- I'm super excited about this event
and having both Dr. Zaire Dinzey-Flores
and Tanya Herńandez with us today.
And I'm gonna do a brief
presentation of each one,
but before I start, I would like to thank
the Divisional Dean of the
Humanities, Amy Hungerford,
for the support of the
320 York Humanities Grant,
Administer Matthew Jacobson of
the Public Humanities Support
and also for the support,
especially for the support of
the Center for Race, Indigeneity,
and Transnational Migration,
it's Director Stephen
Pitti, and our amazing staff
Matthew Tanico and Nandi
Cummings, who have done
so much of the coordination
to make this possible.
And they have just gone way
beyond the call of duty here.
So, first, I want to
introduce Dr. Tanya Herńandez.
Dr. Tanya Hernandez is a professor of law
at Fordham University School of Law,
where she teaches comparative
employment discrimination,
critical race theory
and trusts and states.
She received her BA from Brown University
and her JD from up the street
at the Yale Law School,
where she served as Note Topics Editor
of The Yale Law Journal.
She has served as a faculty fellow
at the Institute for Research
on Women at Rutgers University
and as a scholar in residence
at the Schomburg Center
for Research in Black Culture.
In 2009, Professor Herńandez was elected
to the American Law Institute and in 2007,
Hispanic Business Magazine selected her
as one of the 100 Most
Influential Hispanics, they call.
Professor Herńandez's scholarly interest
is in the study of
comparative race relations
and anti-discrimination law,
and her work in the
area has been published
in the California Law
Review, Cornell Law Review,
Harvard Civil Rights Civil
Liberties Law Review,
and the Yale Law Journal
amongst other publications.
As a Law and Public Affairs
fellow at Princeton,
Dr. Herńandez conducted
research on the topic
of Latino inter-ethnic
racism in the workplace
and its implications for the enforcement
of employment discrimination law.
Her new book, which we have
actually book order forms for,
and I encourage you to look at them,
her new book Multiracials
and Civil Rights:
Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination
was published by NYU Press
in 2018, just last year.
In this recent book,
Professor Herńandez explores
the question of how to
pursue racial equality
in a growing multiracial world.
The growth of a mixed
race population has led
some commentators to proclaim
that multiracial discrimination
is distinct in nature,
from the the racial discrimination
that non multiracial persons experience.
And that as a consequence,
a whole new approach
to Civil Rights Law is required.
And she talks about this and challenges
different approaches to this idea.
Dr. Herńandez describes her own experience
as an Afro-Latina, mixed race person,
and then shares how she tracks down
the core case narratives of
multiracial discrimination
and the story of racial
privilege they revealed,
in this book she does that.
The stories she uncovered
are especially timely,
and coming at a time when
explicit racism is resurfacing.
Dr. Herńandez looks at
multiracial discrimination cases,
and this look is essential
for fortifying the focus
on Civil Rights Law on racial privilege.
I also want to introduce
Dr. Zaire Dinzey-Flores.
Dr. Dinzey-Flores is Associate Professor
in the Department of Latino
and Caribbean Studies
and Sociology at Rutgers
University, New Brunswick.
Where she teaches
courses in Urban Studies,
Architecture and Urban
Planning, Social Inequality,
Space, Place, and the Built Environment,
Latin America and
Caribbean Housing Policy,
and the African Diaspora.
Professor Dinzey-Flores
earned her BA in Sociology
from Harvard University, an
MA in Sociology from Stanford
and a Masters in Urban
Planning and PHD in Sociology
and Social Policy from the
University of Michigan.
Professor Dinzey-Flores' research focuses
on understanding how urban
space mediates community life
and race, class and social inequality.
She uses an interdisciplinary
lens, mixed-method approaches,
and often a comparative
Caribbean-U.S. framework,
to investigate the processes that cement
the built environment and
unequally distribute power.
Her book, Locked In, Locked
Out: Gated Communities
in a Puerto Rican City was published
by University Of
Pennsylvania Press in 2013,
and was the winner of the
prestigious Robert E. Park Award
of the Community Urban Sociology Section
of the American Sociological
Association in 2014.
And an Honorable Mention
of the 2014 Frank Bonilla
Book Award of the Puerto
Rican Studies Association.
Locked In, Locked Out examines
race and class inequality
as they are created,
contained, and negotiated
through urban policy, the
physical built environment,
and community gates in
private and public housing.
Dr. Dinzey-Flores is currently working
on a number of projects.
The first is a mixed method
examination of how race
is articulated in residential
real estate practices
in demographically changing neighborhoods
in Brooklyn, New York.
And the second, looks at the
transatlantic circulation
of housing planning and design ideals
in the middle of the 20th Century.
She is also collaborating
on a mobile data project
with department and university colleagues,
seeking to understand racial segregation
as it occurs in motion
and a mixed-media project
on the construction of the Caribbean.
Professor Dinzey-Flores
has held fellowships
at the University of
Pennsylvania Institute
for urban research and
also has been a fellow of
the Andrew W. Mellon
Postdoctoral Fellow on Race,
Crime, and Justice,
and at the Vera Institute of Justice.
Since 2013, Professor Dinzey-Flores
has been a board member
of the Mayoral Appointed Board
of the New York City Housing Authority
and I would like for us to
give them both a warm welcome
to talk to us today.
(audience applauds)
And before I actually end,
which I will do very quickly, promise.
I just wanted to say that we,
after both of our speakers talk,
we will have some commentary
by two of our undergraduates
here at Yale, Alejandro
Comas-Short and Alondra Mejia.
And I just briefly wanted
to tell you that this,
that the reason why this
is being done today here,
is because of students like them.
They have expressed
powerful, consistent interest
in Afro-Latino values of various kinds,
as well as in blackness
and diaspora context.
And specifically they have
an interest in anti-blackness
in Latinx communities.
Which is a topic that they
raised in various informal
and formal forums in
which they have great,
both personal and academic
intellectual interests.
So I really appreciate them
taking the time to be here,
as representative of other
students who are likewise,
very interested in this topic.
And I'll leave it at that.
And, Tanya Herńandez is gonna start.
- Thank you very much,
it's a pleasure to be back.
I took advantage of
three years at law school
and I never went to the Beinecke,
I went to the Beinecke
for the first time today.
It's quite lovely.
(laughs)
So, what I wanna do, is share a few words
about the background of the book.
Oh, I thought it was up there.
Anyway, my one meager attempt
at media interpretation of.
(speaking foreign language)
- [Woman] It was right there.
- Well, it's not really
that important though.
- But that's very strange
because it was right here.
Can I sign with my, oh, it
has to be the person that--
- Whosever computer that is.
It's not mine, so I don't
know where to sign in.
(audience chattering)
- No, no, this is it.
- This is why I never do a PowerPoint.
(audience laughs)
All I have here is just
one image, that's it.
