The 17^th Annual Philosophy Born of Struggle Conference with the theme, “Struggle in the House of Life: Equality, Education, and Economic Empowerment,” will convene on October 22 & 23, 2010 at Austin Community College, Austin, Texas at the Multipurpose Hall of the Eastview Campus.  Please visit pbos.com for local arrangements and schedule updates.

Confirmed speakers include:

• Tommy Curry — Philosopher of Critical Race Theory
• Joe Feagin — Renowned scholar of white racial framing
• Everet Green — PBOS conference founder
• Leonard Harris — Editor of the Black philosophy anthology, Philosophy Born of Struggle
• James Harrington — Founder of the Texas Civil Rights Project
• Maulana Karenga — Creator of the Kwanza holiday and editor of a classic text on Black studies
• Sara Mokuria — Educator and Independent Scholar
• Greg Moses — Philosopher of  King’s Nonviolence
• Lyndon Wilburg — Community Activist

The theme implies that basic needs of the human person emerge as legitimization of the concept of equality, education as a change agent, and economic empowerment as essential to human security.  Those who are interested in contributing to this conference should locate the concept of equality in the domain of social justice with all its ethical ramifications.  In this regard a vital function of education is to inform action in the implementation of social justice of which economic empowerment is an indispensible pillar.

Topics for consideration may include cultural assumptions embedded in education delivery systems at various levels–family, local communities, and state apparatus–and their impact on equality and economic empowerment.  Practical models for achieving social or distributive justice are welcome, as well as issues related to law, medicine, health care, and economic empowerment.

For papers, please submit abstracts with proposed titles and bios.  For panels, please submit panel title plus abstracts, titles, names, affiliations, and bios of proposed presentations.

Please email proposals by August 15 to:

Everet Green
everet@optonline.net

Leonard Harris
lharrisl@hotmail.com

Greg Moses
gmosesx@gmail.com

Local Arrangements Advisory: PBOS is occurring in the vicinity of the University of Texas during a home football game weekend.  We have arranged TWO OPTIONS for traveling scholars:

(1) Central Location (about 2 miles from conference)

Mr. Rasik Naik of the Super8 Motel Downtown Capitol location has offered a group rate of $95 per night for the PBOS conference (IF booking a 3-night stay for lodging dates: Oct. 21-24).  Here is how he would like to handle the arrangements:

“Those who do take up the rooms should e-mail me (no later than Sept. 20) on super8downtowncapitol@gmail.com by giving their names, phone number, address and credit card number with expiration date. I will then have it changed on my system and e-mail them back with confirmation. Once rooms have been taken up cancellation policy for them is 3 days prior to arrival date.

“Thanks for giving us the business.’

Rasik Naik
Super 8 Downtown Capitol
http://www.super8.com/Super8/control/Booking/property_info?propertyId=08887
1201 N IH 35
Austin TX 78702

512-472-8331

(2) NorthEast Location (about 8 miles from conference)

King Bed Non-Smoking (Each Room).  (Guests may change smoking preference and the price will remain the same.  They also have the option to upgrade to a room with 2 Double beds at the rates shown:

King:  $53.10 + Tax;  2 Doubles: $62.10 + Tax (Corporate/Group Discount 10% Off) These rates are based on 1-2 adults per room.  There is a $5 additional person fee for a 3rd or 4th adult in a room.

Group Reservation Number 73327094
10/21/10 – 10/24/10
(When guests call to put the room in their name and with their credit card, they are not required to stay all 3 nights to receive the special group rates.)

Guarantee Policy: Group Block is currently on a Complimentary Hold until the rooms are picked up individually and held with a credit card.  Any rooms that are not claimed or picked up within the Group Block by Sept. 23, 2010 will be canceled.

Cancellation Policy: 24 hours advance CXL by 4pm (1 day BEFORE arrival date)

Method of payment: A valid Credit Card is required to guarantee the reservation.  The credit card(s) will not be charged until check-in.  We also accept cash at check-in, but will still require the credit card # be kept on file for any incidentals.

