Abstract

The historic institutional exclusion of Black people from academies of higher education does not entail a lack of philosophical and intellectual traditions of Black peoples. In a quest to carry out philosophical work, Black thinkers have pursued academic as well as extra-academic—those that are intellectual in their function but exist outside an institutional system of accreditation—avenues. Thus, Black philosophical traditions, in the U.S. especially, have historically emerged from within the context of Black intellectual culture rather than a white academic system. While further analyses of the forms of institutional alienation experienced by Black thinkers in the contemporary U.S. academy are necessary, they are not sufficient to understanding the histories of Black intellectual life. Thus, the author’s purposes here are to expand analyses concerning the alienation of Black intellectual thought leaders by reading Kersuze Simeon-Jones’ oeuvre together with the work of Africana philosophers Frantz Fanon and Lewis Gordon to consider the meaning of the effects of the alienation on Black intellectual thought leaders and the strategies of resistance employed to mitigate alienation. Additionally, I suggest that Simeon-Jones’s praxis of material survival should be read alongside other resistant methodologies produced by “outsider within” scholars to offer retellings of the canons within the social sciences and humanities and to produce emergent models of care that support scholars belonging to marginalized groups.