THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#24, SEPT-NOV/2026
Brotherwise Dispatch – In what sense do you still regard your own trajectory of thought as in dialogue with what Alain Locke discloses in his “Values and Imperatives” essay from 1935 that “All philosophies are in ultimate derivation philosophies of life and not abstract, disembodied ‘objective’ reality”?
Leonard Harris – I agreed with Locke when I first read that passage and I still agree.
One reason I argue that philosophy should be ‘philosophies born of struggle’ is that there are no non-natural queer properties. No philosophy can reveal non-existing queer properties. Properties such as justice, virtue, piety, Being qua Being, the soul, the alt-self, phenomenological consciousness, etc. do not exist. It is not only that philosophies that claim to have discovered such properties are wrong, but also that ‘philosophy’ as a discipline or reasoning activity should not make the search for queer properties a pursuit. All philosophies are the result of fallible people, struggling, and the best from those that arise from sensibility to the lived experiences of the least well-off. Fredrick Douglass was right.
One reason that the term philosophy has such a high status is that it has been purportedly a way of thinking that discovers truths that are not just abstract or general but are the kind that can tell us how to live. If we know that in all possible universes there can be no contradictions, that tells us nothing about how to live. Avoiding overgeneralizations, confirmation bias, conjunction or composition fallacy, conservation bias, availability heuristics, surrogation and using effective heuristics, logics and argumentative design are no more than methods, not surety for securing right answers.
I would say that since reading Locke I have developed a ton of ideas that are compatible with the claim he made in 1935.
BD – As the editorial architect behind the classic philosophical anthology Philosophy Born of Struggle: Anthology of African-American Philosophy from 1917, what can you share about the process of deciding who would be included in such a monumental work?
LH – The process was torturous. I looked for Black philosophers all of my early years. I used Amilcar Cabral, Franz Fanon, Angela Davis and many others in my master’s thesis at Miami University in 1970. I found Edward W. Blyden’s Islam, Christianity and the Negro Race in the main library at Cornel University in 1973. I used Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive, Rising by William J. Simmons and combed through the Crisis magazine for articles about philosophers. What I mostly found were books or articles about a scholar of one sort or another, but they really were not doing philosophy.
Works like The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters During the Crisis 1800-1860 (e.g., Carter G. Woodson, W.E.B. DuBois) were useless. Such works assumed that there was something call ‘The Negro’ as a singular population and all of its scholars and lay population had one undifferentiated common mind, common aspiration, common experiences and anyone that differed was an aberrant deviant, non-representative of the kind that stood as a shining example defeating racist stereotypes, or was simply inauthentic.
The theologians I ran across were just doing theology – bad theology at that – almost none addressed hard questions let alone showed any knowledge of the history of the Bible. I only learned about theologians such as Howard Thurman long after I finished the 1983 edition of Philosophy Born of Struggle. I just kept looking and when I found someone, they helped lead to someone else.
I was, for example, a Fellow at the Robert R. Moton Research Center for Independent Studies in Philadelphia in 1976-77, along with Lucious Outlaw and others. I learned about philosophers such as William T. Fontaine. I researched him and anyone he knew. I did not read much about Locke until 1982.
The next part of the journey was not fortuitous, but hard. I separated folks into different categories and then, in their descriptions, tried to get their ideas right. Common struggle does not produce common ideas. Folks like Berkley and Essie Eddins were in the same category as Bernard Boxill and Maulana Karenga – Ideal Theory. However, the Eddins’ were anti-liberal and not at all Afrocentric like Karenga. But they both offered ideal theories. African American philosophers have radically different philosophies even when limited to social and political issues, but nonetheless address similar themes, similar experiences and are a part of an imagined community. In later editions of Philosophy Born of Struggle I learned more about, and foregrounded, authors such as David Walker, Maria Stewart and Hubert Harrison. At the time, no one considered Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World as a philosophic text and there were no books like Brian Kwoba’s Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism or Kristin B. Waters’ Maria Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought. Now we also have such great works as Stephen Ferguson and John McClendon’s African American Philosophers and Philosophy that give a picture of the history of Black philosophers.
My project was to foreground competing philosophies within the context of African American history. One philosopher that I approached, William Banner, Chair Department of Philosophy, Howard University, refused to have his name mentioned or any of his works listed because he was not a ‘Negro’ philosopher, just a philosopher. Fortunately, he and his slavish praise of Aristotle have been relegated to the dustbin of history.
BD – How would you describe the journey of your own thought from the philosophical intensity of your early dialogues with the critical pragmatism of Alain Locke towards your later insurrectionist ethical turn?
LH – I would describe it as accidental. I wrote and published like a madman for years. In 2021, with the aid of Lee McBride and others, A Philosophy of Struggle: The Leonard Harris Reader was put together so readers could see it as a coherent body. I never thought anyone would.
A fourth of what I have written was never published. Black nor white journals were not interested. A fourth was published in Afro-American journals, off-beat journals, or by book publishers that put it into the Afro-American Studies category, e.g., The Philosophy of Alain Locke.
I would also describe it as a ‘doing’; a ‘having my say.’ In 1980, as a Portia-Washing Pittman Fellow at Tuskegee University, I had a box full of rejection letters from journal publishers. I had been trying to publish articles about a ton of white folks. One day I threw that box away and decided never again to write about, or to, people that would never write about, or to, me. Published or not. "I took to heart what my father told me: “Son, words are weapons.” And I did what my mother once told me: “Lenny, have your say.”