The cover of the book.
- If that's the case, you may have to--
- And it's no problem
to proceed without it.
(laughs)
(mumbles)
- Yeah, that's not it.
- Okay, no problem, okay.
I'll just close this down,
so that you don't have distraction.
Okay, so what I thought I
would do is share a few words
about the background of the book,
Multiracials and Civil Rights.
(audience laughs)
Before I read a short excerpt for you.
And it's about my own personal story.
So you're getting a exposure to the book
that I don't normally do
in scholarly presentations,
because I think if my colleagues want
that kinda business about
me, they should buy the book.
(laughs)
But for students, I have special love,
I make special consideration of.
So I've been a Civil Rights
professor, lawyer, et cetera,
for over 25 years.
And yet, I was very confused
when I started reading
some commentary about the
rise of people who identify
as multiracial, that
part didn't confuse me,
the part that confused
me, was an attribution
that that rise in this
more fluid, nuanced,
context space, form of
identifying racially,
now meant that we needed
a whole new Civil Rights.
And the reason why that confused me,
is because it didn't seem,
in keeping with what I was observing.
But I decided, you know what,
let me go take a look at these cases,
and see for myself what's going on.
Since these commentators
are now sort of alerting me
to a new dynamic.
So I go back, I take a look at these cases
and what I see is that while
there certainly is a presence
of people who are now
identifying as mixed race,
and they say that before the court.
Where they say, hello, my name is X,
and my racial identity is Y,
and this is what happened to me.
And when they begin with
what happened to them,
the mixed race identity
then takes a backseat,
in their own stories.
Their stories are about
being unfairly treated,
not based on merit, excluded
from public opportunities
of access, all because of them
being lumped as non white.
Not about any particular form of their,
like, meaning that their personal identity
doesn't match up necessarily,
with what the more crude group based
form of treatment that they're receiving.
Yet in this literature,
these commentators,
courts are presumed to misunderstand,
the nature of discrimination
against mixed race persons.
And this is when I wanted
to better comprehend.
So when I looked at all of these,
I did it within the housing
context, employment context,
public accommodations,
criminal justice, education
and all of these various fears,
I found a very particular dynamic, right?
That I'm gonna describe to you.
And with that dynamic,
this focus on non whiteness of any sort,
being problematic by those
who want to discriminate,
what I observed was a
need for reinforcement
of our current structures of Civil Rights
and anti-discrimination law.
As opposed to a justification for,
sort of, rewriting the page.
So let me sort of start with
an excerpt from the book,
from the very beginning.
Where I look at how the multiracial
stories that I dug into.
This is basically what I did,
I looked at people's personal stories,
as evolved in court cases but
still their personal stories.
And in looking at all
those personal stories,
I have to say that it sort
of brought me back to my own.
As an Afro-Latina, mixed race person,
sorta navigating various
tropes in pathologies of
(speaks foreign language)
of racial mixture pride,
in Latino communities.
And it seemed important to be transparent
about how that background was
informing my own analyses.
Just before I begin, how many
of you understand Spanish?
Oh, good, okay!
So, there's a couple of
colloquialisms in here
that I loosely try to translate,
but if you all think there's
a better translation,
feel free to shout it out.
Okay, so, I'm gonna start reading.
I'm not doing it from the book itself,
because the font is too small.
(laughs)
All these 25 years, you know,
they have taken a toll on the eyes.
Okay, so I've got it all
printed out nice in a big font.
All right, I am the mixed race daughter
of a mixed race mother,
almost given away
because of her blackness.
In the 1940s, my maternal
grandmother, Lucrecia,
was a mixed race country girl.
Or what her fellow Puerto
Ricans called a jibara
from a mountain village in Puerto Rico.
Her African ancestry appeared slightly,
in what they described as a
(speaks foreign language),
light, wheat color skin tone
but was not very apparent
in her facial features or hair texture.
Her older sisters were
similarly light-skinned
and favored their fair complected mother
more than their darker-skinned father.
For this reason, Lucrecia and her sisters
considered themselves a race apart
from those who appeared more
unambiguously Afro-descended.
Any tinge of color in
the family was attributed
to the long ago legacy of
Taino Indians on the island.
And it was immaterial to the family
that Taino Indians have
been historically documented
to have been exterminated by the Spaniards
by the mid 16th century,
mid to late 16th century.
When my grandmother
Lucrecia fell in love with
and united herself with a carpenter
and a guitarist named Juan,
her family was not pleased.
Not because of his profession,
but because while he himself
was a mixed race grandchild
of a former slave, and son of
an Afro-Puerto Rican mother
and white Spaniard, his
race mixture appearance
was what Lucrecia's
family labeled as black,
and thus unacceptable.
Puerto Rican identity may claim
to celebrate racial mixture,
but some of us are thought to
look more mixed than others.
Dark-skin deviations from the
idealization of light-skin
with European features and straight hair,
are ejected from the Puerto Rican portrait
of racial mixture.
Lucrecia's family was no
exception from this Puerto Rican
and similarly Latin American,
anti-black conception of racial mixture.
Lucrecia's second child, Nina, my mom,
was born in the 1940s,
and much to the dismay
of Lucrecia's family,
to them the child was dark, too dark.
Too dark to count as racially mixed
and certainly too dark to pass as white,
or a white Puerto Rican.
Baby Nina did not thus pass
the look behind the ears
Caribbean test of seeking out
the future darkness of infants,
'cause you know, our
skin changes over time.
Even more problematic, Nina's skin tone,
approximating that of
1940s African American
singer and actress Lena Horne,
perhaps the Beyonce of her
time for you millennials,
would complicate the family's image
as disassociated from blackness.
Who is she, what is she
to you, in other words.
The campaign to send baby
Nina away began in earnest.
Lucrecia's family
lobbied to have baby Nina
placed for adoption with
an African American family.
Any African American family would do,
so as long as baby Nina was
removed from the household.
Only later, as an adult researcher
would I learn from a colleague,
how much the family impulse to
return dark skinned children
like they are damaged goods
in the foster care system
in Puerto Rico when they become too dark,
was like what happened with my family.
At the same time, the family's animus
towards the Afro-Puerto Rican
father that baby Nina favored,
did not extend to her older sister Monica,
with the same father.
Why a difference?
Monica, although sibling,
was lighter in complexion
with long, straight hair.
Monica's African ancestry
then, did not announce itself
so loudly in her appearance,
and she was immediately
accepted by the family.
The physical comparisons
between the two sisters
was a constant obsession of the family,
with Nina, the dark one,
being called (speaks foreign
language), little monkey
and (speaks foreign language),
little black African-like
girl, my best translation,
while Monica was lovingly
called la nina, the little girl,
the loving little girl.
Nina's darker skin tone
and African tresses
were always viewed as
problematic by the family.
