Navigating (Living) Philosophy: Playing in a Rigged Game

Dear Green BIPOC Philosophers, Thank you for having a mustard seed’s worth of faith that philosophy can diversify and for tenaciously continuing to show up. You’ve beaten the odds, and I’m guessing it’s not been easy. In the next twenty years, your staying-power will be tested, so I hope that some of what I have […]

Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Truth

As a student, I was never introduced to the work of Martinican philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. I read Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth on my own during my Ph.D. in Paris, and since then Fanon’s ideas have constantly accompanied and deeply shaped my own philosophical thinking. With one exception, […]

Children’s Mental Health, Institutional Gaslighting, and Mother-Blame

There is a class action lawsuit against Iowa over failure to provide legally-required and medically necessary mental health services for Medicaid-eligible children. As a mother of an adult son with severe childhood-onset mental illness, I have mixed emotions. I am angry that it took so long and is too late for my son, relieved there […]