Speaking Truth to Power: George Yancy in Conversation with Leading Intellectuals in Pursuit of Justice and Love

Yancy and his contributors engage in critical philosophical discussions on race and inclusion.

Posted on June 28, 2024 in Featured Review

Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future, by George Yancy. Rowman & Littlefield, 2023. 396p index, 9781538176429 $34.00, 9781538176436

Having admired the philosophical career and writings of George Yancy (philosophy, Emory Univ.) for some time, this reviewer can confidently assert that Until Our Lungs Give Out is another significant contribution to a long series of important texts on race and inclusion. Yancy’s works are never easy, nor are they designed to pacify readers, even those who agree with their premises. His works are designed to open dialogues in an honest, vulnerable, and productive manner. This collected volume portrays individuals speaking honestly about their experiences, academic studies, and community involvement in a way that demonstrates how difficult conversations on topics such as the innocence of whiteness, body perceptions, and local and global racial discrimination can be meaningfully conducted. While emotion is honestly portrayed and acknowledged, the discussions are critical and philosophical. The speakers adhere to reasoned discussion and philosophical standards of argumentation. Indeed, when contextualized, each conversation represents a cogent response to the situations examined. In following philosophical rules of engagement, the book challenges readers to recognize and own their reactions to what is said and to engage in an active rather than passive reading experience.

Engaging with this text requires readers to be open to self-reflection and to the admission of privilege where it occurs even in themselves.

Yancy’s philosophical position demands active participation and honesty from readers who bear witness to these dialogues, which further requires them to engage vulnerability and non-sentimental love. This type of love is a philosophical construct that necessitates active listening and disengaging from prejudging, jumping to conclusions, and using fallacies to outstrategize a perceived opponent. Yancy’s “invitation” to join these conversational experiences reflects many historical and current cultural values that embrace the “profound daring of love” as required in “hospitality” ethics (p. 3). This type of hospitality ethic can be observed in differing global Indigenous cultures as well as in various religious communities that attach moral requirements—including respect, protection, and reciprocity—to situations involving the hospitality of friend and foe. Similar to the broader moral requirements of kinship, active and difficult conversations require equity in participant positioning and participant knowledge. Love of this type “is an embodied, courageous, kenotic (emptying), and fragile phenomenon” (p. 3). Additionally, there is no expectation of outcomes. However, there are possibilities for various levels of healing. Engaging with this text requires readers to be open to self-reflection and to the admission of privilege where it occurs even in themselves. One of the most difficult aspects of the love required in these conversations is the willingness to authentically acknowledge, reflect, and adjust to one’s own defensive behaviors when they arise. This is neither a cheap nor easy love, as it requires constant vigilance and the intellectual humility to face one’s own vulnerability in an existential mirror.

While Yancy and several others within the collection admit to a pessimistic worldview, there are discussions of what drives individuals to continue advancing and taking up these difficult dialogues. For example, the book probes the issue of critical race theory, and the scholars and activists who willingly risk negative political, social, and academic consequences in order to eliminate false media claims. Mari Matsuda and Pedro A. Noguera consider the need to use critical theory as liberation and how to change education to embrace democracy and antiracism. In a similar manner, Peter McLaren reaches back to Paulo Freire to invoke critical theory as a way of facilitating educational and world “repair” (p. 120). While these exchanges may not call for hope or offer solutions, they do allow for the possibility of moving the discourse from its current entrenchment and allowing a level of healing in education and among the students involved.

Each interlocutor is unique, as are the conversations, allowing readers to contemplate multiple ideas and assess their rationale within the prescribed philosophical methodology of logic.

The sections cover a range of topics, such as the foundations of whiteness, the Black body, faith and religion, and COVID. In each section, different voices ask questions regarding privilege, authority, and community responsibility. These conversations use historical events, theories, and current events to invite readers into a reality they may or may not regularly experience. For those who face these realities daily, the conversations provide a meeting place and a type of kinship. For those somewhat or completely outside of these experiences, the conversations offer opportunities to inhabit a space other than one’s own and to engage with phenomenal experiences that expand both knowledge and truth from a singularity or a binary into a broader understanding. Each interlocutor is unique, as are the conversations, allowing readers to contemplate multiple ideas and assess their rationale within the prescribed philosophical methodology of logic. The dialogues do not attempt to establish utopian ideals or goals but help explain why these individuals continue to work for inclusion and equality of treatment, which can be viewed as productive interaction. For example, using trans-feminist thought, Che Gossett offers possibilities for imagining other ways of being, which can move discussions of race beyond current roadblocks. A second example is presented in how Joy James employs a collective primal scream regarding the case of Kevin Johnson, a death row inmate who was executed by the state of Missouri in November 2022. The loss of hope for justice, and possibly even for change, is replaced by Yancy’s non-sentimental love as James states, “We are permanently scarred in the hold; we are also sanctified there in our encounters not only with death but with each other as we care for agape. We connect, mutate, and grow capacity for consciousness” (p. 305). The expansion of consciousness replaces hope with a productive individual and community healing of these existential modalities.

The conversations in this text are not easy to read, nor are they intended for those unwilling to enter an arena of despair, agony, and existential turmoil. For those strong enough to risk vulnerability and embrace a higher love, the conversations offer the possibility for dealing with differing levels of racism, including what David R. Roediger discusses as the “death wish” embedded in white supremacy (p. 20), which is further illustrated in Penial E. Joseph’s, Eric Foner’s, and Noam Chomsky’s chapters on white mob mentality. In answer to these dialogues of existential turmoil, there is a progression toward existential freedom embodied in individual choices and becoming as well in communal decision-making. Reading this book is both emotionally and intellectually challenging. However, it offers a way of undertaking difficult conversations that go beyond the binary entrenchment currently affecting politics, society, and education.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.
Interdisciplinary Subjects: Racial Justice
Subject: Humanities – Philosophy

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Lavonna Lovern holds a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Missouri-Columbia and has taught at the college and university level for over 40 years in the areas of philosophy, religious studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. Her works, conference presentations, and publications focus on disability, Global Indigenous, and diverse epistemologies.

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