Days Inn Austin Crossroads

820 East Anderson Ln (Hwy 183 near IH 35)

Austin, TX 78752

(512) 835-4311

Fax: (512) 835-1740

www.northaustinhotel.com

also: www.daysinn.com

FOR MORE INFO: for updates on conference schedule and local arrangements, please visit the conference website: pbos.com

We will convene Oct. 22-23, 2010 at Austin Community College (Austin, TX) at the Multipurpose Hall of the Eastview Campus.

A block of rooms has been reserved at the Super 8 Motel (Austin Central) for $95 per night (plus tax). Reservations should be made via email by Sept. 22. For details about room reservations, please contact the local arrangements coordinator, Greg Moses, via email at gmosesx (at) gmail.com. Please use PBOS Lodging in the subject line.

Please stay tuned for more details and a call for papers.

I would like to express my profound thanks to Professor Blanche Radford Curry and the Fayetteville State University Community for hosting the Sixteenth Philosophy Born of Struggle Conference and particularly the members of the philosophy faculty for their remarkable contribution in making the event the success it has been. Their wonderful generosity will be highly cherished

Our theme on Race , Religion and Social Transformation generated some very interesting presentations which resulted in a number of on going conversations in the realm of philosophical theology, religious ideation and identity formation and religion and the intellectual life, and how these concepts and motivations inform social movements. We hope in the near future we will be able to host a conference with a similar theme to continue to explore an area that is central to the America experience.

Special thanks to our friends and colleagues who travelled from across these United States to be part of this gathering. Your constant support over the years has been central to our effort in bringing this aspect of the African American intellectual tradition to a wider audience and provide a space in which we can celebrate our professional and personal lives . Every year we have seen some of our younger scholars make excellent presentations at these conferences and this year was no exception.

Congratulations to professors Tommy Curry and Steven Ferguson for continuing this tradition.

I am very happy to inform everyone that Professor Greg Moses a foundation member of PBS will be our host in Austin Texas for our 2010 gathering. The working theme is: Equality, Education, and Economic Empowerment. The conference will be around the usual time in October. The exact date will be announced soon.

See you all in Texas and thanks again for a wonderful 2009.

J. Everet Green

Philosophy Born of Struggle 2009 – 16th Annual Conference

Race, Religion, and Social Transformation

Friday, October 23, 2009 – Fayetteville State University, 1200 Murchison Rd., Fayetteville, NC 28301

Shaw Auditorium – SBE Building (beside Chesnutt Library)
Scheduled Events

8:30 AM Registration
African-Caribbean Students Association

9-9:50 AM Welcome and Opening Remarks
FSU Chancellor or Provost, Everet Green, Leonard Harris, Blanche Radford-Curry

10-10:50 AM Keynote Address
John H. McClendon, III, “Plummeting from Paradise to Plantation: A God Centered Philosophy of History and the African American Experience”

11-11:50 AM Ethics and Social Transformation I
Joseph Osei, “United Methodist Women and Social Transformation: Is Talking to the Enemy Careless Ethics or Care Ethics?”
Richard Hall, “Samuel Hopkins and Slavery”

11:55 AM-12:55 PM Lunch

1-1:50 PM Politics and Social Transformation I
Zay Green, “The Power and the Glory: Christianity and the Perpetuation of the Caste System in America”
Douglas Ficek, “The Pitfalls of Petrification: Fanon and the Politics of Philosophical Archaelogy”

2-2:50 PM Politics and Social Transformation II
Steven Ferguson, “Hurricane Katrina Postmortem: Issues of Theodicy, Divine Racism, and Bourgeois Hegemony, a Materialist Philosophical Perspective”
Matthew McNaughton, “No Socialism, No Choice, No Freedom: A Necessary Re-Examination of Sovereignty and Independence”

3-3:50 PM Identity and Politics
Micki Nyman, “Gateways of Difference in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John”
Shannon Gibson, “Empowering African Americans: Politics or Economics?”

