2574. Film Review: I Am Not Your Negro

By Mallory Yu, NPR, February 3, 2017

James Baldwin in "I Am Not YourNegro." Photo: Dan Budnik/Magnolia Pictures

Filmmaker Raoul Peck's Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro features the work of the late writer, poet, and social critic James Baldwin. Baldwin's writing explored race, class and sexuality in Western society, and at the time of his death in 1987, he was working on a book, Remember This House. It was never completed, but his notes for that project became the foundation for Peck's I Am Not Your Negro.

Among those notes was a letter J Baldwin wrote to his literary agent, Jay Acton, in 1979. In that letter, he wrote that he wanted to explore the lives of three of his civil rights movement contemporaries and close personal friends: Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. "I want these three lives to bang against and reveal each other as in truth they did," he wrote, "and use their dreadful journey as a means of instructing the people whom they loved so much who betrayed them and for whom they gave their lives."

Peck had been wanting to make a film about Baldwin for years, but he says it felt like an impossible one to make. When he first read Baldwin's letter, he knew he had the basis for that film. "I had access to those notes, which for me was the real opening I needed to address the film I wanted to make — which was how do I make sure that people today come back to Baldwin and the important writer that he was, and the important words that he have written, and [have] this well-needed confrontation with reality today with words that he wrote 40, 50 years ago?"

The Haitian-born filmmaker has been a fan of Baldwin's writing since he was a teenager. "He helped me understand the world I was in," Peck says. "He helped me understand America. He helped me understand the place I was given in this country."

And Peck wanted to do the same with I Am Not Your Negro. In the documentary, he weaves together archival images and footage to illustrate the impact Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X had — the ways in which they were different, and perhaps more importantly, the ways in which they were alike. Peck says MLK Jr and Malcolm X are often portrayed as being polar opposites in the civil rights movement, but at the times of their deaths, they had in fact become increasingly interested in economic injustice and the class disparity.

"One of the important parts of this story is that both of them were leaving the race issue, because they understood that it was just one side of the battle," Peck says. "It's about class — how in this country, the classes reproduce themselves. If you're born rich, you have a 99% chance to stay rich. If you are born poor, you have a 99% chance to stay poor. That's the big great story of the American dream. It was always the dream of a minority."

It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace, and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you.

But I Am Not Your Negro isn't just a history of the civil rights movement, or its key players. The film also examines, as James Baldwin did in his writing, institutions of racism and the ways they have been upheld throughout the years in American society by people in power, even by Hollywood, through stereotypes and erasure.

"Leaving aside the bloody catalogue of oppression which we are, in one way, too familiar with already. What this does to the subjugated is to destroy his sense of reality," Baldwin said. "This means, in the case of an American negro, born in that glittering republic. And the moment you were born, since you don't know any better, every stick and stone, every face is white, and since you have not seen a mirror, you suppose that you are too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5 or 6 or 7 to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians — when you were rooting for Gary Cooper — that the Indians were you! It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace, and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you."

Peck says Baldwin deconstructed Hollywood, "and all the soft power that Hollywood means, and the lies that is also transported in those films. This is something that we need to confront ourselves with." Indeed, confronting ourselves is at the core of I Am Not Your Negro. When Peck began working on the film ten years ago, he meant to rely mostly on Baldwin's words. As he worked, however, the narrative shifted.

"It became scarier and scarier because I realized I was making a film where the reality was galloping even quicker than I was making it. At the time, my concern was, how do I put these important words of James Baldwin on the front row? You know, how do I make them accessible to the new generation? And as I was editing this film, we started to have those images of young black men being killed — of the resistance, of Black Lives Matter, of young people again going on the streets to protest. And it was incredible to see. It's happening again, almost the same words and the same anger. And then you see that, my God, nothing have changed fundamentally."

There are days — this is one of them — when I wonder, how precisely are you going to reconcile yourself to your situation here, and how are you going to communicate to the vast heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here?