Her kinky curls, what they
call (speaks foreign language),
bad hair, was a source of
consternation that compelled
Lucrecia's family to
continually shave Nina's hair
in the hope that it would
grow out straighter.
I told you they were country people.
(audience lightly laughs)
Any infraction of Lucrecia's
rules of discipline
were greeted with both a beating,
and an expression of regret
for not having given her away
to an African American family at birth,
along with the threat to
place Nina in a foster home.
Again, this was a marked contrast
to the indulgence accorded
her older sister Monica,
with the slightly lighter
skin and more importantly,
(speaks foreign language), pretty hair.
Literally, more culturally
better translated as good hair.
The racialized distinctions
between the two girls
continued their entire lives.
My own childhood experience
with differential treatment
based on how mixed or black
someone perceived me to look
on any given day, or
context, only reinforced
my understanding of the
relevance of anti-black sentiment
within celebrations of
idealized notions of mixture
amongst Puerto Ricans and others.
My grandmother Lucrecia was
never happier than when my hair
was greased down into two
long braids down my back
and I looked as what she fantasized
an indigenous Taina would look like.
But her absolute preference
was for me to have my
hair blow dried straight
regardless of how short in
duration the look would last.
My curly girls in the room
know what I'm talking about.
One day in humid weather,
maybe a week with some
big rollers, dry air,
nightly wrapping for maximum stretch.
However, the hair wars
began in earnest with her
when I cut off my hair in an
act of adolescent independence.
So, much shorter than it is right now.
My grandmother was mystified
as to why I would choose
to have my curls spring out on display
in what resembled my mother's afro.
In my grandmother's eyes,
my mother was unfortunately
afflicted with overtly bad hair,
but why in the world would I
choose to emulate that style,
when I had, what she thought was
the benefit of being better situated
to beat my hair into submission
with a more attractive
assimilation of whiteness.
Every visit to her apartment
on the Lower East Side of Manhattan
was greeted with some version
of (speaks foreign language),
oh, that hair or (speaks
foreign language),
why don't you do something with that hair?
Wearing my hair in a short curly mop
also worked to seemingly eject me
from my presumed membership
in the Latino, Latinx,
I'm with young people, imaginary.
Encountering Latinx merchants
and other Latinx service providers,
I was now constantly
greeted with a surprised,
oh, you speak Spanish, where
did you learn to speak Spanish?
My hair now barred me and barred the door
to my automatic entree to Latinx kinship.
I now had to earn my
way back into Latinaness
by constantly speaking Spanish loudly
and referencing my Latina culture.
Like in Latin America, the
imagined Latino community
has and had a decided vision of mixture
that does not encompass tightly
coiled hair with brown skin.
The anti-black slurs I also heard used
in the Latino community, with
respect to African Americans,
only reinforced my early impressions
that blackness was problematic
despite our assertions of Latino pride
in being a mixture of races.
It became evident to me that our cultural
(speaks foreign language)
pride, race mixture pride,
notwithstanding, not all parts
of the mixture were equally
welcomed or celebrated.
Even outside the family nucleus,
I found that there was a
politics to racial mixture,
that living in the
multi-ethnic New York City
of the late 1960s and 70s did not abate.
I was blessed to have
attended a very dynamic
Head Start program,
located in the Midtown West
neighborhood of Manhattan.
Then known as Hell's Kitchen,
the backdrop for the movie
and the play, West Side Story.
Get a lil' image there?
Okay, the preschool was incredibly diverse
and a delight to attend.
However, when we all graduated preschool
and entered into the local
public elementary together,
I was separated from my
diverse group of friends.
For the first two weeks of first grade,
I found myself in a very chaotic classroom
where we were often left unattended
and where very little learning took place.
This was the Special
Education class of the 1960s.
The class was filled with
brown-skinned Latinos
and African Americans
I'd never met before.
I was separated from my
preschool best friend, Lizzie,
with the sweet white Irish face.
I was separated from my
Puerto Rican buddy Ruben,
with his pale white skin.
Nor were any of the other
lighter skinned Puerto Ricans
from Head Start in the Special
Education class with me.
When my mother discovered that
something was not quite right
about my elementary
school learning situation,
she intervened, or as what
we now call helicoptered in,
and the school official
claimed I was placed there
because of my Spanish
language education needs.
This was an explanation that
was most peculiar, given, one,
the English dominant African
Americans in the class
and the absence of any bilingual education
offered while I was there.
Back then there was not
a public conversation
about the school-to-prison pipeline,
but there was certainly
a penitentiary approach
to warehousing difference.
Only when my mother insisted that English
was actually my primary language
and the language of my
instruction in preschool,
was I able to enter a
mainstream classroom,
where actual teaching took place.
Even after my escape
though, from the Special-Ed
of the 1960s, which was neither
special nor an education,
my New York City public school experiences
continued to operate
within a pigmentocracy,
a hierarchy of color,
where the racial mixture
of Latinos was acknowledged
but closer approximations
of whiteness were rewarded
with presumptions of
competence and intellect.
This became especially clear to me
when strangers did not
know my Spanish surname
or ethnic origin, they just saw the face
and presumed that my black-white mixture
was solely due to an
African-American ancestry.
After a lifetime of
seeing how my mixed race
and multiethnic status,
multilingual status,
did not shield me, from
the racism of our society,
nor many others I have since
been blessed to travel to,
it came as a surprise
to me to read the work
of legal scholars and others,
proclaiming that mixed
race racial discrimination
was distinct in nature, from
the racial discrimination
that non-multiracial
identified persons experience.
While certainly every
individual perceives their
racial discrimination as
their own personal experience.
I'm a lawyer, I get that,
each of my clients is unique.
It's still a jolt to encounter the premise
of the presumed uniqueness of
the discrimination entirely,
against multiracial identified persons
and its requirement that a new approach
to civil rights be formulated.
Because this presumption
is such a disconnect
from my own mixed race
Puerto Rican experience,
I began the journey of tracking down
the multiracial accounts
of racism for myself.
The tale of why multiracial discrimination
is thought to challenge
traditional understandings
of Civil Rights law has a lot to teach us
about how to move towards
a more egalitarian society.
It's my hope that the insights I found
in examining the multiracial
discrimination cases
will be illuminating for you as well,
whatever your own story of race may be.
So that closes the exert.
Do I have a few more minutes
left, or should I close here?
I do, okay.
So, the books examines all
electronically available
anti discrimination law cases,
with mixed raced identified claimants.
All right, so not every single person
who has any racial mixture
in their background.
The inquiry, the focus of the research
was on people identify,
self identify with
their mixed race status.
'Cause that's two different things.
And I looked at their
stories within the context
of the work place, school
settings, housing discrimination,
more about that later,
after Dr. Flores talks,
public accommodations
and criminal justice.
