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

Award-winning Yancy (philosophy, Emory Univ.; Backlash) 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 (Indigenous health, Queensland Univ. of Technology; Another Day in the Colony); British-based political sociologist Akwugo Emejulu, and Brian Burkhart, former interim director of the Native Nations Center at the Univ. of Oklahoma, 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.