UC Berkeley

The question of what constitutes "the human" has been of pivotal import since the rise of European modernity. While what it means to be human has been claimed to be a universal concept, the human has in fact been defined in ways that have been both narrow and exclusionary, especially in regards to race. The purpose of this dissertation, a work of intellectual history, is to understand how black educational thinkers have gone about the task of not only critiquing Eurocentric ideals of humanity, but also redefining what it means to be human. Because modernity and its ensuing Enlightenment focuses so centrally on the capacity to be educated and knowledgeable, or to reason, it becomes a crucial place for black educational thinkers to intervene. Thus, black educational thinkers pose a fundamental question: How do we go about the task of understanding, creating, and articulating notions of black humanity when the very language of humanity is based on a universal that excludes? I seek to understand how race has been rearticulated as a question of "the human" in the 20th century by critical theorists and movement intellectuals by focusing on the educational thought of three individuals: W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and James Baldwin. The historicity of these thinkers illuminates a specific intellectual tradition in the 20th century concerning the relationship between blackness, universality, and the human in the modern era. Together, they illuminate a larger concern--ranging from optimism to despair--over the status of black people in 20th century America and how this status relates to educational projects. This study is important for several reasons: it shows how historical and philosophical debates concerning the human have influenced educational theory and transformation, it allows us to think about how we go about educating persons based on race and/or cultural background, and it also provides the opportunity for scholars from multiple disciplines to consider how we can go about reconciling simultaneous commitments to diversity and the assertion of universal principles of human rights.