And what I found in
each of those contexts,
was a story after story of a very familiar
white versus non white bias.
I wanna share you a sample
of a story from the book.
All right, so you don't just, oh,
this book is just about her, no.
So let me tell you about a
woman named Jill Mitchell.
Jill Mitchell describes herself
as a light skinned biracial woman,
with a black father and a white mother.
She says that based on her appearance,
many people presume that she's mixed.
So they're looking at her like,
oh, something there, right?
But she says when they
guess, they often guess
that she's a mix of some
Latina with European ancestry.
So she starts working for Champs Sports,
sporting good chain, her
chain was in Beaumont, Texas,
just to give you a lil' flavor.
And she works there as a
full-time management trainee.
She works there for a whole
year without any problems,
she actually receives positive
performance evaluations,
but she felt that her entire
work experience began to shift,
once her store manager discovered
that her racial background, while mixed,
was okay for a year, as being mixed,
but that it included African ancestry.
Now, how did he find this out?
She didn't disclose this
on her job application,
she didn't answer his question.
You know all mixed race
people get, so what are you?
She didn't answer that, 'cause
it was none of his business.
It's also an illegal
question, but any case.
So he doesn't know about
her background from her.
He figures it out, so to speak,
when, after a year of working there,
her family started to show
up after work to pick her up,
give her a drive home, meet at lunch,
take her out to lunch, et cetera.
And some of the family
members who showed up
were the darker skinned
members of the family.
So when he did the
question of who are they
and what are they to you, and
she says that they're family,
his little brains works and he comes
to the logical conclusion,
ah, if you're not adopted,
then I guess, boom, boom, boom, boom,
oh, this is part of
your background as well.
So he deduces that her
racial background includes
some African ancestry.
She says that his attitude
towards her changed dramatically,
those are her words, as he
fixated on her African ancestry.
He starts to make negative
remarks to her about black people
and on one occasion, even
sort of confronts her
very directly as to why was
she was only dating black men.
He viewed that as problematic.
A little intersectional analysis here.
At one point, Mitchell
overhears the manager stating
we need to get her outta here.
And sure enough, this racialized
treatment of her continues
until she is eventually
demoted and her former position
is filled with a white
employee, who came not from
the ranks of the established
management trainee program,
but from one of the part time hires.
That's like asking the
boy in the stock room
to come up front now
and be a manager, okay.
As a result, she attributes logically,
her demotion to race discrimination,
and she files a claim.
Now her chances for winning
her law suit were quite low.
Not because of the relative
merits of her claim,
but because it has been documented
that very few complaints
of racial discrimination,
in our contemporary times,
ever yield a success for claimants.
The vast majority of
facial discrimination cases
are dismissed by courts
without even the opportunity
to get to trial.
From 1979 to 2006,
just to give you a quick
little glimpse shot,
federal claimants only won 15%, 15%,
of all job discrimination cases.
And this is by comparison
to all other civil cases,
meaning non criminal cases,
where the win rate is 51%.
Means, so don't come back to
me, oh, don't all people, no!
Not all plaintiffs lose, okay?
Commentators attribute
the low success rate
of employment discrimination,
or anti discrimination law cases,
with the growing hostility
with which courts approach
allegations of discrimination, all right?
Judges sort of seemingly believe
that the passage of the
Civil Rights laws alone,
have wrought a post racial society,
in which instances of
discrimination are rare.
But despite the overarching
challenge of persuading courts
that in instances of discrimination
had actually occurred,
Jill files a motion for
court appointed counsel
and the court grants it.
Let me step back for a moment
just to give you a lil'
law school preview,
for any of my pre law people in the room.
You are only entitled to an
attorney in a criminal case.
New York now has a
little extra section now
for housing discrimination,
that's separate.
Across the nation, you only get a lawyer
paid for by the government,
if you have a criminal case,
because your liberty is at stake.
Civil cases, you're on your own.
But she goes forward and
she says, I need a lawyer
and I'd like for you to appoint one to me
and for the government to pay for it.
When I tell my legal
colleagues about this,
they are like, flabbergasted.
One, that she even had
the balls to ask for it,
and two, that the court grants it!
And he grants it, with the
notation that the merits
of her claims weigh in favor
of granting the motion.
This is quite a victory in the context
of the contemporary judicial animosity
to any discrimination claim.
Here the court's sort
endorsing, sort of implicitly,
the merits of her claim and
expending an investment,
on the part of the government
to allow her to have
a level playing field.
Meaning, having a lawyer to
talk the employers lawyer,
right, to be able to talk power to power.
Having the claimant have a lawyer
had significant consequences, right?
When you level this playing field.
And, as a result, there's
a lil' conversation
that takes place after she gets
her lawyer appointed to her.
And they settle the claim
out of court, right?
So meaning, she is provided
with some settlement
to try to make her whole.
Now, that is a win within the context
and here I'm gonna close, of, perfect,
of anti discrimination law.
In short, here the judge
is not confused, right?
By her claim, right?
Nor by her biracial identity,
she's able to reach a satisfactory
resolution of her case
within traditional Civil Rights law.
Now, at its core, her story
is one about the societal bias
against all non whites,
as opposed to anti racial mixture bias.
And that's the pattern
in all the multiracial
discrimination cases, that I found.
Now, what is interesting
is that these commentators
find the case problematic nonetheless.
I look at all cases, but
I start off with theirs,
in order to sort of see
when people are winning,
why aren't they thinking
that's a good thing?
And the reason why they
don't like this case,
even though Jill wins,
is because the court constantly
refers to her as black.
He describes what her identity is,
but then he oversimplifies her identity
in his legal analysis.
And for these commentators,
that oversimplification
is an indictment on what the court does.
Now, I'll close by simply saying
in a perfect world it would be preferable
for judges to reflect back to claimants,
the personal identity that
they set out at the outset.
Just as a matter of courtesy.
But, is it a legally flawed analysis
when the court doesn't do so?
Here, the judge focuses on her blackness
in the same way that her story does.
Put that in your hat and think on it.
We'll talk more during the Q and A.
(audience applauds)
- So I do have a PowerPoint,
I don't know if we can,
is there a way to put it up, or no?
I have my computer.
(mumbles)
Oh, yeah, it's there, that's the cover.
(audience laughs)
Beautiful cover.
Great, good.
- Sorry, I don't know how to
go back, so that's the problem.
(laughs)
- Thank you, thank you.
- Sure.
- Hi, so, that was a thrill to listen to.
And I think many points of
conversation in the presentation,
I'm gonna take a little
bit different approach,
a rather academic approach.
So, bare with me here.
I will get to myself
sometime in the presentation
but I won't start there.
Although that's where
it all starts, with me.
As Tanya, Dr. Hernandez
displayed, it starts
with us, with each of us.
So I work with buildings and space
and built environments
and I try to understand
how the built environment
affects social dynamics.