So Peck turns Baldwin's words into a mirror on modern audiences by juxtaposing the archival tape of the civil rights movement, or Baldwin's speeches and television appearances, with carefully chosen contemporary footage. As Baldwin speaks about the possibility or impossibility of a black president, Peck plays tape from the first Obama inauguration. As Baldwin talks about how black people have seen the "corpses of your brothers and sisters pile up around you, not from anything they have done — they were too young to have done anything," the film shows photographs of Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin.

And, in a 1963 television segment titled "The Negro and the American Promise," as Baldwin speaks about the way Malcolm X validates protesters' existence, a young black protester shouts "I am" on the streets of Ferguson in 2013 — and Baldwin muses, "There are days — this is one of them — when I wonder, how precisely are you going to reconcile yourself to your situation here, and how are you going to communicate to the vast heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here?"

Raoul Peck says that Baldwin always spoke directly to his audiences — then and even now — and his words were frank and direct without being cruel. Baldwin put the onus of change squarely on people in positions of power and privilege. "What white people have to do," Baldwin said once, "is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a nigger in the first place. Because I am not a nigger. I'm a man. If I'm not the nigger here, and if you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that. Whether or not it is able to ask that question."

Because, as Baldwin wrote, "not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed if it is not faced."

1903. Interview With Eric Foner: The Face of Racism Today

By Elias Esquith, Salon, June 24, 2015

Historian Eric Foner

During the past generation or two, the way educated Americans, and especially historians, have come to understand the Civil War and Reconstruction has dramatically changed. Whereas it was once in vogue to play contrarian and argue that the war over slavery — and the subsequent effort to establish true, multiracial pluralist democracies in the South — had little to do with African-American liberation and white supremacy, that is thankfully no longer the case.

While no one, two or three-dozen people can rightly be said to deserve all the credit for this decades-in-the-making shift, few would deny the pivotal role played by Columbia University’s Eric Foner — especially his classic book “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877” as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.” Among others, it was Foner whose top-notch scholarship and unusually engaging prose helped usher in a new understanding of this seminal era that continues to gain influence today.

Recently, Salon reached out to Foner to get his take on the historical roots of the savage attack on Charleston, South Carolina’s, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. We also discussed Gov. Nikki Haley’s call for the Confederate battle flag to be removed from the state’s Capitol grounds, as well as what it means to say Americans must confront their own history. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.

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How significant would it be, symbolically, for the Confederate battle flag to be removed by South Carolina?

As you know, and as it has been reported many times, the Confederate flag was only put up on top of the Statehouse in South Carolina in 1962. It was put there as a rebuke to the civil rights movement. It was not a long-standing commemoration of Southern heritage. It was a purely political act to show black people in South Carolina who was in charge.

Symbolism has its limits. On the other hand, to see that flag flying … it’s a statement by South Carolina. Black people perfectly well understand what it stands for. A lot of white people do also. I think removing it is certainly a positive step.

Can you tell me a bit about South Carolina’s history in this regard, and why it’s often singled, out even among its fellow former Confederate states?

I have taught in South Carolina as a visiting professor. I have lectured many times in South Carolina at the University of South Carolina, at Clemson, at Beaufort, in Charleston. I have good friends there and I’m certainly not trying to suggest that everyone in South Carolina is a deep racist or has anything to do with a guy like Dylann Roof. On the other hand, one has to recognize that South Carolina has a very unique and deplorable history when it comes to slavery and race.

It goes way back to the American Revolution. South Carolina had delegates who insisted that Thomas Jefferson take out a clause that condemned slavery from the Declaration of Independence. It was South Carolina delegates who got the Three-Fifths Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Clause into the Constitution. It was South Carolina who was the leader in nullification, the leader in secession. The first shot of the Civil War was shot there. South Carolina was the only Southern state in which the majority of white families owned slaves.

And yet, not incidentally, it also had an unusually large African-American population, too, right?

It had about a 60 percent black population at the time of the Civil War. In other words, the majority of the people in South Carolina were slaves. To say that the Confederate flag represents the heritage of that state is not true; it actually did not represent the majority of South Carolinians even at the time the Confederacy existed.

What was South Carolina’s experience during Reconstruction and the long postwar era?

