On a Prevailing Misinterpretation of Biko’s Black Consciousness and How Dewey Helps Us Correct It

In the forty-plus years since his brutal murder by apartheid South African security forces, the legacy of Bantu Steven Biko continues to be contested. Biko is well known for his antiapartheid activism, particularly as a leader of the Black Consciousness Movement. However, more recent scholarship has begun taking seriously Biko’s legacy as worthy of philosophical attention. In an effort to contribute to this body of scholarship, the present paper argues there are valuable lines of affinity (rather than influence) between Biko’s thought and John Dewey’s. Specifically, Biko’s psychology is grounded in something bearing close family resemblances to Dewey’s pragmatic understanding of the self as thickly contextual and profoundly embedded within, and co-constituting its environment in ongoing processes of transactional exchange. Furthermore, Biko’s ethics, much like Dewey’s, appear to flow from this view of the self. Accordingly, both the easy psychology prevalent among Biko’s commentators, which reduces Black Consciousness to psychological bootstrapping, and the sequential teleology of liberation moving from subjective to objective freedom that it underpins must be abandoned in favor of a more complex and contingent picture in which authentic subjective liberation of the self unfolds in step with commensurate objective liberation of environing conditions in an ongoing transactional interplay between individuals and communities and their lived existential contexts.