And I'm especially interested
in racial inequality.
I focus on the built environment,
not only in its form and how
it physically affects things,
but also symbolically,
how people read it,
what they read into it.
And how race is sort of
encoded in built environments.
Today, I'm gonna present on some patterns
of the built environment in the America's,
and focusing primarily on Puerto Rico.
But, sort of generalizing to
the Caribbean and Latin America
and how they formulate racial exclusion.
And how in kind of a performing
raise the built environment,
also formalizes our racial order,
that's supposes that
it's a democratic system.
That race in Latin America
and the Caribbean is liberal,
and that that is rather democratic.
So the racial democracy.
I guess my book, oh, there we go.
So that's my book, Locked In, Locked Out,
where I examine specifically
the production of gates
in public and private housing
and how they do the work
of segregating communities
by physically building race,
class and gender inequality.
In the book I make a long
argument for the ways in which
race is codified in the built environment
and how this violates the
presumed liberal nature
of the structure of race in
Latin America and the Caribbean,
the so called racial democracy.
Which I am not gonna kind
of like go full on to
the description of race in
Latin America and the Caribbean,
except to say that there is a sense
that there's an extensive
mixture of races.
Dr. Hernandez, some of her
work speaks directly to this
and sort of like this mythic
construction of a continuum,
where we're all the same
and we're all African,
Spanish and Indigenous
and we get along well,
and it's not like the U.S.
Dr. Hernandez has
particularly spoken to also
the mythic creations that are
involved in the U.S., right?
In producing how the U.S. is also framed
in ways that benefit this
narrative of the racial continuum,
the (speaks foreign
language), the rainbow people,
sort of discourse.
So, in my book I challenge this
by looking at the built environment.
And so, it's hard to know where it is.
And so, I look at privilege,
gated communities,
which scholarship and gated
communities tends to look
at them sort of like how
it informs their lifestyle.
And these are communities in the city
of Ponce in Puerto Rico.
And I highlight how the form,
the aesthetics of the gates
and the function, the way they
work and who operates them
and who manages them.
Are in built with meaning
of who belongs inside
and who is supposed to be outside.
And with few exceptions,
most of the scholarship
has sort of like forgotten
that these gates also
imagines an outsider.
Sort of like, what
happens, what's going on,
what are they doing inside?
But also, who are they
referencing outside,
it has been overlooked.
And but also that these
gates operate in concert
with other types of gate
and so I look also at,
sorry, at this other gated communities.
There's some animations here
that I can't figure out, but.
(laughs)
They weren't supposed to be there.
But, my book looks closely
at this other side,
and so this is the play on
Locked In, Locked Out, right?
It depends on where you're
standing, who you are,
whether you're inside
or whether you're out.
So I look at these other sets of gates
and the gates of quote unquote, the poor.
Now, there's a lot of
securitization around working class
and sort of like poorer,
named poor communities.
And here I looked at how
these gates in public housing,
both again in form and
aesthetics, but also physically,
work to mark the communities as dangerous,
not belonging, and in
need of being controlled.
So these are the gates of the poor.
And so, in the book, I
try to kind of tease out
the many ways in which
they send this message,
and they create this messaging,
they're branded as such.
And the ways they reproduce
segregation and inequality.
So, continuously making this contrast
between sort of like the right side,
and the left side of those two
images, a private community.
And I look at two private communities
and two public housing
communities in the book.
Now, the questions is, many
people understand this,
this is a class discussion,
this is about class.
Where is race?
Is race in there?
So you may say that these gates are about,
don't really point to a racial hierarchy,
and that tends to be the
reading that it's given
in Latin America, the
Caribbean of in Puerto Rico.
Sort of like, it's not race,
it's class, which is different.
So I actually what I do in the book,
is invoke scholars like Diane Harris,
and others like Kevin Lynch,
drawing from the work of Erving Goffman,
other people like Gerald
Suttles, Glen Lowry,
George Lipsitz, Catherine Mckitry,
to highlight that race
and racial inequality
is also built in.
It's made concrete in
the built environment.
So as Diane Harris says, that's the trick.
Race hides in plain sight.
Landscapes are particularly well suited
to the masking of such constructions,
because they appear to
be completely natural.
Natural and neutral as well.
But they're never thus,
architecture and landscapes
are never thus.
There are always powerful symbols
and containers of cultural values,
just as they simultaneously
work to construct culture.
So I'm really vested in
understanding the built environment,
as a sight that easily sort
of like sends the message like
this is just a wall, those
are (mumbles), right?
That's a door.
But what kinds of racializing
elements are produced
that construction and under converse,
how does it reproduce racial inequality?
So now, I bring you me.
Because I must make a point
here about epistemology,
that's me there, I'm
a five year old there.
And this is a picture taking,
I grew up in Puerto Rico,
daughter of Dominican immigrant parents,
to Puerto Rico who had
had multiple migrations
within the Caribbean prior ancestral,
migrations within the
Caribbean including the anglo,
well, who knows what
the Caribbean was during
their forest or, you
know, work migrations.
Because they were
sometimes in Dutch islands,
sometimes in French islands,
sometimes in British islands,
depending on what era
you're talking about.
But growing up as a black girl
in Puerto Rico frames my analysis,
and it frames my scholarship.
It's impossible for me not to see race.
And to see it from a epistemological,
so phenomenological blackness
and I'm thinking here of Fanon.
So I first read Fanon when
I was at the other school
that is sort of rival with you.
And a rivalry that I really don't.
(audience laughs)
Because, you know, I have
a different relationship,
I'm the first person that
got there in my whole world
and universe, probably
will be the last, you know?
No legacies of like, you know,
bonjour, who do you support?
So, you know, so I'm not
invested in that at all,
but I had the fortune of
going to the library, Weiner Library,
and going in there and
finding Fanon on my own.
And I read Fanon and Fanon
told me, every single moment
I had had since I had been five
years old, as a black girl.
So, this is what Fanon said.
Then, assailed at various
points, the corporeal,
and this sounds like crazy
words, like, you know, but,
schema crumbled it's place taken
by a racial epidermal schema, nausea.
That's when Fanon is
called out on a trade,
mama, the negro, that's the translation,
it uses the word negro.
Mama, the negro, look, the negro.
In the white world the men of
color encounters difficulties
in the development of his bodily schema.
Consciousness of the body
solely a negating activity.
It is a third person consciousness.
Because it creates a real dialectic
between my body and the world.
So the world come through
me in a black body,
and he speaks of this triple consciousness
that then Miriam Jimenez-Roman
and Juan Flores take up
in their Afro-Latino Reader.
A triple consciousness
that builds on DuBois,
W.E.B. DuBois sort of
double consciousness.
I'm not only American
and Black, I'm Latino.