During Reconstruction, South Carolina was the site of a very remarkable experiment in interracial democracy. Because of the large black majority, you had a considerable amount of African-Americans holding office at various levels: going to Congress, being in the Legislature, and local offices.

The result of that was a violent reaction against it. The Ku Klux Klan was very powerful in South Carolina. In 1876 there was the violent overthrow of the Reconstruction government. There have been a lot of massacres — if you want to call them that — of black people in South Carolina history. The Hamburg massacre of 1876 was part of the overthrow of Reconstruction. People forget about the Orangeburg massacre, where a number of black students were killed by officers of the state highway patrol at Orangeburg, a black college, in 1968. This is the history of South Carolina.

South Carolina was the home of Ben Tillman, one of the most vicious racists and segregationists of the 19th century. [Former South Carolina governor and senator] Strom Thurmond led the Dixiecrat rebellion of 1948 against Truman and the Democratic platform. South Carolina was one of the few states that voted for Goldwater in 1964, which was an indication of the possibilities of a Southern strategy the Republican Party has been following ever since. This is the history of South Carolina.

Again, not everybody in South Carolina is responsible for that history, but a guy like Dylann Roof imbibed those views and that heritage. It’s there and I don’t think the state has really confronted it. In a way, flying the Confederate flag is one indication of the fact that South Carolina has never really come to terms with its extreme history of slavery, racism and anti-black violence. It’s not the only place in the country that has that, obviously, but it always has been at the cutting edge of these kind of movements.

You just reminded me of something Ta-Nehisi Coates said recently on Twitter. He argued that Roof’s attack was in some ways more reminiscent of the violence perpetrated against African-Americans in the late-19th century than the upheavals associated with the civil rights movement.

I agree with him. When you read Roof’s statements and manifesto, you see, apart from his craziness, language which does bring you back to the overthrow of Reconstruction in the late-19th century.

They have been raping our women — this was the charge against every black person that was lynched; they were rapists. That’s the picture of blacks in “Birth of a Nation.” Ninety-nine percent of the time, this was completely untrue. In fact, there was far more rape of black women by white men [than of white women by black men]. This is just a racist trope that was used against Reconstruction. It was used to justify segregation. It was used to justify lynching.

What else?

The idea that they are “taking over.” In Reconstruction, they did take over. Even though the governors were white, blacks exercised remarkable amounts of political power compared to what had existed before the Civil War. This led to a very violent reaction against it. Roof’s language is the language of political white supremacy, the desire to put blacks back into their place and to restore white domination. Of course, he’s delusional in the sense that black people are not taking over South Carolina; they have very little political power in South Carolina. But that racist notion is deeply ingrained in reactionary thought.

Is there a similar history of attacking people while they’re in church, as if to say, Even here, you are not safe?

We know there have been other attacks on black churches in the country over the years. The Klan of Reconstruction and the Red Shirts of the 1876 campaign, which overthrew Reconstruction, they went after black people in their homes to make the point that you are not safe anywhere. In a sense, the church [attack] is an example of that.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how we need to confront our history and acknowledge it and bear its weight. What does that mean to you? Because sometimes I worry that that, too, is becoming a bit of an airy, vague cliché.

I’m a historian. I believe people need to know our history. On the other hand, there is a tendency to displace the causes of current problems onto history.

The problems of black Americans today, putting aside this terrible event, are rooted in history, but are also rooted in the present. The face of racism today is not a slaveowner; it’s a guy in a three-piece suit at Wells Fargo who had been putting blacks into subprime mortgages until they lost their homes in 2008. It’s the people who will not hire a black person. It’s the people who will not hire a person when they see he has a black-sounding name [on his résumé]. In other words, the point of studying history is to understand its link to the present — but it’s not to displace the problems of the present. It’s not to say this is rooted in history and the slaveowners are responsible for whatever the problem is today.

One-hundred-and-fifty years later, we still have a problem in this country coming to terms with the existence of slavery. There’s no museum of the history of slavery in the entire United States. There’s a Holocaust museum; there’s plenty of other museums [about tragedies and atrocities], but there’s no memorial to the victims of slavery in the U.S. We have memorials to the victims of the Irish famine; why don’t we have a memorial to the victims of slavery somewhere? What I want people to learn from history is the depth and importance of slavery, and then 100 years of segregation, in shaping the way American society is today.

