From “Dead White Males” …

Within recent moves towards ‘decolonisation’, the use of the phrase dead white males has become a quick way of summing up what is ‘wrong’ with curricula in higher education (Lea, ed., 2015). The phrase is a means of ‘identifying’ a representational problem with content (and processes) in teaching and facilitating. What students typically learn regarding their chosen academic disciplines (especially at the beginning of degree courses, in foundational years) is the product of a specific socially-produced ‘subjectivity’ – writers who are/were ‘predominantly’ (though not exclusively) dead, white, and male (and middle or upper ‘class’ in Bourdieu’s terms). The excuses for this situation include an argument that to learn the subject or discipline students require its ‘history’ (his-story), or evolution, for a full understanding of where the discipline has been and where it is going and, hence, it is deemed essential to read the works of x, y and z, all of whom just happen to be ‘dead white males’! And, of course, this is a past ‘built’ on dead white males.

I happen to think this anti-colonial criticism is valid and that the excuse or defense doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. For a start, anyone familiar with Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge will rightly ask if it can be claimed that disciplinary knowledge has ‘developed’ in such a fashion – that is, with later thinkers directly ‘building’ upon the works of earlier ones and producing a future ‘trajectory’? Yes, as one word follows the next, there is continuity, there has to be. But lauding this continuity and making it central to the future also closes off (or attempts to close off) a living social process which is filled with breaks, challenges, left-of-field notions, changes in direction, the sudden or surprise emergence of new ‘paradigms’ (Kuhn), immanent critiques (Marx), and basic contradictions (which have brought and bring the ‘forward motion’ of what happened before to a grinding halt). In short, the dialogical struggles over and inside ‘ideas’ are, perhaps, more important than presuming the continuations – despite the desire and tendency of emerging ‘ruling ideas’ to create ‘grand narratives’ explaining how they have come to be and where the subject disciplines have landed.

As Kate Raworth makes clear in her attempt to re-set how economics is taught (Doughnut Economics, 2017), Paul Samuelson (Economics: An Introductory Analysis, 1948) was aware that whoever gets ‘first bite’ at students’ understanding may set the agenda for the remainder of a student’s education and how their perception subsequently develops. Thus, the presentation of ‘grand narratives’, of where a discipline has been and where it is going, is not a politically, socially, or culturally ‘neutral’ activity. As Alexander Broadie notes with regards to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and Smith’s earlier History of Astronomy, even the reasoning of the natural scientist (natural philosopher) is not immune from the drives of moral (i.e. social) sentiment. Even physical, never mind social, scientists who claim their writings (and research) make universal ‘sense’ are underpinned by their moral sentiments – such as the passion to be known by publishing their work (otherwise they would keep their ideas to themselves)!

… to Socialising Sense

However, my approach to ‘decolonising the curriculum’ is that I won’t simply or unthinkingly accept any agenda. There is little point (or advantage) in replacing one set of ‘ruling ideas’ with that of another. The movement or agenda can and should, itself, be questioned, and remain open to challenge. Defining the ‘problem’ as being one of dead white males reproduces the identity flaws (racism / sexism) of what ‘went before’ and, in that sense, is one of those questionable ‘continuations’ where identity trumps contra-diction. The new ‘grand narrative’ appears to claim that if populations are more accurately ‘represented’ then the quality of both ideas and actions will improve. Suddenly, what is being said becomes less important (less open to scrutiny) than who is saying what, and through sentimental processes of virtue signalling, some population typologies and characters are deemed, somehow, to have more genuine experiences than others. As such, discussion is closed off. Instead of saying ‘Let’s talk about what David Hume says in relation to race’ we end up with ‘David Hume was a racist, and you must be racist for questioning that fact’.

Often, the new representatives (of populations of a different ‘type’) don’t question what has gone before. I will once again turn to Kate Raworth’s work, which I have noted, already, is praiseworthy in its questioning of how economics is taught and why it it taught that way. Raworth presents an important critical and new voice within the economics discipline, primarily noting the social bias inherent in analysing the human world as if it was a set of mathematical equations. But at the same time she uses the phrase ‘factors of production’ (p.248) without critical reference to how this concept emerged from Jean-Baptiste Say’s (1803) popularisation of Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The term appears to be accepted.

But Smith never used the phrase ‘factors of production’ and makes it clear that it is the workers (labour) who add value to stock (capital). Thus, capital may be an ‘input’ to production (a necessary one in terms of its use-value) but it is not an independent ‘factor of production’ in terms of having an ability to valorise itself (capital does not ‘add value’ to capital). The door did not take itself off its hinges, repair itself, and produce a profit. The latter sorcery was presumed by Say and mixed into an account or interpretation of Smith’s ‘economics’. Hence, Raworth brings a new perspective to economics, as a prominent female professor of economics, but she can still be questioned as to whether or not her perspective goes beyond the existing critiques of some dead white males (such as Karl Marx or Isaak Rubin).

Clearly the existing situation in higher education lacks diversity in terms of ‘role modelling’ as well as perspectives – and whilst certain past characters (the dead white males) will appeal to some students, who can easily ‘identify’ with them, there are others who will not and cannot. I teach on broad-based cross-discipline access programmes and the vast majority of students wanting to study ‘philosophy’ still strike me as being male, even in the 21st century! There might be greater gender balance in wider philosophy. At the same time, psychology appears to have a female bias. We then end up with questions about why disciplines are attracting specific sections of the community?

Clearly, there needs to be curriculum change in terms of showing how people with other / minority characteristics have vital contributions to offer and this means generating ‘role models’ so applicants are drawn to subjects – and, interestingly, this is a moral sentiment and not one connected to an abstract ability to ‘reason’ in one manner and not another (nor the debunked ‘styles of learning’). Unfortunately, when it comes to women there is a long history of their contributions being air-brushed from the disciplinary ‘textbooks’.

But, as declared, my problem is not with the analysis nor the principles of decolonisation per se but with pithy shorthand terms like ‘dead white males’ which blend (liquidize) a vast array of individuals into a single ‘category’ such that the very content of the arguments being made by diverse individuals within that ‘category’ are then lost.

The term intersectionality (coined by Kimberley Crenshaw in 1989 to refer to identities being multi-layered) then comes in to play as many ‘dead white males’ had their own ‘minority’ and/or ‘protected’ characteristics, some of which were clearly oppressed if additionally self-suppressed. John Maynard Keynes (economics), Alan Turing (computer science), and Michel Foucault (history of systems of thought) – all dead, all white – were also gay (bi-sexual in the case of Keynes). Walter Benjamin (philosophy / cultural studies) and Karl Marx (general anarchy) where both Jewish and refugees. David Hume (philosophy) and Adam Smith (morality, psychology, and political economy) were both atheists – a definite minority, or group who were ‘minoritised’ and oppressed in the 18th century.

Hence, it seems necessary to involve those who could speak in the past in our contemporary common sense. Studying such dead white males still forms part of our socialising sense. Ultimately, what is more important is what is taught about what they ‘said’ – that’s the crux of the matter. Marx and Smith form classic examples of misrepresentation and over-simplification. The aim has to be to improve our civil life by extending the capacities and abilities of citizens to interrogate and talk about social and political concerns.