So here, the triple body is being, right,
I am multi, I am who I think I am,
but I'm also who other people think I am
and who other people think
I am is attached to my body,
to my racial schema, all right?
So it's not only about identity,
but it's a racializing identity.
It's what they call a
phenomenological, right?
It's attached to my body.
So I say, this is my
black Latina epistemology
and I cannot undo, right?
That Fanon stopped being a body,
started being a black body, right?
Even to self.
And I wanns turn it around, because,
often this is misunderstood and
it's sort of like, you know,
well, can you be out of race,
and sort of use this
wonderful photographic project
of infuriating the world, right?
Which I think this is a
real representation of
when you encounter the world
as a racial subject, right?
If you turn it around, right?
And whiteness was the other, right?
Like what would that feel like?
Of course this doesn't fully
capture the relationship
because we would have
to really think about
the way I encountered
the world as a black girl
with white dolls, I mean pretty, you know.
I mean it's not like now,
I don't know if you know what
the world was like in 1980,
but in 1980 we had no black dolls.
We had no black DanDee's,
we had no black nothing.
Anyway, that was my world
at least, in Puerto Rico,
so, to clarify.
In the contents of Dominican
Republic, in the Caribbean.
So, we must take this into account,
where thinking about racial inequality
and racial knowledges, racial scholarship.
Because when I looked at
this world of housing,
that was supposed to be natural
and neutral, I saw race.
Even when it wasn't
articulated, but it often was.
So this is a picture of a
public housing project behind,
and you have this writer
Edgardo Rodriguez,
Julia, who says I entered, as he enters,
he talks about going to a
funeral of a famous singer,
a black singer, it's the
funeral of Cortijo, in the 70s.
Well, it's 80s actually, early 80s.
And he says I entered that
cavernous den of iniquity,
the projects, the legendary
symbol of all the criminality
on the face of our Beauteaous Puerto Rico.
The projects, that anti
utopia, shares with that myth,
the virtue of a meaning
that is both blurred
and perfectly clear,
terrifying in its concreteness,
yet at the same time, vague.
And he talks about seeing them and saying
they're watching me too, right?
And they're reading me as a
(speaks foreign language).
He says this, I mean he just
(speaks foreign language),
that's like a white guy,
I think he says (speaks foreign language),
with a mustache, and
they're also seeing me.
So we're all seeing each other,
although it may not be
acknowledged necessarily.
This is another picture.
This is actually Cortijo,
who he attended the funeral,
the representation of the Caserios,
which is the name for the
public housing as a black space.
Nobody's saying don't hang
out with black people,
don't go to the Caserios,
stay out of public housing.
That's the space, so that codified, right?
Put up the gates because
they're dangerous,
stay out of there.
But similarly, this sort of natural,
neutral landscape of
housing, shows its face also,
on the side of private
(speak foreign language),
middle and upper class communities.
I don't know if I'll get the, but maybe,
let's see if this comes up.
Oh, you're not connected to the internet.
Okay, so I'm not even gonna go there.
But I was gonna show you
just one of the commercials
that was running, Professor Jami Carlacio
will recognize this.
(sings in foreign language)
I now have the house that
I always promised you,
between romance and
flowers, we'll form a home.
The home you buy, the mortgaged home,
always comes clad in white images, right?
Often, so that those who live there,
who exist there, are white.
Other, sort of, images
reflect this, this is,
oh, an image from early 1990s,
and the reflection of who's the criminal,
who's the dangerous person
with the visiting partner,
who's clearly black, you know.
In their sort of like
threatening a pueblo,
which is the public.
Represented, I mean it might
be a mixed race person,
I mean in this case it
might be, might not,
but still sort of like
polar opposite, right?
With blackness clearly as the dangerous.
So these images are persistent.
So, that's one way to see it.
When you look up the data,
so if you go looking for it,
you see other things, you see like,
I'll quickly go through
this complex table.
But basically, public
housing, private housing,
public and private housing
together, so the sum of this,
and what turns out is that most people in
(speaks a foreign language)
that I interviewed,
tended to say we're white,
or some form of white.
More mix on the Public
Housing Caserios side,
but still rather, you
know, a slew of people
holding out to black identities,
and also mixed or other identities.
This is based on census figure.
When you look at segregation, we see,
and I'm just gonna point out,
because we tend to look at many things.
We see that this is a
measure of segregation,
it's not that people are
segregated black versus white,
but white people tend
to be rather isolated.
So they get to spend time in white worlds,
in the context of Puerto Rico.
And then I done this kind of calculation,
if you were gonna highlight
white-black, other race
and more races, in different
SES characteristics,
so I look here at
unemployment, household income,
poverty and different kind of levels
of education towards the bottom.
And looking at the differences,
so these are the means,
percentages and this is whether
the difference between white
and black is significant,
white and other significance,
white and other,
white and two more races as
significant, black and other.
So, sort of comparing some
one on one comparison,
and what this shows,
I mean just look at
the white-black differences,
all significant.
Meaning that in pop and
unemployment, in household income,
in poverty, in education,
there are differences, right?
So typically whites
tend to be doing better,
blacks tend to be worse.
There are less differences, for example,
so white and other still many differences.
So whites are completely distinguished
from these other groups.
Blacks tend to not that
different than others,
at least in this measures.
And somewhat different from
two or more races people,
so from the mixed people,
which kind of serve as an
interesting conversation,
kind of dialogue with your findings.
So, the point I wanna make here is that
we think of this racial continuum, right?
As like there is, we don't
know what to classify,
but when it comes to thinking
about racial inequality,
it might be that there are
binaries being imposed, right?
Created, so I wanna think about race
in the Caribbean and Latin America,
rather than for the
purpose of racial inequity,
as rather than a continuum, as
a system of racial binaries,
where the line might be
drawn lower or higher
depending on the particular situation.
Certainly whiteness carries some power,
right here, as does blackness, right?
So, even as we think of like, oh yeah, but
(speaking in foreign language)
Like where do these other terms fit,
in particular situations, they move here
or they move there, but you
know where these people are,
they're not going to the top
in any kind of configuration.
And those people at the
top are not coming down
in any configuration of the situation.
Again, I'm talking here about
social kind of like, dynamics,
right, systemics, structural dynamics,
rather than like how people
feel or how they identify.
So, consequences for
housing, for education,
for employment, for example.
So, I have kind of like
versions of the situations
and how those move, but
I won't talk about it.
Things that show up spacially, people try,
this is for Kingston,
this is from the Portes.
It's a book on Caribbean
cities and you know,
often these are mapped
according to income.
The point here is, if we
know that income is aligned
with race, how do you think this looks?
And how segregated they are.
So if you look at the cities,
they are rather segregated.
There are very few places
that are sort of mixed.
Sorry, I'm going back.
The mix here, well they
didn't do mix here,
but some of this have like
medium and high income.
