Can You Be a Philosopher When the World Calls You a Problem?
How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?
In 1903, a young scholar named W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) asked a strange question. He invited his readers to imagine what it felt like to be treated not as a person but as a problem. He wasn’t talking about bad grades or misbehavior. He meant something deeper: what if the society around you looked at you and saw something wrong—something that needed fixing—simply because of the color of your skin? That question is one of the starting points for Africana philosophy.
Africana philosophy is a field of philosophical research that tackles the problems faced and raised by the African diaspora—the communities of people of African descent who have been scattered across the globe by history. But it’s not just a list of troubles. It also asks how those very troubles shape the way people think, know, and live. It’s a philosophy that grew out of real struggle, and it often begins with this unsettling feeling: that you are seen as a problem before you even open your mouth.
Being a Problem, Facing Problems, Raising Problems
To understand Africana philosophy, you have to see that being called a problem isn’t just a feeling—it’s tied to real historical events. For centuries, European powers colonized much of Africa and enslaved millions of African people. They treated human beings as property and built systems that said Africans and their descendants were less than fully human. Du Bois knew that in such a world, Black people were forced to live as representatives of a society’s moral failures—carrying the weight of being seen as the source of trouble, not as individuals with their own lives.
The thinker Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), a psychiatrist and philosopher from Martinique, put this even more sharply. He observed that in a world shaped by colonial racism, when a Black person tried to reason, they were often ignored or dismissed. He wrote that it was as if reason itself walked out of the room whenever he entered. This wasn’t because Black people lacked reason. It was because the world had been built to assume they were incapable of it. Here we see a second layer of the problem: not just facing hardship, but being treated as a walking problem.
And that leads to a third layer: raising problems for mainstream thought. When Africana thinkers insisted on being taken seriously, they forced philosophy itself to face uncomfortable questions. Why had entire traditions of African thought been ignored? What did it mean for knowledge if whole groups of people were assumed to be non-thinkers? Suddenly, the existence of Africana philosophy became a challenge to the narrow ways the world had defined who counts as a real philosopher.
Can a Person “Without Philosophy” Do Philosophy?
For a long time, European and American universities—many of them built with colonial power—claimed that Africa had no real philosophy. They said African cultures were full of myths, proverbs, and songs, but not rigorous thought. So the very first battle Africana thinkers had to fight was simply to show that they could do philosophy at all.
This sparked a big debate. Some thinkers, often called ethnophilosophers, argued that deep philosophical insight was already alive in African communal traditions—in parables, poetry, and the wisdom passed down through generations. Others, like the Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji (born 1942), pushed back. He insisted that true philosophy required individual, critical reasoning; collecting folk sayings wasn’t enough. The real problem, many later argued, was that the standards for what counted as “real” philosophy had been set by the very cultures that had colonized Africa. So Africana philosophers had to challenge those standards while also doing original, careful work. They had to prove, again and again, that their questions were as tough and their arguments as sharp as anything found in European thought—and that their traditions of questioning had been there all along.
A Philosophy Born of Struggle
Because Africana philosophy grew out of histories of enslavement, colonialism, and racism, it’s often called a philosophy born of struggle. It doesn’t treat questions as idle puzzles; it tackles them because lives depend on the answers. Ask yourself: What does it mean to be human? That question gains a terrifying urgency for people who were legally classified as property. How do we know what we know? That matters acutely for communities whose knowledge was dismissed as superstition. What does it mean to be free? That question is not abstract when you live under constant threat of violence or exclusion.
Many Africana philosophers also do what scholars call theoretical archaeology—digging up and recovering the forgotten contributions of African-descended thinkers. They show that figures like the scholar Alexander Crummell (1819–1898) or the feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins (born 1948) were doing sophisticated philosophy, even when the academic world refused to notice them. Collins, for example, explored how Black women’s experiences give them unique insights into how knowledge works and how power shapes who gets to be believed. This is one form of epistemology—the study of knowledge—applied directly to the struggle for justice. The field keeps expanding its canon, recovering voices that were always there but had been pushed aside by what some thinkers call epistemic imperialism: the way dominant ways of knowing can erase others without anyone even noticing.
Why It Still Matters
Africana philosophy is not just about the past. It still forces us to ask: Who gets to be heard as a thinker? What does it take for someone’s ideas to count as “real” philosophy? Maybe you’ve had the experience of being dismissed because you’re young, or because of where you come from, or because people assume you don’t know much. Africana philosophy reminds you that those assumptions can be fought with careful, courageous thinking. It shows that some of the most powerful ideas emerge when people refuse to accept being treated as a problem. Du Bois, Fanon, and the generations after them didn’t just answer the question of whether Africana people could do philosophy—they changed what philosophy can be. And that inheritance belongs to anyone willing to think hard about the problems that shape our world.
Think about it
- Have you ever felt that your ideas were ignored because of who you are, not what you said? What might it feel like to be treated as a “problem” in someone else’s eyes?
- Can a proverb, a song, or a story carry a philosophical idea just as well as a formal argument? Why or why not?
- If an entire community’s way of thinking had been pushed aside for centuries, what might be lost—and what would it take to recover those ideas?
