Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Racial injustice has remained a stubborn feature of American society. One reason for its persistence is that everyday Americans fail to understand the problem of racial injustice as a lived experience. In his talk, Dr. Lebron will explore the uses of moral imagination to expand white Americans’ awareness of racial inequality but do so through an eclectic gathering of resources ranging from philosophy to black poetry. His argument is simple but urgent: doing better at supporting racial justice requires knowing both when you are racially wrong due to privilege but also knowing what counts as a racial wrong generally. The way to know these things better is to extend our sensitivities and social awareness to encompass the black experience in America.

Chris Lebron is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. His first book, The Color of Our Shame: Race and Justice in Our Time (OUP 2013) won the American Political Science Association Foundations of Political Theory First Book Prize. His second book The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea (OUP 2017) offers a brief intellectual history of the black lives matter social movement. Chris is the winner of the 2018 Hiett Prize in the Humanities, which recognizes a “career devoted to the humanities and whose work shows extraordinary promise to have a significant impact on contemporary culture.” In addition to his scholarly publications, Chris has been an active public intellectual, writing numerous times for The New York Times‘s philosophy column, The Stone, and a wide variety of other publications including Boston Review, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Billboard Magazine.

This event is part of the 2019-20 speaker series “Rethinking the Public Sphere: Part I – Race and the Promise of Participation“.

If you plan to attend the event with a course you are teaching or to offer extra-credit to your students, please let us know at humanities-center@ufl.edu with a tentative number of students to be expected. We are happy to manage sign-in sheets but we need to order extra chairs if students from multiple classes attend. Thank you.