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Marina Salon F, South Tower/Level 3
What's Race Got To Do With Post Racialism?
Only a year ago, the notion that Barack Obama would become the 44th President of the United States seemed improbable. This raises the question of whether we are further along with respect to racial progress than we are capable of imagining—whether we are witnessing the end of race—or, at the very least, the end of race as we know it. This panel proposes to examine post-racialism as both an idea and a political practice through the convergence of four issues: (1) the election of the first Black President of the United States, (2) the passage of Nebraska’s anti-affirmative action initiative and Colorado’s rejection of a similar measure, (3) the financial meltdown and the attendant rhetoric about “under-qualified” minority borrowers as at least one source of the crisis and (4) the recent controversy over UC admissions in which a member of UCLA’s undergraduate admissions committee resigned to protest alleged violations of Proposition 209’s ban on racial preferences in admitting Black students. Each of these racial dynamics has implications for how we understand the current moment in which claims about post-racialism have gained meaningful traction. We investigate whether post racialism constitutes a formally race-neutral paradigm within which race remains salient.
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