t’s impossible to pigeonhole Adrian Piper. At various points in her life, she has been a piano prodigy, a fashion model, an LSD-taking street performer, a disco dancer and an amateur composer for the guitar. Today, she is a prominent conceptual artist, a philosophy professor at Wellesley College and a prolific writer.

In fact, the only way to classify her is to say that she consistently defies classification. Her unique position in society (Piper is a light-skinned African-American) has given her a heightened sensitivity to those things that block such a development: injustice, racial inequities, societal myths and yes, the categorisation and stereotyping of people. Her rather impressive “day job” has given her the skills with which to logically combat these evils. Here, she talks about art, philosophy and the latent racism which exists within us all.