Looking Through Philosophy in Black

Looking Through Philosophy in Black is a compelling story of one man’s struggle for philosophy against the odds, willed by the author’s determination to think freedom under the heel of apartheid South Africa. Buoyed by the Black Consciousness Movement—the author was a classmate of the murdered student leader Abram Onkgopotse Tiro—Mabogo Percy More became a philosopher. Recognized today as one of the most important interlocutors of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness philosophy, More challenges us to reflect on “Being-Black-in-an-Anti-Black-World”—the ontological impossibility of being Black and being a philosopher—as he engages Africana philosophies born of struggle. Looking Through Philosophy in Black is a remarkable and engaging story of life and the human condition. Doggedly resisting philosophy’s epistemic apartheid, its racism and its colored-blindness, More asks us to contest the absurd mediocrity, downright incompetency and paucity of thinking in higher education and by extension in civil society. -- Nigel C. Gibson, Associate Professor, Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies, Emerson College
Looking Through Philosophy in Black: Memoirs is not only a chronicler and definer, it is a courageous narrative that takes philosophy head-on from the locus of blackness. Mabogo P. More makes a unique and extraordinary contribution to self-writing with a lucid craft that grapples with the question of being in the world. -- Tendayi Sithole, Author of Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations of Black Consciousness
A compelling account of a life lived in fidelity to the urgency of freedom, More’s autobiography is marked by a profound and sustained commitment, against the odds, to philosophy as a practice of freedom. This account of the life of the mind, made against the dead weight of racism, moves from the outskirts of Johannesburg to the world via jazz, philosophy and struggle. -- Richard Pithouse, Associate Professor, Wits Institute for Social & Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand
Looking Through Philosophy in Black is a tour de force, a work that delivers. It is a powerful existential reflection on African and Africana philosophy, and at the same time a highly revealing account of what it means to be a Black philosopher today.  -- Paget Henry, Professor of Africana Studies and Sociology, Brown University