Todd Franklin is a professor of Philosophy and Africana at Hamilton College. He’s the chair of the faculty advisory committee for Hamilton’s Opportunity Programs and serves on the board of the Public Philosophy Network.
What types of civically engaged philosophy do you do?
As a philosopher, and more specifically, as a critical race theorist, I always stress the problematic tensions between subjects and systems. All too often, race is framed and deployed as a way of producing and perpetuating inequities, injustices, and divisions. In my work, both as an academic and as a member of various communities, I strive to bring critical race theory to life as fundamentally a form of civic engagement that responds to racism by creating social awareness, formulating analyses, and promoting individual and collective action. In addition to giving lectures and leading workshops on college campuses and within various communities, my work typically entails working collaboratively across boundaries of discipline and/or social station so as to comprehensively and conscientiously address what I and others find deeply troubling and inherently problematic.
Give an example of a successful project.
One project that I am currently involved with focuses on the differential outcomes for students of color versus white students pursuing STEM fields on predominantly white campuses. The issue we are taking up is not the often-cited issue of performance, but rather the rarely examined issue of persistence. Even though many underrepresented students of color perform just as well as their white peers by all manners of metrics, far fewer of them persist within the sciences and go on to earn a STEM-related degree. Partnering with colleagues from a variety of different STEM programs, we’ve been able to devise a project that examines and addresses institutional obstacles and inadequacies as opposed to pernicious notions of student of color deficiencies. Happily, this project was well-received by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and is among the short list of projects being considered for a one-million-dollar multi-year grant.
A second project focuses on differential outcomes for Blacks and other people of color in terms of police violence. At this point we are all painfully aware of the way Black people have been callously killed by the police. The problem, however, is not the proverbial “bad apple.” On the contrary, the problem is a system that is in many ways rotten to its core. To confront this system, I participate in vigils and marches, and make public statements and pronouncements that call out and condemn the systemic nature of anti-Black police violence. In addition, I’m working with local community leaders and holding discussions with local law enforcement officials. Finally, I’m helping a coalition of citizens, students, scholars, politicians, and criminal justice professionals craft what will ideally be a set of recommendations that will quickly lead to the abolishment of no-knock warrants in New York state and the curtailment of other practices and policies that harass and harm while feigning to serve and protect.
What motivates you to do this work?
Margaret Walker wrote a poem entitled “For My People.” In it, she describes the trials and tribulations of being Black and in the final stanza exclaims, “Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born.” Long before I encountered Walker’s poem, I was inspired by what I witnessed in my youth as the trials and tribulations of being Black and the indominable spirit of scores of Black folks who struggled so that I and others would hopefully live in a world vastly different. Chief among those who struggled before me was my grandmother. She graduated as one of only a handful of Blacks who attended an “integrated” high school. Despite the challenges she faced there in a hostile sea of whiteness, she graduated as one of the top students in her class. Nevertheless, the doors of higher education remained closed to her many years thereafter. Given that she was denied the opportunity to realize her academic potential, I relished the opportunities I enjoyed and vowed to strive to push the door open as widely as possible for others so that we as a people—we who are bonded together irrespective of hue by the common conviction that all are fundamentally worthy of equal regard and respect—could prepare ourselves to productively work in common to hasten the birth of a new and much better world.
In what ways does the work inform your teaching (or vice-versa)?
For me, life as an engaged philosopher and as a professor are inextricably interwoven. All of my teaching, both in the classroom and beyond it, focuses on self-realization with an emphasis on ethical and engaged citizenship. In short, as all of my students will report, the first thing they learn from me about critical race theory is that it’s not simply something that you study, it’s something you do!
What has been your biggest obstacle in doing civically engaged philosophy?
The biggest obstacle I have in pursuing the interests and aims of equity and justice is inertia. Whether I’m working on campus or in the broader community, I constantly find that systems of inequity and oppression have any number of ways of maintaining themselves despite professed intentions to the contrary. Moreover, the constant refrain that “we need to be reasonable”—reminiscent of what Martin Luther King Jr. characterized as the refrain that “we need to be patient and wait”—connotes the claim that doing more at this time is impossible, when in actuality delaying is more a matter of inconvenience.
What is your favorite quote and why?
In those instances when the forces of inertia prove particularly strong, I call attention to my favorite quote. More often than not, I call it to the attention of my students, for they are the ones who are going to have to continue the struggle and usher forth the new world that so many of us desperately long for. I tell them that in my office there are many books but that on my bulletin board hangs only a single quote highlighting the fact that progress is a product of struggle:
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. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Frederick Douglass spoke these words in 1857 as he called out for the collective pursuit of freedom. Today, they continue to ring true as we press for the redress of inequities and the full realization of the ideal of justice.
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