Today’s conversation is with Paul C. Taylor, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to a number of scholarly essays and edited collections on philosophy and the question of race, he is the author of Race: A Philosophical Introduction (2003), On Obama (2015), and Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (2016). He is currently at work on two book-length projects: Dark Futures and Uneasy Sanctuary: Rethinking Race-Thinking.In this conversation, we discuss the place of philosophical thinking in the study of Black life, critical theory as a form of Black study, and the intersection of aesthetic questions and critical theories of race in the field of Black Studies.