Paul Taylor has a unique story to tell
The UCLA philosophy professor shares his insights about comedy, Hallmark movies and Black aesthetics in the U.S.

Gioncarlo Valentine
Paul Taylor: “From the very beginning of even the most sort of Eurocentric version of the tradition I inhabit ... it was people talking to each other, often telling stories, trying to figure out how to navigate the world, using these stories to illuminate their path.”
February 4, 2025
|Over the course of his career, Paul Taylor has generated complex lines of inquiry at the intersection of race and aesthetics. He’s held a particular interest in Black life, pushing back against the disinterest paid to it by the forms of traditional philosophy in which he was trained. His first book, “Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics,” is a subtle and expansive treatise on the role that art and aesthetics play in creating the worlds that Black people inhabit, often against racial formation under white supremacy.
A graduate of Morehouse College, Taylor continued his studies at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and finished his training in philosophy at Rutgers University. Currently, the inaugural Presidential Professor of Philosophy at UCLA, Taylor is newly elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, founded in 1780 with a mission to “cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.”
Here, the trailblazing Taylor talks about the connection between anti-racist politics and aesthetics, the politics of hope, and his careful uncovering of the emancipatory traces to be found in works of popular culture, particularly in films — from Hollywood mid-century classics to Black “Hallmark” films of the present day.
I’m interested in your thoughts on race in what you call “comedies of remarriage.” Can you talk about what those films are, and how race does — and doesn’t — show up in them?
The idea of the “comedy of remarriage” comes from the work of Stanley Cavell, the late Harvard philosopher [who was a philosophy graduate student at UCLA], who is perhaps best known for a book called “Pursuits of Happiness,” which is organized around a handful of what most people think of as screwball comedies.
One of the interesting things about those films is that they’re comedies from the ’30s and ’40s, which is to say, they’re almost entirely about white people. There are other people in there, and what the other people are doing is a matter of some interest to me, but not to the films themselves. So it takes a little digging to see what they’re doing.
I think there’s a story to tell about this in the context of American cinema history. What do these films say about whiteness and alternatives to whiteness on screen? There was a sort of second wave of remarriage comedies in the ’80s and ’90s, about half of them starring either Julia Roberts or Meg Ryan, and a couple of them trying to do what people call “diversity” better. And so I thought there would be some value in thinking about this second wave, what it’s doing, specifically in the context of the rise of, for example, the “Best Man” films, which are marriage comedies — but perhaps not re-marriage comedies — starring Black people and focusing on Blackness. There’s a story to tell there.
Do you think that these more recent films are also in conversation with other theoretical concerns about Black life? Has this multicultural era changed some of those prospects?
The prospect of marriage and the promise of marriage have played a different role historically in African American life than for other people. One of the things the comedies of remarriage do is invite us to consider what it takes for marriage to, as Cavell puts it, retain its preeminence among human relations. To which someone who studied the history of American slavery might say, “Well, for some folk, it couldn’t be central in the same way.” Right? Some other things had to happen.
So that leads directly to some really interesting arguments people are making now around marriage abolition. The common denominator is that the institution of marriage plays a certain role in certain kinds of societies for the benefit of some people, and it doesn’t work for everyone — and, in fact, is oppressive for some people. And wouldn’t it be better if we had a more fluid conception of what a family could be, and what committed romantic relationships could be, and child-rearing and parenting and those things that don’t all have to go together? There are lots of stories to tell about that.
One could argue that Black folks in the United States had, by necessity, to experiment with these alternative modes of human relations and human relatedness. Why are there no Black comedies of remarriage? The answer might just be because Black folk were doing some other things. Let’s talk about what those are.
“What are the limits of those forms of experimentation that Black folks have done with these alternative modes of living?” is a question that looms pretty large in Black life generally.
The ongoing question of our lives is how well some of us do it. Even bad films can help us do this. My wife and daughter found some film — I can’t even remember the name — it was like a Negro Hallmark film. It was terrible, but the whole point was, “Look, Black people can do this silly thing, too.” We live in a world in which our entertainments are curated by these giant media conglomerates, and they do this by recycling certain kinds of themes and tropes for us, and they do all of this most of the time in not super-interesting ways. But we can engage with them in interesting ways and engage each other in interesting ways in the context of those creative efforts. This, to me, is the work of criticism.
