500 word essay

APA Newsletter oN

Philosophy and the Black Experience

John McClendon & George Yancy, Co-Editors Spring 2013 Volume 12, Number 2

From the editors

As co-editors, it is with a deep sense of sadness and yet with abiding honor that we dedicate this issue of the APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience (spring issue, 2013) to the memory and legacy of the late Dr. William R. Jones. It was actually our intention to devote a special issue to Dr. Jones over two years ago; however, he was intent on revising and reformulating his ideas and the project never came to fruition. In the next issue of the newsletter, we intend to continue our efforts to acknowledge the philosophical heritage that Jones has provided.

Our contributors in this issue span the generational spectrum of African American philosophers and students of philosophy and we greatly appreciate their insightful contributions toward honoring the memory and thought of Dr. Jones. In “The Honor Was All Mine: A Conversation with William R. Jones,” Dr. George Yancy briefly reflects on his richly textured 1996 conversation with William R. Jones, which is followed by the interview that has never before been published. Dr. Lewis R. Gordon, in his “Remembering William R. Jones (1933–2012): Philosopher and Freedom Fighter,” provides a personal and moving remembrance of Bill Jones. Gordon’s reflective piece beautifully captures the spirit of love and freedom that Jones embodied and provides a context for understanding the philosophical, humanist, and theological magnitude of Jones’s thought. Dr. Stephen C. Ferguson II, in his essay “On the Occasion of William R. Jones’s Death: Remembering the Feuerbachian Tradition in African-American Social Thought,” astutely situates Jones’s philosophical work within the context of African American philosophical tradition and alerts us to how the Feuerbachian Tradition in German philosophy is apropos in the assessment of Jones’s philosophy of religion. Dr. J. Everet Green’s “William R. Jones: Philosophical Theologian Extraordinaire of the Twentieth Century” introduces us to how Jones was a formidable thinker in the context of twentieth- century philosophical theology and Africana thought. Dr. Greene was a student of Dr. Roy D. Morrison II, who in turn was not only a very close friend of Jones but also a co-worker in the field of philosophical theology. Green shares with us his personal vision of the intellectual landscape that frames Jones’s legacy in philosophical theology. Ms. Brittany L. O’Neal’s “William R. Jones’s Humanocentric Theism: Reconceptualizing the Black Religious Experience” continues the discussion on the import of Jones’s magnum opus, Is God a White Racist? by locating its significance for reconceptualizing Black religion in non- theistic terms in contrast to classical theism. Ms. Kimberly A. Harris, in her “The Legitimacy of Black Philosophy,” provides a critical assessment of Jones’s seminal contributions to the affirmation of Black philosophy as an academic pursuit and its

metaphilosophical implications. Dr. John H. McClendon III, in his “Dr. William Ronald Jones (July 17, 1933–July 13, 2012) On the Legacy of the Late ‘Dean’ of Contemporary African American Philosophers,” offers a personal and historical account of Dr. Jones’s legacy. McClendon argues that Jones stands at the apex of the African American philosophical tradition both as a scholar and activist, and thus deserves the honor of “Dean.”

In this issue, we are also delighted to include six book reviews. Tim Golden reviews James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree; Jessica Patella Konig reviews George Yancy’s Christology and Whiteness: What Would Jesus Do?; Floyd Hayes reviews John H. McClendon and Stephen C. Ferguson’s Beyond the White Shadow: Philosophy, Sports, and the African American Experience; Chike Jeffers reviews Robert Birt’s The Liberatory Thought of Martin Luther King Jr.: Critical Essays on the Philosopher King; Michelle V. Rowley reviews George Yancy and Janine Jones’s Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics; and, Chris Mountenay reviews Jacqueline Scott and Todd Franklin’s Critical Affinities: Nietzsche and African American Thought.

Articles

The Honor Was All Mine: A Conversation with William R. Jones

George Yancy Duquesne University

The following is part of a larger conversation that took place in 1996 with Dr. William R. Jones (1933–2012). The conversation was synoptic in scope, covering fragments from his childhood, his interest in philosophy, Blacks in the field of philosophy, the Committee on Blacks in Philosophy, racism, theodicy and Christian theism, Black theology, and oppression, the last of which shaped the driving theme to which Jones dedicated his life to understand and eradicate.

Like his Black heroine Harriet Tubman (1820–1913), Jones was compelled to continue in his liberation efforts. For Jones, there was no justification to discontinue. Liberation struggle, for him, took place within the context of history, on the plane, as it were, of existential suffering and social praxis. No matter the truth or falsity of the vertical theistic/metaphysical claims made by theologians regarding the existence of God, Jones was clear that it was our responsibility to wage struggle against the multiple forms of oppression experienced by human beings. In short, then, his “theism” did not mitigate his humanist drive to change the world for the better. His “humanocentric theism” is conceptually consistent with the need and responsibility

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for human beings to transform destructive forms of historical repetition, to dismantle structures of oppression, and to attack manifestations of social evil wherever they are found.

When talking with Jones, one got the impression that there is so much more to be done, so much more social evil that needed to be eradicated. One also got the sense that the effort to fight for a better world is one’s personal responsibility, a responsibility that one bears despite the fact that one is always already born in medias res, in the very middle of the drama of human existence. Indeed, we participate (both directly and indirectly) in the interdependent matrix of social, political, economic, and psychological forces that oppress so many. And while it would be false to say that we all engage in acts of oppression in the same ways or that we all experience oppression in the same ways, it is true, nevertheless, that our duty is to locate where and how we oppress others and to seek out ways of challenging and undoing those forms of oppression.

This was partly what was so profound and didactic when talking with Jones. He forced me to confront my own bad faith, something he did with passion and sometimes tears. Out of all the interviews that I have done, it was with Jones that I was, for the very first time, personally moved by a profound sense of passion, a form of passion that was deeply infectious and abiding. As he talked about Harriet Tubman and her headaches, caused by the trauma of being hit on the head with a blunt object by her white “owner,” his voice began to crack. His cracking voice gave way to a process of gentle sobbing. In silence, I listened to Jones complete the powerful moral story of Tubman’s liberationist indefatigability. Tears welled up in my eyes. From what I recall, I turned off the recorder. And with a somewhat strained composure, though one not easy to maintain, I simply said, “we should end there.” He agreed. That moment of shared tears, of shared tarrying over Tubman’s ethical and spiritual journey, left me in silence long after the conversation was over. The sheer joy of journeying through that emotional moment with Jones was itself a burden and yet liberating. I was reminded of the pain and angst suffered by Tubman. Yet, I was reminded of her sacrifice, her duty, and her love for others. I was also deeply stirred by Jones’s humanity, his vulnerability, and his intense passion. Most of all, I was reminded—as he spoke of finding absolutely no justification for why he should discontinue fighting against oppression—of the fact that Jones was a philosopher who wept. GEORGE YANCY: When did you first discover that there was a field called philosophy? WILLIAM R. JONES: As a teenager, I did a great deal of reading. I was a little bitty, tiny kid. And I had very, very bad eyes. In fact, I should have used glasses well before I actually got them. But you know back then if you wore glasses they called you “four-eyes.” And so literally it got to the point, and this was in high school, where I could not see the board from the first row, and the teacher, Mr. Forbes, called my parents and told them he thought that I needed glasses. I’ll never forget the time when they put those glasses on me. The world looked different. I just hadn’t seen anything. But I couldn’t participate in sports. So I did not get into that athletic route that, to me, is really an oppressive structure designed to keep Black people oppressed. So, because of my physical body size and my eye problem, I began to do a lot of reading. I remember reading Plato back then. YANCY: At what point did you apply to Howard University? JONES: Actually, I had not decided to go to college because I didn’t have any money. My father was a postman and he did not have much money, but his argument was that he had to help my sisters. He said that he had to set aside and make sure that

