Hello all. Given our conversations throughout the series, most directly the session focused on police violence and mass incarceration, you may be interested in the Injustice Boycott which launches tomorrow, Monday 12/5 (anniversary of the launch of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955). The website has more information, and Shaun King offers a helpful explanation of the effort in this video.

One of the overwhelming sentiments of the series, in my view, was the desire, need, and urgency to DO something to advance racial justice, and this is one example of a tangible action one could take in that direction.

In an effort to make sense of the historic 2016 presidential election, you may want to check out the wonderful resources curated by historians N.D.B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain, presented as Trump Syllabus 2.0 (because the Chronicle of HIgher Education had published a Trump Syllabus that almost entirely omitted discussion of race, racism, and racial politics). The material below is from the introduction to the syllabus:

This course, assembled by historians N. D. B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain, includes suggested readings and other resources from more than one hundred scholars in a variety of disciplines. The course explores Donald Trump’s rise as a product of the American lineage of racism, sexism, nativism, and imperialism. It offers an introduction to the deep currents of American political culture that produced what many simply call “Trumpism”: personal and political gain marred by intolerance, derived from wealth, and rooted in the history of segregation, sexism, and exploitation.

The readings below introduce observers to the past and present conditions that allowed Trump to seize electoral control of a major American political party. By extension, this syllabus acknowledges the intersectional nature of power and politics. The course emphasizes the ways that cultural capital like Trump’s grows best under certain socio-economic conditions. Trump’s open advocacy for race-based exclusion and politically motivated violence on matters both foreign and domestic cannot be separated from the historical and day-to-day inequalities endured by people of color, women, and religious minorities living in or migrating to the United States. Concerned less with Trump as a man than with “Trumpism” as a product of history, this course interrogates the connections between wealth, violence, and politics.

The weekly readings are organized by themes captured by Trump’s own statements on the campaign trail during the 2016 presidential election. The syllabus is built for flexibility. The recommended books may be used in whole or in part. Primary sources can work under one theme or across weeks. A collection of assignments to accompany this syllabus appears on the website of the African American Intellectual History Society—with the contributing faculty member’s name provided for attribution.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble will give a public lecture on the subject, Challenging Algorithms of Oppression: Black Annihilation and the Internet, on November 16, 2016, 3:30-5PM in the Valley Library.

The circulation of surveillance videos and images of African Americans murdered or detained by police and private security has been enhanced by the spectacle of new media. This new research, building upon my previously published research about Trayvon Martin in The Black Scholar, argues that media spectacles are created by surveillance records to foster news ratings and advertising revenues at the expense of national conversations and public policy addressing racial justice. The use of digital technologies has become an enticing way of giving voice to marginalization and oppression, but technological engagements are an insufficient intervention on racist, sexist, and systemic economic oppression. In this talk, Safiya Umoja Noble will discuss the importance of the academic-activist scholarly community to offer models of intervention through research and teaching, and the importance of examining the consequences and affordances of information and technology projects.

She will also lead a workshop, Field notes from Critical Information Studies (and What Can We Learn from Google Glass), focused for graduate students. This will be held on November 16 from 11:30AM-1PM, with lunch served. You can register for the workshop here.

Utopian discourses of freedom through technology are not new. Critical information and geography scholars have written extensively about how hierarchies of power are reproduced and enacted through digital technologies, and they point to the ways in which the informationalization and digitization of everyday life heightens control and surveillance, but also establishes digital enclosures with power-laden boundaries across race, gender, and class.Technological projects are never neutral. In this workshop, Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble from the UCLA Department of Information Studies will discuss the importance of the digitally-enabled academic-activist community to offer models of intervention and resistance through research, practice and teaching. By illuminating linkages to power struggles over values, particularly in the context of the digital, we can re-examine information contexts that can engender greater responsibility and imperative to act.

Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble is an assistant professor in the Department of Information Studies in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. She also holds appointments in the Departments of African American Studies, Gender Studies, and Education. Her research on the design and use of applications on the Internet is at the intersection of race, gender, culture, and technology. She is currently working on a monograph on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in search engines like Google (forthcoming, NYU Press). She currently serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, and is the co-editor of two books: The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Culture and Class Online (Peter Lang, Digital Formations, 2016), and Emotions, Technology & Design (Elsevier, 2015).

Support for this event comes from OSU Libraries & Press, the College of Engineering, the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, the School of Language, Culture and Society, Queer Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, and the Office of Institutional Diversity.

