Until Our Lungs Give Out

George Yancy is the author, editor, and co-editor of over 20 books, including Backlash: What Happens When we Talk Honestly About Racism in America. He is known for his influential essays and interviews in the New York Times philosophy column, The Stone. Adding to his many awards in recognitions, in March 2022, Yancy was honored to discover an anonymous muralist known as "Belove" had painted Yancys larger-the-life portrait in downtown Denver. Yancy lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he is professor of philosophy at Emory University.

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Tim Wise

Introduction: Critical Voices that Refuse to be Silenced

George Yancy

Part 1: Whiteness as Innocence Must Die

1. It’s Time for “Whiteness as Usual” to End: How do we Overcome the Death Wish of White Supremacy?

Interview with David R. Roediger

1. To be Black in the US is to Have a Knee Against Your Neck Each Day

Interview with George Yancy by Woojin Lim

1. Confronting Prejudice isn’t Enough: We Must Eradicate the White Racial Frame

Interview with Joe Feagin

1. We Have to Let White Supremacy Die in Order to Truly Live

Interview with David Kyuman Kim

Part 2: Global Anti-Blackness

1. Afropessimism Forces Us to Rethink Our Most Basic Assumptions About Society

Interview with Frank B. Wilderson, III

1. “I Can’t Breathe” Is a Cry Well Known to Black Indigenous People in Australia

Interview with Chelsea Watego

1. Black Feminist “Back Talk” Anchors Resistance on Both Sides of the Atlantic

Interview with Akwugo Emejulu

1. Anti-Black Racism is Global: So Must be the Movement to End It

Interview with Adele Norris

Part 3: Racism, Education, and Practices of Freedom

1. Trump is Attacking Critical Race Theory Because it is a Force for Liberation

Interview with Mari Matsuda

1. Education Will be Critical in the Fight for Democracy and Anti-Racism

Interview with Pedro A. Noguera

1. Paulo Freire: Critical Education in a World in Need of Repair

Interview with Peter McLaren

Part 4: Challenging White Foundations

1. The Tulsa Race Massacre Went Way Beyond “Black Wall Street”

Interview with Robin D.G. Kelley

1. The Whiteness of Harvard and Wall Street is “Jim Crow, New Style”

Interview with Cornel West

1. US Founders Demonized Indigenous People While Coopting their Political Practices

Interview with Brian Burkhart

1. Founded on Inequality, Can the US Ever be Truly Democratic and Inclusive?

Interview with Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting

Part 5: Assaults on the Black Body

1. White Indifference is Normalizing Spectacular Acts of Violence

Interview with Robin D.G. Kelley

1. White Journalists are Still Using the N-Word: This is an Intolerable Assault on Black Freedom

Interview with Elizabeth Pryor

1. Protests Unleashed by Murder of George Floyd Exceed All in US History

Interview with Noam Chomsky

Part 6: Matters of Faith and Religion

1. Black Womanist Theology Offers Hope in the Face of White Supremacy

Interview with Kelly Brown Douglas

1. Christianity is Empty if it Doesn’t Address the Racist Carceral State

Interview with Mark L. Taylor

1. White Supremacist Christianity Drives Trump’s Loyal Mob: We Must Scream it Down

Interview with Susannah Heschel

Part 7: The Politics of Catastrophe

1. Mourning is a Political Act Amid the Pandemic and its Disparities

Interview with Judith Butler

1. Trump’s Lying about COVID Amounts to Treason

Interview with Eduardo Mendieta

1. Big Pharma Cares More About Profiting from COVID than Human Survival

Interview with Noam Chomsky

Part 8: Realizing (or Imagining) the Possible

1. Black Trans Feminist Thought Can Set Us Free

Interview with Che Gossett

1. Reaching Beyond “Black Faces in High Places”

Interview with Joy James

Part 9: White Mob Mentality

1. The Capitol Siege was White Supremacy in Action: Trial Evidence Confirms That

Interview with Peniel E. Joseph

1. Capitol Mob Reveals Ongoing Refusal to Accept Black Votes as Legitimate

Interview with Eric Fonner

1. Trump has Adopted a “Viva Death!” Approach to the Presidency

Interview with Noam Chomsky

About the Contributors

Index

Award-winning Yancy presents this collection of interviews that are replete with ideas and insights about all that the pursuit of justice, equality, and peace entails. The author brings together leading intellectuals and philosophers—Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Cornel West, and Eric Foner, for example—to discuss the topic in raw, searing honesty. Author/scholar/activist Frank B. Wilderson III describes the impact of unrelenting oppression against Black people, and there are powerful chapters such as the one called, "To Be Black in the U.S. Is To Have a Knee Against Your Neck Every Day." The book also includes observations by somewhat lesser-known people: author Chelsea Watego; British-based political sociologist Akwugo Emejulu, and Brian Burkhart, and more. Explicitly addressed is the preposterous suggestion that everyone just "move on" from thinking about racism. This book’s contributors say that the only way society can do that is if white people go through some type of kenosis about their prejudices and notions that people do not deserve the same rights. All readers stand to learn something from this compelling book.

