Africana Thought and African Diasporic Studies

Abstract

much intellectual work with regard to black people. They are: 1) the appeal to reductionistic experience and 2) the retreat to disciplinary decadence. 1) Reductionistic experience undergirds the study of black people with the credo that black people offer experience whereas white people offer theory. The impetus for the turn to experience is not in itself insidious. After all, for a long time there was the denial of black inner life, of black subjectivity; the notion of a black person's point of view suggested consciousness of the world, which would call for dynamics of reciprocal recognition. Thus, it made sense to point out blacks' experience of the world, and ethnography in the study of black folk prevailed. When the question of philosophy emerged in the study of black experience, the result was the well-known appeal to ethnophilosophy, the unanimistic notion of black collective philosophical worldviews. There are, however, obvious problems with such an approach to the study of black folk as the primary approach. The obvious problem is the nature of experience itself. We have all had the experience, for instance, of trying to figure out our experience. In such cases, we seek the interpretive support of others: Something just happened and I can't quite figure out what it was... It is not enough to have an experience; it is also important to interpret it. If black experience relies on white thought, then the relationship would be one of dependency. Beyond the obvious