1833. On the Roots of American Racism: An Interview with Noam Chomsky

By George Yancy, The Hampton Institute, April 22, 2015

George Yancy: When I think about the title of your book "On Western Terrorism," I'm reminded of the fact that many black people in the United States have had a long history of being terrorized by white racism, from random beatings to the lynching of more than 3,000 black people (including women) between 1882 and 1968. This is why in 2003, when I read about the dehumanizing acts committed at Abu Ghraib prison, I wasn't surprised. I recall that after the photos appeared President George W. Bush said that "This is not the America I know." But isn't this the America black people have always known?

Noam Chomsky: The America that "black people have always known" is not an attractive one. The first black slaves were brought to the colonies 400 years ago. We cannot allow ourselves to forget that during this long period there have been only a few decades when African-Americans, apart from a few, had some limited possibilities for entering the mainstream of American society.

We also cannot allow ourselves to forget that the hideous slave labor camps of the new "empire of liberty" were a primary source for the wealth and privilege of American society, as well as England and the continent. The industrial revolution was based on cotton, produced primarily in the slave labor camps of the United States.

Thomas Jefferson feared the liberation of slaves, who had "ten thousand recollections" of the crimes to which they were subjected.

As is now known, they were highly efficient. Productivity increased even faster than in industry, thanks to the technology of the bullwhip and pistol, and the efficient practice of brutal torture, as Edward E. Baptist demonstrates in his recent study, " The Half Has Never Been Told." The achievement includes not only the great wealth of the planter aristocracy but also American and British manufacturing, commerce and the financial institutions of modern state capitalism.

It is, or should be, well-known that the United States developed by flatly rejecting the principles of "sound economics" preached to it by the leading economists of the day, and familiar in today's sober instructions to latecomers in development. Instead, the newly liberated colonies followed the model of England with radical state intervention in the economy, including high tariffs to protect infant industry, first textiles, later steel and others.

There was also another "virtual tariff." In 1807, President Jefferson signed a bill banning the importation of slaves from abroad. His state of Virginia was the richest and most powerful of the states, and had exhausted its need for slaves. Rather, it was beginning to produce this valuable commodity for the expanding slave territories of the South. Banning import of these cotton-picking machines was thus a considerable boost to the Virginia economy. That was understood. Speaking for the slave importers, Charles Pinckney charged that "Virginia will gain by stopping the importations. Her slaves will rise in value, and she has more than she wants." And Virginia indeed became a major exporter of slaves to the expanding slave society.

Some of the slave-owners, like Jefferson, appreciated the moral turpitude on which the economy relied. But he feared the liberation of slaves, who have "ten thousand recollections" of the crimes to which they were subjected. Fears that the victims might rise up and take revenge are deeply rooted in American culture, with reverberations to the present.

The Thirteenth Amendment formally ended slavery, but a decade later "slavery by another name" (also the title of an important study by Douglas A. Blackmon) was introduced. Black life was criminalized by overly harsh codes that targeted black people. Soon an even more valuable form of slavery was available for agribusiness, mining, steel - more valuable because the state, not the capitalist, was responsible for sustaining the enslaved labor force, meaning that blacks were arrested without real cause and prisoners were put to work for these business interests. The system provided a major contribution to the rapid industrial development from the late 19 ^th century.

That system remained pretty much in place until World War II led to a need for free labor for the war industry. Then followed a few decades of rapid and relatively egalitarian growth, with the state playing an even more critical role in economic development than before. A black man might get a decent job in a unionized factory, buy a house, send his children to college, along with other opportunities. The civil rights movement opened other doors, though in limited ways. One illustration was the fate of Martin Luther King's efforts to confront northern racism and develop a movement of the poor, which was effectively blocked.

The neoliberal reaction that set in from the late '70s, escalating under Reagan and his successors, hit the poorest and most oppressed sectors of society even more than the large majority, who have suffered relative stagnation or decline while wealth accumulates in very few hands. Reagan's drug war, deeply racist in conception and execution, initiated a new Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander's apt term for the revived criminalization of black life, evident in the shocking incarceration rates and the devastating impact on black society.

