"Speaking the Unspeakable" would not be possible without the  support of our sponsors.  We are extremely grateful for their help to make this event possible!  Please join us in thanking the following organizations: 

(Click on the organization names to learn more.)

While racism is often popularly understood as explicit bias epitomized by Jim Crow-era segregation and the use of racial slurs, for over 20 years scholars have argued that the New Racism is characterized by structural inequality, colorblindness, and racially coded words and phrases.  Critically, investigations of racism today focus not just on formal legal policies or the overt use of denigrating language, but also on the ways in which language is used to occlude or make legible racial inequality. 

“Speaking the Unspeakable” will examine how race and racial inequality are structured, experienced, and felt through the languages of colorblindness, racism, and antiracism.  Here, we recognize that language informs social policy and everyday existence:

• How do we talk about or avoid talking about race? 
• How are conversations and ideas of race manifested materially? 
• What are the emotional or felt impacts of verbal and nonverbal racial communication?

This two-day conference will bring together scholars, community experts, students, and public-service providers for interactive workshops, panels, roundtables, and more. Learn more by exploring each of the tabs on this page.

George Yancy, Ph.D.

Professor, Department of Philosophy, Emory University
Philosophy of Race Book Series Editor, Lexington Books

“Removing the Mask of Whiteness”
Friday, February 17, 2017  |  5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Memorial Union (MU), Room 230 (Pima)

Whiteness, Yancy argues, is a site of fragility. It is also a site that has a binary structure. In other words, the logic of whiteness needs the other, the Black, the wretched, the damned. So, whiteness has a parasitic relational structure. If this is so, Black people will function as a site of pain and suffering, the sub-persons, the ontologically needed and yet paradoxically discarded and disposable. Hence, Yancy contends that what is necessary is what Baldwin calls a loss of white identity. Yancy argues that to go down this path, whites must be vulnerable, which means that whites must be prepared to face the structural emptiness of whiteness and begin to undo their complicity with white power and white privilege. Here Yancy pulls from his work regarding white opacity and white un-suturing. At the end of the day, we need to envision what it would look like for whites to live in a state of rage against white power and white privilege and begin to create conditions for this rage.    

Laura E. Gómez, Ph.D.

Interim Dean, Division of Social Sciences
Professor of Law
University of California, Los Angeles
 

“On the Continuing Relevance of History: Manifest Destiny, Racism and Nation-Building in the Present”
Saturday, February 18, 2017  |  5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Memorial Union (MU), Room 230 (Pima)

More than ever, all Americans should be aware of the long and rich history of Mexican Americans and the complex position of the original Mexican Americans who negotiated their place in both the regional and national racial landscapes of the late 19th century. Anyone who hopes to understand the dramatic and unstoppable demographic shift that is changing the U.S. from a majority-white to a majority-minority nation, where whites will become a minority compared to Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and those who claim a multi-racial identity must grapple with this racial history in order to make sense of the present and future racial order.  This history—detailed in the new edition of Manifest Destinies: the Making of the Mexican American Race, to be released in 2017—must be the starting point for thinking about social policies that will move us forward as a nation in ways that allow for the full incorporation of Latinos. Rather than repeat the mistakes of the past, we must understand how we got here in order to move forward in a way that seeks to perfect our national promise of equality and civic incorporation of all Americans. My comments will explore contemporary racial politics that have played out in the past decade—from the pro-immigrant rallies of 2006 that blocked immigration legislation, to enforcement of local and state anti-immigrant laws like Arizona’s SB1070, and in some senses culminating in one of the most divisive presidential elections in American history, in which Mexican Americans played a leading role. What lessons do these events hold for how race and racism have changed and where Latinos fit in the new racial order?