News & Events Archive: 2013

December 19, 2013

Mandela’s work is our own by john powell  

December 5, 2013

Center for Race & Gender Thursday Forum Series presents...Bodies of Difference and Desire Meditations on Mammy: Asexuality and BlacknessIanna Hawkins Owen, African Diaspora StudiesThe Asexual Visibility and Education Network functions simultaneously as a message board based community and as an advocacy organization advancing the claim that asexuals are “just like everybody else.” In this context, black asexuals on AVEN have created threads/posts seeking out other black asexual users. Non-POC responses in these threads have employed various color-blind strategies that reveal the trouble the black asexual poses to the campaign of fusing “asexual” with “everybody else.” After nearly ten years of…

November 22, 2013

Inaugural lecture delivered upon appointment to the chair of Extraordinary Professor of History of the Dutch Slavery and its Legacy at the University of Amsterdam on October 5th , 2012 Living History: The Legacy of Slavery in the Netherlands

October 31, 2013

Come out and meet a best selling author and award winning actor Hill Harper as he signs and talks about his latest book, Letters to an Incarcerated Brother. This powerful book has messages of inspiration and hope for us all. Come out, get your book signed, talk with the author and be a part of this historic Bay Area event! brought to you by UNITED MEN OF ALLEN TEMPLE

October 30, 2013

Comic book characters aren't exactly known for their racial diversity, but now a group of self-proclaimed black girl geeks are trying to change that. Guest Host Celeste Headlee speaks to Grace Gipson, a blogger for Black Girl Nerds, about the lack of black representation in geek culture. Off the top of your head, how many black female comic book characters can you name?  Well, now a number of self-proclaimed black girl nerds who grew up reading comic books with characters that looked pretty much nothing like them are now joining forces to bring some diversity to so-called geek culture. The…

October 30, 2013

Nell Painter will present the Jefferson lecture on November 7, 2013, entitled: "Why White People Are Called 'Caucasian' (Illustrated)." The lecture is free and open to the public. No tickets are required. About Nell Painter Nell Painter is currently a painter (formerly known as the historian Nell Irvin Painter). She is the author of The History of White People and six other books and is the Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, among many others, she is a former president of the Organization of American Historians…

October 30, 2013

The Cost of Sugar In her presentation, UC Regents' lecturer Cynthia McLeod takes us back to the 18th-century Caribbean plantation colony Suriname. She presents Surinamese society through the eyes of two Jewish sisters, Elza and Sarith, descendants of the settlers of the "New Jerusalem of the River," known today as the Jodensavanne, the oldest Jewish settlement in Suriname which boasts the first synagogue in the Western hemisphere. The Cost of Sugar is a frank exposé of life in the Dutch slave colony when sugar ruled as kind - and the tragic toll it took on the lives of colonists and…

October 29, 2013

In We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement, Akinyele Omowale Umoja argues that armed resistance was critical to the efficacy of the southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement. Intimidation and fear were central to the system of oppression in Mississippi and most of the Deep South. To overcome the system of segregation, Black people had to overcome fear to present a significant challenge to White domination. Armed self-defense was a major tool of survival in allowing some Black southern communities to maintain their integrity and existence in the face of White supremacist…

October 23, 2013

Geoffrey Raymond and Nikki Jones, Department of Sociology, UC Santa Barbara Kristin Precoda, SRI International Abstract: This talk reports some initial findings from an ongoing, large-scale observational study of policing practices in two major cities. Using a large database of video recordings of police-civilian encounters (drawn from two sources, dash mounted cameras in patrol cars and video recordings made by researchers) and research methods that have enhanced the delivery of healthcare (by improving communication between doctors and patients, see Mangione-Smith, et al., 2004; Heritage, et al., 2010) this project has three main goals: (i) to understand and describe basic aspects…

October 18, 2013

In the 1920s, Langston Hughes invented a new poetic form, the blues stanza, which enabled him to embody the continuing presence of the black countryside in the modern city. In his 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes asserted the importance of creating a distinctively black poetics out of working-class life. The blues—and the blues stanza—were a central part of that project. Both Hughes’s blues poems and the form itself continue to be hugely influential in contemporary African American poetry and poetics. This talk explores that long reach—through a discussion of Natasha Trethewey’s hybrid blues poems, recent…