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December 2008 > School News
Race, Culture and Equity Speaker Series Inspires Fresh Thinking
From left, Michael Omi, Christine Sleeter and Charles Mills were among the speakers in 2008. GSE’s Race, Culture and Equity Initiative (RCEI), inaugurated last spring to provide a forum for faculty, staff and students to address race and racism in education and society, presented six provocative speakers in 2008: Charles Mills, Prudence Carter, Bryan Brayboy, Na’ilah Nasir, Michael Omi and Christine Sleeter.
“GSE must exert leadership and fresh thinking in our schools to lift low-achieving students,” says Professor Bruce Fuller, who co-chairs the initiative planning committee with Associate Professor Patricia Baquedano-López. “The Initiative spurs new thinking on how we can serve children of color and the schools that serve them through our research and service to practitioners.”
Mills made two public presentations on November 7. A morning lecture in Tolman Hall entitled, “White Ignorance and the Racial Contract,” was followed by a lunch session with faculty. That evening, Mills spoke on “Exploring the Connections between the Racial Contract and Education” at Berkeley High’s Little Theater, a fundraiser for the Principal Leadership Institute at the Center for Urban School Leadership.
Mills, a professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern, works in the general area of social and political philosophy, particularly in oppositional political theory as centered on class, gender and race. His first book, The Racial Contract, won a Myers Outstanding Book Award for the study of bigotry and human rights in North America. It has been adopted widely in college courses across the United States. His most recent book Contract and Domination, co-written with Carole Pateman, explores the intersection of racism and feminism.
The RCEI series began in January when a crowd of more than 300 visited UC Berkeley’s Alumni House to hear Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies Michael Omi discuss the inherent contradictions of a colorblind society. One week later, CSUMonterey Professor Emerita Christine Sleeter addressed ways in which racism becomes institutionalized in education and what can be done about it.
In October, Stanford’s Prudence Carter gave a public talk with follow-up conversations that compared race dynamics in mixed-race high schools in the U.S. and South Africa, and demonstrated that students with “cultural flexibility” confidently navigate school culture by avoiding rigid racial associations concerning achievement.
“Professor Carter’s interaction with us was decisively helpful,” says Assistant Professor Ingrid Seyer-Ochi, one of the faculty organizers of RCEI. “The comparative nature of her work opened lines of dialogue about race in the U.S., shedding light on race relations as a social rather than natural process.”
The speaker series continued November 19 when Bryan Brayboy from the University of Alaska and Arizona State University, spoke on “White Ignorance and the Racial Context.” Na’ilah Nasir, a new associate professor in GSE and African American Studies, capped off the series for the year on November 21 with a lecture on how students’ contexts — bounded by race and culture — shape the daily activities in which they learn.
The series continues in spring 2009 with a full slate of new speakers and panelists.
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