my two sisters got an education rather than operating within the framework of “who had the best potential.” So, I had decided to try to get into the armed services and then get some money and go on the GI Bill. But one morning I went to school and I hadn’t studied for a chemistry exam and our homeroom teacher told us that there was a representative from Howard who was there to give this national competitive scholarship exam. The exam was scheduled at the same time the chemistry test was going to be given. If you took the scholarship exam you would miss the chemistry exam that day. So that’s what I did. I took the scholarship exam because I wasn’t quite ready for my chemistry examination. And I won a national competitive scholarship. It was a four-year scholarship, a thousand dollars per year, and that thousand dollars covered your tuition, room and board, and there was a little left for books. My education was essentially paid for all the way through. YANCY: When did you decide that you wanted to study philosophy? JONES: Well, I went to Howard to study engineering. You know they give you these aptitude tests and I did well in math, and so engineering came up as one of the things that they said I was suited for. Back then, I was operating on a bread-and-butter approach. The whole theory was that you would get in and get out as soon as possible so that you can make the most money. And so engineering made a lot of sense. But I did not like mechanical drawing. I remember having to do isometric drawings and I just did not like it. I eventually went to the dean of engineering and told him that I wanted to transfer to liberal arts and do philosophy. And the dean said that he hadn’t had anybody with those good grades moving out of engineering into philosophy, and that I really didn’t have to worry about the mechanical drawing because they had draftsmen—computers weren’t in then—who did all of that. He said that I didn’t have to worry about that and he didn’t think that I was making the right decision. But I just didn’t like it. My friends said, “You’re crazy. It’s fine if you want to give up engineering, but don’t go into philosophy. What can you do with it?” They said that I would only get my AB degree and that I could hardly teach with that. In fact, I was told that if I wanted to teach philosophy, I would have to get my MA and PhD But my friends told me that if I was talking about putting in that amount of time and money and effort, I may as well go to law school or medical school and make myself some money. But the philosophy program was interesting to me. There was a fellow named Winston McAllister who was my mentor. Eugene Holmes was the head of the department and Alain Locke had been there, but had retired. I did not study with Locke, but I knew about him. There were only about four or five students who were majoring in philosophy there at Howard. YANCY: All male? JONES: All male. There were no female faculty members in philosophy at that time and no female majors in philosophy. YANCY: Why do you think you had such a passion to pursue the field? JONES: It was more of a survival tactic. I know that sounds odd. I couldn’t fight or anything. I never got into fights. I was always able to sort of argue my way out of things. So, argumentation and rhetoric were sort of survival tactics for me as a kid. Philosophy enabled me to enhance my survival and well-being through developing effective coping skills for a context of oppression. The reality of societal oppression pushed me into this kind of analytic, critical, virus detection operation. Hence, I could develop effective strategies, develop a sort of keen, analytical, critical approach, not for the sake of philosophy per se, but because this was a survival, well-being tactic or strategy for me. YANCY: Talk about the impact that philosophers McAllister and

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Holmes had on your philosophical direction. What were they like as teachers? JONES: I didn’t understand Holmes that much. He was way, way above me in terms of my understanding of philosophy at that time. He was at that time one of the few Blacks who had a PhD in philosophy. You could almost count them on your hand. I remember we did a survey back when I was at Yale, which was in the early ’70s or late ’60s I guess, to try to identify an exhaustive list of African American philosophers, and we came up with under thirty. And that was a deceptive figure. YANCY: Why was it a deceptive figure? JONES: It was deceptive because that number included not simply African Americans, but Caribbeans and also Africans who were teaching in the United States. So, I’m trying to say that we found out back then that the figures were deceptive. You know, I was instrumental in helping to set up this Committee on Blacks in Philosophy. YANCY: Yes. JONES: We went through and used some of the survey material from that data collection to establish, to institutionalize that committee. It turned out that there was approximately one Black philosopher for every million Black persons. As I say, we came up with thirty, and if you subtract Africans and people from the Caribbean, who were in the United States, subtract seven, and there were about twenty-three million Black people back then, so you’re talking about one Black philosopher for every million Black persons. Now, you were asking about Eugene Holmes, also. I knew that he was one of the few Blacks in philosophy. The issues that the faculty in philosophy at Howard were dealing with at that time were not focusing on oppression per se, but it was more classical philosophy and the like. Alain Locke had done some work on cultural pluralism and so forth, and McAllister did some courses on ethics, but McAllister taught logic, and so forth, so my introduction was basically to logic, logical positivism, and so forth. Keep in mind that Holmes also identified himself at that time as a Marxist so I got a little splattering of that. But the main impact from McAllister and Holmes was to solidify philosophy as an appropriate and useful pursuit for African Americans interested in the struggle. They didn’t themselves focus on that particular issue, but I did begin to see how I could take these kinds of tools and skills and develop an arsenal against oppression. YANCY: Which courses did you take with McAllister and which with Holmes? JONES: I took elementary logic and symbolic logic from McAllister. I took his course in ethics. The history of philosophy I think I took from Holmes. Holmes did a course on the pre- Socratics, which was my introduction to the Sophists and so forth. He didn’t stress the Sophists, but he gave great emphasis to the naturalists. But that was my introduction to Protagoras and that became a critical piece of my eventual philosophical outlook. YANCY: Was it a shock to you that there were actually these Black philosophers? JONES: I don’t remember that kind of response. To me, I was pursuing philosophy for the personal reasons that I indicated before, and at that point, I wasn’t on target yet in terms of my phenomenology of oppression, how it operates and the like. I taught at Yale Divinity School and I began to notice what we call the “starving statisBtics phenomena,” the SSP factor, that there’s a striking disproportion that is representative of lack people when you look at certain kinds of indexes. And it doesn’t matter whether it is a negative index like illegitimacy or representatives in the NBA [National Basketball Association], or whatever. But there are striking disproportionalities between the percentage

of Blacks in the population and their percentage in whatever context or index you’re talking about. And this is one of the things that struck me about philosophy and religion. We have produced an enormous number of ministers but almost no philosophers. We have theologians but almost no philosophers. And I didn’t understand that at the time but later on I began to associate that with the operation of oppression and how the maintenance of oppressive structures would dictate that kind of starving statistic. YANCY: How do certain oppressive structures dictate that kind of starving statistic in philosophy? JONES: I started off by analyzing the issue of the linkage between religion and oppression, that is, the role that religion plays in oppression. At that point, I saw this uniquely central and exclusive role that religion played in maintaining oppression. But I reached the erroneous conclusion that to get rid of oppression you had to get rid of religion, as if religion was the only institution in the society that was the maintainer of oppression. I began to see that it’s more of a cage metaphor. In a cage, you’ve got solid bars with a lot of open spaces as opposed to a solid wall. Oppression is a very predictable phenomenon. We can literally go into a situation and predict what people are going to do. We never lose on this. But one of the things we found out was that oppressed people, when they talk about their situation, often drag in this metaphor of the cage. When oppressors talk about the situation they don’t use the cage metaphor, they talk about walls, solid walls, and giving people ladders to go over the wall, or opening or creating a door to go through the wall. Now when you look at those, to me, I notice another kind of metaphor. When white Americans focused on an animal symbol for their situation, they picked an eagle. Black people, and I pay attention to the Brer Rabbit stories, they picked a little rabbit. Now that’s an interesting kind of contrast, particularly when I went back and I remember reading that an eagle is a predator. Now there are a lot of predator birds that human beings have tamed, have used in hunting, like the falcon and so forth. Have you heard of anybody taming an eagle? My point was that they chose an untamed predator as the animal to represent their freedom. Black people chose the little bitty rabbit. They had the historic memories of lions and tigers and panthers and snakes and all that stuff, but they chose the rabbit. You know part of the West African folklore identifies two underdogs: one is the hare and the other is a tortoise. In the tortoise and the hare story, it is the tortoise that is the underdog and it is the hare that is the overdog. In the United States, at least for me, the image of the hare, the rabbit, in relationship to the eagle, the predator, was the most accurate description for Black people to understand and to describe both who they were and to make sense of their situation. And if you look up the Brer Rabbit stories and deconstruct them, contextualize them, you have a situation in which these were stories that Black parents were teaching to their children while they were also caring for the master’s children. So, to talk about the evils of racism and oppression and to protect their children against it while they were caring for the white kids, they had to use symbols and stories and so forth. Otherwise the kids, the white kids, could say (presumably to their parents), “Aunt Jane called you a mean S.O.B.” But if you look at the stories, in the natural arrangement of things, what happens when the rabbit and the eagle, or the rabbit and the fox, or the rabbit and the bear meet each other? In the natural order of things, it is the fox or the eagle that is the eater, and it is the rabbit or the hare that is the eaten. But if you look at the Brer Rabbit stories, what you see is that the Brer Rabbit story sort of turned nature upside down. It is the Brer Rabbit that uses wile and guile to overcome the superior power of the fox or the bear. On my reading, that was the lesson and the model that Black parents were trying to teach their children living within

