Sabeen Ahmed, assistant professor of philosophy and peace & conflict studies, Swarthmore College will speak on “Empire of White Supremacy.”

Given its resurgence in public discourse, the inconsistency of its deployment, and, most importantly, its status as the defining existential problem of modernity, the current ubiquity of the discourse of 'white supremacy' renders the term an especially urgent subject for philosophical interrogation. In lieu of liberal frameworks which would reduce white supremacism to a species of racism, however, I develop and deploy the lens of empire to reveal white supremacy as a historically-specific, racialized configuration of power.