For our final fall episode before our winter break hiatus, Michael Borshuk sits down with Dr. Sebastian Ramirez, the Humanities Center's 2021-2022 Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities. Sebastian speaks with us about his research on white supremacy and "white backlash" and how his scholarship builds on the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Mills, and others. Over the course of the conversation, Dr. Ramirez shows us how philosophy's disciplinary focus might contribute to anti-racism, and reminds us of the importance of conceptual clarity as we look critically at white supremacy's history and legacy.
Some of the works Dr. Ramirez mentions in our conversation: Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. Du Bois, The Racial Contract by Charles Mills, From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism by Charles Mills, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It) by Elizabeth Anderson, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, and The Ideological Condition: Selected Essays on History, Race and Gender by Himani Bannerji.