On Race: 34 Conversations in a Time of Crisis

ISBN-13: 9780190498559 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 384 str.

George Yancy

Opis

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.

Recenzje

How should a liberal society respond to the Ku Klux Klan? What if Batman were a black man? How can a white professor teach about race effectively? Why is there a lack of trust between black communities and local police? Does racism have the same roots as what leads factory farm workers to use live chickens as footballs? Have Muslims of Arab descent replaced black people as the pariah of American society? George Yancy has put together 34 penetrating, illuminating, and in some cases heart-rending interviews with today's leading thinkers about race in a timely book about racism in America that answers these questions and more.

O autorze

George Yancy is Professor of Philosophy at Emory University.