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Journal apologizes for Black Lives Matter issue with no black writers

Talk about missing the point.

An international journal devoted to politics and philosophy is apologizing for publishing an issue on the Black Lives Matter movement without a black author’s perspective, calling the glaring omission a “grave” oversight.

Robert Goodin, editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy, posted an open letter to apologize on a philosophy blog on Thursday after a professor of African-American studies and philosophy at Yale and others criticized the absence of black voices in its June issue.

“We accept the point eloquently and forcefully made by our colleagues that this is an especially grave oversight in light of the specific focus of Black Lives Matter on the extent to which African-Americans have been erased and marginalized from public life,” the apology reads. “Part of the mission of the JPP is to raise awareness of ongoing injustices in our societies. We appreciate and encourage having an engaged and politically active scholarly community willing to hold everyone working in the profession to account.”

To avoid such gaffes in the future, the journal has scheduled a meeting with its editors to review procedures for its symposiums, which are “plainly inadequate,” according to Goodin’s statement.

The journal will also invite at least two African-American philosophers to its editorial board, which currently consists of six people of color, but no African-American thinkers.

“More generally, we will be working harder to encourage work from philosophers and political theorists of color as we have done with women and young scholars in the past, and we will revise our editorial guidelines to reflect this commitment,” Goodin’s statement continued.

The striking exclusion of black voices in the issue caught the eye of Chris Lebron, an assistant professor at Yale who recently published a book on the philosophical foundation of the movement.

“So, if you might – please do – try to imagine my distaste when it was brought to my attention that your journal published a philosophical symposium on ‘black lives matter’ with not one philosopher of color represented, without one philosopher of color to convey her or his contextualized sense of a movement that is urgently and justifiably about context,” Lebron wrote. “It certainly cannot be said there was no one to ask. I should know.”

Lebron, who will join Johns Hopkins University as an associate professor of philosophy later this summer, also claimed that the quarterly journal has not published a single essay on the philosophy of race, despite articles on other topics like voting, elections, immigration and even a special issue on philosophy, politics and society.

“You can see, then, how at this point the generous reading of the mishandling of the symposium comes under significant pressure,” Lebron’s post continued. “So much pressure, in fact, that it becomes compressed into something else: strained hope. The hope that intelligent and imaginative people can see the landscape of morality in its complexity and be sensitive to life-worlds beyond their range of experience.”

A message seeking additional comment from Goodin was not immediately returned.