It got worse after that. I wrote my own philosophy. I am the author.
BD – How does the insurgent ethical turn in your philosophical discourse inform your initial approach to racism as a contested concept and now as a manifestation of “necro-being”?
LH – One does not ‘inform’ the other; each has its own history and a particular place in the theory.
(a) insurrectionist ethics did not come about as a result of thinking about racism. It came about by showing the limitations of pragmatism to deal with worst forms of misery, racism et al. The primary example was slavery – any form of slavery – whether the slave was in Ethiopia, China or America (see Lee McBride, Ethics and Insurrection: A Pragmatism for the Oppressed; Jacoby Carter, Insurrectionist Ethics: Radical Perspectives on Social Justice) We need an ethical theory that gives us the poetics to manage absolute misery and the unlikelihood of liberation and yet provide resources for solace and warrant for a slave to revolt. It’s not a position that tells you what to do, but whatever your ethical theory you have fails unless it gives a slave motivation to engage in insurrection and sees such behavior as laudable and duty bound.
(b) racism as an inherently contestable concept does not mean we cannot have a defensible view. My view is pretty clear, “Racism is a polymorphous agent of death, premature births, shortened lives, starving children, debilitating theft, abusive larceny, degrading insults, and insulting stereotypes forcibly imposed.” (Harris, Racism: Key Concepts in Critical Theory, (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books,1999 p. 437). Racism, as polyhedron, is only one variable in a vast range of sometimes ambiguous and multifarious influences of different saliences making necro-being.
(c) Necro-being, as I mean it, is intended to depict the morally worst form of subjection – death and living death in a non-moral universe. It is the material condition of absolute - without any recompense or redemption ever: indominable misery in a non-moral universe. This view is contrary to theories that consider the worst form of misery a function of alienation, exploitation, lack of civil or human rights or a violation of an imagined or real social contract. Racism, disability discrimination, sexual slavery, genocide, etc. can all be conditions that sustain conditions of necro-being.
BD – Your early canonical academic work on Alain Locke as a professional philosopher of critical pragmatism whose thought engaged with aesthetic orientations of ‘the New Negro’ subjectivity indicative of the ascendant humanity of Black community, situated against the post-World War I era of rampant lynchings and racist dehumanization, and that ultimately came to be artistically associated with the Harlem Renaissance is unimpeachable.
As such, although the relatively recent publication of The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart and The New Negro Aesthetic which he edited have been able to generate some notable literary buzz within the imperial mainstream, which included winning the 2018 National Book Award. I still regard your biographical venture with Charles Molesworth entitled Alain Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher and your definitive compilation of his thought which you also edited entitled The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, as more discursively rigorous with regards to the full scope of Locke’s philosophical thought, and hence more intellectually rewarding.
As someone who is uncontroversially regarded as the preeminent scholar of Locke’s critical pragmatist thought, did Stewart reach out to you at all during the preparation of his biography, what were those interactions like, and how would you describe any shortcomings of his celebrated work?
LH – 1. No ‘reaching out’; no ‘interactions’ of note.
2. Stewart saw our biography of Locke and well as the work of Christopher Buck on Locke and Bahá’í faith. (Christopher Buck, Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy, Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 2005).
3. I am always glad for some new work on Locke and Stewart certainly did a great deal of research. His contribution is admirable.
4. I will not offer a long critique: Stewart fails to see Locke as a philosopher in the fullest sense. He was not just a cultural agent. It is his philosophy that makes sense of his cultural work. Locke was a creator of critical pragmatism – a version contrary to John Dewey, William James and Ralph B. Perry’s versions. He’s an author of a philosophy that has universal value and thereby stretches far beyond the limitations of American situations and peoples. Locke is not just a ‘New Negro’. Locke is, for example, a seminal luminary in the Bahá’í Faith community. Locke was involved with the Bahá’í Faith almost his whole adult life. It makes no sense to treat that involvement as tangential. (see the pluralist, Volume 19, Number 2 Summer 2024, pp. 97-105 and Volume 20, Number 3 Fall 2025 : pp. 94-113)
5. Locke’s philosophy has faced in some ways the same problem that I face: Black scholars want him to be a cultural hero and that’s it – a New Negro and that’s it. Locke’s advocacy ethics not only informed his version of the New Negro, but it influenced folks in South Africa, France and the Caribbean. However, anything he has to say about valuation, knowledge, aesthetics, etc. is too often reduced to a comment on Black life, caused by his racial identity or a tool that Black people can, or should not, use to get liberated. His mode of pragmatism disappears; his struggle to create a new conception of race disappears; his controversial and complex conception of cosmopolitanism disappears. (see for his complex views Corey Barnes, Alain Locke on the Theoretical Foundations of a Just and Successful Peace, Jacoby Carter, African American Contributions to the Americas’ Culture). All the work on my conception of necro-being, as distinct from Achille Mbembé’s massive and insightful works (Critique of Black Reason, Necropolitics) to often gets reduced to a concept about racism.
I hope that the work of African American philosophers get seen as their work, their theory, their contribution, their different and unique voices.
BD – This has been another one of our BROTHERWISE FIVE interview series, during which THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH interrogates intellectuals, artists and activists with five probing questions to the delight of our readers.
On behalf of Leonard Harris and THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH,
Peace.
-A. Shahid Stover
(this interview of Leonard Harris for THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH was conducted by A. Shahid Stover through email correspondence from June 7th – June 12th, 2026.)
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