Street Smart
Assistant Professor Darien Pollock applies philosophy for social change
Growing up, Darien Pollock says he would often witness conflicts turn aggressive. “I come from a small, rural town, where there were impoverished conditions. It was an environment where argument was always something that inevitably led to violence,” he says. But as an undergraduate at Morehouse College in Atlanta, he took an introductory philosophy course, and his view of argumentation changed.
“We learned that argument is a skill,” he says. “Argument is something that brings people together. This kind of argumentation, I think, was one of the main things that drew me into studying philosophy—this fact that it invited people to give their points of view, but also try to reconcile their points of view with other people’s points of view. I thought it was a beautiful craft.”
Pollock, an assistant professor of philosophy, specializes in studying what he calls street knowledge—philosophy that’s rooted in lived experience. A×S spoke with Pollock about how he defines and applies street knowledge and his work with his nonprofit, the Street Philosophy Institute.
How did your upbringing influence your approach to philosophy?
Pollock: I grew up in a town in North Florida called Marianna. It’s known for two main things. One is that T. Thomas Fortune, who was a very well-known Black abolitionist, was born there. He actually helped mentor people like Booker T. Washington. Unfortunately, Marianna is also known for one of the biggest mass public lynchings that ever happened. In 1934, a Black man by the name of Claude Neal was lynched in a spectacle [kind of] fashion there. So [the city] has that reputation, and that lynching is symbolic of the culture.
I didn’t go into college thinking [philosophy was] what I was going to study. But I would say I come from a family of resisters. My mother grew up in Newark, New Jersey, and New York and was part of activist cultures in the ’70s and ’80s.
My grandmother did a lot of movement stuff in Marianna to make conditions better for the Black community. I come from a family that was always trying to improve the conditions for other people, and that always involves criticism and trying to organize people to get them to do things. That was just part of my personality.
When I got into philosophy, I realized, oh, there’s a skill set, and argumentation is the baseline. Argumentation allows you to criticize and to struggle with people organizing to think about things clearly. It was like a match made in heaven—my character matched the craft.
How would you describe “street philosophy” or “street knowledge”?
There’s a method in academic philosophy called ordinary language philosophy. It’s about seeing how ordinary terms are used by the general public and trying to base our philosophizing about those terms on the common intuition of what these terms mean. That was the spirit I was coming in with. You often hear the term “street smart.” I wondered why no one in philosophy ever tried to give a clear interpretation of what it means to be street smart. Is it a real thing? Is it some way we talk?
Street philosophy grew out of me taking a public kind of intuition and trying to make it a formal thing. The streets, for me, are just cultures of criticism. In popular culture, “the streets” are always connected to certain kinds of impoverished conditions. So, in some ways, it comes down to this thinking that to be street smart, you have to have a certain kind of material situation. I totally disagree with that. I think that being street smart just means to have a street disposition, as I call it, to start a cultural criticism, or to become part of a cultural criticism that can evolve into a struggle of resistance. This idea of street knowledge is me trying to say that street smarts are important to thinking about how we should criticize and how we should resist.
Street knowledge is me trying to say that street smarts are important to thinking about how we should criticize and how we should resist.
What kind of work have you done through your nonprofit, the Street Philosophy Institute?
It started informally when I was an undergraduate at Morehouse College. What I was trying to do was take the social capital and educational skills of Morehouse students and use those skills to help the youth in my local community back in Florida. I was trying to take the resources back to the community in terms of helping the youth understand the importance of college, how to stay out of the incarceration system, how to eat well.
Then I got into philosophy, and I started thinking about street philosophy. The event that sparked the actual incorporation of the Street Philosophy Institute was when Trump got elected. There was a wave of fear that pushed the cultures of criticism in North Florida even deeper into the trenches. I thought, we have to start creating an organized way to push back on this. The institute wasn’t created in response to Trump, really, it was more in response to the cultural fear that people were trying to instill in marginalized folks in those areas. It isn’t even a color thing—there were a lot of critical white brothers and sisters who couldn’t speak on issues.
I started the Street Philosophy Institute to help the cultures of criticism get more light. We did projects working with relief efforts after Hurricane Michael, when we saw Black communities in North Florida not getting the same kind of resources from the state government. One main project we’ve done is around felon voting rights in Florida, and we have also done some voting registration drives in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida.
How would you apply street philosophy to aspects of daily life?
Street philosophy involves getting on the ground in your local community, seeing what kinds of cultures are popping up, what people are criticizing, what people are against, what people want to change. One of the reasons you need street philosophers is because, when you are dealing with positions of power, or people who don’t want information to come out to the public, the cultures of criticism get punished and suppressed.
With the Street Philosophy Institute, we saw that when we were doing a study of the Black interpretation of the lynching of Claude Neal in Marianna. There was a whole generation of Black people who were forcibly kept quiet, who weren’t allowed to express their interpretation and their lived experience about how the lynching went down. To this day, we are still dealing with that. That project is an example of us trying to take what I call a hidden script and make it more available to the wider public. It’s a culture that has been there, and people have talked and written about it too—but then why isn’t this lynching recognized more within our public libraries? Why isn’t this taught in our schools? So street philosophy leads the way for policy change, and for cultural change too.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.