What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher?

In this interview, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, talks about being a Nigerian immigrant in Cincinnati, high school violence, hoarding Pop-Tarts, 9/11, the Nigerian Civil War, issues with authority, Indiana University, the death of his mom, music, politics and the invisible lever pullers, going to UCLA, working with A.J. Julius, how his work in social and political philosophy is informed by German Transcendentalism, transformational justice, antagonistic security, getting a gig at Georgetown, George Floyd, Rodney King, and the political half-life of protests, bargaining for the common good, Amílcar Cabral, the Affordable Care Act, Trump, Biden, tempeh, and what question he would ask an omniscient being…

[12/31/2020]

So, where did you grow up? What was your family like?

I grew up in the affluent suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio to a devout Christian family of Nigerian immigrants. My two older siblings were born a year apart - I was born seven years later, so the considerable age gap made some things difficult. I had a fairly racially segregated social life - much of what I did with my family was in the fairly sizeable (from a kid's perspective, at least) Nigerian diaspora community in the tri-state area. But we lived in a white neighborhood, and I was one of a handful of Black kids in my elementary and middle schools.

Were you religious? Are you religious?

I'd say I still believe, but haven't been to church in a while - problems with authority.

How are the experiences of a first-generation Nigerian immigrant different from the experiences of other immigrants, you think?

The main difference, I think, is the huge gap between the stereotypes and the reality - or at least that's how things look to me, since I did the expected middle-class Nigerian thing of getting hypereducated. With East and South Asian first-generation immigrants, there's a "model minority" myth going on, so when you have high academic expectations and reach them then there's probably a predictable range of reactions which can trivialize those achievements and marginalize people that don't fit that mold. But Nigerians are Black, so things are a little more complicated. Nigerians are actually the most educated of immigrant populations by some measures (largely, I think, because of the filtering structure of immigration law and the classed selection bias of who is able to come here). Among Black people there's some awareness of this, particularly among those who went to college. Amongst non-Black people, though, I think there's much less awareness of that and a more common response is confusion at the Nigerians who achieve its internal class aspirations and lack of surprise at those who don't.

What did your parents do for a living?

My parents both came here for grad school but my mom got the job that kept us in the country. My dad stayed home with us much of our childhood, later did some computer engineering work. My mom was a pharmacologist.

How are most similar and dissimilar from your siblings?

I’m a lot like my brother, I think. Conversation with him is pretty intensely focused on questions. He’s autistic (“functioning” labels have come under well deserved criticism, I think, so suffice it to say that conversation with him is unambiguously different than with people who are neurotypical or ‘pass’ as neurotypical) so his version of this often takes the form of direct lists of questions. I meander a bit more than he does, but both of us are hyperfocused on knowing, often for its own sake. My sister was always a bit more pragmatic – always a good student, always thinking ten plus years ahead, a real planner. I’ve tried to become more like her as I’ve gotten older and began to appreciate the wisdom of that.

So, what was on your mind a kid?

I always liked to think about things, and was a fairly bookish kid, but mainly read science fiction. I fell in love with Ender's Game, and the Star Wars expanded universe. I was very into video games, and also soccer (in fact, for much of my childhood I wanted to grow up to play pro - a lofty goal for a fat kid).

Love Star Wars. Favorite video game in high school?

Super Smash Bros. Melee! I got pretty okay at it.

Into music back then?

Always, but my parents started me off on classical piano, which I hated and didn't value till much later. But I played saxophone in band as soon as they'd let me, which got me into jazz. From there I was always into listening, if nothing else.

What were you listening to?

Jazz, funk, and hardcore hip hop to a much lesser extent the more instrumentally focused R&B - basically Black music from 1970-96.  Herbie Hancock, the Brothers Johnson, Jedi Mind Tricks, Outkast, Patrice Rushen, Sade.  Some pop here and there: Michael Jackson of course (didn’t get into Prince until much later).

Gotta love Prince! High school…good experience? Challenges?

High school was a mess. I decided I had had enough of being the only Black person around. We moved to Indianapolis, at which point I demanded to go to the nearest high school in the city rather than attend high school in the suburb we moved to. It was an extremely formative political experience. The Nigerian community was class diverse but we at least had nationality and the immigrant or first generation experience in common. This was my first time going to school with a critical mass of people who really weren't from the same class as I was. A lot of things about this were extremely difficult - I wasn't particularly socially adept and I had never really been responsible for my own physical safety from violence before. But a lot of things were great, including that this experience, and reflecting on it over the years, helped disabuse me of a lot of the illusions I had absorbed about what American life was like. Also, a white supremacist organization left literature on our driveway - one of my earlier memories is finding it when I went outside to wait for the school bus. Never really trusted most of my neighbors after that. Beyond that, mostly the normal nerd kid things - humiliation, loneliness (in high school, add getting jumped).