Saturday, October 24, 2009 – Fayetteville Technical Community College, 2201 Hull Rd. , Fayetteville, NC 28303

Multi-Purpose Room – Tony Rand Student Center
Scheduled Events

9:30-9:50 AM Welcome and Opening Remarks
FTCC Administrator and Blanche Radford-Curry

10-10:50 AM Identity and Social Transformation
Lee A. McBride, III, “The Future of Racial Identities”
John Pascoe, “Marriage, Matriliny, and Matrices of Personhood”

11-11:50 AM Religion and Social Transformation
Gregory Rich, “Religion in The Secret Life of Bees”
Tommy J. Curry, “Birthed from Africa: The Role of African Civilization in the Reclamation of Racial Spirit”

12-1:30 PM Lunch

1:45-3:00 PM Ethics and Social Transformation II
Tom Smythe, “Advocating the Moral Point of View”
Greg Moses, “Jesus as a Race Leader”
Gregory Sadler, “By the Content of their Character: Christian Love and Virtue Ethics in Martin Luther King’s Writings”

3:10-5:00 PM Wrap-Up Session
William R. Jones, Everet Green, and Leonard Harris

Sixteenth Annual Conference
October 23 & 24, 2009
Race, Religion, and Social Transformation

Fayetteville State University and Fayetteville Technical Community College
Fayetteville, North Carolina

The Sixteenth Annual Philosophy Born of Struggle Conference will address a variety of approaches to religion in contemporary society and particularly the interconnections between race, religious practices, and political action. Conference presentations could focus on such diverse topics as race and social transformation in a global village; race and religious constructions; civil religions in various cultures; personal guidance systems; race, women, and religion; and social and cultural transformations in a world of migration, syncretism, and global change.

Proposals of 150 to 200 words for papers or panels are welcome on these or related topics. Please send proposals by e-mail in Word or RTF format by August 31, 2009, to Mrs. Kimberlee Hyman (khyman1@uncfsu.edu). Proposals should include presenter’s name, paper title, affiliation, and an abstract. Presentation time for papers should not exceed twenty minutes in order to leave time for discussion. Graduate and undergraduate presentations are welcome.

There will be a registration fee of $25 for all conference participants except students and emeritus faculty members, who will not have any registration fee. A registration form will be available at the PBS website. Please make checks payable to Fayetteville State University and put PBS on the memo line. Registration by September 4, 2009, is encouraged since that will help defray early conference expenses. On-site registration (by check) will also be accepted.

Since this is the first meeting of this conference to be held in the south, Philosophy Born of Struggle is pleased to extend a special invitation to colleagues in Philosophy/Religion in the Carolinas and the surrounding region.

A block of fifteen rooms has been reserved with Comfort Inn on Skibo Rd. for the conference rate of $72.04 per night including tax and a continental breakfast. In order to receive the conference rate, however, you must make your reservation by September 23, 2009.

To make your reservation, phone the hotel directly at 910-867-1777. In making your reservation, you will need to mention that you will be attending the PBS conference at FSU. The event number is 697. In addition, when you arrive at the hotel, please be prepared to show academic identification.

Other nearby hotels include a Fairfield Inn and a Holiday Inn Express. These hotels and the Comfort Inn are within walking distance of Fayetteville’s Cross Creek Mall.

Download Registration Form (pdf format)

Blanche Radford Curry
bcurry@uncfsu.edu

J. Everet Green
Everet@optonline.net

Leonard Harris
lharrisl@hotmail.com

Reviewed by Carlin Romano
Inquirer Book Critic

When Philadelphia-born Alain L. Locke (1885-1954), the first African American to win a Rhodes Scholarship, wrote home to his mother shortly after beginning undergraduate life at Harvard, he didn’t exactly express solidarity with his few black student peers.

According to Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth in their superb, eye-opening biography of the man they call “the most influential African American intellectual born between W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Locke complained that he couldn’t understand how his peers “come up here in a broad-minded place like this and stick together like they were in the heart of Africa.”

Having grown up four blocks from Rittenhouse Square as a member of Philadelphia’s free-born black elite – a community that, the authors write, “did not look with special indulgence on lower class people from any race” – Locke found many of his Harvard classmates “coarse,” a flaw he believed his fellow black students compounded by their separatism.

“[By] common consent,” Locke wrote to his mother about dining-room habits at Harvard, black students had “unanimously chosen to occupy a separate table together. Now what do you think of that? It’s the same old lifelong criticism I shall be making against our people.”

