Callipers Kofi

So I decided to rank the races. In particular, I wanted to see just how many more white philosophers there are on the list of the 376 Most Cited Recent Philosophers in the Stanford Encyclopaedia compiled by Eric Schwitzgabel.  I didn't have any way of telling more sophisticated than using my background knowledge plus google images search to examine the exact shape of people's brows to work out their ethnic background. So I am sure I made some mistakes (is Richard J. Arneson just really swarthy or what? And no link to ethnicity but shout out to Will Kymlicka's moustache it's great) -- but on the whole I think I am at least roughly correct.

So I think there are 8* non white philosophers on the list: 

1. Jaegwon Kim, 59th most cited.
2. Amartya K. Sen, 83rd most cited.
3. Richard Sorabji, 111th most cited.
4. Kwame Anthony Appiah, 158th most cited.
5. Linda Martín Alcoff, 260th most cited.
6. Mohan Matthen, 272nd most cited.
7. Charles W. Mills 335th most cited.
8. Sahotra Sarkar, tied for 335th most cited.

I wouldn't read too much into the particular areas they are drawn from as the process of commissioning articles for the (excellent, genuinely a communal treasure for which we should be eternally grateful) Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy is very much not random. So the spread of areas represented might just reflect where we've started from as it gradually expands.

To make this more official I got ChatGPT to draw a pie chart of this proportional relationship:

From which I concluded that 8/376 is not a very great proportion. Further inferences to be drawn from this will have to await more sophisticated scientific analysis, probably involving t-tests and Bayesian squared DAGs and such like. In the mean time, the following stands out to me:

• It's mainly Asian men. Not many non-white women getting cited at all.
  
  
• I don't really think there is any practical upshot of this. Every now and again (thankfully rarely) I see people advocate for something like affirmative action but for citations. I think this is an awful idea that would directly hurt me. It would change the meaning of the signal citations send so far as they confer prestige, meaning that they specifically conferred less prestige to scholars of colour. And it would also make them less useful as a guide to what the author thought significant in this literature so decrease their scholarly value. So I'm keen to stress people shouldn't do that.
  
  
• I wonder how much the limit to recent philosophers made a difference here. In particular I think classical Chinese ethical/political philosophy and medieval Arabic philosophy of logic and religion are quite well represented so that might mean that certain absolutely key figures (Mengzi and Ibn Sina especially) are going to recur throughout entire swathes and so end up appearing higher.
  
  
• Since I am here editing things I thought I would add that I suspect something similar to the agenda setting effect discussed by Kieran Healy here is at play. Focusing on the SEP undersells how much attention work by people of colour gets in the day to day research life of the field. But the SEP does provide a neat little snapshot of what people think one needs to engage with to be introduced to a field, and to that extent gives a sense of something like agenda setting. So the thing we learn is that non-white authors are less likely to be agenda setting relative to their place in the field.
  
  
• My guess is that most of us, of any ethnicity at all, really play no role in shaping the field. This is probably a good thing. So one comforting way of looking at this is that even if we publish we at least are very unlikely to do much harm. Unfortunately one cannot say the same for white philosophers; they'll have to find their own scant comforts.

So yeah that's all I got! Sorry this is thin and I haven't been posting much lately, but this remains true.

*EDIT: there is another! Samir Okasha at 272nd most cited.

EDIT EDIT: and here is a nice and far more detailed analysis from Eric Schwitzgebel.