Penn Bioethics Seminar Series (PBS): George D. Yancy, PhD

The Structural Bind of Whiteness

George D. Yancy, PhD | Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Emory College of Arts and Sciences 

Zoom link:
https://zoom.us/j/91704598811

Description: In this presentation, I argue that whiteness is both an opaque and systemic structure. In short, to be white, to be embodied as white, raises the question not only of white privilege, but the question of white racism and how it is that racism is an insidious phenomenon that is replicated in the lives of white people.  I think that we can all agree that white racism is unethical. But what if it is not possible to make a clean exit, as it were,  from the bind of whiteness? What if to be white means that one's ethical state, as Peggy McIntosh has suggested, is not completely dependent upon one's ethical will? This raises not only the theme of the unethical structure of whiteness, but the way in which white people (consciously or unconsciously) perpetuate racialized injustice and thereby are unethical.  

Bio: George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College. He is also the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural fellow in the Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Program (2019-2020 academic year). Yancy is the author, editor and coeditor of over 20 books, including Black Bodies, White Gazes; Look, A White; Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America; and Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an American Philosopher published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020. He is known for his influential essays and interviews in the New York Times philosophy column "The Stone," and is "Philosophy of Race" Book Series Editor at Lexington Books.  

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