— Library Journal, Starred Review

These stimulating and wide-ranging engagements—from Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler, to Robin Kelley, Mari Matsuda, and Cornel West—remind us of the range and depth of philosophical knowledge that underscores George Yancy’s work as a public intellectual as well as a scholar. This collection of conversations is a must-read for those of us seeking deeper understandings of the complex interactions of race, class, gender, and justice.

— Henry Louis Gates Jr, the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

Until Our Lungs Give Out is a painfully relevant and indispensable book that brings together world-renowned scholars to collectively demonstrate what it looks like to face the horrors and deep conflicts of the world head on and to speak against them despite the dangers of doing so. As one of our nations most searingly insightful philosophers, Yancy has prophetically modeled speaking truth in love and has steadfastly refused to sugarcoat the truth no matter the personal cost to him. This collection of critical conversations underscores the hard truth that we have neither been good stewards of the earth nor have we been good neighbors toward each other. We have failed to give the abundance of care that each one of us deserves. Until Our Lungs Give Out bears witness to a cadre of renowned peacemakers (not peacekeepers) who will fight for national and global justice, humanity and peace until their lungs give out.

— Kirsten Powers, CNN senior political analyst, New York Times bestselling author

Many thanks to philosopher and public intellectual George Yancy for this bounty of engaged thought from our foremost thinkers. We need this gift now more than ever—as a source of both perception and hope.

— Nell Irvin Painter, author of The History of White People

Robin D. G. Kelley poignantly captures the protests for racial justice during the surge in white nationalist retaliations. He states, If there is such a thing as the arc of the moral universe, it does not bend on its own. We bend it one way, our enemies bend it back. George Yancy’s interviews with Kelley and many of the most important thinkers and doers of our times inspire many ways we can go forward from here. These interviews are thought-provoking, forward-thinking, and inspiring about next steps.

— Tera W. Hunter, author of Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century

Until Our Lungs Give Out is a timely and tremendously important book. It presents thoughtful and thought-provoking conversations between distinguished philosopher George Yancy and a dazzling array of the world’s most profound, original, and generative thinkers about anti-Black racism in the U.S. and around the world.

— George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness

The title of George Yancy’s new collection of interviews tells it all: he gives voice to the top critical thinkers in today’s struggle against racism and sexism, thinkers who persist in their struggle to the end, until their lungs give out. I’ve never seen a volume which combines multiple perspectives with a united strong commitment to emancipation. Until Our Lungs Give Out gives hope, and hope is what we need in our dark times.

— Slavoj Žižek, author of Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed and Heaven in Disorder

In this set of interviews, George Yancy invites leading intellectuals to tarry with global white supremacy, planetary anti-blackness, nocent settler-colonialism, structural misogyny, and insatiable capitalist extraction. The message and messengers are deeply political, philosophical, and pedagogical. At once an act of defiance and radical love, Until Our Lungs Give Out asks us to peer into a futurity its authors likely will not inhabit.

— Zeus Leonardo, author of Edward Said and Education

Refusing to adjust to injustice, George Yancy’s interlocutors speak with passion and urgency attesting to Yancy’s skill as an interviewer. Listen to what they have to say, for the insights they express speak to some of the gravest issues of our times.

— Robert Gooding-Williams, professor of philosophy and African American studies, Columbia University