Dabo Li
Contributing Writer
Linda Martín Alcoff, invitee for the Philosophy Department’s Ninth Lindner Lecture in Ethics, will speak on the future of whiteness at the College next week.
Originally from Panama, Martín Alcoff now lives in Brooklyn, New York. She holds degrees from Georgia State University (B.A. and M.A.) and Brown University (Ph.D.)and served as President of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, in 2012-2013. Her writings have focused on social identity and race, epistemology and politics, sexual violence and theory such as Foucault and Dussel and Latino issues in philosophy. Martín Alcoff was named the Distinguished Woman in Philosophy for 2005 by the Society for Women in Philosophy; the following year she was named one of the 100 Most Influential Hispanics in the United States by Hispanic Business magazine.
Martín Alcoff’s talk will offer philosophical perspectives discussed in her upcoming book, The Future of Whiteness, to be published by Palgrave Publishers in 2015. According to Martín Alcoff, the U.S. will become a majority nonwhite country in 2042.
“It [the book] offers a theory about social identities in general and whiteness in particular and looks at the relationship between white identity and white supremacy,” said Martín Alcoff. “I argue that a great deal of what we see in the national news is actually about this — a sturm und drang [storm and stress] caused by white apprehension.”
If you are interested in learning about the philosophy of philosophy, you should attend Martín Alcoff’s lecture. She writes on her website, http://alcoff.com, “Despite how much I have loved philosophy, I have often felt an extreme alienation from most of it, and that my lifeworld is invisible to the world of public discourse and absent from the canonical tradition.” She adds, “But, still naive, I have felt this to be all the more reason to stay in the field, to try and communicate and justify my perceptions, and to critique the false universalism of philosophies which are almost always based on culturally limited intuitions.”