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the context of oppression under slavery. What I’m trying to say is that this is all a part of a certain theory of culture that I find in Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and some cultural anthropologists, that what we do and what we make, all of our actions and all of our products, express a very specific value orientation, a very specific picture of reality, and that you can literally take our actions and our products and decode the underlying belief in value, the world-view position that undergirds those actions and products. Let’s return to the cage example. With the cage, you’ve got the solid bars and the open spaces with an illusion of freedom. No single bar by itself can keep anything inside. But if you take the multiple bars, even with the open spaces, and link them together, that cage with the open spaces will produce the same kind of rigidity and impenetrability as a solid wall. My point is that to understand oppression you have to understand that each one of those bars is a particular institution in the society. One bar is education, one is politics, and so forth and so on. Not any single one of those factors by itself is sufficient to encage you, but what they do is that they all operate together. Education will operate with politics, and politics with religion and entertainment, and so forth, to produce the same kind of rigidity. Another question to ask is: “Why is it that the oppressor doesn’t talk about the cage, but talks about the solid wall?” Now the cage metaphor automatically sets up one of the features of oppression: a two-category system arranged in a hierarchy of superior and inferior. The cage says we’ve got a “cagee,” something inside the cage, and we’ve got something outside the cage. I’m in the cage and then there’s something that is outside the cage, the keeper. The thing that is outside the cage has the key that keeps me inside. There’s a surplus of power and privilege that’s related to the keeper that establishes that kind of hierarchy. Now if we talk about the solid wall, we don’t have that kind of hierarchy automatically presented. So if the oppressor talks about a cage image, it means that he or she is pointing to a situation where we’ve got these two groups with disproportionate amounts of power and privilege. But what’s the cause of that? How did that happen? If you talk about the wall, the solid wall with the ladder going over it, there is no hint of any kind of hierarchical arrangement or surplus of power or deficit of power configuration that automatically comes to mind as when you focus on the cage. The point here is that the oppressor is not going to pick the kind of metaphor that will reveal or suggest their status as oppressors. So they’re not going to use the cage metaphor, they’re going to use the wall metaphor. YANCY: Relate this cage metaphor to your discussion regarding the paucity of Black philosophers. JONES: I have found that our world-view, our beliefs and values, our strategies, and so forth, reflect our context. We operate on what we call the “CC Connection.” There is a connection between the content of your beliefs and values and the context (economic, social, and political situation) that determines the world you live in. Everything that we do and everything that we make is a combination or a relation between some context and some content. Tell me if you find an exception to this. As human beings gain control and predictability over certain areas of human life, the concept of God’s control and sovereignty diminishes. There’s an inverse relationship that’s reflected by the following: If you got sick in the medieval period, who would you call on first? You would go to the priest first, right? Now, as medicine has developed, you no longer call the priest in, you call a physician. Today, when do you call the priest? Well, when the physician says, “I can’t do any more for you.” What I am saying is that that change represents a shift in human control over an area. Again, it’s an inverse relationship: as human control and predictability over an area are increased, we do not relate God’s causality to that area. People don’t go out and

do rain dances now. So, if you are an oppressed person or an oppressed group, it means that your control over areas is by definition drastically diminished. Tell me if I’m wrong. To me it’s [not] accidental that Black people developed this concept that God’s got the whole world in his or her hand because of their lack of power and control over their own social reality. If Black people cannot effectively overcome the structures of oppression at the economic, social, political level, if they don’t see the possibilities of some external power or force that is more powerful than the power of whites, if they don’t see that possibility, what hope do they have? They have no hope. What I’m saying is the impossibility of hope to cope with their situation under oppression compels a lot of Black people to look for supernatural help or support as their only recourse. If you look at the actual development of humanism, to me, humanism begins to develop in those areas and situations where human beings begin to gain control. They can exercise human power and get certain predictable results. So I think that if you look at the history of our world-views in that way, then you don’t have humanism developing in those areas where people have little or no control over things. YANCY: Since philosophy involves a kind of independent criticality, are you suggesting that the reason that there might be a paucity of Black philosophers is because Black people don’t feel like they’re in control of their lives? JONES: Yes. YANCY: So, you actually formally established a Committee on Blacks in Philosophy, right? JONES: That’s correct. YANCY: Well, within the context of oppression, what led to this? Was there any opposition that you received, say, from the APA at the time? JONES: Oh, yes! The response of the APA was predictable. We have found that oppressors go through three denials. They describe the present situation in such a way that the labeling of oppression is inaccurate or inappropriate. You can use internal criticism to have them relinquish the first denial. But then they move to the second denial, “Well, I’m not the cause.” But then, again, through internal criticism, we get them to relinquish that claim. So, they admit that there is oppression, that they are culpable, and that something that must be done to correct this oppression. But this is where the third denial emerges. The oppressor selects a method of correction that will not correct. The APA did not see the oppression in their structures or in their policies because they were not looking at it from the angle of analysis that would reveal such things as oppression. The whole concept of Black philosophy was deemed a square circle category. The initial effort was to establish the legitimacy, the necessity, of doing what we called ethnic philosophy or looking at the philosophical enterprise in terms of contextualism. We tried to pull together a volume on Black philosophy, and the response of most white philosophers, and some Black philosophers, was negative. I don’t want to name anybody, but we tried to get one Black philosopher to write an article on criticizing Black philosophy or anything that he wanted to do on it, and his response was that he would not be involved in the enterprise because even to undertake the project of critiquing Black philosophy would presuppose that the concept itself is meaningful rather than a square circle concept. YANCY: Right, because to debunk it you would have to give it legitimacy, right? JONES: That is the point. To enter into the discussion, to debunk it, gives it a status that he was denying that it had. Notice, though, what we were trying to do. We were trying to find an entry point for doing Black philosophy in a deconstructivist or

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postmodern mode. That’s what I mean by contextualism. We were trying to do philosophy in a contextual mode. That, to me, is all that ethnic philosophy is. And one of the things that we kept running up against was, in my opinion, the inaccurate and illegitimate view that was informing the majority of philosophers at that time. It was the view that the norm of philosophy is something synonymous with reason per se or something like that, which, to me, is totally inaccurate. Reason does not have the discriminating capacity or ability that they were assigning to it. They were operating on an absolutist analysis. Reason was considered to be operating as some kind of absolute that the philosopher ought to accept as norm, and that just does not wash as I see it. Let me give you an example of what I mean. For example, we label a cow as subhuman, outside the circle of humanity, and therefore through the process of labeling, and remember, a label is something that we attach to the object, the cow is allowed to be murdered and cannibalized. We kill it and we barbecue it. Now, take Hindu culture. They do not label or classify the cow in the same way and therefore it is considered murder to kill it, cannibalism if you eat it. Now, I want you to show me, using reason, who is right and who is wrong. You cannot do it. Reason does not have that kind of discriminating capacity. Go back and look at the history of philosophy, go back to Greek philosophy. You had two opposing points of view. You had the absolutism of the Platonic-Aristotelian rationalistic point of view on one side. On the opposite side, you had the Sophists. And the Sophists were arguing for this kind of humanism, this contextualism, this relationalism that I am talking about. Western philosophy and theology at that point chose the absolutism of Plato and Aristotle, and rejected the contextualism of the Sophists. I would argue that as we have progressed, and I don’t mean improved, there has been a more explicit acknowledgment from the noncontextualist side, the absolutist side, of contextualism as norm. This is what is involved in the postmodernist situation, where it is the contextualist position, what I call the Sophist Principle or what I call the functional ultimacy of the human being, not ontological ultimacy, that is being accepted as the critical norm. YANCY: So, the whole emphasis that postmodernists place on notions like disciplinary matrices, or paradigms, or communities of intelligibility, you see as an instantiation of Protagoras’ dictum? JONES: Well, two points. I make a distinction between universals and absolutes. There are universals. A universal is something that is omnipresent, something for which you cannot identify an exception in a particular context. You always have to start with a context. I’ll give you an example. This is one that informs my whole understanding of oppression, and really everything else. At the organic level, in order for anything to survive it has to feed on something else. You cannot give an exception to that. My system simply takes that universal and extracts the implications from it. It says that you and I were put into a reality where we had two and only two choices: we could choose either to commit suicide, that is, feed on oneself—for if you feed on yourself eventually you exhaust the food supply—or the only other option is to murder and cannibalize something else. All I’m saying is that we have two choices, two different moral options: the morality of treating things other than ourselves as coequal, and therefore not eating them, or establishing a hierarchy relative to those things that are not ourselves and establishing ourselves at the top as the predators and we prey upon the others. The fact that you are alive is all the evidence you need to show that you rejected suicide, which means that you have set up a structure that says there is a predator and there is the preyed upon, that is, you live according to a hierarchical structure that says you are superior and whatever you eat is inferior. Now that’s the fundamental structure of oppression, that’s the ontological structure of oppression that I see. Now, there’s no way to