Reality is of course more complex than any simple recapitulation, but this is, unfortunately, a reasonably accurate first approximation to one of the two founding crimes of American society, alongside of the expulsion or extermination of the indigenous nations and destruction of their complex and rich civilizations.

'Intentional ignorance' regarding inconvenient truths about the suffering of African- Americans can also be used to frame the genocide of Native Americans.

G.Y. : While Jefferson may have understood the moral turpitude upon which slavery was based, in his "Notes on the State of Virginia," he says that black people are dull in imagination, inferior in reasoning to whites, and that the male orangutans even prefer black women over their own . These myths, along with the black codes following the civil war, functioned to continue to oppress and police black people. What would you say are the contemporary myths and codes that are enacted to continue to oppress and police black people today?

N.C.: Unfortunately, Jefferson was far from alone. No need to review the shocking racism in otherwise enlightened circles until all too recently. On "contemporary myths and codes," I would rather defer to the many eloquent voices of those who observe and often experience these bitter residues of a disgraceful past.

Perhaps the most appalling contemporary myth is that none of this happened. The title of Baptist's book is all too apt, and the aftermath is much too little known and understood.

There is also a common variant of what has sometimes been called "intentional ignorance" of what it is inconvenient to know: "Yes, bad things happened in the past, but let us put all of that behind us and march on to a glorious future, all sharing equally in the rights and opportunities of citizenry." The appalling statistics of today's circumstances of African-American life can be confronted by other bitter residues of a shameful past, laments about black cultural inferiority, or worse, forgetting how our wealth and privilege was created in no small part by the centuries of torture and degradation of which we are the beneficiaries and they remain the victims. As for the very partial and hopelessly inadequate compensation that decency would require - that lies somewhere between the memory hole and anathema.

Jefferson, to his credit, at least recognized that the slavery in which he participated was "the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other." And the Jefferson Memorial in Washington displays his words that "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever." Words that should stand in our consciousness alongside of John Quincy Adams's reflections on the parallel founding crime over centuries, the fate of "that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty…among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgment."

What matters is our judgment, too long and too deeply suppressed, and the just reaction to it that is as yet barely contemplated.

G.Y.: This "intentional ignorance" regarding inconvenient truths about the suffering of African- Americans can also be used to frame the genocide of Native Americans. It was 18^th century Swedish taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus who argued that Native Americans were governed by traits such as being "prone to anger," a convenient myth for justifying the need for Native Americans to be "civilized" by whites. So, there are myths here as well. How does North America's "amnesia" contribute to forms of racism directed uniquely toward Native Americans in our present moment and to their continual genocide?

N.C. : The useful myths began early on, and continue to the present. One of the first myths was formally established right after the King of England granted a Charter to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629, declaring that conversion of the Indians to Christianity is "the principal end of this plantation." The colonists at once created the Great Seal of the Colony, which depicts an Indian holding a spear pointing downward in a sign of peace, with a scroll coming from his mouth pleading with the colonists to "Come over and help us." This may have been the first case of "humanitarian intervention" - and, curiously, it turned out like so many others.

Years later Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story mused about "the wisdom of Providence" that caused the natives to disappear like "the withered leaves of autumn" even though the colonists had "constantly respected" them. Needless to say, the colonists who did not choose "intentional ignorance" knew much better, and the most knowledgeable, like Gen. Henry Knox, the first secretary of war of the United States, described "the utter extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union [by means] more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru."

Knox went on to warn that "a future historian may mark the causes of this destruction of the human race in sable colors." There were a few - very few - who did so, like the heroic Helen Jackson, who in 1880 provided a detailed account of that "sad revelation of broken faith, of violated treaties, and of inhuman acts of violence [that] will bring a flush of shame to the cheeks of those who love their country." Jackson's important book barely sold. She was neglected and dismissed in favor of the version presented by Theodore Roosevelt, who explained that "The expansion of the peoples of white, or European, blood during the past four centuries…has been fraught with lasting benefit to most of the peoples already dwelling in the lands over which the expansion took place," notably those who had been "extirpated" or expelled to destitution and misery.