Like many a philosopher, Locke knew himself. His future work, now seen as the fount, in African American thought, for what came to be called “multiculturalism,” would celebrate cultural pluralism, both philosophically and personally.

From his early postgraduate studies in Oxford and Berlin to his embrace of the Baha’i faith, vast collection of African art, and decades (from 1912 on) as a professor and head of Howard University’s philosophy department, Locke more or less created the image of the black cosmopolitan emulated by black Americans from jazz artists to professors.

Yet how did such an elitist aesthete, fond of fine things such as personalized stationery, sufficiently enamored of French literature that he changed his name from Allen to Alain, also become the famous catalytic editor of The New Negro (1925), the groundbreaking anthology that both established “the Harlem Renaissance” as an epochal moment in American cultural history and stirred renewed respect for black folk culture?

That fascinating story is just one of many unpacked by Harris, a philosopher at Purdue University regarded as the top expert on Locke’s thought, and Molesworth, a literature scholar at Queens College. This long-overdue book – astoundingly, the first full biography ever of a thinker for whom schools, prizes and societies across America are named – closes a project the two men decided to do together after originally embarking on separate lives of their subject.

Why has it taken so long for a definitive biography of Locke to appear, when works on comparable black intellectuals abound? It’s a backstory that sheds light on a practical truth: Fascinating subjects for biographies can be the most difficult to take on.

Locke scholar Russell J. Linnemann once offered a celebratory explanation. Noting Locke’s extraordinary interests in “anthropology, art, music, literature, education, political theory, sociology and African studies,” Linnemann speculated that few “potential biographers” possessed the “intellectual breadth” to “fulfill the task properly.”

Yet Harris and Molesworth also draw back the curtain on other factors. Perhaps the largest is that Locke was gay and closeted, though people of any acuity understood his sexuality.

It was an orientation that created tensions between him and homophobic parts of conservative black culture, while also moving supporters to keep his life under the biographical radar. Entries on him in such standard reference works as The Oxford Companion to African American Literature and Africana Arts and Letters do not mention his homosexuality.

Harris, in a courageous 2001 essay titled ” ‘Outing’ Alain L. Locke,” accused some Locke scholars of merely mentioning Locke’s gay life in passing, inaccurately leading readers to believe that “Locke’s sexuality was irrelevant to his intellectual and personal history.”

Harris and Molesworth close that gap, not going into Locke’s intimacies with the detail of Harris’ essay, but explaining how they shaped the philosopher’s prodigious aesthetic sensibilities.

The third important obstacle to a Locke biography was its subject’s personality. Harris and Molesworth’s adjectives for their subject, such as “aloof” and “elitist,” confirm that Locke, as they report, “did not suffer fools gladly,” and was always more respected than loved.

Harris and Molesworth’s book thus unfolds as no hagiography, but a critical, contextualized understanding of a singular thinker who did not fit the stereotype of many black intellectuals.

As Harris has said elsewhere and demonstrates, with Molesworth, in this crowning achievement, Locke was not a black activist with a political solution for every problem. He was not a black Christian. He was not a foundationalist with simplistic answers to epistemological questions, a family man like Du Bois, or a “poor black man who works by candlelight to become successful.”

Rather, Locke struck most as an erudite genius and elegant networker whose championship of African American work in theater, sculpture, painting, literature and music helped the Harlem Renaissance’s glow solidify into a permanent spotlight on African American art at the center of American culture.

A memo, then, to students, teachers and staff at Philadelphia’s Alain Locke Elementary School, their colleagues at all Locke schools elsewhere, and to winners of the Alain Locke Prize at Harvard, given to the student with the highest GPA in African American studies:

That “Alain Locke” with his name on the wall was also a living, breathing, peculiar character at the very top of his talented tenth. This, finally, is his story.

Contact book critic Carlin Romano at 215-854-5615 or cromano@phillynews.com.