Questions about the event, including requests for accommodations, can be made to Lindsay Marlow at lindsay.marlow@oregonstate.edu or by phone at (541) 737-2376.

Per the group’s conversations around mass incarceration this week, some OSU researchers published a study demonstrating that more spending on mental health care means less spending on prisons – certainly not “the” answer to the complicated and racialized problems around mass incarceration, but a useful piece of data.

Paul Chappell, an Iraqi veteran, is Peace Literacy Director for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He will share his vision on how we can move forward together as a society in spite of our troubled times followed by four panelists – Donald Nisbett, Nana Osei-Kofi, Ann Mbake, and Joseph Orosco – who will extend, critique, and comment on peace literacy.

Whiteside Theater, Tuesday 11/15 at 7 PM

The College of Liberal Arts is hosting a viewing of the film, Agents of Change, followed by a discussion with the filmmaker. Agents of Change chronicles the emergence and manifestations of Black Power on American college campuses in the 1960s, offering a social movement model and a great deal of fodder for discussions about the state of racial politics on today’s campuses and possible steps forward.

Wednesday, October 19 at 6:00 p.m. in LINC (Learning Innovation Center) 200.

How Public Education Helps Sustain a Diverse Democrac

Featuring Amy Stuart Wells, 2016-17 Wayne Morse Chair

• Tuesday, October 18
• 7 p.m.
• 175 Knight Law Center
• free and open to the public

Amy Stuart Wells is a professor of sociology and education and the coordinator of Policy Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her writing focuses on issues of race and education. Her books include Both Sides Now: The Story of School Desegregation’s Graduates (2009) and Stepping Over the Color Line: African American Students in White Suburban Schools (1997).

This event is part of the Wayne Morse Center’s 2015-17 theme of inquiry, the Future of Public Education. Cosponsored with the UO College of Education and the Latino/a Law Student Association.

The Special Collections and Archives Research Center (SCARC) at Valley Libraries is hosting an event called Hear the Stories to celebrate a new collection of oral histories from African American railroad porters who lived and worked in Oregon.

The event will be held Wednesday, October 12 from 3:00-5:00 p.m. in SCARC, which is on the 5th floor of Valley Library. It is free, and members of the OSU and Corvallis communities are welcome to attend.

A new report from the Economic Policy Institute, titled “Black-White Wage Gaps Expand with Inequality,” finds that black-white income gaps are larger today than they were in 1979. According to the study’s authors, “our research reveals that changes in black education levels or other observable factors are not the primary reason the gaps are growing” and that, in fact, “just completing a bachelor’s degree or more will not reduce the black-white wage gap. Indeed the gaps have expanded most for college graduates.” The growth of economic inequality since the 1970s has hurt Americans of all races, but the rising racial wage gap leads the study’s authors to insist that achieving greater economic inequality will require policy solutions that reverse the broader trends causing economic inequality as well as the specific impacts of racial discrimination on African Americans.

Read the report for detailed analysis and some policy proposals aimed at addressing the problem.

Race in America, Past and Present is a collaborative exploration of the complex historical legacy of anti-Black racism in the United States and of the multifaceted history of resistance to racism, racial capitalism, and racial inequality and their many manifestations. Structured by short common reading and viewing, facilitated conversations will explore the impact of history on contemporary racial politics.Participants will gain a strong, historically informed foundation for understanding the causes and consequences of racial inequality in today’s society and reflect on the relationships between past and present and between personal and political.

The workshop will convene for five two-hour conversations during Fall 2016 and one two-hour session during Winter 2017. Funding from the Office of Diversity and Cultural Engagement and the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion will provide refreshments. This year’s workshop facilitators are Terrance Harris, Director of the Lonnie B. Harris Black Cultural Center; Marisa Chappell, Associate Professor of History; and Linda Richards, Instructor in History. Students from across campus will be welcome to participate.

This year’s pilot workshop is designed around the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates is a senior editor at the Atlantic and publishes extensively about racial politics in the United States; his works are grounded firmly in historical context and analysis. Coates will visit OSU in February 2017, where he will offer a public lecture and meet with students. Coates’s work offers a constructive foundation for introducing and discussing the contemporary resonance of historical legacies of race and racism. We envision future workshops built around broad themes (e.g., race and bio-politics; activisms past and present; race, gender, and sexuality) or focusing on the works of particular thinkers, authors, or activists. Above all, we aim to create the conditions for meaningful, constructive, and collaborative conversations that will equip members of the OSU community not only to understand current manifestations of racial inequality but also to join the struggle to build a more just society.