Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future

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.

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.

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 nation's 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.