escape that kind of oppression, as I said, except through suicide. But the kind of oppression that I’m working against has to do with what we call human societal oppression, not ontological oppression. Now, you can avoid human societal oppression. Ontological oppression can’t be avoided in toto—you’re going to have to take some species and treat it as inferior. That’s what oppression does. You see what oppression does is to establish within the human species the same kind of predator and preyed upon hierarchy that we acknowledge as definitive for the ontological structure. And my whole argument is that that kind of intra-species oppression worked before, but given that people at the bottom no longer accept those kinds of definitions and structures about their inequality and protest that, efforts to maintain that kind of predator/preyed upon hierarchy produces a great deal of conflict. YANCY: So would you accept my analogy earlier that the postmodernist’s use of these terms—and I think those terms are equivalent to your use of contextualism, terms like disciplinarian matrix or paradigm or communities of intelligibility—are instantiations of Protagoras’ dictum that man is the measure of all things? JONES: Take the development of modernism. Modernism attempted to critique supernaturalism, that is, revelation based on the Bible. Take Descartes, take all of them. It was an attack on the supernaturalism that informed the medieval church. Now they did an internal criticism which attempted to show that “supernatural epistemology” was not an absolute. It was contextual; it was not an absolute. So, what they did was to de- absolutize that absolute by a method of internal criticism using another norm. For instance, say you start out with the Bible as your single norm. The moment Catholics use that one norm, that one absolute to reach one conclusion, and Protestants use the same norm to reach a different conclusion, you have set up a situation where you have to go and pick and choose between those alternative definitions of a single thing. The text doesn’t enable you to do that, so you have to go outside the text. Take any verse in the Bible. It can be interpreted either literally or symbolically. There isn’t anyone who can disagree with that, even the most rabid infallibilist. If you go into the text itself and try to establish the basis for that choice, the text, that is, the absolute that you started out with, never tells you. The text doesn’t say, “Interpret John I literally or interpret John I symbolically.” There is nothing in the text that tells you that. So in trying to make that decision you have already gone outside of the text, you have brought in a norm other than the absolute according to which you said you were operating. So people will use a norm to de-absolutize something else, but then they begin to treat that norm that they used to de-absolutize as an absolute. YANCY: Moving back to African American philosophy, would you describe yourself as an African American philosopher? JONES: Oh, yes. YANCY: In your essay, “The Legitimacy and Necessity of Black Philosophy: Some Preliminary Considerations,” you conclude the following: “Of course, of crucial importance is the description of possible models for executing the enterprise of Black philosophy.” Do you feel that Black philosophers have begun to describe the possible models for executing the enterprise of Black philosophy? JONES: I think so. I tried to do that in terms of my first book, Is God a White Racist? This book was an effort to take all this theory that I am describing and apply it to Black religion and the Black church. And it was attacked at first. That work was identified as a sort of theological pariah; it was identified as not being Black. And I’m arguing that it draws on the African American/Black intellectual tradition. So, if you look at the actual evolution of Black theology since then, they have had to

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incorporate the norms and the methodologies that we argued for twenty-five years ago. So I’m trying to say that even though it was initially rejected as an accurate picture of the evolution of liberation theology and liberation philosophy, it was accurate in the sense that people have had to incorporate certain norms and methodologies that we argued for twenty-five years ago as they dealt with oppression. Now, I have difficulties with Afrocentricity. YANCY: What are some of those difficulties? JONES: Because it’s operating on a faulty diagnosis of the problem and therefore a faulty therapy. I’m influenced in large part on this by Frantz Fanon. On my view, diagnosis dictates the therapy, and I’m arguing that that’s a universal principle. I can show that the Afrocentric is operating on that just as everybody else is. What is the diagnosis in Afrocentricity of the Black plight? It reaches the conclusion that Black people are in a bad situation because they have strayed away from, abandoned the world-view, the beliefs and values and so forth of Africa, of the motherland. So the diagnosis is that we have abandoned Africa or replaced the African world-view with Eurocentrism. Given that diagnosis, what is the only therapy? The only therapy possible, according to them, is to go back, recover, resurrect, re-introduce that world-view that we have abandoned. Now, what is wrong with that? I’m operating on an oppression model. Frantz Fanon pointed out that if you look at the actual operation of colonialism and oppression, dying colonialism and oppression, he says that you have to differentiate between two kinds of colonists, two kinds of colonialism. And he also argues that you’ll never have a successful decolonization, eradication of colonialism, unless you have two revolutions. He operates on the two-revolutionary theory. It’s based on his understanding of how colonial oppression operates. You have the alien colonists, those are the English, the Germans, Dutch, and so forth, who come from their country to another place, i.e., Africa, South America, whatever, and introduce oppressive structures. But the mechanism that they use to set up the oppression is the following: they look within the indigenous culture for persons, principles, and policies as the structure, as the infrastructure of the oppression. So his point is that colonization is an exercise in indigenization. So the indigenization then sets up two colonists: the alien colonist and the indigenous colonists. So if you have one revolution, you kick out the alien colonists, but you’re leaving in that place the indigenous colonists. But that says two things: it says that the original set of beliefs and values that were there in the pre-colonialist period had the potential, had the capacity, had the possible outcome, of oppression, of maintaining oppression. Therefore, if given that fact, if you want to recover, reintroduce, resurrect, the original African world-view, you cannot do it without subjecting that original pre- colonial world view to a filter which at least does the following. It differentiates between the beliefs and values that helped to support oppression that supported the maintenance of the colonial system, and those that do not. Now, to do that, you’re going to have to introduce a phenomenology of oppression. That kind of self-critical, self-filtering is not going to take place by simply going back and recovering what’s there. Now the moment that you understand that, it means again that you are introducing into the whole discussion a filter that has not been designated or decided as Afrocentric. In order to make the distinction between what you bring forward from the African tradition and what you keep back there, don’t bring forward, you’re introducing a non-Afrocentric item. I want to start with a sort of phenomenology of oppression, a grid of oppression, and use that, because eventually that’s what the Afrocentric is going to have to come to anyway. And I’ve done a lot of research in South Africa, and what I am finding is that the oppressor utilizes that principle of indigenization to go back

and pick those parts of the traditional African culture that help to maintain this neoracism, neo- apartheid. And people, South Africans, let them get away with that because it is advanced as a process of indigenization. YANCY: In the “The Legitimacy and Necessity of Black Philosophy” article, you argue that Blacks dehumanize themselves if they fail to philosophize from their own cultural perspective. JONES: Sure. If you understand oppression, what oppression does is to set up a two-category system arranged in a hierarchy of superior and inferior. Oppression is a response to difference, but difference is contextual. You cannot tell me whether things are different until you give me a context. Take two identical things. Pick them out. There will always be a context from which you can show that those two things are different. For instance, I am holding one in my left hand and I am holding one in my right hand. You can take two “opposite” things, and there will always be a context from which you can show that they are similar or the same. Take any two things. They may be different, but different things on this table. So what I am saying is that difference is always contextual. What oppression does, oppression wants to treat things differently. So, in order to treat things differently it has to establish a difference. The difference can be real, it can be imaginary, it can be important, unimportant, whatever, but it is going to focus on a difference and then it is going to respond to that difference in a precise, predictable way. That is, those differences will be arranged in a hierarchy. But there are many different kinds of hierarchies. We can have a hierarchy between big and little, young and old. All we’re talking about is rank order. But the oppressor is going to arrange the differences in a specific hierarchy; it’s going to be a hierarchy of superior and inferior. If it focuses on intelligence, if it focuses on skin color, it’s going to use that difference to establish a hierarchy of superior and inferior. Now, if you want to overcome oppression, what you have to do is to reduce that hierarchy, get rid of that hierarchy of superior and inferior. In order to defend slavery, one will attempt to justify it as good and right, proper, moral, reasonable, and so forth. Hitler did this. It is what I refer to as legitimation, which is a universal characteristic. The oppressor is always going to legitimate the structure of oppression as moral, as good, as right. Now take the United States. They had a situation where they wanted to defend the policy of institutionalized slavery as good and moral, and not only good and moral but as best for the people they were oppressing, enslaved Africans. They took people involuntarily from their country, involuntarily now, and subjected them to the most dehumanizing situations. Through the Middle Passage, Africans were brought over here involuntarily, put in at the bottom of the social ladder, actually outside of the social ladder because they were defined not as human beings, but as chattel property. If a dog has puppies, to whom do the puppies belong? Now, you continue that from generation to generation, with all the horrors that we relate to that, and now the oppressor wants to, or has to, legitimate that as good and right and proper and best for the slaves. Now I’m saying it is always possible to justify anything. This is a feature of contextualism. If you understand contextualism, there will always be at least one angle from which you can establish something, I don’t care what it is, as good, and at least one angle from which it is bad. I can’t tell whether something is good or bad until you give me a context. So, what whites did in order to defend that policy of slavery was the following. It was a very simple recipe. If I take you from one place and plop you down in another, to justify that shift as good all I have to do is go back and describe whatever I took you from as the worst place in the world, as the pits. So, no matter what I do to you, by taking you out of that “bad situation” what I have done is [deemed] moral and good and best for

