Naomi Zack

• 1. Introduction

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  Naomi Zack was born in 1944 in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish mother and a father who was Black and Native American. That combination of identities placed her at the intersection of multiple worlds from the very start of her life. How does a person shaped by such a background navigate a field as historically exclusive as academic philosophy? And how do the questions she carries from childhood eventually become the questions she poses to an entire discipline?

  Zack went on to become a philosopher whose work spans race, feminism, disaster ethics, and the history of philosophy. She has written thirteen books and three textbooks, and edited or co-edited five anthologies. The breadth of that output is one thing. The urgency running beneath it is another. The rest of this documentary examines where that urgency comes from, and what she built with it.

• 2. From Brooklyn to Columbia

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  Zack earned her bachelor's degree from New York University in 1966, attending on a New York State Regents Scholarship and becoming a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Those credentials opened the door to Columbia University, where she completed her doctorate in philosophy in 1970. Her dissertation tackled the epistemology of C. I. Lewis, a logician and pragmatist philosopher, and she wrote it under the supervision of Sidney Morgenbesser, one of the more celebrated figures in mid-twentieth century American philosophy.

  The path from that doctorate to a stable academic position was not a straight line. Zack served as an adjunct assistant professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for the 1990-91 school year, decades after finishing her doctorate. She accepted her first assistant professorship at the University of Albany only in 1998, where she also became an affiliated member in the Department of Women's Studies in 1993. She was promoted to associate professor in 1998, and then to full professor for the 2000-01 school year, while simultaneously directing the Doctor of Arts in Humanistic Studies Program.

• 3. Race, Identity, and Mixed Heritage

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  Race and Mixed Race, published in 1993, was among her earliest books and set the terms for much of what followed. Zack's own mixed heritage, with roots in Jewish, Black, and Native American ancestry, gave her a vantage point on racial classification that most philosophers did not share. She has returned to these questions repeatedly, from Thinking About Race in 1998 to Philosophy of Race: An Introduction in 2018, with a second edition arriving in 2023.

  The edited anthology American Mixed Race: Constructing Microdiversity appeared in 1995, and her co-edited volume Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality: The Philosophical Questions, produced with Laurie Shrage and Crispin Sartwell, came out in 1998. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, which she edited, arrived in 2017. Across these works, Zack pressed the discipline to treat race not as a settled biological or social fact but as something actively constructed and contested. Her 2011 book The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality after the History of Philosophy, which went to a second edition in 2015, brought the history of the discipline directly into dialogue with contemporary questions of equality.

• 4. Disasters as Moral Events

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  Ethics for Disaster, first published in 2009, marked Zack's most sustained engagement with a subject that sits at the edges of what philosophy usually addresses. She examined how disasters are socially constructed rather than simply natural events. Her framework carries an optimistic view of the social contract: governments bear not only an obligation to respond after disasters occur but also a positive obligation to plan in advance for likely types of disasters.

  Zack drew a careful distinction in that book. A government's ethical duty is not to provide the best assistance imaginable. The duty is to provide the best assistance that the government could have reasonably planned for. That distinction matters because it shifts the moral weight toward preparation, not just response. She also documented how the portrayal of what counts as a disaster shifts depending on the political, racial, and socio-economic position of those affected. A second edition of Ethics for Disaster appeared in 2023, suggesting those arguments have found continued relevance. Her 2021 book The American Tragedy of COVID-19 extended that framework into the most consequential public health disaster of the century.

• 5. Justice, Rights, and Police Violence

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  White Privilege and Black Rights: The Injustice of US Police Racial Profiling and Homicide, published in 2015, addressed the wave of public attention to police violence that had grown through the early part of that decade. Zack distinguished between two philosophical approaches to justice. One begins with an ideal, reasoning from what justice would look like in a perfect society even if no real society has ever fully realized it. The other begins with injustice itself and works backward toward correction.

  She argued for a deliberate shift in framing: rather than centering the conversation on white privilege, she invited people to think about Black rights, because what is frequently denied to Black people is not a matter of privilege at all but of basic human rights. That reframe is more than rhetorical. It changes which obligations fall on governments and institutions, and which arguments carry moral weight. Her 2016 book Applicative Justice: A Pragmatic Empirical Approach to Racial Injustice continued that line of thinking, and Reviving the Social Compact: Inclusive Citizenship in an Age of Extreme Politics followed in 2018.

• 6. Feminism, Intersectionality, and Late Work

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  Inclusive Feminism: A Theory for the Third Wave appeared in 2005, with a second edition in 2009. Women of Color and Philosophy: A Critical Reader, which Zack edited, came out in 2000. Her involvement with journals including Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy placed her work in the professional conversation around feminist philosophy over several decades.

  In 2019, two things happened in parallel. Zack joined the philosophy faculty at Lehman College, City University of New York, her current position. She was also awarded the 2019 Romanell - Phi Beta Kappa Professorship. The Romanell lectures, titled "A Philosophical View of Intersectionality", were postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and eventually delivered in 2022. In 2021, she was invited to give the John Dewey Lecture at the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, titled "Philosophy and Me". Her 2024 book Intersectionality: A Philosophical Framework, drawing from those Romanell lectures, marks the most recent extension of a career that began with a dissertation on C. I. Lewis and has arrived at one of the central conceptual debates in contemporary philosophy.