Craig Irvine, Ph.D., Academic Director of Columbia University’s Master of Science in Narrative Medicine program, is included in George Yancy's new collection of interviews, "On Race: 34 Conversations in a Time of Crisis," published today by Oxford University Press.
Many of the interviews are with thinkers at the forefront of the effort to understand "the nature, challenges, and deepest questions surrounding this fraught and thorny topic," including bell hooks, Judith Butler, Cornel West, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Peter Singer, Seyla Benhabib, and Noam Chomsky. Irvine writes:
To challenge racism and the role whiteness plays in perpetuating racist practices requires more... than a cognitive shift. It requires work on the somatic level. It doesn't matter how many lectures are delivered or articles published by well-meaning healthcare reformers about the evils of racial disparities; until white researchers, clinicians, and the reformers themselves begin to engage in a continuous effort to perform our bodies' racialized interactions with the world differently, meaningful healthcare reform will never take place.
Irvine adds that he hopes the collection advances and deepens the national conversation through the serious interrogations of race and racism that George Yancy pursues in his interviews.