This is Guatemala, I'll just quickly go,
this is not a good map.
But this one, is not a
good image I should say.
It's a great a map, it's
just my image is bad.
But, I wanted to highlight
it because Kingston here,
they do race and color in here,
and then you're able to see some of them.
This is Paramaribo,
which also shows sort
of segregation in here,
sort of like an ethnic
breakdown of the city.
What I'm trying to show here,
is that if we look for
them, if we understand race
and I'm looking for it, you know,
I'm not gonna make mistakes.
We see that there is a
racial distribution, right?
That aligns around inequality.
And we can continue to see a distance.
(speaks in foreign language)
In Dominican Republic,
which was built to celebrate
the 500th anniversary of the arrival
of Christopher Columbus to the Americas.
A project that took a
century to make happen.
And in the federal colone, it's
made into landscape, right?
Where you have to hide
the close by communities
behind the wall.
So race is there, it's not
only class, it's race also,
that is actualizing this constructions.
This is in Lima, Peru,
interestingly enough.
(speaking in a foreign language)
Which separates, sort of irregular,
they called it, settlements,
but squatter settlements,
from the rest of the city.
Actualized right, I mean
just, the symbolism.
We think of it as a wall, it's a wall.
Upper class (mumbles), but
look at the representation
of who the residents of
either side of the wall are.
So here again, we see sort
of like this binary, right?
In the built form, it's not
like you can live in between
right in the wall, or in between,
but there are rather stark
distinctions being made
between better or worse, good
and bad, white and black,
whatever, non white,
white, black, non black.
Here's another very popular image.
It doesn't look that
well here, it looks okay,
but there it doesn't look that great.
But, actually, somebody's
using it for the book,
very excited about Hugo Serones book,
that uses this image
about Mexican golf clubs.
But here it's of, this is from Brazil,
Sao Paulo, I believe, and it
shows this stark distinction,
right, about between quote unquote favela
and upper class exclusion.
But they're everywhere, if you
look through security points,
who does it sort of profile?
Who does it look, who is it
keeping out, who it's not.
I'm not gonna play this
video, but it's a great video,
I recommend you look at
Carlos Angulo in Colombia,
going through the city and
noting how he's always stopped
and he gets very pissed off in this video.
It's a fantastic video,
I highly recommend it.
Because for black bodies, in
Latin America and Caribbean,
they never, they're always
right, it feels like a binary,
it feels like that Fanonian
moment, and it's documented.
Okay, I'm just gonna get here.
And so, the question is if
we think, if we rethink,
this continuum into binaries,
how does it look like?
So here's a case of Brazil,
who was like, okay, we're
gonna do affirmative action,
those who are black, there was
very low enrollment of black,
Afro-Brazilians in higher education,
and they've did a formal policy program.
We're gonna bring in Afro-Brazilians,
and they're gonna kind of like
increase the numbers, what happened?
Suddenly everybody was black, right?
Like, all the mixed race people were like,
this is my way in and so I love this
because then they were
like, wait a second,
we have to figure this out.
So as the mixed race country grapples
with its legacy of slavery,
affirmative action race tribunals
are measuring skill shape and nose width
to determine who counts
as disadvantaged, right?
So we go to this place
where we have to figure out
who are the people that are benefiting
or not benefiting from this racial orders,
that are kept sort of complex and hard,
but that also in their complexity
and hard to understand,
reproduce inequality?
So, this parts are for people
who are phenotypically blacks
and one history major and a
member of student activist group
told me it's not for people
with black grandmothers.
That's the difference.
That's what we have to figure out, right?
How to address blackness in ways
that's responsible to the
actual social dynamics
that are reproducing inequality.
But in a country of
uniquely diverse as Brazil,
where 43% of citizens
identify as mixed race, Tanya,
and 30% of those who think
of themselves as white
have black ancestors.
It's not immediately clear where the line
between race should be drawn,
nor who should get to draw
it, and using what criteria.
So if addressing, sorry, racial inequality
requires coming to
terms with the structure
in which those privileges
and those penalties
are distributed, what do we do then?
When it's not about identify, oh yeah,
you can be whatever you want, right?
But if you walk, right,
when are you encountered with
the phenomenological, right?
Reality of a racial bodily schema.
So that's my sort of
question moving forward.
And so my work is trying to
say this built structures,
you know they're not like
you can tear them down,
I cannot walk through the wall.
I want to walk through the wall,
but that's the very same way in which
racial structures exist,
even if they're perceived to be invisible
and rather liberalizing.
So I'll stop there,
thank you for listening.
And I look forward to.
(audience applauding)
- [Woman] So now we have
a very brief intervention
by Alondra, Alejandro.
I open it up to four questions
that they will just maybe
make comments and then
can ask the question.
- Well, I was gonna thank you
for having me here so much.
This was amazing.
And so, I kinda wanted
to start the Q and A,
but I don't know.
- No problem, not at all.
- So I guess mu first question
is for both of you, I guess,
what are some challenges in
researching anti blackness
through these larger
structure space and law?
Especially when there's
a personal, I guess,
relation to this larger topic.
Sorry.
(chuckles)
- You wanna start?
- So the challenge for the researcher?
- Yeah, of the research and
like studying anti blackness,
especially in these large,
really large structures,
especially when there
are some personal ties,
or relation to the blackness
luxure itself, you know?
The way it's reproduced
in these different,
in Latin America and in
the U.S. here as well.
- Well, I guess what I
wanna do is, you know,
respond to that in a very lawyerly way.
And what I mean by that is
this, in picking up immediately,
right, where Dr.
Dinzey-Flores left off, right?
This idea of oh, how does Brazil deal with
affirmative action in this
racialized hierarchy, et cetera.
Well, it was as you put that out there,
that I started to reflect back how
what the legislators and what
many universities have done,
but then there was a federal
law that come down, anyway,
that much detail you don't need,
but what they did in
response was incorporate
the built racial constructs, right?
The physicality of racialization into
their affirmative action policy.
What do I mean by that?
Rather than only focusing
on race identity,
the affirmative action
cases for higher education
look at, okay, allocate a
significant number of spaces
for those who come from
public high schools.
Which, majority of the
white league don't attend.
And so, that racialized space,
without having to engage in this like
measuring someone's head,
none of that nonsense, right?
Which sort of feels very,
you know, antebellum, right?
To say the least.
So it takes the built
environment and this was an idea,
excuse me, this was an idea
of the black social justice movements.
Their response to when people say
oh, well, how can you
be asking for policies
of social inclusion based on race,
when nobody knows what anybody is
and we're so mixed and blah, blah, blah,
and there are like little corpus,
just ask a police officer, right?
They always know, right?
They always know because they're
busy with racial profiling,
and they figure it out.
That's somewhat a little
offhand way of responding,
but what it encapsulates is this idea
of it's not that complicated
when you become very pragmatic
at looking at the effects of
group based racialization.
