Faculty-Student Task Force on the Study and Teaching of Race

Mission Statement

The Duke History Department Faculty-Student Task Force on the Study and Teaching of Race sees its mandate as follows:
 
First and foremost, to base all our activities on a genuine commitment by the department to curricular and structural innovation.  With this commitment as a platform we will start to educate ourselves collectively in anti-racism work, while recognizing the broad importance of race, ethnicity and their global analogs as a basis of historical analysis and the teaching of history. In broadest terms, the aim is to foster an intellectual and social environment conducive to the discussion of race, ethnicity, anti-racist work and critical race theory.
 
To make more prominent extant curricular initiatives on the history of race and racial justice while increasing departmental offerings on the same, beginning at the graduate level and then at the undergraduate level.  This includes but is not limited to a revised and regularly offered 790S course, as well as workshops that bolster this course and the professionalization seminars. 
 
To ensure that this 790S course is taught ever year, and that it takes a global perspective on the history of racial formation and structural racism, engages with epistemologies of race making in the US as well as elsewhere in the world, and confronts pressing regional and transregional issues of race as they manifest in the lived experience people.  The revised course should serve as a model and springboard for further graduate classes, e.g. on global critical race theory. 
 
To embed the study and teaching of race more firmly and consistently in graduate professionalization seminars, especially 701 (theory) and 703 (pedagogy).  This requires changes in structure and format, not simply the inclusion on particular weeks on race.
 

To continue our conversations on this curricular enhancement with various scholarly and social groups within and outside the department.  Based on these conversations, we will compile a library of resources on the history and teaching of race and ethnicity, as well as race theory and anti-racism work.  These resources will be available to all instructors for use in shaping their syllabi.

 

Duke Alumnus on Challenges of Anti-Racism at Duke

https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/be-anti-racist-duke-must-get-root-matter?fbclid=IwAR1WO3dmvedXDewRM2W8zEN0BPgrLv-OpgtTqaW0mwf1bzaB_RhXe4xa2Bs

 

Events of Interest

This is a bulletin board to help circulate campus-wide events on the study and teaching of race.

Wednesday Mar 24 | 5:00 - 6:30 PM

Anti-Asian Violence: Historical Legacies

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Wednesday, March 24, 2021

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5:00 pm - 6:30 pm

Webcast

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Nayoung Aimee Kwon; Eileen Chow; Esther Kim Lee; Susan Thananopavarn

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SPONSOR(S): Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement, Office for Institutional Equity (OIE), Provost's Office, and Trinity College

This panel invites the Duke community to come together in response to the startling increase of violence against people of Asian descent, including the mass shootings in Atlanta on March 16 that killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent. Featuring four scholars, the panel aims to provide a historical context to the recent spate of anti-Asian violence and to increase our collective awareness of and knowledge about issues that afflict Asian Americans.

This event is closed to the public. Only current faculty, staff, and students may register.

 

Tuesday Mar 16 from 3-4p.m

Please join the History Department Faculty-Student Task Force on the Study and Teaching of Race on Tuesday Mar 16 from 3-4p.m. where our own Travis Knoll will show and discuss his documentary "The Book Revolution.":

This documentary traces the incredible campaign of Catholic-inspired Black movement activists in Rio de Janeiro's urban periphery to expand education access to Brazil's political minorities. This campaign changed Brazilian society's discussion of race in the process. Written and produced by one of Brazil's most prominent Black journalists and edited by one of Rio's leading community rappers, the film covers a wide range of issues from pre-college prep courses, to Black aesthetics and self-esteem, to police violence. At its core, the film argues for the revolutionary potential of social mobility when combined with grassroots political consciousness-raising and wrestles with the difficulties of sustained activism in the face of institutional racism and an increasingly reactionary political environment in Brazil.

 

Zoom link

Join URL: https://duke.zoom.us/j/92422213454?pwd=c2hGRnA2c0xjME56eStUcGsxajR0UT09

 

Monday, March 15, 2021| 6:00 – 7:30 p.m.

Keynote | Our Land: The Histories that Black and Indigenous Americans Share

Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery (she/her/hers), Director of the Center for the Study of the American South and Professor of History, UNC-Chapel Hill

Moderated by: Vivette Jeffries-Logan, Founder & Principal of Biwa Consulting

If we told American history truthfully, our story would include Black and Indigenous Americans who have already created the world we want to live in, a world of resilience, creativity, self-governance and shared purpose. In this keynote, Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery will propose that we add these founding principles to our story and seeks to reveal a few of the episodes that illustrate them.

Keynote: Malinda Lowery, Professor of History, UNC- Chapel Hill

 

 

To pre-register, go to:

 

https://sites.duke.edu/justspace/conference/

Join us on:
  

Wednesday, February 17, 2021
12:00 - 1:00 PM EST


for

Perspectives on Anti-Blackness in
the Arab World
 

This year, the John Hope Franklin Center (JHFC) and the Duke Center for International and Global Studies (DUCIGS) transitioned their signature Wednesdays at the Center (W@TC) series into an online format inspired by the legacy of John Hope Franklin. The series, titled “Global Anti-Racism (histories of action),” seeks to address one of the most pressing social and political problems of our time: ongoing structural racism and issues of racial inequality.
The third event in our spring semester series features a panel including Hassan Juma Ndzovu (Moi University), Moses E. Ochonu (Vanderbilt University), Loubna Belmekki (Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University), Afifa Ltifi (Cornell University), and Yasmin Moll (University of Michigan). The panel will be moderated by Muhammed Haron (University of Botswana). 