This is related to how stories and media are recycled, quite routinely, for the multicultural era, especially as a stand-in for reparation. I think one of the easiest examples is the form of the fairy tale and the kind of inclusionary complex that comes with those — the simple remaking and reskinning of characters to essentially be “Black” now, without any shift in historical or social context. Something like what Kristen Warner calls “plastic representation.”
So two things come to mind immediately. One is one of the things to remember when we deal with film. And this is a warning to philosophers, in particular, people who are trained the way I’m trained, for whom it’s easy to engage with these films as if they are poems written by one person in her study. These are huge corporate products, and they’ve been brought into being by mass armies of people, many of whom have very different aims and purposes. These are huge, complicated artifacts that come into being through complicated processes. Assigning a single aim or intention to the source of the thing is probably not the thing to do.
The second thought is, I’m someone for whom my first serious encounters with the work of aesthetic production involved jazz performance, which involved taking very familiar melodies and harmonies and chord structures and doing interesting things with them. I’ll put it differently: I am not someone for whom the simple act of borrowing and recycling familiar, populist cultural resources is already problematic. I think that’s just how culture works.
Pixar and Disney recycle things — fairy tales or narrative forms — and do it in the context of a profit-making enterprise that is trying to be as inoffensive as possible. Which means all sorts of things are off the table. But for some people in the army of creatives who are behind these artifacts, there are ways to smuggle in interesting moves. Think about all of the artwork that’s flashing by in the background in the last “Spider-Man” animated film [“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”]. There’s some super-interesting things going on back there, and it’s presented to us in the way that, like, Chuck Jones’ Bugs Bunny cartoons were presented. Here’s some stuff for the people who are paying attention to it.
To me, one of the really exciting developments in contemporary moving picture production is that it’s possible for these artifacts to work on these multiple levels and give us so many ways to engage with them. There’s a reason that they have spawned, and continue to sustain, these giant economies of people commenting on and criticizing and recapping TV episodes and films and all of that — because there’s so much going on. That’s tremendously exciting to me.
Your work is also centered on a “politics of hope” in the present.
I have, for all of my career, actually been fairly ambivalent about philosophy. I talk about this in “Black is Beautiful”: What we continue to think of as Western philosophy didn’t care about Black people. Philosophy remains one of the least diverse humanities disciplines. There is, or has been, a temptation to guilt or shame with respect to my interest in cultural production. It’s the question from Du Bois and criteria of Negro art: “Why are y’all doing this stuff in this ballroom, talking about poetry and whatnot, when people are catching hell outside?”
The forms of philosophy I was being trained to engage with had not thought through that question in relation to the issues that interested someone who came up through Morehouse College, an HBCU, who is interested in issues related to Black aesthetics and Black people.
Can you say a little more on how this affects your teaching now?
I can take students in a philosophy of film class and invite them to think together in relationship to the cinematic objects and pull them in a bunch of different directions that draw on philosophical resources, but head immediately and directly into real-world issues that they can recognize and engage with. The philosophical study of film offers a variety of opportunities for straightforward pedagogical engagement in the classroom. But the act of consuming film is a kind of pedagogy as well.
Another question that was in the back of my mind is about cultural phenomena more broadly. I come from working-poor Black folks in northern Philadelphia. A lot of friends will see The Best Man Holiday or the Hallmark film, and be like, “This is the best film ever created.”
Yeah, that’s interesting. I’m currently working on three books, which is stupid, yeah, and two of them were supposed to have been done, but don’t tell anybody. [Laughs.] So one book gets at the sort of “hope” stuff. It’s currently called “Dark Futures,” which takes its title from a line from Virginia Woolf’s journal on the eve of World War I. She wrote that the future appears dark, but darkness doesn’t have to be some sort of oppressive gloom — darkness can just be the condition in which we don’t quite know yet what’s happening. Even under dire circumstances, there are moves to make. And then there’s this other stuff, like the comedies of remarriage, philosophy of film, a kind of thing that’s slowly coming into view. I’m thinking about all this stuff at once.