The indicators are there, right?
We've saw a beautiful display of that
in this body of research.
And so yes, it's a challenge,
but yet, only, I think,
when people, and this
is all tied to mestiza,
when people overly focus on
trying to sort understand racism
by reducing it to the personal, right?
Where it's just only
about you and how you feel
in any given space.
That's not unimportant,
but it doesn't actually
illuminate how racism operates,
which is unconcerned about
your personal identity
and solely focused on how to
racialize you as not belonging.
- Yeah, I know, I mean I would
second everything you said.
I think that one of the challenges
that precisely this concern with,
sort of like people feeling about it.
Or you know identity,
which is heightened
for good reasons often,
in the Caribbean and
Latin American setting,
that we're all one nation
and it was attached
to national projects, right?
Anti-colonial projects
that required sort of like
a tight population.
The challenge in focusing on that
is also that we don't produce the data.
We don't produce the type of information
that will allow us to
tease out these inequities.
And so, you know,
I don't built environment
and the questions is like,
and that's why I've started talking about
this epistemological piece, it's like,
I don't see race there, that's not race,
that's just like, you know?
In the same way that when
people have experiences
it's like how do you
know that was about race?
It's like well, you know, I mean, maybe,
yeah, I think it was and you know,
how do you actually provide
the evidence for it?
And so I think that there's also,
probably not the best word for it,
but there's a hydromanic production
that dictates what data counts
and what data is important.
- [Woman] We probably have
time for one more question.
- Oh sorry, oh so, so
I'll stop, I'll stop.
I'll stop so that you can
have, so that's it, that's it.
- Open it up to the floor.
- You sure you don't wanna ask anything?
Or ask it and then have more questions
and then we can like
figure out how we can.
- Yeah, that's two minutes.
- [Woman] And he's
coming to dinner with us.
- Yeah, I can ask later.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [Man] So, I wanted to ask, sort of,
thinking about what you said for example,
in this idea of creating
capital citizenship,
which is signature.
Urban cities are going
through a major upheaval,
both in terms of it's demographic,
but also it's built social
ethnic requirements.
How do we read this binary
or is this binary no longer becoming,
does it no longer have
utility in a fenestration,
so to speak, right?
How do we see that and read that?
And certainly in the U.S.,
but maybe you've sort of
looked at this South Central?
- Did we want to take
another question or no?
- [Woman] So maybe he can
take a couple of questions
and then you guys can, together.
So there was another
question, oh, there, yeah.
(speaking in a foreign language)
- [Audience Member] Right
before we come up here
and these are great, I thank you both, so,
you each was kind to share
about your background,
'cause it's a lot we didn't (mumbles).
One of my scribbles is, when
were we both setting here?
And so glad you talked about the bias,
because I hear a lot the black
and white Spaniard in here
is very, very strong.
And so I just want your, and yeah,
this raised in Puerto Rico, you know?
The realest effect.
How does that effect even what we do
and how we see reality, you know?
Because we not invisible a race,
but it is a lot of glimpse
we love that slide that
you have on publicity.
'Cause I didn't view that proper language.
And there's some specific racism there.
And there is, so anyway,
I'm just trying to figure out
what are the benefits of that
and how you kind of also
been generous scholarships,
if we also just see black and white.
When you see other people
also being in the mess
in this big empire that we live in.
- [Woman] Okay, and one more
and then they can take it
collectively to help to lurid one.
Oh, that's it, so then we can.
- Well, I can be very brief on this one.
I sort of see the two questions asked
as related to each other.
So I'm just gonna one response.
Why is the black white binary
still even relevant today?
If it is relevant, does it
have some negative influences
in that it obscures other
intersections, other vectors
and sources of inequality.
And I think everything
we've talk about today
suggests that the binary
is still relevant.
You don't wanna call it black-white,
if that indicates to you a
sense of only African American
and only European white?
Then let's rename it, I'm
not tied to it, right?
But if what we understand
as blackness and whiteness
is more than just African
American and European whites,
and we understand that the way it operates
is about a in-out,
equal-unequal, mode of analysis,
I think one, it's actually very relevant
in how we see socioeconomic
status arrayed,
and also relevant for analysis
and trying to combat it.
How then do we deal with
what some might view
as a negative consequence of hiding
other vectors of discrimination?
Well, in my world, discrimination.
We include them, right?
This idea of doing multivariate analyses,
for the social science
people in the room, right?
Yes, it makes things more complicated,
but it doesn't mean that it's impossible.
You can look at gender and race,
you can look at race and color.
There's lots of ways to
deal with these things,
and not have a response that means,
oh, we've moved beyond
and we're so post racial
that binaries are no longer in operation.
'Cause when we get rid of
that language, my fear,
and we've seen this sort of
before Civil Rights movements,
become, in Latin America,
that it is a form of currency
that then undermines the ability
to even voice and name what's going on.
- Yeah, I mean it's interesting
that you name post raciality, right?
Because to begin with,
I think to not think of,
to think of inequality,
to not think about inequality benefits
from thinking that it's complex and hard,
and yet as you say, like a cop knows,
and we know what our prison
population looks like, right?
And we know that communities are being,
who benefits sort of like
in the richer Florida,
who benefits, right, from
this new kind of order
of the city that is highly
entrepreneurialized, right?
Who has access to funds, who doesn't.
We are not suggesting that
the binary is sort of like
a racial schema, only a racial schema.
I'm suggesting that schemas
are laid out in binaries
in ways that says who
benefits and who is penalized.
And so if we think about
that beyond our concern with
whether it represents all of us, right?
Like, is that capture my
black grandmother, right?
I mean, does it capture
it, well in this instance,
your black grandmother
is irrelevant, right?
Because you might be
able to walk into a place
that the person who is
actually themselves black
would not be able to walk.
So, it's sort of like,
I'm thinking about it,
not as a strict, and that's
why I say it's moving
and it's plural, right?
Like it's plural in that it can,
different situations call
for different things.
So that's what I'm thinking here.
It doesn't restrict ethnicity
from participating in that, right?
And why are we gonna think
it's like oh, you know,
let's say a Dominican in Puerto Rico,
we're gonna think we
have to take into account
that they're Dominican if they blend in,
into whiteness Puerto Rican style.
Does that matter in that instance?
It likely doesn't, you know,
of employment, let's say,
if it's race that's really
at the heart of sort of like
what's going on with
regards to employment,
then we get at that, right?
So it's not about sort of
oppression politics or competing,
kind of life privileges.
But what are the operative,
kind of dimensions,
social dimensions that
reproduce inequality.
And how thinking of it binarily,
because it operates, right?
People are excluded or included,
how might we use it to address inequality?
- [Woman] That was great,
I think that we can
thank our panelists.
(audience applauding)
(light music)
