate starting-point for inquiry into value is the social and political world. Afterwards I examine Locke’s rejection of both value-objectivism and value-subjectivism. Locke thought that if we took society and the political world as our starting-point for investigating the nature of value, then we would reject both objectivism and subjectivism. After engaging his rejection of value-objectivism and value-subjectivism, I discuss Locke’s positive value theory. For Locke, values are emotional forms of experience. And finally, after discussing Locke’s positive view, I relate it to democracy and cosmopolitanism.

The fourth chapter elucidates Locke’s theory of race, which was the first of Locke’s two-part response to racism. In elucidating Locke’s philosophy of race, I begin by looking at what Locke took to be the significance of and appropriate starting-points for inquiry into race. After showing why studying race is important, and how one should begin the investigation, I illustrate Locke’s refutation of anthropological theories of race. After discussing Locke’s critique of anthological theories, I discuss Locke’s positive racial view. Locke argued that race is a product of history. In fact, race is itself a culture-product—a sort of value that better unifies members of a group around a shared culture-type. After discussing Locke’s ontology of race, I discuss Locke’s answer to the normative question of race—namely, what we ought to do with race. Locke seems to have thought that race is of value beyond pragmatic reasons that would license conserving it. Race is valuable because of its necessity for culture. And culture is necessary for human flourishing. I end with a discussion of Locke’s views of racism, along with his statements on so many “fallacies of race.”

The concluding remarks do three things. First, they briefly recap the structure of the book. Second, they discuss two potential problems with Locke’s theoretical solutions to the gravest impediment to cultivating a cosmopolitan community. Locke said nothing of sexism and homophobia. Further, Locke needs a practical program to motivate people to abandon racist and white supremacist practices. Third, the concluding remarks set up a forthcoming work that completes the systematization of Locke’s philosophy—namely, that his philosophies of education, art, and religion are practical solutions that show how we might change people’s perceptions in a way that moves them toward a democratic mindset, thereby cultivating a cosmopolitan community.

The third chapter focuses on racism. Locke took racism to be America’s deepest and most fundamental problem. As such, he took it to be the gravest threat to the practice of democracy and the cultivation of a cosmopolitan community. Rather than highlight the history of practices emerging from white supremacy, I highlight important theoretical moments for white supremacy throughout history. I highlight these moments by looking at the works of four authors—namely, François Bernier, Immanuel Kant, Johann Blumenbach, and Arthur de Gobineau. Each of these author’s theories of race created aspects of, reified, justified, popularized, or reinforced racism in important ways. Each thereby demonstrates why democracy could not be practiced, and thus why cosmopolitanism could not be achieved.

The second chapter describes Locke’s democratic theory. I begin by separating an overarching concept of democracy from eight conceptions of democracy. Afterward, I focus on political democracy specifically. In so doing, I answer what type and model of political democracy Locke endorsed. I then provide Locke’s answer to political democracy’s value, the requirement to spread it throughout the world, and thus why its values are of such importance for the establishment of a cosmopolitan community. As such I provide answers to why it is favored over other forms of government.

Leonard Harris distinguished moral suasion from insurrectionist ethics, and argued that moral suasion possessed inadequate character virtues for ending slavery. For Harris insurrectionist ethics possessed a counter set of character virtues and actions following from them that were more prudent and dignity-affirming for ending slavery. This chapter extends Harris’ distinction and charge against moral suasion to protests in response to poor policing. Moral suasionist tactics such as peaceful protesting that deny violence are inadequate responses to poor policing. An appeal to insurrectionist ethics shows violent protesting to be a reasonable—that is morally justified and prudent—response. I argue for the reasonableness of violent protests in accordance with insurrectionist ethics in a few ways. First, I briefly distinguish moral suasion from insurrectionist ethics. Second, I show how Black people’s appeal to moral suasion is inadequate for changing poor policing practices. Third, I show that insurrectionist ethics avoids the preceding problems with moral suasion, and that—in accordance with insurrectionist ethics—violent protesting in response to poor policing is reasonable given the kind of environment to which poor policing contributes.