Anti-Black racism exists all over the globe but varies according to the context and society. In Arab societies, anti-black racism is pronounced, widespread, and largely denied by the intelligentsia, the ruling elites, and clergy despite its roots in either the trans-Saharan slave trade or the Indian Ocean slave trade. This roundtable discussion by prominent scholars in the fields of religion, history, and race seeks to generate new research insights to facilitate the development of original narratives and academic voices on the subjects of anti-Blackness in the Arabic speaking world. The discussion will also offer some suggestions about how to move beyond racism toward an inclusive worldview.
Zoom Event Registration Link

Join us on:
  

Wednesday, February 10, 2021
12:00 - 1:00 PM EST


for

Covert Racism in Economics
 

This year, the John Hope Franklin Center (JHFC) and the Duke Center for International and Global Studies (DUCIGS) transitioned their signature Wednesdays at the Center (W@TC) series into an online format inspired by the legacy of John Hope Franklin. The series, titled “Global Anti-Racism (histories of action),” seeks to address one of the most pressing social and political problems of our time: ongoing structural racism and issues of racial inequality.
The second event in our spring semester series features John Komlos, Professor Emeritus of Economics and Economic History at the University of Munich.

In his talk, Komlos will explain that mainstream economic theory is replete with implications that feed into structural racism inasmuch as it has the unintended consequence of severely disadvantaging people at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum, which in the U.S. includes a disproportionate number of Hispanics, Indigenous people, and those whose ancestors were slaves. He argues that economic theory thereby provides justification for preserving the status quo and thereby becomes covertly racist because the assumptions upon which it rests handicaps minorities.
Zoom Event Registration Link

 

This year, the John Hope Franklin Center (JHFC) and the Duke Center for International and Global Studies (DUCIGS) transitioned their signature Wednesdays at the Center (W@TC) series into an online format inspired by the legacy of John Hope Franklin. The series, titled “Global Anti-Racism (histories of action),” seeks to address one of the most pressing social and political problems of our time: ongoing structural racism and issues of racial inequality.
The first event in our spring semester series features Mark Driscoll, Associate Professor of East Asian and Global Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In this talk, Driscoll follows the shift from sustainable agricultural practices rooted in local cosmologies in 17th and 18th century China to unsustainable practices underpinned by a Euro-American colonial worldview in the 19th century. Driscoll traces this historical shift to the imposition of scientific and philosophical assumptions about human progress and the natural world developed in 17th century Europe.
Zoom Event Registration Link
If you require closed captioning to access the material in our event, please email Meredith Watkins (mw390@duke.edu).
 

Past Events

 
Tuesday, December 15, 2020 - 5:30pm to 6:45pm
 

Remembering a 1979 Moral Moment: Medical Activists, Racial Justice, and Confronting the KKK

Registration Required 
  • Endowed Lectureships 
Boyarsky Series on Race & Health - Panel Discussion 
National Newspaper Headlines Nov 7, 1979 crop2.jpg

 

Register here for Zoom webinar

On November 3, 1979, members of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party drove into an African-American neighborhood in Greensboro, North Carolina to disrupt an anti-klan march planned by the Communist Workers Party. The KKK and Nazis opened fire on the demonstrators, killing five labor and civil rights activists, three of whom - Dr. Mike Nathan, Dr. Jim Waller, and Cesar Cauce - had ties to Duke University. Sandy Smith and Bill Sampson were also killed on that day. Two all-white juries subsequently found the shooters not guilty of state and federal criminal charges. Later in a civil suit for wrongful death, the KKK, Nazis, and City of Greensboro were found liable.    

Following a segment from a recent film about what became known as the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, survivors will share why this story is worth remembering, and why it remains relevant to health and racial justice activism today.

Panelists include:

Dr. Marty Nathan, Physician, widow of Mike Nathan, and Duke University Medical School graduate

Dr. Paul Bermanzohn, Psychiatrist, wounded survivor of the Massacre, and Duke University Medical School graduate

Joyce Johnson, Co-Executive Director of the Beloved Community Center of Greensboro, Massacre survivor and Duke University graduate

The panel will be facilitated by Rosalyn Pelles, Massacre survivor and strategic advisor to the Poor People's Campaign.

Faculty Curriculum on Anti-Racism
 
Sherilynn Black Charmaine Royal

Opening Short Course: Monday, January 11 – Thursday, January 14, 2021
9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

 

Lead Course Facilitators

SHERILYNN BLACK, Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement
CHARMAINE ROYAL, Professor of African and African American Studies 
As faculty work to deepen their knowledge of historical, structural and systemic racism and its implications, we have developed a curriculum to combine practical skills, tangible actions and historical contexts to inform faculty and build personal capacity to promote equitable academic environments. The curriculum will start by guiding faculty through intensive sessions in the form of a ‘practical skills’ short course, including topics such as:
  • How to hold constructive conversations about race
  • How to move your local environments toward equity
  • How to navigate interactions contradicting and undermining your equity goals
  • Lasting practices to promote anti-racism and equity in your research, mentoring and learning environments
The opening short course will run for four consecutive days from 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. each day. These sessions will be followed by additional curricular sessions focused on the histories of race and racism, and the impact of structural inequities in America. Faculty participants will receive a certificate at the completion of the course. More information will follow in the coming weeks.