On Race: 34 Conversations in a Time of Crisis

by George Yancy

With the recent barrage of racially motivated killings, violent encounters between blacks and whites, and hate crimes in the wake of the 2016 election that foreground historic problems posed by systemic racism, including disenfranchisement and mass incarceration, it would be easy to despair that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream has turned into a nightmare. Many Americans struggle for equal treatment, facing hate speech, brutality, and a national spirit of hopelessness; their reality is hardly "post-racial." The need for clarity surrounding the significance of race and racism in the United States is more pressing than ever. This collection of interviews on race, some originally conducted for The New York Times philosophy blog, The Stone, provides rich context and insight into the nature, challenges, and deepest questions surrounding this fraught and thorny topic.

In interviews with such major thinkers as bell hooks, Judith Butler, Cornel West, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Peter Singer, and Noam Chomsky, Yancy probes the historical origins, social constructions, and lived reality of race along political and economic lines. He interrogates fully race's insidious expressions, its transcendence of Black/white binaries, and its link to neo-liberalism, its epistemological and ethical implications, and, ultimately, its future.

384 pages, Hardcover

Published October 2, 2017

About the author

George Yancy, Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, works primarily in the areas of critical philosophy of race, critical whiteness studies, and philosophy of the Black experience. He is particularly interested in the formation of African-American philosophical thought as articulated within the social and historical space of anti-Black racism, African-American agency, and questions of identity formation. His current work focuses on the theme of whiteness and how it constitutes a site of embedded social reality and a site of deep and enduring opacity, which is related to what he has theorized as white ambush. He is interested in the ways in which whiteness as an embodied phenomenon is a reality underwritten by historical forces and practices. Hence, he takes history seriously as an ever present force through which bodies are positioned. He is interested in themes such as white subject formation, white epistemic ways of knowing/not knowing, privilege and hegemony, and forms of white spatial bonding as sites of white solidarity and interpellation (or hailing). He is also interested in how such forms of white epistemic and bodily bonding are underwritten by white intelligibility. Yancy explores the theme of racial embodiment, particularly in terms of how white bodies live their whiteness unreflectively in relationship to the deformation of the black body and other bodies of color. He sees the two as relational. Within this context, his work explores Black Erlebnis or the lived experience of black people, which raises important questions regarding Black subjectivity, modes of Black spatial mobility, ontological truncation, and embodied resistance. He has theorized critical processes of what he terms suturing and un-suturing and how both concepts are linked to questions of embodiment and spatiality. Yancy is also interested in the intersection between philosophy and biography. More specifically, he is interested in questions regarding philosophical self-formation, that is, how philosophers come to believe what they believe and how such belief formations/configurations are linked to historical, cultural, racial, and gendered processes. Yancy is also interested in ways to engage philosophy dynamically, to practice frank speech or courageous speech, within and outside the classroom. Yancy's publications are varied and extensive. He has authored, edited, and co-edited numerous books, articles, and chapters. His work has been quoted worldwide, including in Turkey, Australia, South Africa, and Sweden. He is known for his powerful and influential conversations with philosophers on race at The Stone, New York Times. Yancy is also "Philosophy of Race" Book Series Editor at Lexington Books.

Reviews

[Tonstant Weader]

On Race is a collection of thirty-four conversations about race between author George Yancy and educators, writers, thinkers, and philosophers. Many of these were originally published as part of the New York Times philosophy blog The Stone.

The course of these discussions ranges widely from looking at racism, through its relationship and interaction with religion, feminism, capitalism, film, education, music, and of course, with philosophy. With experts from so many different fields, we are offered many lenses through which to consider how racism works.

There is an urgency to this question with a white nationalist president who calls the Klan and Neo-Nazis good people, some of them. Which makes me wish the form of these interviews were a bit less formal and more wide-ranging. Yancy often asks people how they came to study or think about what they study and think about and that is usually long and not that informative unless you want to make a list of books to read. They studied this or that person, read this or that book, and were intrigued this or that lecture or class or reading. Far more interesting would be asking for that aha! moment when they realized racism is woven into the fiber of their lives and governs how they perceive the world.



A broader understanding of racism is urgently needed and I was hoping for more ideas to advance my understanding of how we can undermine and disrupt racism. For me, this book is covering the right ground, but too quickly and without the depth needed. The conversation just starts to get interesting and dang, it’s on to the next one. I would like less of the background and development of their ideas and far more about the ideas they have. It’s a bit like Goldilocks for me, too much of one thing and too little of another.

The people he chose to interview though are a diverse and fascinating group of people and this book had me writing down books I should read and the names of people I need to learn more about…so it functions a good springboard to more exploration of this most urgent issue.

I received an e-galley of On Race for review from Oxford University Press through NetGalley.

On Race at Oxford University Press
George Yancy author site
The Stone at The New York Times
Yancy’s interviews at The Stone
Dear White America by George Yancy – essay in NY Times

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpre...

[C.Reider]

A pretty incredible set of interviews. Not every section is amazing, but there is undeniably much to learn from here in these discussions of whiteness and blackness (mostly) in the USA (mostly).

[Craig]

3.5 Stars

[Niral]

Valuable survey of many important thinkers on race.