Chris Lebron

The texture of black life under conditions of racial inequality has become increasingly harder to describe in our time. Though empirically undeniable, categorical racial inequality has become so diffuse that the experience of living under unequal terms of democratic association can be difficult to grasp. This matters for moral and political philosophy because the experience of racial inequality as captured in both mundane and tragic ways is fundamental to equality. This chapter attempts to give some content to a human point of view of equality, a view culled from Bernard Williams's injunction that we understand equality as a property between humans, with all the complexity and richness that term brings with it. I do so by engaging a range of black novelists and satirists (Ann Petry, Percival Everett, Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson, and Colson Whitehead) whose own projects are geared to engaging readers' ethical sense by describing both dramatically and satirically the various effects and outcomes racial inequality imposes on black lives. My own aim is to present a work of political philosophy that mirrors their attempt to imaginatively engage readers for the express purposes of working towards a robust and re-imagined conception of egalitarianism appropriate for race in our time.

In this paper, I provide an analysis of the movie, Barney's Version, to reflect on Barbara Herman's claim that the demands of morality are like that of loving someone: helping form the life it is a part of. I show that the movie helps us more richly understand both the power of that claim as well as its limits in pressing on key differences between morality and love that may lead to difficult decisions once we realize that relationships built on love imply that the persons in involved are jointly responsible for each others successes as well as failures.

This is the final lecture in my series, "Black Love and Black Rage In America" wherein I critically engage the relationship between the Kantian tradition the rise of colonial slavery and offer a schematic account of a moral theory responsive to conditions of racial injustice.

In this course, we will survey a group of thinkers for whom the issue (or some, the problem) of power is central. Many of the questions we cover are familiar from our everyday experiences: who has power? Who ought to have it? How does power affect me, my interests and my social groups? This course tethers the common everyday questions to foundational philosophical questions that don't get taken up in our common conversations: what is the nature of power? What makes its use legitimate? Can and how does power produce political subjects? This course energetically covers a wide range of both canonical historical works in philosophy as well as more contemporary works that address general theoretical questions as well as more particular political ones such as the nature of racial inequality, the treatment of women and transgender persons, and those with disabilities. The aim of this course is to provide students with a hefty set of tools with which to engage the political, social, and economic concerns that matter most to them with greater insight.