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you. Now that’s exactly what happened. The consequence of that was to give a totally inaccurate, negative view of Africa. What I’m trying to say is that any policy that understands racial oppression in the United States has to recognize that you have to go back and rehabilitate the picture and image of Africa, that is, get beyond that oppressive picture of Africa that was used to legitimate oppression. I’m not against Afrocentricity. You have to knock down Eurocentric supremacy, but you cannot simply be uncritical about the content of pre-colonial African culture precisely because of the use that was made of that pre-colonial belief and world-view to support colonialism. It requires you to do a rotten-apple-in-the-basket approach, that is, not to bring forward anything until it has gone through the filter of not supporting oppression. As I’ve said, if you understand oppression, oppression sets up this hierarchy of superior and inferior. Contextualism is always looking at things from a very particular, single angle. What the oppressor is saying is that if I take this object, a toilet tissue holder, let’s say, and I say “this is a toilet tissue holder,” what I am doing is taking one attribute, one description of that item, giving it hierarchical superiority, in terms of the definition of that thing. To show the error of that, what I need to do is to pick another angle and establish the coequal interpretive status, the coequal definition status of that angle. And that’s my point. If Black people don’t take their life experiences, their choice of the angle of interpretation, and treat them as coequal, and force the opposing point of view to justify the “superiority” of their position in light of the coequality that I assign to mine, and that to me is going to dictate a process of internal criticism, if I don’t do that, what I am doing by not forcing them to do that kind of analysis is to affirm the superiority that the oppressor has put on that situation at the outset. YANCY: I recall that there was the Wingspread Conference in Wisconsin in 1976 where you, Dr. Joyce Mitchell Cook, and the late Dr. Robert Williams were discussing the nature of Black philosophy. Is there a Black philosophy? JONES: I go back to my earlier analysis of what is meant by “Black.” You see, “Black” is a label. Now, to answer the question that you just put to me, I would have to go back and ask, “What is your definition, what is your angle of analysis of the word “Black”? If you mean that it represents or is a description of the experiences or the angle of perception of a given group of people, then how can anybody disagree with that? How can you disagree with that conclusion if you mean by “Black,” the ethnic membership of a particular group, or if you mean by “Black” the audience for whom this [Black philosophy] was intended? Given this, at least for me, there is no dispute about it. What was in dispute back then was the following point. People were not looking at the word “Black” in the sort of broad way that I was looking at it. They were looking at “Black” in terms of a racial category. And from this they concluded that if we were talking about Black philosophy in racial terms that we must be talking about a causal linkage, some kind of genetic determinism between skin color or race, and belief and value or philosophical content. Leonard Jeffries tries to argue that if you talk about whiteness as producing or predetermining a kind of specific value orientation, then there is a specific value orientation connected with the genetic, factual feature of being white. But there is a difference between focusing on Black or white as cultural categories, contextual categories, and focusing on them in terms of causal categories in the genetic sense. YANCY: So, if one means by Black philosophy a chromosomal project, then you find that highly problematic? JONES: I argue that what people call the Black experience or what Jeffries is identifying as the white experience is not related to chromosomes. It is related to the contextual, economic, social, political situation which dictates a certain kind of choice.

This is what I am saying. If I am an oppressor, that means I have committed myself to maintaining a certain kind of structure. Now, within a given context there will be certain things that will support that oppressor status and other things that will work against it. The point here is that the oppressor will choose those things that help to maintain his/her oppressor status. This choice will not be based upon chromosomes. In trying to set up color oppression in the United States, the United States had a very peculiar kind of oppression. Not all oppression is based on color or race. That’s just one variable. For me, I argue that race is a social construct. But white people could not maintain the kind of structures that they wanted if they had focused only on chromosomal eye color or chromosomal hair color as opposed to chromosomal skin color. If they had focused on chromosomal hair color, then white people who are brunettes would be in the same class as Black people who are brunettes. That would not have been the kind of variable that they needed or wanted. So they had to focus on the skin color factor as the basis for separation and oppression. Again, however, that has nothing to do with chromosomal causality. It has to do with what is the most effective way to maintain oppressive structures within a context where people have different skin color. And I think if we don’t understand that, then we enable the oppressor to put into place neo-oppressive structures. And that’s what neo- oppression, neo-racism does. You don’t use chromosomes as a basis for discriminating against people. What you use is the un-level playing field effect of the prior use of chromosomal differentiation. If I discriminate against you on the basis of skin color, if I do that for a couple of generations, if I don’t teach you to read and write, then after a certain number of generations I have established a two-category system arranged in a hierarchy of superior and inferior. The group that wasn’t taught to read and write will have deficits in education, in economic status, health care, etc., relative to the group that was not discriminated against. The former group will be at a disadvantage. So the use of race, which was originally used to discriminate against a certain group, establishes what we call the deficits, disadvantages, and defects. And one can add demerits and so forth. So, after that is done for a couple of generations, one can literally stop using race altogether to discriminate against others and still produce the same kind of discrimination that was accomplished when explicitly using chromosomal discrimination. What the oppressor does now is highlight the demerit, the deficit, or the disadvantage, and use that as a basis for discriminating against the oppressed. They can then argue, “How in the world can you accuse me of being a racist when I’m not using race anymore?” And that is precisely the mechanism of neoracism that one finds. And if we don’t understand these processes of neoracism, then we have a situation where you have black people in the US, and as was the case in South Africa, concluding that because whites no longer exclude Black people on the basis of race, they are no longer discriminating against Black people. They are discriminating against Black people because they have not corrected for the prior discrimination. If you don’t correct for the prior disadvantages, then all you are doing is continuing the discrimination. YANCY: I understand. What is humanocentric theism and how does this position help to address issues of theodicy, particularly the problem involving God’s purported omni-benevolence and the reality of the oppression of Black people? In other words, what is humanocentric theism? JONES: This is the point of my book Is God a White Racist? I’m trying to develop effective strategies for dealing with what I call “neoracism.” So, I’m doing a phenomenology of oppression that tries to identify the features, the beliefs, and values that bring about oppression. Now, if you look at the debate between theists and humanists, you will find a very interesting point.

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The so-called problem of evil, as you know, is produced when you assign a certain complex of attributes to God and then you try to account for certain things within human history. This includes such things as the oppression of Black people, or inequalities, or earthquakes, and so on. If that list of God’s attributes is correct, then those other things of great travesty that happen to human beings shouldn’t be there. So, the problem of evil is trying to account for the existence of those things. I can logically solve the problem of evil by changing one of those attributes of God, by taking off the “omni” of any one of those attributes. One move within theism has been the willingness to relinquish the “omni” feature of power and the “omni” feature of knowledge, but it has never been willing to relinquish the “omni” feature of benevolence. So that identifies to me the central premise of theism, namely, that it is affirming in some way the omni-benevolence of God. That’s the indispensable item that it will not relinquish. So, what I did was to go back and show—in Is God a White Racist?—that the principle of God’s omni-benevolence is a concept that helps to support oppression or the context within which affirming the omni-benevolence of God is part of the mechanism of oppression. I was trying to show the economic, social, and political practice of the use of that concept of omni-benevolence. I argued that that’s exactly what it is. If you look at the history of the Black church, Black theology, and so forth, the concept that God’s got the whole world in his hands and that no matter what happens in this world, as my grandfather used to say, it operates for our good, what that is saying is that everything that God does is benevolent relative to us. I raised the issue of omni-benevolence as an accurate attribute of God or the creator. I asked people to explain to me how it is that the choice either to commit suicide or to commit murder, for these are the only choices that God gives us, factors out as an affirmation of divine benevolence, particularly divine omni-benevolence? If I argue that something is in conformity with God’s will and purpose, then I cannot label it bad. If God does it, then, by definition, it is good. Hence, I can never label it as bad, and therefore I can never label it as oppression. So, in order for me to approach something as oppression, that is, to exterminate it or to eradicate it, I must first establish within the Judeo-Christian tradition that this is not the effect of God. If it is divine punishment, now, that is an effect of God, and if it is divine punishment, I am not permitted to try to escape it. So, what I’m arguing is that the moment you identify something as caused by God and you are operating within a system where whatever God does is by definition good, then there is no possible starting point for a theology of liberation, a philosophy of liberation. The philosophy of liberation must first establish that something out there is wrong or bad, that something out there is not operating for my survival and well-being. I am protesting that and I’m trying to eradicate that. I’m not trying to conform to it. So, I’m saying that by arguing for God’s omni-benevolence it makes it difficult—impossible—to establish the initial starting point for a theology of liberation. So, I’m just trying to make sure we understood that point. YANCY: Absolutely. JONES: Now, given that situation, if you want to operate within a theistic system, and I am not interested in doing that myself, then you have to operate with a concept of God that enables you to label something in that environment as bad, as wrong, or as oppressive, and therefore something that you can approach in terms of eradication. That is where humanocentric theism comes in. The opposite point of view is theocentric theism. Theocentric theism argues that God has got the whole world in his hands. Indeed, not a sparrow falls without God knowing it and willing it. Theocentric theism argues that whatever is, is what it ought to be, because whatever is, is the result of God’s causality, God’s willing purpose. So if whatever is, is what ought

