George Yancy

George Dewey Yancy (born June 3, 1961) is an American philosopher who is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. He is a distinguished Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, one of the college's highest honors. In 2019–20, he was the University of Pennsylvania's Inaugural Provost's Distinguished Visiting Faculty Fellow. He is the editor of the book series "Philosophy of Race" at Bloomsbury Publishing. He is known for his work in critical whiteness studies, critical philosophy of race, critical phenomenology (especially racial embodiment), and African American philosophy, and has written, edited, or co-edited over 25 books. In his capacity as an academic scholar and a public intellectual, he has published over 250 combined scholarly articles, chapters, and interviews that have appeared in professional journals, books, and at various news sites.

Yancy has authored numerous essays and conducted interviews at both The New York Times' philosophy column "The Stone," and at Truthout, which is "a nonprofit news organization dedicated to providing independent reporting and commentary on a diverse range of social justice issues." While writing for The New York Times' philosophy column "The Stone," Yancy conducted a series of interviews on death (called Conversations on Death ) through the lens of major religions (Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Jainism, Taoism, and the Yoruba religious tradition). The interview series also included an interview on atheism with philosopher Todd May. Yancy began the series with his own reflections on the meaning of death in an article titled, Facing the Fact of my Death. He continued the interviews on death through the lens of Sikhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism in a lengthy discussion titled, “Eastern Religions on Death and the Afterlife” at Tikkun.

At “The Stone,” he also conducted an influential series of interviews on the topic of race, including conversations with philosophers and public intellectuals Charles Mills, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Peter Singer, bell hooks, Anthony Appiah, Joy James, and others. The series began with an engaging conversation with philosopher Naomi Zack on the themes of white privilege, Black embodiment, and the social construction of race. At Truthout, Yancy has continued his public-facing philosophical work through conducting interviews with philosophers and scholars across various disciplines, exploring such areas and themes as disability studies/theory, white supremacy, xenophobia, genocide, fascism, Africana thought, global Black feminist thought, abolitionism, carceral logics, Afropessimism, global forms of anti-Blackness, authoritarianism and the meaning of democracy, social and political injustice, liberation politics, critical pedagogy, Critical Race Theory (CRT), white Christian nationalism, and more. As with "The Stone," he also writes standalone articles for Truthout.

Yancy has written about the importance of philosophy as grounded within the quotidian. He writes, "In terms of my own meta-philosophical turn, I came to understand that doing philosophy is an activity, one that is framed by various historically grounded assumptions, paradigms, disciplinary matrixes, linguistic communities, metaphorical devices, and narrative frames. Fundamentally, doing philosophy is a form of social engagement that is always already a process in medias res. And even while thinking 'alone,' one does not think without a language, which is socially and historically saturated with meaning. Many white philosophers that I’ve encountered, despite their pretensions to the contrary, are unable to brush off the dust of history and begin doing philosophy ex nihilo. More specifically, philosophizing is an embodied activity that begins within and grows out of diverse lived contexts; philosophizing takes place within the fray of the everyday. In their attempt to escape the social, to defy history, and to reject the body, many white philosophers have pretensions of being godlike. They attempt to defy the confluent social forces, the multiple identificatory registers, and their historicity and particularity, that shape their philosophical voices. They see themselves as totally detached from the often inchoate, social, and existential traffic of life and the background assumptions (race, gender, class, ability, sexuality) that are constitutive of a particular horizon of understanding. Having 'departed' from life, having rejected the force of effective history, embodied orientations (broadly construed), white philosophy is as good as dead, devoid of relevance, devoid of particularity, and escapist."

Also, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, he curated a special issue on the practical social significance of philosophy. Pulling from the work of essayist, poet, and feminist Adrienne Rich, Yancy has critiqued the field of philosophy as having lost the smell of the earth. And in his chapter contribution to the book A Companion to Public Philosophy (edited by McIntyre, McHugh, and Olasov, he argues, "I find problematic the distinction between 'public philosophy' and philosophy done within the classroom or within academia, especially where this distinction implies an incommensurable difference, a pure separation, a clean break. The 'public' is always already operative within the academically cloistered spaces of the classroom, and philosophical thinking is always already occurring outside the walls of academia. Within this context, I also find problematic the distinction between 'philosopher' and 'non-philosopher.' There is so much messiness when it comes to these 'dichotomies.'"