Crazy. Scariest stuff that went down in school?

The fights usually had a ceiling of violence things didn't progress past, but one time a kid got picked up and slammed on his head directly in front of me in a particularly dangerous looking way - that definitely made an impression.

Did you get jumped?

Nope!

Great! Best part of high school in the city?

More interesting stuff going on artistically, I think. I developed a lot of the musical sensibility I have now while I was there, the other band kids would show me different things (mostly artists I hadn't heard of, sometimes technique).

How would you describe your musical sensibility?

Pretty tough to describe. Somewhere between The Roots and Miles Davis, maybe, in terms of participation in musical tradition (especially Black ones) alongside an eagerness to experiment and blend traditions.

Thinking about politics?

9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan was a big wake up call politically. When I learned we were going to war, I started stashing all the non-perishable food I could find (mainly Pop-Tarts) in my room. My parents were at first confused by this - then beside themselves laughing as I explained myself. My understanding of what war was was the work of imagination, based on stories my mother had told me about the Nigerian Civil War. But this war wasn't going to affect us - at least, not in that way. When you're American, war is something that happens to other people, somewhere else. Part of the point of their immigrating here, I remember thinking many years later, was to become the sort of people that war didn't happen to.

How old were you during 9/11?

I was 11.

Memorable stories your mom shared about the Nigerian Civil War?

She once told a story of how the family used to have a piano but had to run and leave it behind when the war started. She was trying to get me to appreciate having the opportunity to take lessons. Didn’t quite work on 6 year old me, but it definitely left an impression – ended up being a framing story for one of the chapters of my dissertation, “British Petroleum”, actually!

What would the person you were in high school make of who you are now?

The high school version of me was a loner, not particularly applied at anything or studious school wise. He was very independently curious, but had, uh, issues with authority. High school Femi would be very surprised that things worked out, I think, that adult Femi found a job where he didn't *quite* have a boss in the standard sense.

What were your issues with authority?

I've just always hated being told what to do, but especially being told what to think (and my parents tried for a while! maybe cultural.) I'd always argue. To me, part of the point of knowing things and reasoning was that you couldn't be dictated to with respect to that fact - the most an expert or authority could do was suggest a perspective for you to evaluate and then sign on to. That's still very close to how I think about things, and fundamental to my political outlook.

Did you start thinking about what you wanted to do in college, if college was even on the table?

I was raised in a house where the question was which college (preferably an Ivy) rather than whether. That said, given the whole immigrant thing, I was mainly left to my own devices to figure the system out. I applied to the state school (Indiana University) and some Ivies. Mostly rejections (tested well but didn't apply myself gradewise), but I got into IU with a scholarship and a couple very expensive schools. I remember getting into Washington University in St. Louis, which I thought seriously. I decided that the scholarship seemed like a prudent choice - a decision which to this very day shapes my economic life in ways that are frightening, given how little about student debt anyone ever told me.

Was college what you expected?

I'm not sure I had many expectations about college, except the unshakeable expectation that it was the next thing to do. I really got into economics at first, and just started taking philosophy classes because I was frustrated by what assumptions I felt my economics classes were making about the world and didn't want to have to take their word on what assumptions were licensed.

What sorts of assumptions?

That problems (poverty, underemployment, etc) in the Third World were entirely reducible to mistakes present day people were making. Wasn’t a lot of history discussed in these classes.

Inspirational teachers, classes?

I had a number of economics teachers, like Elyce Rotella, Gerhard Glomm, Ed Buffie, who really made me feel like I could learn it. I hadn’t realized until I studied it how much of an issue math anxiety was for me until college and grad school, and how difficult it was for me to take myself seriously in that domain. But it’s a skill like any other – I practiced, I got better, I got through the classes.

I also got really into debate in college, and back into music towards the end of it. I was fairly directionless and unmotivated in high school, so while my parents still wanted me to become a doctor, I think they didn't push too hard - maybe they weren't sure I would finish school at all. Then towards the end they had bigger things to worry about, as my mom contracted cancer (from which she died), so there wasn't too much scrutiny on my decision to go to grad school.

Sorry about your mom, man. Terrible. How did you cope?

Not sure that I did, honestly. It was a fairly destructive time in my life. Music helped to some extent, though - always has, hopefully always will.

Tell me a bit more about your involvement in music. Does it inform your philosophical work? How does your philosophical work inform your music?