to be, then there is no way that you can protest anything that is. So, in order to protest, you have to introduce a theological or philosophical perspective that allows the human being to look at that reality out there not in terms of what it is from God’s angle, but what it is from the angle of human beings’ reality, how it impacts them. Think of humanocentric theism in terms of the metaphor of a parent who has a business and voluntarily hands over the business to the children. The parent does it out of his/ her own power. The parent is not forced to do it. The parent does it because he/she wanted to do it. So, the parent leaves the business in the hands of the children. The parent tells them to sink or swim with it. Now that’s an affirmation of God’s will and purpose and God’s power, but the consequence of that is to take the responsibility for what happens in human history out of God’s hands and put it in human hands. My point is that if Black theologians want to do a theology of liberation, if they want to avoid the conclusion that God is a white racist, based on the fact that this situation of Black people hasn’t been improved, then the only way they can do that is to move towards this position of humanocentric theism. There is no other way to do it. YANCY: How is humanocentric theism different from deism? JONES: Deism is a form of ontological determinism. The deist argues that God at some point has set up a whole set of deterministic mechanisms. What deism says is that God does not intervene after God has set that up. It is no longer necessary for God to intervene and make any corrections. But there is a form of determinism, there is a telos already built into the order of things that is not changeable or correctable by human choice or human power. YANCY: So, is it still legitimate to ask if God is a white racist, particularly given that Black people still live under conditions of discrimination, oppression? JONES: Oh, yes. You see, I was asking the question. I did not think that you can answer the question. If you are a contextualist, that’s a question that you cannot respond to with a definitive, demonstrative answer. What I was trying to do was simply to force Black theologians and people in the Black church to look at the strategies of liberation they were operating on in terms of their effectiveness. Humanocentric theism gives Black people the right, the authority, and the power to take the angle of reality that emphasizes their inequalities and so forth and to make that the point of the discussion, the master concept that has to be answered at some point. What humanocentric theism does is to establish the coequality of human power relative to God at the level of human history. It is based upon giving or granting coequal power and authority to human beings by God. So, this position enables theists to hold on to their concept of God if they want. It allows them to hold on to their concept that God does this out of his benevolence and so forth, but it forces them to avoid the situation where whatever is, is what ought to be. YANCY: How did Black theologians receive your book on this question concerning God and racism? JONES: They rejected it. They said that it was not theology; they said that it was not Black theology, that is, they questioned the Blackness of it. And all of this points to some fundamental misunderstandings about the mechanism of liberation theology. All I did was to take the purpose and method of liberation theology at that time and apply it to Black theology. It involved internal criticism. They argued that I was introducing some alien norm and evaluating them on the basis of that alien norm. No. I was doing an internal criticism. After all, they claimed to offer philosophies and theologies of liberation. And I maintained that the moment they do that, a very precise methodology is determined, which they did not follow. As they began to work with some of these issues later on, the evolution of Black theology shows that that analysis that I put forward twenty years

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ago was absolutely accurate because they had to do what I said they had to do. If you do internal criticism correctly, you never lose, because if a person disagrees with you they are disagreeing with their own position, contradicting themselves. If I take my norm to criticize you from you, and execute that criticism, and then you say, “No, no, that’s wrong, I disagree with that,” then you are contradicting your original norm. But their response also indicates their lack of awareness and understanding of these alternative forms of religious belief in Black thought. For example, if you go back, many Black theologians said, and almost by definition, that Black people are theists. This is part of Afrocentricism. They were arguing that African spirituality is based on theism. Therefore, when I was trying to introduce humanism, I was said not to be Afrocentric. I wasn’t being Black. The implication was that some white person had messed over my mind, so to speak. What I did was to go back and show that in the Black religious tradition in the United States, there is this position that I called “Black religious humanism.” I helped to resurrect that point of view which so many other Black theologians said was not there. And when that tradition was shown to exist, it was a liberation theology. YANCY: Who are those who would identify as Black religious humanists? JONES: Well, to me, Brer Rabbit is one. I’m going back to folklore. John Henry is one. I would say that Sterling Brown is one. He wrote an article on what he called “the slave seculars.” Alongside of the slave spirituals and so forth, you know, the theistic stuff, there were the slave seculars who were criticizing, who were making fun of that belief in God. So that’s what I’m drawing from. We found if one does the historical research that there are the accounts of people like Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne. They indicate that there were a lot of Black people who said they would not set foot in the church because they could not make sense of church beliefs and the continued oppression of Black people. So that tradition was there. But it was not very visible; it was not identified as a prominent part of the Black tradition. But if you understand the mechanism of oppression, it is very predictable. Oppression involves what I call the “VIP principle,” that is, the visibility, invisibility pattern. The oppressor is always going to make certain things very visible, very prominent. Ask kids how many have seen a school or street named after Booker T. Washington. Everybody raises his hand. But how many have seen a school or street named after W. E. B. Du Bois? In 1991, Martin Luther King’s birthday, January 15th, was also the day that George Bush said we’re going into Kuwait. They could not legitimate that by utilizing Martin Luther King. And so you go back and you listen to the tape and George Bush says that we’ve got to use any means necessary. As you will recall, Malcolm was widely criticized for urging Black liberation by any means necessary. So, notice what he did in order to legitimate that excursion into Kuwait. He went back and made Martin invisible on his birthday and made Malcolm visible in order to support the structures of oppression that they were trying to support. But that’s the tactic. An oppressor will make visible whatever helps to maintain the structures of oppression. They will keep invisible or undercover whatever undermines that structure. YANCY: How does religious Black humanism differ from Jean Paul Sartre’s or Albert Camus’ humanism? JONES: I think that they are very similar, but it is important to differentiate not so much because Camus and Sartre are operating on humanism as a response to oppression, which is not the same thing as the Enlightenment humanism as I will show you in a moment. They were also operating on the existentialist principles of contextualism, which, to me, is a going back to Protagoras’ principle. I make a distinction

between that kind of humanism and Enlightenment humanism, the humanism that is associated with thinkers like Paul Kurtz and so forth. There is a Black scholar, Norm R. Allen Jr., who works with Paul Kurtz. Allen edited a book on Black humanism, African American Humanism: An Anthology, which was published in 1991. I was not asked to participate in that. I guess it was because I’m endorsing a whole different kind of Black humanism. But anyway, go back and look at Enlightenment humanism. Enlightenment humanism developed out of a conflict between supernaturalism, on the one hand, and the new naturalism, the new scientific epistemology, on the other hand. What that humanism could not accomplish was how to fit in the new science, the new naturalism, with the old supernaturalism. African American humanism has nothing to do with the Enlightenment. The issue for African American humanism was/is the inability to connect logically and morally the oppression of Black people with this concept of God’s benevolence. It was the theodicy question that was the central issue that motivated or generated Black humanism. It was more of the epistemological issue that generated Enlightenment humanism. So, I begin from the Black religious humanism angle, not the Enlightenment humanism according to which Allen and Kurtz operated. I really find parts of Enlightenment humanism as part of the structure of oppression, of neo-racism. YANCY: In terms of your educational background, you wrote your dissertation [Sartre’s Ethics in Relation to his Philosophical Anthropology: A Criticism of Criticism] on Sartre while at Brown University, right? JONES: Right. I was in the religion department, but the dissertation is actually included in philosophy. At Brown, I had a NDEA fellowship, a National Defense Education Act fellowship for religion. That’s why I went into the religion department instead of philosophy. I worked with Stephen Karey and Wendell Deitrich on my dissertation. YANCY: What made you decide to get your MDiv from Harvard? JONES: When I graduated from undergraduate school, I received a Rockefeller trial year fellowship. The Rockefeller Foundation at that time was concerned because there was a paucity of what they thought were bright people going into the ministry. People were not considering ministry as a career option and they felt that sort of “dumbing down” of the ministry would have bad consequences. So they selected various people and we got to pick any seminary of our choice, and they paid all our expenses for that year. And all they asked us to do was to consider the possibility of going into the ministry. If we decided to go into the ministry, we would stay in the seminary and then complete the degree. I didn’t feel that I could make a decision about the ministry simply based on my first year. I thought that one really needed to be in a ministerial context, get some experience, and then decide. So I stayed on and did the MDiv, and then I worked for two years at an all-white church in Providence, Rhode Island, a wealthy, upper-class white church. However, after the first five or six months I recognized that I really wanted to teach rather than preach so I stayed there in Providence and got this NDEA fellowship to go to Brown University. YANCY: Given that your dissertation was geared toward Sartre, in what way does his thought continue to shape your later philosophical concerns? JONES: To me, Sartre has been much misunderstood. My dissertation did the following. And it’s not something that I would recommend. I tell students not to do this, but I started off with one thesis adviser who left the university. They then assigned someone else to me. That is important background. What I did was to take all of the criticisms against Sartre, and then developed a topology that rebutted all of those. So I was trying to show that all of these criticisms were wrong. Now

