John McWhorter, Ayishat Akanbi and Roger Berkowitz 'Language and Race: The Words We Live In'

Ayishat Akanbi is a cultural commentator, stylist and artist. Through her work and large online following she confronts complex issues around living in today's society. She uses her platforms to comment and call out injustice and inequality in intelligent, personal and moving ways. Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights at Bard College. Professor Berkowitz authored The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition (Harvard, 2005; Fordham, 2010; Chinese Law Press, 2011). Berkowitz is editor of On Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau and Hannah Arendt (forthcoming, 2024); The Perils of Invention: Lying, Technology, and the Human Condition ( 2020) and co-editor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2009), The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis (2012) and Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch (2017). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The American Interest, Bookforum, The Forward, The Paris Review Online, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and many other publications. Berkowitz edits HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center and the weekly newsletter Amor Mundi. He is the winner of the 2024 Compassion Award given by Con-Solatio and the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bremen, Germany. John H McWhorter is an associate professor in the Slavic Department at Columbia University. He earned his B.A. from Rutgers, his M.A. from New York University, and his Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford. Professor McWhorter has taught the seminar "Language in America," a study of American linguistic history that considers Native American languages, immigrant languages, creole languages, American Sign Language, Black English and other speech varieties-- their development, interactions, and preservation. He has also taught the seminar "Language Contact," which focuses specifically on the mixture of language in North America, and studies the development of creoles, pidgins, koines, "vehicular" languages, and nonstandard dialects. Both seminars consider perceived legitimacy of languages, and the standing of language mixtures in media and education. Professor McWhorter also teaches various other courses for the Linguistics Program and Music Humanities for the Core Curriculum program. This video was filmed live at the Alpine Fellowship 2024 Symposium in Tuscany, Italy. The event was held in partnership with Bard College through the Open Society University Network and supported in part by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.