RATIONAL MANLINESS AS GOODNESS: RESPONSES TO INTERSECTIONAL DOMINATION AND THE PRESERVATION OF THE MORAL SELF IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Resumo

How should we understand the persistence of racism in the British academy and the efficacy of current responses to address racism? Drawing on philosophers Sylvia Wynter and Charles Taylor, I claim higher education in Britain is a manifestation of ‘Rational Manliness’ – a co-constitutive moral framework - as a hypergood. I then, deploy the Rational Manliness framework to evaluate three common responses to injustice in higher education – Rational Man fragility, confessions/self-forgiveness, and intellectual decolonization. Ultimately, I argue that, insofar as higher education holds Rational Manliness as a hypergood, responses to injustice are rooted in a commitment to preserve a sense of self as good, by maintaining the intersectional matrix of domination. As such, I suggest that higher education in Britain must be reconstituted and transformed in ways that depart from Rational Manliness as a hypergood towards establishing the-eradication-all-forms-of-domination as a morally defensible hypergood.