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Skidmore College

Skidmore Speaks:
Conversations about the First Amendment and the Meaning of Free Speech

November 5-8, 2018

Wendy Moore and Joyce Bell

Challenging the Right to Be Racist in College: Racist Speech, White Institutional Space and the First Amendment

A lecture on racist speech, institutional spaces and the First Amendment featuring professors Joyce M. Bell and Wendy Leo Moore, and hosted by Assistant Professor of Sociology Jennifer Mueller's Race and Power class.

Monday, November 5
7:00 p.m.
Gannett Auditorium, Palamountain Hall

Wendy Leo Moore
Wendy Leo Moore
Wendy Leo Moore is associate professor of sociology at Texas A&M University. Her research examines racial inequality and racism in the law, legal institutions and the broader social structure. Her book “Reproducing Racism: White Space, Elite Law Schools and Racial Inequality” examines the way in which elite law schools operate as white institutional spaces, reproducing white racial norms and values, and the tacit justification of white power, privilege and wealth.
Joyce Bell
Joyce M. Bell

Joyce M. Bell, is Don A. Martindale Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her research deals with race, work and organizations, and social movements. Her book, “Black Power Professionals: The Black Power Movement and American Social Work” (2014, Columbia University Press) details the impact of the Black Power movement on the profession of social work. A second area of her research is concerned with diversity as a racial project. 

From hurling racist slurs, to hanging nooses, to “ghetto” parties caricaturing communities of color, explicitly racist incidents continue to erupt on college and university campuses around the nation. Bell and Moore disrupt common beliefs that such incidents represent extremist anomalies in otherwise egalitarian institutions. Drawing on extensive analysis of public news coverage, legal cases surrounding racist expression on campuses and the website for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Moore and Bell draw a thread between overt racist expression and the covert, institutionalized elements of contemporary colorblind racism. Their analysis reveals how explicitly racist incidents operate in tandem with neoliberal educational policies and colorblind racism – to mark and reinscribe colleges and universities as “white institutional space.”

The event is hosted by Jennifer Mueller's Race and Power class with generous support from the Department of American Studies, Civic Engagement, the Department of Education Studies, the Gender Studies Program, the Intergroup Relations Program, the International Affairs Program, the Latin American and Latinx Studies Program, the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Political Science, the Palamountain Chair in Political Science, the Department of Social Work, the Department of Sociology, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) and the Office of the Vice President for Strategic Planning and Institutional Diversity.