I feel like our main repository for thinking about all this stuff at once, especially in the present, is rap music. Well, rap and anime for my generation, specifically.
To me, this is why a lot of people were, when I was coming up, interested in hip-hop culture and rap music — because this was the space where you could clearly see Black people undertaking a kind of critical engagement with the conditions of their being in a way that was utterly undeniable, and clearly aesthetically and politically ambitious. And that didn’t stop. Hip-hop culture and rap music got commodified. And so now we have to navigate that space a little more carefully. Drake and Kendrick Lamar can play out their beef on the world stage in a way that was impossible in the late eighties, but the basic fact is that this is just what humans do. And one of the consequences of denying the status of the human to Black folk was to say, “They can’t do that.” This is to reject the claim that Black folks are subhuman, to insist on the capacity of these people to engage creatively with their lives and to reflect critically on the conditions of their lives in their creative output.
Which brings us back to your original question. This kind of critical engagement can happen even in these terrible movies, as an expression of the creative capacity to engage with the conditions of our lives. Maybe the people you’re talking about aren’t reading the reviews in “The New York Times,” but they’re engaging in criticism because they’re consuming these works, and they’re making distinctions, and they’re judging things as good or bad. My wife and I watch some mediocre movie that’s got some people of color in it, and we’ll say, “Oh, that wasn’t very good.” But it wasn’t any worse than all this other stuff that these other people are in. And there’s pleasure just in seeing people who look like us doing the dumb stuff that the people in the other movies do.
One of the things you said raised another kind of inquiry, because you also brought up hip-hop. There’s something interesting about the role of negativity, and our attention to negativity in relation to things like rap music and the Afropessimist discourse. There is a really vile inability to convince people to respect Black people and Black life in a certain way. If you could, talk about that in relation to the politics of hope.
I should warn you: I think I have aged out of any claim on responsible engagement with rap. So I will steer clear of fine-grained readings of anything that’s happening in that space. That said, negativity is important. We think of the sort of wide-eyed optimist as someone who just isn’t thinking hard enough about what the world is like; we think our pessimist is not attending to all of the data properly. Lots of philosophical traditions have language for this — that, you know, the world is a world of plenitude, and there will be bad bits, but there are good bits. I happen to be drawn most often to the Buddhist versions. Let’s remind ourselves that we’ve been here before, and moments like this look better than they often turn out to be.
Once you say that, the pessimistic countermove follows pretty directly. And so that registers to some people as a refusal of possibility. The Afropessimist appears to think nothing is possible, but that’s not the point. The point is that in moments when optimism threatens to carry us away and to blind us, to obscure from us the real challenges we face, one of the things that the rap music I grew up listening to did very nicely was to insist there are creative ways to identify these challenges and navigate these conditions.
Talk a bit about how you try to create something that is taking part in the philosophical enterprise, but that’s stylistically also invested in the reader and engaging a broader set of conversations.
Plato wrote stories, and made those stories do a lot of work. From the very beginning of even the most sort of Eurocentric version of the tradition I inhabit, there is this model showing that we didn’t start with scholarly journal articles. It was people talking to each other, often telling stories, trying to figure out how to navigate the world, using these stories to illuminate their path.
I take that very seriously. In one of my earliest moments of the ambivalence I described about philosophy, I stumbled on Langston Hughes’ the Simple stories. He was telling stories about how to navigate the world in ways people can understand, using this imaginative deployment of prose to illuminate our path in ways that I found very familiar and very close to what Plato had done.
Just for my own sake, I had to find a way to engage with these ideas that didn’t require the acquiescence to the idea that I would only be talking to 20 or 30 of my closest scholarly friends. And that imposes burdens. Writing accessibly is a craft that takes hard work to master, at least for most of us. But there can be considerable value in putting in that work.
This story appeared in UCLA Magazine. Read the complete winter 2025 issue here.