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one of the criticisms that I was showing was wrong was an interpretation that my new thesis adviser thought was a correct interpretation. So, I literally had to show him that he was wrong in order to get my dissertation through. But there are many common criticisms of Sartre, which, to me, are simply wrong. And if you go back and do what I call “a descriptive apologetic,” an internal description of Sartre, it was easy to show that all of those criticism were wrong. Now, what I learned from Sartre was in part this issue of the legitimacy and necessity of doing internal criticism, and doing accurate phenomenological description. Sartre is to me essentially a phenomenologist. And if you understand that, the criticisms that people have of him go by the board. For instance, if I am going to describe a phenomenon, then every item presents several different phenomenological angles. Anything is going to have more than one angle, right? So, if I am going to describe that item, I have to describe it from a multi-angular approach, I have to pick different angles of it, and describe them. Also some of these angles may be in contradiction with each other even though they are angles of the same object. For instance, I position a toilet tissue holder so that the people immediately in front of me can only see the circle, the two-dimensional geometrical figure. You can position it so that the circle is the only thing they can see. People on the side do not see a circle, they see a rectangle. So that one object, depending upon the context or angle, presents opposing descriptions. Now if you understand that you are doing phenomenology, that your description of something is going to have that kind of “contradiction,” then it shouldn’t be used as a way of saying that you are in contradiction with yourself. If I describe a circle over here and then I describe the rectangle, I am not in contradiction with myself. I’m only in contradiction if you interpret the circular description as definitive rather than simply one different angle. So, I’m trying to say that I approach Sartre as a phenomenologist, and that’s what I am doing. What I am doing is a multi-angular description of oppression. I can literally give you a very accurate description of oppression, because what we did was to look at every single instance of oppression that anybody brought forward, and then went through it to try to find the common dimensions of each one of those descriptions. My students call it the “JOG and JAM” model. JAM stands for the Jones Analytic Model, the core of which is JOG, the Jones Oppression Grid, and the Jones Oppression Grid is the phenomenology of oppression. From Camus, I became interested in the issue of theodicy and the metaphor of the plague as oppression. The notion of a plague is sort of a master symbol for me in terms of looking at oppression. In fact, the concept of a plague is another way of talking about a virus. I have a student, Billy Close, who is in criminology and he has helped me understand the concept of conceptual incarceration, which maintains that the angle or label from which we approach something has the consequence of imprisoning us to our oppression, that is, that there are certain concepts which support oppression. So an adequate phenomenology of oppression requires two things. You’ve got to go through and decode the institutional, economic, social, political, the so-called objective component of oppression. But that objective component, the institutional factor, is always linked together with what I call the subjective component, that is, the belief in value systems. So you also have to reduce oppression to its set of concepts, its sine qua non concepts. And that’s what I am saying we have done. YANCY: How do we get younger Blacks in the field of philosophy? JONES: First, I’m persuaded that if the economic, social, and political reduction of the oppression of Black people takes place that one of the byproducts of that will be an ascendancy of the principle of philosophy in Black culture.

YANCY: Sure. It works inversely, right? JONES: Right. Second, I think part of it has to do with moving beyond this concept that reduces or equates Blackness or negritude with theism and/or the Black church. I think that is another important factor to counter. Because if you go back and look at philosophy in terms of Black thought in the United States, it has been associated primarily with a criticism of the Black church or Black religion. There’s no way to read Carter G. Woodson without seeing his Miseducation of the Negro as also talking about the mis-religion of the Negro. Go back and look at every one of those statements where he talks about the mis-education of the Negro. A contextual analysis will show you that in every one of those places he also mentions religion. If you go back and do a contextual analysis of the chapters themselves, at least three, perhaps four of them, they actually talk about religion. But what I found, and this is my reading of it, was back then because of the hegemony of the Black church, if he had attempted to do what I did in Is God a White Racist? he would have received a very negative response. So you sort of have to cloak this critique of mis-religion under the rubric of mis-education. But it’s right there. YANCY: How does your identity relate to your overall philosophical world-view? JONES: Now I’m not sure what you’re packing into “identity.” YANCY: Exactly. How does Bill Jones’s own self-perception of who he is as an African American thinker in the world relate to his overall philosophical world-view? JONES: That has to do with understanding my mission and purpose and so forth. As a young child, I started protesting oppression vis-à-vis my sisters, who tended to be rather domineering. Fighting against oppression as been the single, singular motivation, method, message of my research and my life. I’ve tried to show that that develops out of this predominance of oppression in Black culture. This is emotional for me, because Harriet Tubman has been a very crucial influence for me. If I were to pick a single Black heroine or hero, I always talk about Harriet Tubman, never Martin. I talk about Brer Rabbit and I talk about John Henry, those three figures, one real, the others fictional, one an animal symbol. Well, these encompass everything that I have been trying to do. You remember Harriet Tubman. She was a slave and she got her freedom. And one of the most glowing accounts of freedom that I came across was when she described how very different the very world looked, how different things are when she is looking at the sky, for example, from a context of freedom in contrast with looking at the same objects when she was a slave. And please note that I am operating on the premise that no matter what you and I do, we always try to legitimate our positions, and that you and I are normally in denial of our oppressions. We do not normally identify ourselves as oppressors, even though I’m aware of the fact that the only way we could be living here is for us to have adopted an oppressor relation in respect to some other life form. So, when she said that she tried to justify and legitimate her being free and other people still being enslaved, she said that every legitimation she came up with echoed in her mind and in her heart as the same legitimation that the oppressor had used to legitimate her being a slave and his being free. The point here is that when she began to look at her situation of freedom, of affluence, she recognized that she was in that hierarchical position and that the only legitimation that she could come up with was the kind of oppressive legitimation that she had heard earlier. So based on that she said she had to go back and give back. These aren’t her exact words, but I think you understand the philosophy. Reaching that level of freedom required her, obliged her, to go back and reduce the oppression of other people or otherwise she would simply be continuing the

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oppression that she had gotten from under. So she did. She went back and she gave back and she never stopped. You know she had this ailment, these headaches, very painful headaches that were the result of her white master hitting her over the head with a stick or a blunt object. These headaches never left her. She talks about reaching this situation where she became weary. You know, old folks make a distinction between being tired and being weary. Tiredness is when you’ve worked, when you’re exhausted, you have used your muscles and your body to the point of exhaustion and you need to rest, relax, restore yourself so that you can go back and pick up the task again. Weariness, however, means something else. And I learned this from my father when he was suffering from cancer. They arrested the cancer and seventeen years later they wanted to subject him to what I call “survival medication,” and he didn’t want that. He said, “Billy, I’m weary.” He did not say that he was “tired,” but weary, which meant that he wanted to rest, not to take up the battle again. He just wanted to rest, to sleep, just to stop the whole rat race. So, imagine Harriet Tubman. She’s having all these headaches. Yet, she’s devoted her whole life to getting people free, and so she asks herself, “When can this be the last trip, when can I stop the underground railroad and rest?” And she said every time that she tried to justify this as the last trip, the only way she could do it was to picture herself, her pain, her willingness as having more value, more importance than the people who were still not free. I don’t know any way to get out of that. I’m an asthmatic, I’m permanently disabled with it, and how do you justify not continuing the struggle at a certain level of energy, even with that disability, without concluding that my disability has more importance than the oppression of other people? What I am trying to say is that this concern about oppression, this effort to protest it and set up programs that eradicate it, which has sort of been my life struggle, leaves me in the situation where I still haven’t been able to establish the anti-oppression value of my setting aside certain kinds of facilities and so forth for myself to accommodate my disability. I’ve done it but if you ask me to justify that, and to show that the special care I give myself, the special equipment that I have in my house for my asthma, to show that that is not a continuation of the oppression of other people because I have not taken those resources and so forth and devoted it to their liberation rather than the handling of my disability, I have no moral justification for that.

Jones’s Selected Publications*

Books Jones, William R. Is God a White Racist? Prolegomenon to Black Theology. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973. Jones, William R. & Bruce, Calvin E. (eds.). Black Theology II. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Press, 1978. Jones, William R. Is God a White Racist? Prolegomenon to Black Theology, Revised Second Edition. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997.

