Derrick Darby – författare

Our lives take shape around identities. Race, religion, sexual orientation, and other collective identities impose scripts that dictate how we should think, act, and associate. African Americans should support reparations and affirmative action. Evangelical Christians should associate with true believers and feel outraged by same sex-marriage. Gays and lesbians should come out and engage in LBGTQ+ activism. When identities are scripted too tightly, we get boxed in and democracy suffers.In Boxed In, philosophers Derrick Darby and Eduardo J. Martinez diagnose the profound challenge that inflexible identities pose for democracy and offer a novel prescription that involves taking up civic responsibilities to search for, make visible, and attend to group differences in background, perspective, and empowerment.Collective action to pursue common projects under an identity--an abiding feature of democratic life--requires that we break free from tight scripts. Skeptics worry that the pervasive influence of identities on political reasoning and action make them unsafe for democracy. Optimists find identities too valuable in mobilizing political action to do without. Taking lessons from both sides, Darby and Martinez contend that optimists must qualify their acceptance of identity by mitigating the dangers that tightly-scripted collective identities pose for democratic collective action when group heterogeneity is disregarded.Using a wide range of examples from fútbol fans to Jay-Z's beef with Oprah, to literal box-checking on the U. S. Census, Darby and Martinez illustrate how scripting identities too tightly can box us in and they tell us what we can do to mitigate it. Weaving philosophical analysis with empirical research on identities, coalitions, and social movements, Boxed In prescribes making identities safe for democracy by undertaking responsibilities that help us break free from tight scripts that box us in and work together while taking our differences seriously.

The United States is dogged by racism and racial disparities in income, wealth, health, education, and criminal justice. Philosophers disagree on what kind of politics is needed to address this problem. Do we pursue race-specific remedies to undo racism or do we assume the permanence of racism and opt for non-race-specific remedies in pursuit of a more egalitarian society? Paradoxically, the way to make racial progress in racist America is to downplay race.In A Realistic Blacktopia, political philosopher Derrick Darby challenges the "small tent" approach by examining U.S. Supreme Court cases on education and voting rights arguing that they hold general lessons about the limits of racial politics. Securing racial justice in racist America calls for "big tent" remedies, and Darby argues that pursuing non-race-specific remedies with maximal democratic inclusion is a necessary strategy for mitigating racial inequality and achieving racial justice.A Realistic Blacktopia offers clarity on how racism persists, contrary to claims that America is a postracial society. Explaining why the myth of postracialism cannot be ignored in crafting remedies for racial inequality, Darby supplies a principled pragmatic proposal for achieving racial justice. Drawing on the political thought of Martin Luther King Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois, and the black radical tradition, Darby also explains why achieving racial justice requires inclusive democracy.

American students vary in educational achievement, but white students in general typically have better test scores and grades than black students. Why is this the case, and what can school leaders do about it? In The Color of Mind, Derrick Darby and John L. Rury answer these pressing questions and show that we cannot make further progress in closing the achievement gap until we understand its racist origins. Telling the story of what they call the Color of Mind--the idea that there are racial differences in intelligence, character, and behavior--they show how philosophers such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and American statesman Thomas Jefferson, contributed to the construction of this pernicious idea, how it influenced the nature of schooling and student achievement, and how voices of dissent such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and W. E. B. Du Bois debunked the Color of Mind and worked to undo its adverse impacts. Rejecting the view that racial differences in educational achievement are a product of innate or cultural differences, Darby and Rury uncover the historical interplay between ideas about race and American schooling, to show clearly that the racial achievement gap has been socially and institutionally constructed. School leaders striving to bring justice and dignity to American schools today must work to root out the systemic manifestations of these ideas within schools, while still doing what they can to mitigate the negative effects of poverty, segregation, inequality, and other external factors that adversely affect student achievement. While we cannot expect schools alone to solve these vexing social problems, we must demand that they address the dignitary injustices associated with how we track, discipline, and deal with special education that reinforce long-standing racist ideas. That is the only way to expel the Color of Mind from schools, close the racial achievement gap, and afford all children the dignity they deserve.

American students vary in educational achievement, but white students in general typically have better test scores and grades than black students. Why is this the case, and what can school leaders do about it? In The Color of Mind, Derrick Darby and John L. Rury answer these pressing questions and show that we cannot make further progress in closing the achievement gap until we understand its racist origins. Telling the story of what they call the Color of Mind--the idea that there are racial differences in intelligence, character, and behavior--they show how philosophers such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and American statesman Thomas Jefferson, contributed to the construction of this pernicious idea, how it influenced the nature of schooling and student achievement, and how voices of dissent such as Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and W. E. B. Du Bois debunked the Color of Mind and worked to undo its adverse impacts. Rejecting the view that racial differences in educational achievement are a product of innate or cultural differences, Darby and Rury uncover the historical interplay between ideas about race and American schooling, to show clearly that the racial achievement gap has been socially and institutionally constructed. School leaders striving to bring justice and dignity to American schools today must work to root out the systemic manifestations of these ideas within schools, while still doing what they can to mitigate the negative effects of poverty, segregation, inequality, and other external factors that adversely affect student achievement. While we cannot expect schools alone to solve these vexing social problems, we must demand that they address the dignitary injustices associated with how we track, discipline, and deal with special education that reinforce long-standing racist ideas. That is the only way to expel the Color of Mind from schools, close the racial achievement gap, and afford all children the dignity they deserve.

What is the source of rights? Rights have been grounded in divine agency, human nature, and morally justified claims, and have been used to assess the moral status of legal and customary social practices. The orthodoxy is that some of our rights are a species of unrecognized or natural rights. For example, black slaves in antebellum America were said to have such rights, and this was taken to provide a basis for establishing the immorality of slavery. Derrick Darby exposes the main shortcomings of the orthodox conception of the source of rights and proposes a radical alternative. He draws on the legacy of race and racism in the USA to argue that all rights are products of social recognition. This bold, lucid and meticulously argued book will inspire readers to rethink the central role assigned to rights in moral, political, and legal theory as well as in everyday evaluative discourse.

What is the source of rights? Rights have been grounded in divine agency, human nature, and morally justified claims, and have been used to assess the moral status of legal and customary social practices. The orthodoxy is that some of our rights are a species of unrecognized or natural rights. For example, black slaves in antebellum America were said to have such rights, and this was taken to provide a basis for establishing the immorality of slavery. Derrick Darby exposes the main shortcomings of the orthodox conception of the source of rights and proposes a radical alternative. He draws on the legacy of race and racism in the USA to argue that all rights are products of social recognition. This bold, lucid and meticulously argued book will inspire readers to rethink the central role assigned to rights in moral, political, and legal theory as well as in everyday evaluative discourse.