I am honored to be awarded the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement award of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. The award has encouraged me to look back critically on my life’s work like many people who reach my age and to try to identify and learn from its mistakes. One bright spot was my decision at UCLA to do political philosophy. I had gone there intending to study logic. Perhaps I hoped that the subject would distract me from more urgent questions that I feared would be painful to try to answer. At UCLA in the sixties this ostrich like project proved impossible to sustain. The writings and speeches of Martin Luther King, Stokley Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and Frantz Fanon, crowded out those of Russell and Quine and recklessly, but with the enthusiastic support of my wife Jan, I wrote my dissertation on the “protest” writings of David Walker, Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell, WEB DuBois, Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass, and most surprisingly found someone at UCLA, Tom Hill, to supervise the project. The trouble was that few in the philosophical circles I found myself in and heard of the heroes whose work I had discussed and would sigh ruefully that they were not philosophers when I tried to explain who they were. Then it occurred to me that a study of the great classics of western political philosophy would enable me to tie my work explicitly to the philosophical issues that my colleagues were familiar with; no longer would they be able to dismiss my work as not really philosophy. I should have been more cautious. Far too slowly it has dawned on me that many of these classics that I had turned to in order to make my work more “respectable” are ideal theory, which is to say, evasions of the urgent problems that first drew me to the study of political philosophy, while others actually develop the ideologies that have led to those problems. This is the lesson I have learned. We philosophers of the Third World must not get caught up in the endless debates about the details of Western political philosophy, but always keep in mind what the whole enterprise helped to do to us. So I must end commending the Caribbean Philosophical Association which has from the first encouraged a critical attitude to Western political philosophy and urged its members to make reflection on their own experiences as the scapegoats of that philosophy the inspiration for their own philosophy