Interview with Professor George Yancy

The question of identity is a complex one. We articulate who we are within the context of a discourse that has its limits. So, I would say that I am a self who is incapable of fully saying who I am as my being is both a past, which is often too opaque to see with absolute clarity, and a future that is always not yet. So, I’m caught within these temporal poles and the limits of discourse. However, this doesn’t and shouldn’t generate absolute silence. After all, we can and do have the agency to rethink the past and anticipate the future from a meaningfully pregnant and agential present. We must engage the question of who we are. This is what we do as beings who are capable of raising the question of the meaning of our being. Of course, through the lens of white racism, this capacity for self-consciousness, indeed, critical self-consciousness, is denied. On this score, Black people are denied Geist or spirit.