César Cabezas is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. He received his PhD from Columbia University. His research focuses on the concept of racism—specifically, on how different conceptions of racism lead to different (and sometimes conflicting) diagnoses and proposed solutions to the problem of racial injustice. He is also interested in Africana and Latin American philosophies of decolonization. While at the Center, he will work on a project titled “Racism: A Systemic and Explanatory Account”. The project’s aim is to offer a philosophical reconstruction and defense of two key insights of the dominant conception of racism among anti-racist social movements. The first insight is that racism is systemic—the term “racism” refers, first and foremost, to a system of race-based oppression. The second insight is to conceive of racism as an explanatory concept. When we use “racism” as an explanatory concept, the point is to explain the persistence of social problems afflicting non-white communities, such as police violence, mass incarceration, and racial disparities in education, employment, and health care.