They’re pretty joined in my head – I rarely do a big project in one without doing a parallel project in the other. My approach to both is pretty chemical, I think: I think less about creating something new out of nothing (nobody does that!) and more about combining things that already exist in interesting ways. Some things work, some things don’t, but you don’t know till you try, I think!

I like it. How did you get into philosophy, exactly?

I wanted to understand how the world worked, in something of a systematic way. I had thought economics and political science were what you’d need to know, but I was a bit impatient with the textbooks – their assumptions seemed to background stuff that I thought should be foregrounded. I just figured philosophy was the place you went to think about background assumptions.

So, you were involved in politics in college.

I was always thinking about politics but participating in very different ways than now - I wrote a letter to the Democratic Congressional Campaign the summer before my freshman year and spent a lot of time working in the Democratic party machine that first semester, which was the semester Barack Obama was running for president. Later I interned in the Office of Management and Budget in Washington DC for a semester. Both of these experiences in particular informed a lot of how I think about politics now - I met a lot of great people who genuinely believed in what they were doing, and worked very hard to do it, but who were often so far removed from the decisions that structured what they were doing that they essentially had to trust that they were being used effectively by invisible lever-pullers (trust which I would come to believe was misplaced). The combination of these experiences while studying econ pushed me in the structural direction of thinking about politics, which is where I've stayed.

Why do you distrust the invisible level pullers?

Their decisions have never made sense to me - I felt frustrated by the (I thought) more important questions seemed to me to get ignored entirely, in favor of what struck me as bean counting. Why worry about designing a food stamp system to be abuse-proof if you haven't designed it to solve the social problem it's about in the first place (food insecurity)? There were a lot of priorities that didn't seem to add up.

When did you decide you wanted to do the grad school thing? What was the aim, going to grad school?

I just always assumed I’d do something after undergraduate, given the hypereducated folks and the cultural pressures I grew up around. It was always about deciding what. Going into college law seemed pretty practical, but by the end of it I wasn’t interested and I was very taken in by the first philosophy courses I took.

What was UCLA like?

UCLA was a fairly analytic department.

Good atmosphere?

I think folks were willing to have conversations about a lot of things, but I went outside the department for most of the history and cultural studies that informs my work. That was the principal challenge for me in grad school - I knew what I wanted to work on and what I wanted to say, but I didn't know how to say it in ways that get uptake in analytic circles, because those weren't usually the rooms where this stuff was getting talked about my advisor A.J. Julius’ classroom being an important exception. A.J.'s class was explicitly talking about these things, so these were always the rooms where I could get down to business. But other classes connected less directly, which meant more work for me to actively connect the dots and made it harder to talk to other students about what I was thinking.

What was on your mind?

I was thinking about the things I write about now: race and colonialism, in very concrete ways, how resources and infrastructure are globally distributed; policing, and what to do about it; tangible questions about how institutions function and how they ought.

Other than A.J. who else did you bounce ideas off?

I got a lot of help on this from my dissertation advisors, Daniela Dover, as well as Josh Armstrong (who was on my committee), and Barbara Herman (who was not), were the main people I went to to talk philosophy, all great. Grad student wise, I mainly hung out with the other lefty grad students of color.

What advice to Dover, Armstron, and Herman give you?

I think Dover helped me reconcile this with my more abstract inclinations as a transcendental philosophy stan, by helping me work on some of the less clear communication habits I had picked up from there. Armstrong really helped with the communication and philosophy of language stuff. That's helped me when I was working on "Beware of Schools Bearing Gifts" and "The Empire Has No Clothes". Herman, along with A.J., helped convince me that it was less important than I thought it was that I work on what other people were working on, and more important that I work on what I was working on well. I took that to heart, I think.

What’s Herman like?

She seemed pretty laid back and plain spoken, which isn’t the personality I usually associate with people that smart. I found that refreshing, since so much of the academy is so culturally uptight and alienating.

Totally. How does German transcendental philosophy inform your work?

Ultimately, I think it's mainly my problems with authority worming their way into my kind of methodological predispositions. Like them or hate them (and I have a very tumultuous relationship with Kant), the German transcendentalists were methodical. They gave you the whole picture, whether you wanted it or not. Systematicity in my mind is a form of accountability, a way of saying "here's the most complete picture I can offer you of what I've taken on board and what I'm responsible for making coherent". While I haven't yet written much in the way of a direct response to these folks, a lot of my core ideas were formed in response to Kant and Fichte, stuff like that.

What are your core ideas?

