Short answers, pulled from the story.
Naomi Zack is a Professor of Philosophy at Lehman College, City University of New York, known for her work in the philosophy of race, feminist theory, and disaster ethics. She has written thirteen books and three textbooks, and edited or co-edited five anthologies. Her research has been particularly influential in arguing for a rights-based rather than privilege-based approach to racial justice.
Naomi Zack completed her doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University in 1970. Her dissertation examined the epistemology of C. I. Lewis and was written under the supervision of Sidney Morgenbesser.
Naomi Zack's major works on race include Race and Mixed Race (1993), Philosophy of Science and Race (2002), The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality after the History of Philosophy (2011), White Privilege and Black Rights (2015), Applicative Justice (2016), and Philosophy of Race: An Introduction (2018). She also edited the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race (2017).
In Ethics for Disaster, Zack argues that governments have a positive obligation to plan in advance for likely types of disasters, not merely to respond after they occur. She holds that the ethical duty is to provide the best assistance that a government could have reasonably planned for. She also analyzes how the portrayal of disasters differs depending on the political, racial, and socio-economic position of those affected.
In 2019, Naomi Zack was awarded the 2019 Romanell - Phi Beta Kappa Professorship. Her resulting lectures, titled "A Philosophical View of Intersectionality", were postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and delivered in 2022.
Naomi Zack argues in White Privilege and Black Rights (2015) that framing racial injustice as a matter of white privilege misidentifies what is actually at stake. What is denied to Black people, she contends, is often not privilege but basic human rights, and shifting to a rights-based framework changes which obligations fall on governments and institutions.