The national poet, Walt Whitman, captured the general understanding when he wrote that "The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history… A superior grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared out." It wasn't until the 1960s that the scale of the atrocities and their character began to enter even scholarship, and to some extent popular consciousness, though there is a long way to go.

That's only a bare beginning of the shocking record of the Anglosphere and its settler-colonial version of imperialism, a form of imperialism that leads quite naturally to the "utter extirpation" of the indigenous population - and to "intentional ignorance" on the part of beneficiaries of the crimes.

G.Y.: Your response raises the issue of colonization as a form of occupation. James Baldwin, in his 1966 essay, "A Report from Occupied Territory," wrote, "Harlem is policed like occupied territory." This quote made me think of Ferguson, Mo. Some of the protesters in Ferguson even compared what they were seeing to the Gaza Strip. Can you speak to this comparative discourse of occupation?

N.C. : All kinds of comparisons are possible. When I went to the Gaza Strip a few years ago, what came to mind very quickly was the experience of being in jail (for civil disobedience, many times): the feeling, very strange to people who have had privileged lives, that you are totally under the control of some external authority, arbitrary and if it so chooses, cruel. But the differences between the two cases are, of course, vast.

More generally, I'm somewhat skeptical about the value of comparisons of the kind mentioned. There will of course be features common to the many diverse kinds of illegitimate authority, repression and violence. Sometimes they can be illuminating; for example, Michelle Alexander's analogy of a new Jim Crow, mentioned earlier. Often they may efface crucial distinctions. I don't frankly see anything general to say of much value. Each comparison has to be evaluated on its own.

G.Y.: These differences are vast and I certainly don't want to conflate them. Post-911 seems to have ushered in an important space for making some comparisons. Some seem to think that Muslims of Arab descent have replaced African-Americans as the pariah in the United States. What are your views on this?

N.C.: Anti-Arab/Muslim racism has a long history, and there's been a fair amount of literature about it. Jack Shaheen's studies of stereotyping in visual media, for example. And there's no doubt that it's increased in recent years. To give just one vivid current example, audiences flocked in record-breaking numbers to a film, described in The New York Times Arts section as "a patriotic, pro-family picture," about a sniper who claims to hold the championship in killing Iraqis during the United States invasion, and proudly describes his targets as "savage, despicable, evil … really no other way to describe what we encountered there." This was referring specifically to his first kill, a woman holding a grenade when under attack by United States forces.

What's important is not just the mentality of the sniper, but the reaction to such exploits at home when we invade and destroy a foreign country, hardly distinguishing one "raghead" from another. These attitudes go back to the "merciless Indian savages" of the Declaration of Independence and the savagery and fiendishness of others who have been in the way ever since, particularly when some "racial" element can be invoked - as when Lyndon Johnson lamented that if we let down our guard, we'll be at the mercy of "every yellow dwarf with a pocket knife." But within the United States, though there have been deplorable incidents, anti-Arab/Muslim racism among the public has been fairly restrained, I think.

G.Y.: Lastly, the reality of racism (whether it's anti-black, anti-Arab, anti-Jewish, etc.) is toxic. While there is no single solution to racism, especially in terms of its various manifestations, what do you see as some of the necessary requirements for ending racist hatred?

N.C.: It's easy to rattle off the usual answers: education, exploring and addressing the sources of the malady, joining together in common enterprises - labor struggles have been an important case - and so on. The answers are right, and have achieved a lot. Racism is far from eradicated, but it is not what it was not very long ago, thanks to such efforts. It's a long, hard road. No magic wand, as far as I know.

This interview was conducted by email and edited. Previous interviews in this series (with Linda Martin Alcoff, Judith Butler, Joy James, Charles Mills, Falguni A. Sheth, Shannon Sullivan and Naomi Zack) can be found here .

George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Duquesne University. He has written, edited and co-edited numerous books, including "Black Bodies, White Gazes," "Look, a White!" and "Pursuing Trayvon Martin," co-edited with Janine Jones.