I'd say I have a few core ideas and recurring themes. One that I don't talk explicitly about are narratives - since I am not quite sure what they are yet, I'm more comfortable talking about politics as processes. Essentially, political power accumulates across massive timescales, much larger than the ones folks usually uses when evaluating the institutional arrangements that history makes possible. It's hard to study colonialism without this kind of thought in mind, and hard to relate it to other discussions in political philosophy without getting this thought on the table. Another core idea is about materialism and security (working on a piece for Aeon that discusses this at length), which was a big theme in my dissertation and something I hope to come back to working on. I'm trying out a way of understanding political institutions and even social divisions as divisions in the production and distribution of security.

Interesting! Related to current events?

That relates to how I think about police brutality: I think that police exist to secure things for elites by way of distributing precarity to non-elites (what I think of as an "antagonistic security" mode of production). Ultimately, I'm an abolitionist - I don't think the police really should exist as such. But that's because of the way I've just described their functional role. That's the thing, at bottom, that has to change - we shouldn't have a society that's based on securing those who are already safest in this cannibalistic of a fashion. But we should have collective ways of keeping each other safe, which is a thing violence interruptors and folks that think about transformative justice have thought a lot about. We'll need to wrench the power over the resources that police have from elites to get that done. What that means, to me, is community control over police.

But that's not just true about police: land, housing, so many aspects of our society are set up to make security for some in this antagonistic way. Community control is a broader ethos against that sort of thing, I think the right positive statement of the ethos for which "abolitionism" is maybe a negative statement. There's a great article in The Nation that describes the broader perspective and political pattern that community control over police fits into.

How do you choose what to focus on philosophically? How do history and cultural studies influence your work?

I've never really stopped asking the questions that got me into philosophy in the first place - why are these places and people poor and disempowered, and those other ones rich and empowered? I focus on whatever helps me answer those questions, or the related ones that I've developed over the years. As such I don't track disciplinary boundaries super closely. It was obvious to me early on in my graduate program that I'd need a lot of history and cultural studies to answer those questions, and so those are the things I read primarily.

What was your first publication on? Proud of it?

It was "Beware of Schools Bearing Gifts: Miseducation and Trojan Horse Propaganda" - about Carter G. Woodson on education. He's always struck me as a practical, grounded thinker and so I think it was a good place to start for me, as that's something I aspire to. He was a historian and his political views on education systems come from a sort of long term, large scale view of how civilizations and the peoples within them rise and fall, advance and are set back. I think that kind of background, big-picture thinking is something historians are well trained to do and is another aspiration of mine.

Did you teach?

We did TA ships but rarely taught our own courses.

What was the job market like when you finished?

Honestly there's little informative I can say about the job market because I experienced such a bizarro world version of it. In the political atmosphere that came after Trump was elected I think there was an upswing in philosophy of race and social justice relevant hiring lines. I didn't find out about this because I was paying attention - I just happened to be at a philosophy conference with Ellie Anderson, who mentioned that there was hiring happening in my area and encouraged me to look into it. I was a fourth year at this time and had just started thinking about really getting into my dissertation, I wasn't thinking about the job market seriously at all, at least in the short term. I put out a handful of applications after following her advice, just figuring that it couldn't hurt and that I'd learn something for when I was really on the market, and got intensely fortunate to get interviewed and then offered a job by Georgetown.

Surprises at Georgetown? Favorite parts? Challenges?

Continually impressed with how much is happening and how involved students are (which is also my favorite part). The biggest challenge is adjusting to the rank shift - people treat you differently on this side of things, and my sort of internal picture hasn't changed much. There's also some cultural baggage: I have colleagues whose PhDs are older than me, and I'm expected to talk to them as though we're equals in a sense (for Yoruba people, age hierarchies are a bigger deal than they are over here).

How does that square with your resistance to authority?

Pretty consistently weirded out by the authority I have now and consistently anxious about it. I don’t see any simple solution – obviously lording it over people is pretty inconsistent with my politics and sense of ethics, but so is pretending it doesn’t exist. 

Teaching philosophy?

I mostly just try to convince students that questions are worth asking, and worth asking by them - less interested in what they say or even what they learn (in the fact acquistion sense of "learning") and more concerned with what relationship to their own thoughts and accountability for them that they develop. Curiosity and accountability, I hope, do the rest of the work from there.

You've done a bit of public philosophy. How is your approach different when you do public philosophy?

I don't tend to focus on advocacy or even information with students. These are central to how I think about public philosophy. When you're doing public philosophy, the focus is on participating in public life rather than preparing people for it (as one does in school). This isn't as different from the classroom as I've made it sound - people often don't think of themselves as directly enacting norms or reproducing institutions (through action or inaction). But that's how I think of even very mundane actions, from a political philosopher's perspective, and so there's an element of trying to raise curiosities and tell compelling stories that get people to think more critically. So it's ultimately a difference in emphasis rather than categorically different approaches.