Alain Locke is most known for his involvement in the Harlem Renaissance. However, he received his PhD in philosophy from Harvard University in 1918, and produced a very large corpus of philosophical work. His work shows him to have been a sophisticated philosopher who thought through practical and theoretical problems regarding the nature of cosmopolitanism, democracy, race, value, religion, art, and education. Although Locke’s philosophical work has been discussed in parts, there has been no theorizing about how his different philosophical commitments fit together. In this book Corey L. Barnes begins to systematize Locke’s philosophical thought, showing how his democratic theory, philosophy of race, and value theory are connected to and undergirded by a commitment to cosmopolitanism. In so doing, Barnes unearths aspects of Locke’s thought—for example, his economic thinking—that have not been accorded attention and reimagines parts of his work about which have been theorized, all while bringing Locke into current debates about each subject.

Adrian Piper provides an excellent way of thinking about both what motivates discrimination and the relationship between stereotyping and discrimination. Piper elucidates two kinds of political discrimination, namely first- and higher-order political discrimination. The relationship between discrimination and stereotyping can be captured by a form that I call “discrimination from descriptive stereotyping.” Here, stereotypical properties are taken to be possessed by and principally define individuals because of groups to which they belong; they are descriptive properties explain what group-members must be like. Discrimination results from and is thought to be justified by the perception that group-members must unfailingly possess certain negatively valued attributes because they belong to targeted groups. In this article I add a form of discrimination as related to stereotyping that has been rather overlooked, call it “discrimination from normative stereotyping.” Here, stereotypes prescribe criteria for what legitimate members of some group are like, and thus which attributes group-members ought to possess. Discrimination results from a failure of group-members to possess these stereotypical attributes. And thus negative evaluations that lead to discrimination are not made insofar as persons are thought to possess some negatively valued attribute. Herein I take discrimination from normative stereotyping to explain the use of particular slurs, namely race-traitor terms such as “Uncle Tom” and “Nigger Lover.” Targets of these slurs are discriminated against in some sense because they are perceived as failing to be legitimate group-members.

Marya Schechtman has given us reasons to think that there are different questions that compose personal identity. On the one hand, there is the question of reidentification, which concerns what makes a person the same person through different time-slices. On the other hand, there is the question of characterization, which concerns the actions, experiences, beliefs, values, desires, character traits, etc. that we take to be attributable to a person over time. While leaving the former question for another work, Schechtman answers the latter question by proposing what she terms the narrative self-constitution view, whereby Schechtman claims that we account for intuitive features (moral responsibility, survival, compensation, and self-interested concern) of characterization through narratives. Still, merely having a narrative is not enough. In order to live the life of a person, an agent’s narrative must sync with the narrative told about him/her in community. This paper, while in full agreement with Schechtman’s claim regarding narratives and their ability to explain the intuitive features that regard the question of characterization, puts pressure on the latter claim. I argue that a person’s narrative is not merely one that synchs with the narrative told in community, but one that is determined by the person’s community. In focusing on Schechtman’s second claim, I appeal to the Akan conception of personhood, showing that the community sets the parameters of personal identity, and by body politics and conferring social recognition, determines the traits that we take to be attributed to a given person over time.

Cosmopolitanism seems to appeal to liberal neutrality because both are committed to core values such as reciprocity, autonomy, respect for the individual, personal accountability, and inclusivity. Further, cosmopolitanism is legitimate for many only insofar as it endorses value-pluralism in open societies, which is a staple of liberal neutrality. And yet, one might think that there is a moral obligation to create a cosmopolitan community. One can think of this as moral (normative) cosmopolitanism. To the end of creating a cosmopolitan community, certain values ought to be fostered in laws and public policies, and certain attitudes ought to be cultivated. This leads to a potential impasse, namely if cosmopolitanism is committed to neutrality then it cannot promote its normativity, and if it is not committed to neutrality then it cannot promote value-pluralism. I propose a solution to this potential impasse by examining several of the democratic and cosmopolitan commitments of Alain Locke. What I take from Locke is his grounding of both pluralism and moral cosmopolitanism in democratic, time-honored principles that exist in all acts of free association, namely: liberty, equality, and fraternity. These values, of necessity, pervade all political conceptions of good lives because all political conceptions require what acts of free association allow, namely community with others. To this end, I provide an argument for how someone can consistently be committed to both moral cosmopolitanism and liberal neutrality.