Catarina recently posted something about dimensions of exclusion in philosophy other than gender - specifically race - and perhaps coincidentally Leiter today has a link to the. Rutgers Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy
When it comes to such huge disparities as we see around race - less than 1% of professional philosophers are African America - it seems obvious that strategies like ensuring representation at conferences, affirmative action in hiring, etc. are not going to help. The problem is clearly not, or not primarily, that the few African Americans who make it into the profession are excluded once they are here, but that African Americans are not coming into the profession in the first place. (I'm not saying there is no predjudice once in, just that this is not the primary factor in this case.)
No doubt there are complex and multi-valent reasons for this, many of them structural, but my goal is not uninformed reflection on the specific causes, but rather brain-storming about possibly meaningful ways to help.
Beyond this, I want to mention a program that was carried out for about 5 years by my teacher, friend, and comrade Tamara Horowitz ( a program that ended when she died far too young). Tamara made contact with numerous colleges with a large African American population and worked to find students who showed signs of serious philosophical talent. She got Pitt to offer one extra fellowship a year to the students she found in this way. She got the entire department to agree to offer whatever remedial courses the admitted students might need in their first year - philosophical background was not a consideration, only philosophical talent. Then the students were given this offer: they would come as a provisional student the first year. At the end of that year they would either be admitted on their merits to Pitt, or the department would help them gain admission to another program, not necessarily philosophy, if it didn't work out. Among the graduates of this program are Tommy Shelby and Derrick Darby.
Such "bottom-up" approaches as Tamara's and Rutgers's strike me as the obvious strategic focus - assuming that one thinks that greater African American representation in philosophy is a good thing - and I'd love to hear of anything others are doing, or ideas for initiatives we might get rolling.
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