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I think that Sean Corby has an impressive CV as a musician. He'll know about iconic black musicians like Miles Davis and John Coltrane, they were black musicians who aspired to a universal vision.

The darker side to this is that black American Jazz musicians and singers like Billy Holiday could play with mixed bands and for white audiences but then had to find separate hotels or eating places to the rest of the band. There's a story about Miles Davis being beaten up by police while having a cigarette outside the theatre where he was the star turn. So, race is always a relationship, Davis may have seen himself as a visionary artist, but the cop didn't.

Popular music has been an important field where black people have expressed their individuality but that's not what I want to talk about today.

The question of 'racelessness' seems to be the coming subject. Recently in response to Glen Loury's question 'why does race inequality continue?', I pointed out that the definition of 'race' has an in- built inequality. Recently Loury addressed this subject directly, I think I share his view that 'blackness' is a thing, but it doesn't have to be a significant thing or the most important thing.

I get the sense that Loury and the black philosopher Cornel West do not always see eye to eye, I don't know if that's right. West published a book back in 1993 called 'Race Matters', the title was no doubt a reply to those who may have been suggesting otherwise.

I think it was in the late eighties or early nineties when Cornel West came to the UK, I went to see him speak in London it may have been the Festival Hall. I'm usually sceptical about the whole role-model thing, but as a young black man with an interest in philosophy I guess I was looking for role-models (black or white). West was sleek in his black tie and black suit, like the rest of us he's greyer up top and wider around the middle these days. But 'blackness' is a thing, I did not necessarily have anything in common with the American philosopher, but he made an impression on me. West is deeply knowledgeable about race and black people but works within the Western Philosophical tradition.

America once gave black leadership to the world. These days that leadership is in crisis. I remember my West Indian grandfather telling me about Jesse Owens the great black American athlete who put Hitler's nose out of joint in the Berlin Olympics of 1936. But even here I'm being selective, my grandfather loved sport, another hero of his was the American golfer Jack Nicklaus (the white Tiger Woods?). Figures like Muhammad Ali inspired black people around the world. So, blackness is a thing but it's an ever-changing thing and it's not everything.

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