White Supremacy, Gender, And Speech in The Wake of Charlottesville
10.10.2017| 4:00 – 6:00 PM | 140 Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley School of Law
This symposium will focus on the roles white supremacy has played throughout U.S. history as well as its continued effects today, particularly in relation to the 2016 election and upsurge of white nationalist and white supremacist movements. It will address the intersections between white supremacy and gender construction, particularly masculinity as a rampant force in alt-right discourse, but also the ways white femininity continues to serve as a symbol of white nationalism. This discussion is a response to recent events in Charlottesville, VA and throughout the country. It also engages the discourse on “free speech,” and asks how have the intersections of “free speech” politics and white supremacy impacted UC Berkeley’s community (past and present) and how can we develop a more generative and radical politics moving forward.
SPEAKERS:
- Michael Cohen, African American Studies
- Charis Thompson, Gender & Women’s Studies
- Ziza Delgado, Student Equity Program, Glendale Community College
- Justin Leroy, History, UC Davis
BIOS
Michael Cohen is an Associate Teaching Professor in African American/African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. He is broadly interested in the cultural and political history of the United States from the Civil War to the Present. Teaching Areas: US Cultural History from the Civil War to the Present; Work and Labor History; World War II; Race, class and American popular culture; Cultural Studies and Marxist Theory; Drugs and Alcohol in US History.
Charis Thompson is Chancellor’s Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley, and a former founding director of the Science, Technology, and Society Center at UC Berkeley. Before coming to Berkeley, she taught in the Science and Technology Studies Department at Cornell University, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and in the History of Science Department at Harvard University. She is the author of Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (MIT Press, 2005), which won the 2007 Rachel Carson Award from the Society for the Social Study of Science, and of Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research (MIT Press, 2013).
Ziza Delgado earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Delgado is currently the Cultural Diversity Coordinator and instructor of ethnic studies, history, women’s history and urban education at Glendale Community College (GCC). In 2017, she developed the first certificate degree in Restorative Justice for a community college in the nation and started a campus program serving formerly incarcerated students at GCC. Dr. Delgado conducts research on and teaches about race, racism, white supremacy, social movements, education, restorative justice, the history of ethnic studies and U.S. history. Her research analyzes the impact of systemic racism and the potential of education to empower historically marginalized populations through liberatory curricula and pedagogy.
Justin Leroy is an Assistant Professor of History at UC Davis. An historian of the nineteenth-century United States, he specializes in African American history. Prior to joining UC Davis in 2016, he was a postdoctoral fellow in global American studies at Harvard University. He is at work on his first book, Freedom’s Limit: Racial Capitalism and the Afterlives of Slavery. His research focuses on 19th-century United States; African American history; intellectual history; slavery and abolition; the Atlantic World; comparative histories of empire; the history of capitalism.