尤物视频

By Kkhemet - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 The Black United Students 1st Black culture center where many events of the 1st Black History Month celebration took place.

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Black History Month 2020

February 01, 2020
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Celebrating Black History Month with philosophers past and present suggested by faculty and grad students in the Department of Philosophy at 尤物视频.

Black History Month grew out of a proposal by black educators and students at Kent State University in 1969. This year the event focuses on , since 2020 marks the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment and votes for women, and also the sesquicentennial of the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) giving black men the right to the ballot after the Civil War. The theme in Canada is 鈥鈥.

Further reading: 'I'm used to being the only brown person in the room': why the humanities have a diversity problem鈥   --Cultural bias and a lack of plurality of voices may account for low numbers of BAME postgraduates in subjects such as history and philosophy.

Feet forward, head turned backward, the Sankofa bird reflects on the past to build a successful future.

Early Philosophers

St. Augustine

is described as the greatest Christian philosopher of the Antiquity. He was an early Christian theologian whose work influenced religious thinking well into the nineteenth century. He is also described as the first medieval philosopher, one of the earliest to think about time. Furthermore, his work, the Confessiones, which is a first-person perspective of philosophy, influenced modern autobiography.
A Roman citizen, he was born to a Berber mother in Thagaste, a town in Numidia, the Roman province in North Africa that is now modern Algeria. Contrary to how artists have represented him over the ages, there is good evidence that .
Social media image credit: [Public domain]

Zera Yacob

was a who explored religious skepticism. His 1667 treatise, the Hat盲ta (Inquiry) investigated the light of reason and has been compared to Descartes' Discours de la m茅thode.
Yacob advised following one鈥檚 own reasoning process rather than accepting the beliefs of others without question. He is also noted for his ethical philosophy around the principle of harmony, advising that an action鈥檚 morality could be judged by its effect on overall world harmony.
Social media image credit: [FAL]

18th Century

Philosophers consider the first personal slave narratives by women that were used as arguments for abolition are arguably philosophical as the key theme is human dignity. Authors Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, and also Phyllis Wheatley (philosopher and poet) wrote in the late 18th/early 19th centuries, bringing awareness to a wider public of the daily existence and often brutal hardships endured by slaves.

Phyllis Wheatley

, the first published woman of African descent, was enslaved as a child and transported from West Africa to America. She was not only , but was also the first to earn a living from writing. Her volume, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was critically acclaimed. Also an accomplished letter writer, she drew attention by calling for an end to slavery. Learn more in . 
Social media image credit: [CC0]

Mary Prince

British abolitionist and autobiographer, (1788 鈥 1833) was enslaved in Bermuda then escaped to England where she wrote her slave narrative, The History of Mary Prince. Her accounts of the violence and mistreatment she witnessed helped activate the anti-slavery movement. She was the to the British parliament.
"鈥擨 can tell by myself what other slaves feel, and by what they have told me. The man that says slaves be quite happy in slavery鈥攖hat they don't want to be free鈥攖hat man is either ignorant or a lying person. I never heard a slave say so. I never heard a Buckra (white) man say so, till I heard tell of it in England." 
Check out the honouring Mary Prince's 230th birthday.

Harriet Jacobs

(1813 鈥 1897) was the first woman to write a in the United States. She was born in North Carolina and enslaved at birth. She wrote her autobiography, under a pseudonym. Its descriptions of sexual abuse and harassment exposed the daily life commonly endured by many slave women.
Social media image credit: By Unknown - "Harriet Jacobs" By Jean Fagan Yellin, found at Google booksitem provenance: image: Illustration from page 265, Public Domain,

First PhDs

Anton Amo

(c. 1703鈥1758) was born in Ghana, West Africa. At the age of three, he was gifted to the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenb眉ttel in the Netherlands. Under colonial efforts to Christianize people in Dutch colonies, he was baptized then educated, becoming . One of his is his .
However, his first work, 鈥淒issertatio Inauguralis De Jure Maurorum鈥, argued that African kings were the same as their European equivalents and thus had been vassals of Rome. His conclusion was that by slave trade, Europeans were violating the principle in Roman Law that all Roman citizens are free. He taught philosophy for many years before returning to Ghana in around 1747.
Social media image credit: [Public domain]

WEB Du Bois

(1868 鈥1963) was born in Massachusetts, US and died a naturalised citizen in Ghana. He studied Philosophy among other subjects at Harvard, and was . He wrote extensively on issues of race, African American rights and Pan-Africanism and was a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ().
Social media image credit: [Public domain]

20th Century

James Baldwin

(1924鈥1987) was born in Harlem, New York City. As a writer, playwright and essayist he played an important role in in the US during the civil rights movement of mid 20th century. Many of his works of the time, and he was especially known for his on the black experience in America.
Social media image credits: [CC0]

Sophie Oluwole

(1935鈥2018) was the . She completed her doctoral studies at the University of Ibadan then taught at the University of Lagos (UNILAG). Her work built around Yoruba philosophy, a branch that she proposed predates Western traditions in the subject. Her book, Socrates and Orunmila: Two Patrons of Classical Philosophy examined and contrasted the two philosophers that influenced her work the most. She was an advocate for the importance of African philosophy and challenged colonial educational indoctrination that presumed that Africans were primitive and could not think.

They said Africans could not think,鈥 Oluwole told the Punch newspaper, 鈥渢hat we were not thinkers, that we were primitive. I felt challenged and said I was going to find out if truly we could not think. I wanted to prove them wrong.

Listen to Sophie Oluwole

Study Philosophy at SFU

Contemporary Philosophers

the first African-American woman to complete both a JD and a PhD in philosophy, was appointed by President Obama in 2010 to sit on the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

examines how race and gender prejudice distort within and across communities.

 specialises in political theory and the philosophy of race. His offers an intellectual history of the black lives matter social movement.

's and book,   "Focuses on subjects too often omitted from mainstream philosophy, and shows what philosophy can contribute in divisive times".

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