On October 15, 2013 at 5:30 p.m. in Smathers Library (East), 1A, Stephen Steinberg of Queens College, CUNY will present a lecture: “The Perennial Racial Divide: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back.” The event is presented by the UF Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere for its 2013-2014 speaker series: “Civil” Society? On the Future Prospects of Meaningful Dialogue.
The election of “the first black President” was a watershed event, and Barack Obama was widely hailed as “a transcendental figure” who mended the racial divide and augured a post-racial future. However, a close examination of voting patterns in the 2008 and 2012 elections indicates that the electorate was highly polarized racially. Indeed, the half-century since the passage of landmark civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965 has been an era of racial backlash that amounts to a counter-revolution on race. It has succeeded in driving one nail after another into the coffin of the civil rights revolution in such areas as affirmative action, employment discrimination, schooling, housing, welfare, food security, voting, and the evisceration of civil rights. This cold reckoning with history compels us to rethink the current state of race in America, as reflected in recent Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action and voting rights, as well as the acrimonious debates over the Trayvon Martin case.
Stephen Steinberg, a sociologist, is Distinguished Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Beginning with The Ethnic Myth (1981, 1989, 2001), his intellectual project has been to challenge prevailing orthodoxies on race and ethnicity, both in academic and popular discourses. His next book, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (1995, 2001) received the Oliver Cromwell Cox award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship. His most recent book,Race Relations: A Critique (2007) was described by one reviewer as “a devastating exposé of a century of the discipline’s theoretical bad faith, sociological mystification, and conceptual obfuscation of what should have been the central and obvious socio-historical fact of the white oppression of people of color in the United States.” In addition to his academic publications, Steinberg has published articles in The Nation, New Politics, and other popular venues.
This event is free and open to the public.
For more information, contact humanities-center@ufl.edu.
This event is part of a series of six lectures organized by the UF Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere to examine the obstacles and opportunities for constructive public dialogue on pressing political issues, and is sponsored by the Rothman Endowment at the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences with co-sponsorship from the UF Libraries, Honors Program, Department of History, Department of English, Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, and the Office of Sustainability.
The Perennial Racial Divide: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
Stephen Steinberg (Queens College, CUNY)
15 October 2013, 5:30 pm, Smathers Library (East), 1A
“Civil” Society? On the Future Prospects of Meaningful Dialogue
2013-14 Speaker Series – UF Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere