Race and Racist Institutions

In this video, Eduardo Mendieta (Penn State University) asks “What are the consequences of race thinking and the institutional and legal forms of segregation if race is not real? Why do we categorize race as a real thing based on visual perception and how is such a category anti-democratic?”

Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University

Eduardo Mendieta was born in Colombia, but grew up in the United States. He studied at Rutgers, Union Theological Seminary, the New School for Social Research, and the Goethe University in Frankfurt. His research interest include: Frankfurt School Critical Theory, especially the work of Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst; Latin American philosophy, Liberation Philosophy, and the work of Enrique Dussel –which he has translated–, and Latino/a Philosophy. He has done work on and with Angela Y. Davis, whom he considers to be part of the Critical Theory traditions, given that her philosophical education took place at the Goethe University, and Brown University, under the mentorship of Herbert Marcuse. He has also been doing research on Latin American urbanism. He recently finished a monograph titled The Philosophical Animal: On Zoopoetics and Interspecies Cosmopolitanism, which is forthcoming with SUNY Press, as well as a Spanish edition, with an extended introduction, to work by Angela Y. Davis on penality and prison abolition. He is already at work on what he considers to be a prequel to his animal book, tentatively entitled, Philosophy’s War: Nomos, Polemos, Topos. Most immediately, however, he is editing his essays on the critical philosophy of race and will gather them under the title of Technologies of the Racist Self. He is also editing a couple of anthologies on the history of Latin American philosophy and its most recent developments.

View Website