Thoughts on George Floyd? Have you attended any protests?

Yeah, I've been out there. DC was a warzone for a time there, and protests are still ongoing. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, countless others - very deep indictments of how very broad systems work. Spectacular police violence is the tip of a very large iceberg, but I'm impressed and hopeful about the force of the popular reaction to it. I'm also worried about our window of opportunity - it seems like every decade or so, the broader public re-learns that police brutality is a major issue. Rodney King and the LA riots happened when I was very young, and the uprising in Cincinnati (near where I lived) in 2001 after the police killed Timothy Thomas was a formative political experience. But things were out of control for a while, then reverted - now Over-the-Rhine, where the murder happened, is a trendy nightlife spot. So part of me worries that this will be just another flash in the pan, from a longer view of history.

What are you working on nowadays? Excited?

Primarily climate justice, so "excited" doesn't seem like the word. But, as with policing, I'm at least made somewhat hopeful by the quality of recent organizing and scholarship around climate. In particular, I've been trying to learn more about Bargaining for the Common Good, an approach to bargaining that puts workers in connection with community organizations to develop and fight for demands. This approach was used in what LaborNotes called the "first climate strike" (hopefully not the last!). When I heard about this, I thought: "wow, the people working on this might literally be saving the world right now." That's still what I think.

What do you do to unwind nowadays?

Play guitar or instruments when I’m at my best – otherwise, binge watch anime and manga.  Am rewatching much of Naruto: Shippuden now, and am reading Vinland Saga.

How do you feel about philosophy and philosophers on twitter and social media in general, such as the philosophy blogs?

So far, philosophy has good norms about argument and such. Can't say the same for much of social media, so there's a bit to be worried about. But my experience with philosophers on these platforms has largely been positive.

Thoughts on academia in general?

As a member of the academy, I hope that it can both corral more public support (and thus become a less exploitative work place and learning environment) and earn it (by being less concerned about itself and more responsive to people who aren't in the academy). So if I have any goals as an academic, they're just to be part of a better collective than the one we have now.

Best philosopher? Worst philosopher? Best philosopher you disagree with most?

I can't say I like any philosopher more than Amílcar Cabral (I guess some people will dispute that he's a philosopher, but fuck ‘em). I dunno if I have a worst philosopher - I'm angriest at Kant, but that's partly because of how close I think he was to getting something important right!

What are a few things most philosophers are wrong about?

I disagree with social/political philosophers about priorities, I think. That disagreement relates to one concerning which are the hard questions that require lots of complicated gazing and which are the easy questions that don't. "The Empire Has No Clothes" is partially about this - I think a lot of work has gone into identifying subtler and subtler parts of power structures. But I don't think that's where the action is, because the power that matters is typically in the institutions where power is most naked: zooming in on the institutions and norms that structure our interactions, figuring out how they got there and what to do about them. Identifying the knee on George Floyd's neck is the easy part. Thinking up fancy names for it doesn't help.

Right!

What we could do about the police, tracking the specific story about how we got this version of them, how we could get something else, what the institutional pros and cons of different approaches are - those are hard, drastically understudied problems, if you ask me. These are the questions our field should be asking, if you ask me.

How's the quarantine treating you? What are you listening to nowadays? Watching? Reading?

I'm making it. Into comics these days! In particular, I've been reading a bunch of Jason Aaron's stuff - Southern Bastards, Scalped, The Other Side. Unbelievable. Also been re-watching The Wire - whatever complaints people have about it, it's one of the most interesting and overall best portrayals of how institutions function that I've ever seen.

Southern Bastards is great! What was your election night like, in 2012? 2016? Feeling good about 2020?

2008 was incredible - Indiana had gone blue for the first time in a long time, and we were part of it. 2012, the sheen was starting to wear off. I was in DC for the Affordable Care Act passage - I can't say that I saw the writing on the wall or anything like that, but the compromises were starting to taste funny. By 2016 I was fairly solidly against both parties, but still taken aback by how the WWE guy ended up in the Oval. Honestly I'm somewhat relieved we had an election this year!

Was Trump that surprising though, all things considered?

Can never put anything past this country!

Optimistic about Biden/Harris?

No.

Last meal?

Tempeh stir fry and red lentil pasta (I've lost all the arguments to vegans so I'm trying to be more plant-based these days).

If you could ask an omniscient being one question, and get an honest answer, what would it be?

"Is moral realism true?"

What happens if you get a ‘no’?

I’d owe Liam Kofi Bright a soda, I guess!

Ha! Thanks Femi!