PHILOSOPHY BORN OF STRUGGLE
PBOS.COM
Sixteen Annual Conference

FAYETTEVILLE STATE UNIVERSITY
Fayetteville, NC

OCTOBER 23-24, 2009

Contact for submission and information:

J. Everet Green
Everet@optonline.net

Leonard Harris
lharrisl@hotmail.com

Blanch Radford-Curry
bcurry@uncfsu.edu

Philosophy professor Harris and English professor Molesworth fuse disciplines in this groundbreaking study of Locke (1885–1954), the preeminent African-American aesthetician and philosopher in the years between WWI and WWII, most familiar as the editor of the New Negro, “the chief group presentation of the values and interests of the Harlem Renaissance.” The authors are painstakingly detailed along the usual biographical path—childhood, education (Harvard; Oxford, where Locke was the first African-American Rhodes scholar), work (Howard University professor, editor, writer). The authors’ separate perspectives bring uncommon depth and detail to the analysis of their subject’s multiple interests: “philosophy, cultural criticism, race theory, adult education, and esthetics, among others.” Locke the thinker holds the center in this biography, but all around are glimpses of Locke the social being—a who’s who of turn-of-the-century Harvard and of decades of African-American writers, scholars and political figures. Harris and Molesworth are as exhausting as they are exhaustive, and in delineating Locke’s life with dense archival richness, the authors have given historians of the Harlem Renaissance, in particular, welcome material to mine for years to come. (Publishers Weekly, October 27)

CLICK HERE TO ORDER

I assume that African Americans are agents. They decide and are creators. Obama’s candidacy, I believe, requires an explanation that takes account of African Americans as agents – whether or not we like the expression of their agency, especially when that agency is manifested as American nationalism, patriotism, and acceptance of the existing system.

The desire to create a separate nation, overthrow the ruling class, or elect representatives from a party other than Democrat or Republican are arguably desires which are consequences of deep condemnation of racism, capitalism and American nationalism. The importance of feeling pride and vicarious dignity by identifying with Obama may outweigh otherwise deep condemnation or it may be a preference determined by the fact that the alternatives are completely unacceptable. But such a socio-psychological explanation is nonetheless than explanation. And like all social explanations, it presupposes that agency is not a function of volitions – desires are responses to or a function of the logic of external conditions..

Obama said on October 29, 2008, “Power concedes nothing without a fight.” Shortly thereafter, Steve Wonder’s “Here I am Baby” played, and after that, a country/western tune,” Only in America” by Brooks & Dunn. In the context of his political campaign, Wonder’s song romanticized Obama as an anointed agent and Brooks & Dunn’s song expressed American exceptionalism and patriotism. The two use similar instruments and a common language.

It is this happy, or unhappy, coincidence that requires not an explanation (it is obviously the politics of an-a-racial appeal) but a dialogue about what it is to be a progressive, anti-racists internationalist and in favor of deeply dedicated African American -American nationalist.

It is as much some of Obama’s policies that I favor as it is what the campaign makes possible for social communication – it provides a sense of dignity for African Americans making possible greater communicative confidence and for others’ a sense of being a-racial activists. Both agents favor similar policies. They form, in a sense, a new coalitional union.

Coalitional inferences are traits we infer or attribute to persons qua their person, without empirical evidence about them. Two women who are strangers, for example, in a crowd of men may trust one another in ways that they do not trust the men who are equally strangers. Such inferences are not identical to ones about kinds, such as rocks. Properties of kinds are attributed to each and every member of the kind. Thus, racists treat each African American as embodying traits of the population generally. Inferences about trust for kinds are ubiquitous; inferences about coalitional relations are capable of being variegated. Even persons that generally distrust African Americans as a people are capable of trusting an African American as a leader. Although, for all of America’s history, both kinds of inferences were so deeply imbedded in racism that both sorts of inferences precluded African Americans from gaining national as leaders. Usually, the openness of racist hostility toward African Americans is public only when it involves sensation criminal attacks. However, Obama’s campaign has been an occasion for every social segment to hear, see and witness open racism and hostility. Insults directed at Obama are public in a way that racism discloses itself, unwittingly. Obama’s candidacy has enhanced the recognition of racism within American popular culture by whites – a recognition that has increasingly become efficacious for more competent communication.

Obama was paraphrasing Frederick Douglas from his 1857 “It There is No Struggle, There is No Progress” when he said “Power concedes nothing without a fight.”

“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Leonard Harris
2008

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