Additionally, he has published at CounterPunch, The Guardian, Inside Higher Ed, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. At "Academic Influence," Yancy has been called one of the top 10 influential philosophers in the decade spanning 2010–2020, due in part to the number of citations and web presence. Yancy was also the winner of the 2024 Public Philosophy Network's (PPN) Leadership Award. The Award recognizes the long-term and substantive contributions of philosophers to public philosophy. As of 2025, Yancy is the founder of "Candid Conversations with George Yancy." The inaugural event consisted of an exciting, engaging, and philosophically fecund and robust conversation with philosophers Cornel West and Judith Butler on October 29, 2025. On May 19, 2026, Yancy had the honor of being selected as the narrator in a performance of prominent rising composer Joel Thompson’s oratorio “To Awaken the Sleeper” with the DeKalb Symphony. The orchestral piece was conducted by Paul Bhasin. Thompson’s “To Awaken the Sleeper” is inspired by the work of Black writer James Baldwin and powerfully examines the deep contradictions in America's ideals versus its reality, while also articulating a steadfast and passionate sense of love and hope. In one review, William Ford writes, "The narration was delivered by George Yancy, professor of philosophy at Emory University. Using a microphone with remarkable clarity and articulation, Yancy projected Baldwin’s words with commanding presence and intellectual gravity. In a room where orchestral detail could easily blur into reverberant mass, the precision and immediacy of his spoken delivery became an anchoring force within the performance."

Education and career

Yancy received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh cum laude in 1985, his M.A. in philosophy from Yale University in 1987, his M.A. in Africana studies from New York University (NYU) in 2004, and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Duquesne University with distinction in 2005. He began teaching at Duquesne in 2005, progressing from assistant professor to full professor in eight years, 2005–2013. After teaching at Duquesne for ten years, he moved to teach philosophy at Emory University in 2015.

As an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, Yancy wrote his undergraduate honors thesis on Bertrand Russell's Sense Data theory. His honors thesis was directed by American philosopher and epistemologist Wilfrid Sellars. Also at Pitt, he studied Kant under Nicholas Rescher, studied with Adolf Grunbaum on Freud's theory of religion, studied Martin Heidegger under John Haugeland, and took a graduate seminar on Plato taught by Mary Louise Gill, and modern philosophy under Annette Baier. Yancy also took a course entitled Human Nature taught by prominent political theorist John W. Chapman, which explored questions of human nature from Plato to Marx, Sartre, Freud and Skinner. While at Yale University, he took graduate seminars with eminent philosophers such as John Edwin Smith (on pragmatism), Maurice Natanson (on the thought of Alfred Schutz), Rulon Wells (on the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz), and others. While at New York University, Yancy took a seminar on democracy with political and economic theorist Leonard Wantchekon, a Black history course with historian Robert Hinton, and a seminar with poet Kamau Brathwaite in which Yancy was exposed to surrealism, magical realism, and radical decolonial ways to rethink W. Shakespeare's The Tempest. The Consortium that existed between NYU and Columbia University allowed Yancy to enroll in a seminar on Gender and the Diaspora taught by cultural anthropologist Donna Daniels at Columbia University. Yancy also wrote his MA thesis under the direction of Columbia University's comparative literary theorist Farah Griffin. While at Duquesne University, Yancy wrote his dissertation on race and embodiment under philosopher Fred Evans.

Media appearances

Yancy has been interviewed on various radio stations throughout the U.S. He has also appeared in three documentaries, the six-episode series Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story (2018), Lillian Smith: Breaking the Silence (2019), and interviewed for and appeared in the Netflix documentary, Power, by Oscar nominated American film producer, Yance Ford, on policing in America (2024).

"Dear White America"

In 2015 Yancy published an article in the New York Times' philosophy column, The Stone, entitled "Dear White America". The article generated considerable controversy, resulting in him receiving large amounts of hate mail and harassment. This experience later helped convince the American Philosophical Association to issue a statement denouncing bullying and harassment. It also resulted in Yancy being added to the Professor Watchlist, a website which purports to document anti-conservative college professors, in 2016. He received over 1,000 messages of support. 68 philosophers and intellectuals signed a letter in his defense, supporting his freedom and the freedom of others to engage in philosophical discussions regarding major social and political issues. In response to being placed on the Professor Watchlist, Yancy wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times entitled "I am a Dangerous Professor."

Works

See also

• Hypatia transracialism controversy

References

External links

• Official website