Articles Jones, William R. “Theodicy and Methodology in Black Theology: A Critique of Washington, Cone and Cleage,” Harvard Theological Review 64 (October 1971): 541–57. (Black theology is internally inconsistent because it does not function as an extended theodicy). (R, I) (Reprinted in: C. Eric Lincoln (ed.), The Black Experience in Religion. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and The A.M.E. Church Review CVIII (1993): 28–39.) Jones, William R. “Toward an Interim Assessment of Black Theology.” The Christian Century 89 (May 3, 1972). (A prediction of

the evolutionary tilt of Black theology as a neoteric discipline). (R) Jones, William R. “Reconciliation and Liberation in Black Theology: Some Implications for Religious Education,” Religious Education 67 (September-October 1972): 384–88. (Defends the hypothesis that how a theologian rank orders these categories is predictive of her/his tilt towards social quietism). (R) Jones, William R. “Theodicy: The Controlling Category for Black Theology,” Journal of Religious Thought (Summer 1973): 28–38. (As a liberation theology, Black theology is an exercise in theodicy). (R) (Reprinted in: The A.M.E. Church Review, Vol. CVIII, 1993, 9–17. Jones, William R. “Crisis in Philosophy: The Black Presence,” Radical Philosophers’ News Journal (August 1974): 40–45. (The causality and implication of the under-representation of Blacks in the discipline of philosophy and the foundation for the establishment of the first Committee on Blacks in the American Philosophical Association). (R) (Reprinted in: Proceedings and Addresses of American-Philosophical Association XLVII, 1973–74). Jones, William R. “Theism and Religious Humanism: The Chasm Narrows,” The Christian Century 92 (May 21, 1975): 520–25. (A defense of the co-equal moral and rational status of anti-theism). (R, I) Jones, William R. “Religious Humanism: Problems and Prospects in Black Religion and Culture,” Interdenominational Theological Center Journal (December 1979): 169–86. (Rebuts the common claim that humanism is alien to African American religious thought and practice). (R) Jones, William R. “Functional Ultimacy as Authority in Religious Humanism,” Religious Humanism (Spring 1978): 28–32. (A defense of the Protagorean principle of “Man the Measure” as a claim for the Functional Ultimacy of Wo/man). (R) Jones, William R. “The Legitimacy and Necessity of Black Philosophy: Some Preliminary Considerations,” Philosophical Forum IX (Winter-Spring 1977–78): 149–60. (Establishes the foundation for an ethnic philosophy in the philosophical discipline). (R, I) Jones, William R. 1978. “Theological Response to ‘The Church and Urban Policy’,” Journal of the Society for Common Insights II (1978): 49–57. (The culpability of the church for the creation and maintenance of the urban ghetto). (I) Jones, William R. “Process Theology: Guardian of the Oppressor or Goad to the Oppressed: An Interim Assessment,” Process Studies (Winter 1989–90): 268–81. (Process theology is not the ideal liberation theology as its advocates claim). (R) Jones, William R. “Oppression, Race, and Humanism,” The Humanist 52, no. 6 (1992). (Elements of neo-oppression in humanism, a bastion of liberalism; Acceptance address: Humanist of the Year Award). (I) Jones, William, R. “The Disguise of Discrimination: Under Closer Scrutiny, Gains Were Ephemeral,” FORUM, The Magazine of the Florida Humanities Council (Summer 1995).

Essays, Short Articles, Professional Organization Publications (Selected) Jones, William, R. “Humanist Principles Underlying our Code.” Humanist Professional: The Journal of the International Association of Humanist Educators, Counselors, and Leaders, 1990. (Implications of the principle of functional ultimacy of wo/man for the humanist professional). (R) Jones, William, R. “Toward a Black Theology.” Mid-Stream, (Fall-Winter 1973–74). Jones, William, R. “Black Theology and Black Higher Education.” Journal of Ministries to Blacks in Higher Education, 1976.

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Jones, William, R. “Toward a Unitarian-Universalist Concept of Authority.” KAIROS: An Independent Quarterly of Liberal Religion, 1979.

Chapters Jones, William R. “The Case for Black Theology.” In Black Theology II, edited by William R. Jones and Calvin E. Bruce. Bucknell Press, 1978. (Defense of religious humanism as a legitimate and necessary expression of African American religion). Jones, William R. “Ethical Perspectives in Black Theology: Mao, Martin and Malcolm.” In Philosophy Born of Struggle, Anthology of Afro-American Philosophy from 1917, edited by Leonard Harris. 229–41. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall-Hunt Publishing Company, 1982. (Defense of hypothesis that the evolution of Black theology will tilt towards the position of Malcolm X). (I) Jones, William R. “Religion as Legitimator and Liberator: A Worm’s Eye View of Religion and Contemporary Politics.” In The Worldwide Impact of Religion on Contemporary Politics, edited by Richard L. Rubenstein. 237–57. New York: Paragon Press, 1987. (Religion operates either as guardian of the oppressor or goad to the oppressed). Jones, William R. “The Religious Legitimation of Counterviolence: Insights from Latin American Liberation Theology.” In The Terrible Meek: Revolution and Religion in Cross-Cultural Perspective, edited by Lonnie D. Kliever. 189–215. New York: Paragon Press, 1987. (Protest, marked by counter-violence, will be the future response of the oppressed to the violence inherent in a situation of oppression). Jones, William R. “Moral Decision-making in a Post-Modern World: Implications for Value Education in Unitarian- Universalism.” In Unitarian-Universalism 1985: Selected Essays, edited by Wayne Arnason. 31–52. Boston: Papercraft Printing Co., 1985. (Critique of the neo-fundamentalism and the religious right as preaching moral absolutism but practicing situation ethics, their definition of moral nihilism). (R, I) Jones, William R. “Is Faith in God Necessary for a Just Society? Insights from Liberation Theology.” In The Search for Faith and Justice in the Twentieth Century, edited by Gene G. James. 82– 95. New York: Paragon Press, 1987. (Theism is not a necessary condition for morality as moral absolutism claims). (I) Jones, William R. “Intercultural Diversity, Diversity, Divisiveness, and Dialogue: The Religious Connection.” In Global Outreach: Global Congress of the World’s Religions: 1982–83, edited by Henry O. Thompson. (1987): 81–98. (Authentic pluralism is the only antidote for the intercultural conflict of the post-modern world). (I) Jones, William R. “Hypocrisy, Bibliocracy, and Democracy: Implications for Gays and Lesbians in the Military.” In The Christian Argument for Gays and Lesbians in the Military: Essays by Mainline Church Leaders, edited by John J. Carey. 37–44. Queenston, Ontario: Mellen University Press, 1993. (An argument of internal criticism demonstrates that the religious and moral rejection of gay and lesbians rights is hypocritical and contradictory). (I) Jones, William R. “The New Three R’s.” In The Transient and the Permanent in Unitarian Universalism, Vol. II, edited by Jan Seymour-Ford. (1995): 161–76. (Advances a new model of conflict reduction for the post-modern world). (I) * (R) = Refereed, (I) = Invited

Remembering William R. Jones (1933–2012): Philosopher and Freedom Fighter

Lewis R. Gordon University of Connecticut at Storrs

To write about Professor William R. Jones is for me to write about a man who was more than a scholar, more than a historic figure, more than a friend, and definitely more like a relative. His passing is a loss for so many. It is a blow to a profession and a discipline in addition to many erstwhile political causes. And given his love for his wider community and family, it is also, for many of us who loved him, a profoundly personal loss.

I will move from the professional to the personal, which, for Professor Jones, as we all knew him, was never neatly separate. I encountered Jones in perhaps the best way one should with a philosopher: through his work. His ideas were instrumental in the later parts of my dissertation, which was later revised into my first book, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. The part entitled “God in an Antiblack World” was inspired by his important book Is God a White Racist?: A Preamble to Black Theology (1973; reprinted in 1997), which I first read in the course “Black Theology,” a course I took at Yale Divinity School under the instruction of one of my mentors, M. Shawn Copeland, who now teaches at Boston College. That classic work was Jones’s devastating critique of James Cone’s and others’ articulation of Jesus’s symbolic location as a champion of the oppressed. The history of Black suffering doesn’t bear that out, he insisted. Black liberation theology required, he argued, a rigorous engagement with theodicy. Such an exploration would reveal the classic problem of responsibility and free will, where human agency must be considered for the path of any commitment to social transformation and liberation—the project, that is, of bringing some semblance of heaven on earth.

Jones’s thought had a profound impact on me. He raised a problem that led to my asking a different kind of question. As he asked the reader to consider what to do if G-d were a white racist, I began to question the mediation of deities in terms of self-reflection, especially from the actual behavior of people of faith: Must G-d, in other words, be in their image? If G-d could never be in their image, and if they could never hope but to echo G-d’s as an ethical hope (the Jewish view), then another conundrum emerges, especially when one reflects on the troubling history of gender and race: How is Black female love of a non-female deity possible?

That consideration was a clue to a problem in many models of ethics: the presupposition of similarity as a condition for responsibility and love. What if such commitment and devotion could be premised on difference? If so, wouldn’t that pose a radical consideration of responsibility for those who use difference as an excuse instead of an opportunity for an ethical extension of the hand and the heart?

I continued reading Jones’s work, and I was struck by his activist-oriented scholarship. He articulated a demand for “Black philosophy,” as it was at that time called, well in his challenging essays “Crisis in Philosophy: The Black Presence,” in the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association XLVII (1973), and “The Legitimacy and Necessity of Black Philosophy: Some Preliminary Considerations,” published in The Philosophical Forum IX (1978). These writings brought to the fore his astute understanding that every liberation struggle, every fight for social justice, also involves exploration of their epistemic and theoretical conditions. In his own way, he identified a problem of philosophy often overlooked by its practitioners from racially and ethnically dominant groups: