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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 authors 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 Goodins 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, Goodins 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, Lebrons 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.

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Journal apologizes for Black Lives Matter issue with no black writers - New York Post

This week, the prestigious Journal of Political Philosophy published a series of articles under the heading Black Lives Matter. One problem: All the authors published in the series are white.

It gets worse. It turns out that the journal hasnt published a single article on the philosophy of race since the Black Lives Matter movement began five years ago, the Yale philosophy processor Chris Lebron found, and wrote in an open letter about the symposium (a group of papers originally presented at a conference). Voting, elections, immigration, global markets, and animals have gotten their time in the journals sun, he wrote. But the journal has failed to represent race in its pages.

And it gets still worse. The editors of the Journal of Political Philosophy have also not deigned to feature a single black philosopher in its pages. As Lebron (who is moving to John Hopkins this summer) wrote: So far as I can tell, not one black philosopher has seen her or his work appear in the pages of your respected journal, on race or any other topic.

This failure cannot be ascribed to the lack of black philosophers working on either Black Lives Matter or other areas of political philosophy. As Melvin Rogers, political science and African American studies professor at UCLA writes in his own open letter, there are prominent non-white professors at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Barnard, Michigan, and plenty of other universities who are positioned to easily say something meaningful about the [Black Lives Matter] movement and its connection to substantive normative issues. Lebron himself, for example, has recently published a book on the philosophical foundations of Black Lives Matter.

The journals decision not include any black philosophers in this symposium is not just a failure to be diverse and inclusive, but also a moral and intellectual failure.

What is so deflating about the journals misstep here, Lebron wrote, is that this contribution to the historical record is in fact a kind of replaying of history that the movement for black lives has dedicated itself to eliminating from a society struggling to be decentthe erasure of black presence when and where it counts and is needed.

The editors of the journal say theyve recognized their mistake and plan to add at least two African American scholars to their editorial board, and will work harder to feature work from non-white academics. We have learnt important lessons here and will do our utmost to avoid such oversights and errors in the future and to be more sensitive in the manner we encourage, curate, frame and present work that engages with issues of grievous and persistent injustice, they wrote.

But the issue also reflects broader concerns that philosophy as a field is too deeply embedded in its white, male cannon, and is struggling to innovate and remain relevant today. In the past month, US philosophers have been fiercely debating a newly-published article on transracialism in Hypatia journal, which evaluates whether the idea has merits similar to transgender rights. Hundreds of academics complained that the author failed to properly engage with transgender or non-white scholarship on the subject; members of Hypatias Board of Associated Editors apologized for the article and said it shouldnt have been published; and there was a massive backlash to this criticism.

In other words: A journal published questionable scholarship on a nuanced topic; those who were upset demanded censorship rather than rebuttal; and the journal was utterly ham-fisted in its response to the complaints.

Such debates in academic philosophy may seem obscure, but in the past great philosophical ideas have had impact far beyond university walls, and shaped our entire world. With glaring problems in the philosophical discourse on race and gender, apparently the rest of us will have to look elsewhere for guidance.

Correction: Hypatias associate editors apologized for the article on transracialism but did not immediately retract it, as previously stated.

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Philosophers published a Black Lives Matter series written entirely by white professors - Quartz

The Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter has scheduled a weeklong Youth Activist Camp for this summer.

A taxpayer-funded professor of pan-African studies at California State University-Los Angeles is organizing the Black Lives Matter summer camp. Its free for all Black youth, ages 10-18.

Anthony J. Ratcliff is the professor behind the Black Lives Matter summer camp, reports Campus Reform.

The Youth Activist Camp and Resistance Space 2017 will run from June 12 to June 16 (from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day), according to a Facebook announcement.

In addition to learning strategies for organizing social justice campaigns and direct action tactics, the camp will focus on community building, skill-sharing, critical literacy, public speaking, the Facebook notice says.

The Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles youth vanguard is helping to coordinate the summer camp. Prior to the start of the camp, we will invite all interested youth participants to a community assembly to decide upon curriculum and activities for the week, the Facebook message explains.

All youth attendees will be served a breakfast snack, lunch, and afternoon snack.

The Facebook announcement invites interested youngsters to fill out an online form. The webpage for the form indicates that BLMLA Youth Activist Camp 2017 Registration is no longer accepting responses.

The finals words at the end of the Facebook announcement are EDUCATE * AGITATE * ORGANIZE!!!

A $10,000 fundraising appeal to bankroll the Black Lives Matter summer camp is not going well. The YouCaring fundraiser which features a quote by Black Panther revolutionary Huey Newton has raised just $764.

The Newton quote is: The young always inherit the revolution.

On his Cal State Los Angeles webpage, Ratcliff describes himself as a critical educator and radical historian who specializes in Black feminist theory and the impact of colonialism, mass incarceration, and deportation on Hip Hop cultural production.

When not in the classroom or mentoring students, Dr. Ratcliff is an organizer with Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles, the Peoples Education Movement and the California Faculty Association.

Ratcliff obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the same public school which bestowed a Ph.D. as well as a graduate degree in advanced feminist studies upon Melissa Click, the former University of Missouri professor whothreatened a student cameraman with mob violencewhen he tried to cover student protests. (RELATED: The 9 Most Preposterous Parts Of Melissa Clicks Absurd Rsum)

Ratcliffs Facebook likes include, Anarchist People of Color, The Black Panthers: Vanguard Of The Revolution, Michael Moore and Krazy for the Kardashians

Follow Eric on Twitter.Like Eric on Facebook. Send story tips to[emailprotected].

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FINALLY! America Gets Its First Black Lives Matter Summer Camp For 10-Year-Old Kids - The Daily Caller

The Black Lives Matter movementwill receive the Sydney Peace Prize, an award given by the Sydney Peace Foundation part of the University of Sydney and be honored at an event in the city in November, the foundation announced this week.

Black Lives Matter was chosen for allegedly building a powerful movement for racial equality, courageously reigniting a global conversation around state violence and racism. And for harnessing the potential of new platforms and power of people to inspire a bold movement for change at a time when peace is threatened by growing inequality and injustice, the foundations website states.

Giving a peace prize to a group that foments violent demonstrations would be enough to give irony a bad name.

Western Australian Labor senator Pat Dodson and former winner of the Sydney peace prize told the Guardian newspaper that Black Lives Matter as a movement stands against ignorance, hostility, discrimination, or racism.

Defenders of law enforcement against the often-violent, racially charged and hateful rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement, which often openly advocates for violence against police, expressed disapproval.

Giving a peace prize to a group that foments violent demonstrations would be enough to give irony a bad name, said William Otis, a professor of law at Georgetown and a former federal prosecutor.

Still, I could see it if black lives actually mattered to Black Lives Matter, Otis told LifeZette. But if that were so, BLM presumably would want to suppress the thing that poses the most danger to young black lives murder.

We know how to suppress murder, because we did it for an entire generation, from 1991to2014, Otis continued. And we know how we did it: more police, more aggressive and proactive policing, more restraint on nave sentencing, and more use of incarceration to keep criminals away from law-abiding people, said Otis.

Tragically, these crime-suppression measures are precisely the things BLM has made a point of opposing, said Otis

As the BLM program of reducing incarceration for crime and putting restraints on police has spread, so has murder. In 2015 and 2016, for the first time in decades, murder increased in the United States for two consecutive years, Otis said. The victims are disproportionately African-American young men.

Heather Mac Donald, Manhattan Institute fellow and author of The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, attributes the decision to grant Black Lives Matter an award to the naivet of western elites.

Cultural elites in the Western industrialized world outside the U.S. are as committed as American elites are to the myth of ubiquitous white racism and to their own virtue-signaling, Mac Donald told LifeZette.

It is therefore no surprise that the left-wing Sydney Peace Foundation has chosen Black Lives Matter as this years peace-prize recipient, Mac Donald said.

The selection is galling nevertheless. Far from bringing peace to high-crime urban neighborhoods, Black Lives Matter has brought increased violence and death, as the police understandably back off of proactive enforcement under the relentless charge of racism, Mac Donald continued.

Homicides in the U.S. rose in 2015 by the largest one-year increase in nearly 50years; the additional victims were overwhelmingly black, Mac Donald said. Nine hundred more black males were murdered in 2015 than in 2014, bringing the black homicide total to 7,000, 2,000 more black victims than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined. Their killers were not the police, but criminals.

The real irony, says Mac Donald, is the tragedy of violence that grows in inner-city communities as police retreat or are forced to pull back.

"The rise in street violence has continued into the present, taking the lives of innocent children as well as of gangbangersto not one peep of protest from Black Lives Matter activists," Mac Donald said.

"BLM-co-founder Patrisse Cullors tells The Guardian that high-crime communities do not 'need police.' We are testing her claim at this very moment as police decide to stay in their patrol cars rather than getting out to question a known drug dealer loitering on the corner. The results of this tragic experiment are unequivocal: When the police back off in high-crime areas, black lives are lost," said Mac Donald.

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'Black Lives Matter' Movement to Be Awarded Peace Prize - LifeZette

The founders of The Black Lives Matter Movement Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi will be receiving the Sydney Peace Prize. Sydney, as in Sydney, Australia, a country whose reputation includes the colonization of its Aboriginal population.

Similar to the Nobel Peace Prize, the University of Sydney awards individuals who have made marked contributions towards world peace through human rights activism and combating injustice. I couldnt think of anyone more deserving of this awardand humbled by it, than these three amazing black femmes.

The trio has remained pretty low key since they founded BLM in response to the miscarriage of justice that was the Trayvon Martin trial. A wise move considering the speed which the rallying cry Black Lives Matter instantly resonated worldwide. They encouraged the statement black lives matter to stand on its own volition, and theyre certainly aware that not everyone will appreciate, respect, or accurately report on the work theyre doing.

Related: Southern Poverty Law Center To Classify White Lives Matter As A Hate Group Because They Deserve it

Although BLMs decentralized leadership approach has allowed its founding members a level of protection from the senseless scrutiny from the conservative media and our government (which has a history ofgunning down our leadersin their sleep) the lack of a central figurehead vocalizing BLMs goals has led to the commercialization of the movement as well as misinterpretations of the motives of the organization. Some folks have run off with the name printing it on shirts, writing it on walls. More dangerous, some critics, out of sheer spite, have actively sought to muddy BLMs agenda by labeling it a hate group and calling for BLMs disbandment.

By virtue of all this, the general public is misinformed. Even French Montana shouted black lives matterfor a reason unbeknownst to all of us. And, make not mistake, the reasons why black lives matter activists use that specific phrase are important.

So with this celebration near, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you all of the ways BLM is actually a peaceful organization.

Consider, firstly, the inclusiveness of the movement. If you visitBLMs official siteand click on theguiding principleslink, you will find a clear list of all the things BLM is, all the variations of blackness and marginalized identities BLM embraces. From unapologetically affirming inter-generational, queer, non-binary and transgender identity to centering the unique struggles of disabled black communities, and so many others.

Unlike its predecessors, such as the Civil Rights Movement, BLM does not have an exclusionary nail in its foundation. The founding members understand that for black lives to matter, all categories of black identity must be recognized. They understand that as a Black person shouting Black lives matter, you are subscribing to the fact that all lives will not matter until ALL Black lives matter. Not just the lives that are related to you; not just the lives of Black people like you, or who hold your values. But, all Black lives. The Black lives you appreciate and the Black lives you cant quite get are deserving of equal respect, without issue.

Consider, secondly, the kinds of events BLM sponsors. Take a look at thislist ofongoing events and initiatives which are actually sanctioned by BLM.

What about supporting black mothers, hosting nationwide teach-ins, or deepening higher-ed curriculum with BLM-themed readings translates to hate and violence? Nothing. Peace, true peace, demands this kind of work. Its essential and timely.

Lastly, consider BLMs trained instinct for self-criticism. Using an intersectional lens to frame the contemporary struggles of Blacks, BLM was the first movement to call out even the most well-meaning Black activists for their phobias, just as Kimberle Crenshaw, the founder of intersectional feminist theory, called out her white women counterparts.

People affiliated with and sympathetic toward the black lives matter struggle know that they are called upon to embody the goals set forth by Cullors, Garza and Tometi. They are required to do more than exclaim Black lives matter or add a #BLM to their Twitter bio. They are required to option transformative love and reconciliation over hate, as avenues that lead to real peace.

Real peace is only possible when we draw attention to the invisible worlds that made BLMs now famous rallying cry necessary. We come closer to its quarters when we take seriously what the name of this struggle has been trying to get across to people of privilege for years: We matter! Please dont kill us, someone will mourn us!

Those who truly understand what the BLM movement is about will continue to work on behalf of the goals discussed above. Furthermore, awarding the founding members the Sydney Peace Prize affirms the goals and the work accomplished by BLM so far have been crucial to any modern peace-building initiative.

To reiterate a point I made earlier, given Australias history of colonization and violence towards Aboriginal people, it is refreshing to witness their support of BLM.

But, why stop here? Our question now is, hey Nobelwhere you at?

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Black Lives Matter Just Won Sydney Peace Prize. It's Time To Stop Calling It A Hate Group. - Wear Your Voice