Race Archives - Public Seminar

Interviews

The Return of the Oppressed

A conversation with Robert Fieseler on American Scare and the recovery of queer history long obscured by state censorship

March 11, 2026 • by Robert W. Fieseler and Katelyn Kimberlin

“I kept wondering why it felt like we were all living in the United States of Florida,” says Robert W. Fieseler. In his new book, American Scare: Florida's Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives (Penguin Random House, 2025), Fieseler examines the forces shaping the fastest-growing state in the ...

Literature

Electronic Music’s Savior Complex

Amphetamines, techno, and radical politics in Aria Aber’s Good Girl

June 16, 2025 • by Alexandra Chaves

Those who set foot in Berlin’s famous nightclubs can sense desire coursing through the air, as palpable as the reverberations of the electronic music within. It’s an easy enough formula of seduction: a door policy that leaves you seeking approval from staff who never disclose their criteria for entry; dark, ...

Latin America & Caribbean

The Working-Class Venezuelans at the Center of Trump’s “Crisis”

Xenophobic rhetoric divides immigrant communities

May 2, 2025 • by Erick Moreno Superlano

Alex was trembling when he entered the café. He had agreed to participate in my research on Venezuelan immigration in New York and we had decided to discuss his story over coffee. But as he walked down the street to meet me, an ICE van had pulled over and parked ...

The Working-Class Venezuelans at the Center of Trump’s “Crisis”

Podcast

Black Children, White Schools

Episode 71: A conversation with historian Noliwe Rooks about democracy, education, and her new book Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children

April 9, 2025 • by Claire Potter

On November 14, 1960, 6-year-old Tessie Prevost woke up and put on one of her prettiest dresses. Like Leona Tate, Gail Etienne, and Ruby Bridges, Tessie was a very special little girl. Along with hundreds of other Black children, the New Orleans Four, as they would forever be known, had taken ...

Health care

Standing Up for the Health of Black Americans

Trump’s proposed budget cuts are definitely cuts to Medicaid—and will be felt hardest by Black Americans

April 4, 2025 • by Eric T. Jones

On March 4, Rep. Al Green (D-TX) was censured by his Congressional peers for interrupting President Trump’s joint address to Congress. What was lost in the media coverage of Green’s censure is the content of his comments—he was condemning Trump for projected cuts to Medicaid, which are certain to exacerbate ...

Standing Up for the Health of Black Americans

Migration

From Moral Panic to Government Policy and Research

The stated rationale for policing street gangs in Montreal has always been “prevention” rather than actual incidents

March 24, 2025 • by Benoit Décary-Secours and Anne-Marie Livingstone

The evolution of criminological research on gangs in Quebec mirrors events elsewhere. It began in the late 1980s with a media frenzy that attracted the attention of political elites and became the object of government policy and research....

From Moral Panic to Government Policy and Research

Migration

A Brief History of Travel Bans

What could follow a Trump victory in November?

October 25, 2024 • by Emmanuel Guerisoli

On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump promised retribution for the San Bernardino Isis attack in December 2015: he would enact a ban prohibiting the entry of Muslims into the country. It was, unfortunately, one of the campaign promises he made good on. In late January 2017, President Trump signed ...

Literature

Poet Paisley Rekdal Summons the Lost Voices of Chinese Railroad Workers

Poetry on the landscape of race, past and present

September 24, 2024 • by Aditi Bhattacharjee

The transcontinental railroad—one of the great engineering feats of US history—was laid thanks to the labor of Chinese immigrants: between 1865 and 1869, some 12,000 Chinese workers constructed the western line. Yet very little evidence remains in the words of the workers themselves. “This is not to say there are ...

Poet Paisley Rekdal Summons the Lost Voices of Chinese Railroad Workers

Film & Performing Arts

The Transformations of Katherine Dunham

The dance pioneer’s contributions to postmodern anthropology

June 11, 2024 • by Megan Robinson

The possibilities open to an anthropologist engaging with her fieldwork in a creative way is what drew me to the Dunham Technique in the first place....

Middle East & North Africa

From the River to the Sea, There Is Space for Many Different Interpretations

Labeling the slogan “antisemitic” is a powerful tool used by Israel to deny the existence of the Palestinian people

April 9, 2024 • by Alon Confino and Amos Goldberg

It is often maintained that the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” expresses a genocidal and antisemitic intention. But this is generally not the case....

From the River to the Sea, There Is Space for Many Different Interpretations

Indigenous Peoples

Belonging as Poetry in New Narratives on the Peopling of America

A new book reshapes how we talk about immigration

April 3, 2024 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff, Alexandra Délano Alonso and Paloma Griffin

T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Alexandra Délano Alonso chat with Paloma Griffin about challenging conventional stories of immigration in their book NEW NARRATIVES OF THE PEOPLING OF AMERICA....