Lesson 1: THE PHILOSOPHY OF OPPRESSION

From the ethnic categorizations on the population census influencing policy to the racially discriminatory laws of the past, the presence of black Americans has always carried political weight. It's more than just a label; it embodies a philosophy.

But where did black-oriented inequality stem from? When did humanity decide to advance at the expense of others' humanity? The theorization of mankind's entry into a structure of social progress, whether implicit or with heinous intent, also called for the degradation of a people. Rousseau famously said, "The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'This is mine,' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society." Thus, the beginning of the social contract, whether we reflect on Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, or Plato, was the beginning of institutional inequality.

In any American political philosophy course, there will be a semester filled with the "classic" work of many historical Eurocentric men who justified the role of civil society as maintaining progression. But at what cost? Rousseau and Marx offer remarkable arguments to address inequality, but so do James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis—figures you will seldom hear in the standard classroom. The lack of diversity in the analysis of human society has led to a monstrous ideology of white male-centered power structures and romanticism of so-called great nations who also commit genocide occasionally. And the worst part of it all is the impact it has on human psychology.

According to the significant work of Charles Mills, in addition to the ideological social contract, as people come together for the sake of better conditions for self-preservation, came the racial contract. This pact was also formulated and enacted amongst European Americans in the age of exploitation. To ensure Europe's economic and worldly supremacy, an agreement amongst white people that required the marginalization of non-white others was erected.

This is showcased in many international policies and audacious aggressions such as the "Open Door Policy." This policy was proposed by the United States in the late 19th century, which forced equal access to China’s markets. Then there was the Treaty of Nanking (1842) between Britain and China following the Opium Wars forced China to open several ports to foreign trade, and then sanctions put on Haiti by the World Bank and other “great nations” in hopes of dissolving the state before its next independence day celebration. Just to name a few. The racial contract is explicit in such examples but is deeply replicated implicitly in today’s society with respectability politics, institutional rules, cultural norms, and race-based expectations.

To examine one aspect of the social contract, let's evaluate the implications of the inherent value of property. John Locke’s Second Treatises of Government chapter 2 receives great praise for his illuminating declaration of the laws of nature being life, liberty, and estate, against injuries of other men including killing. This ideology of labor mixed with land produces entitlement, greatly tying the value of man to its proprietorial worth. This leads to the idea that “you are who you are because of the space you are part of and its properties.”

This notion of labor and property begins to be reshaped as Europeans embark on conquest as they narrativize foreign spaces as the pre-sociopolitical “state of nature” in comparison to what they deem as the post-sociopolitical locus of “civil society,” that being Europe. To clarify the connection, the wilderness environment denoted nonwhites as savage while white Europeans were civil because of the idea of the “state of nature.” This has an epistemological effect as Europe adopts the idea of preemptive restriction of knowledge, denying intellectual progress to those spaces, in addition to ethnocentric actions of ignoring, appropriating, and destroying evidence of so-called foreign myths such as Aztec manuscripts.

These actions eliminate the real and valuable knowledge of non-European worlds. It also took shape in a moral way, as European maps perpetuated a “geography of monstrosity,” making non-European spaces demonized and developing a “need” for redemption. This all justified the exploitative white man’s burden as they mixed their unwanted labor into the lands and minds of foreign communities, taking the product of their deeds as property.

European philosophy is the root of othering and a racially unequal reality.