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What’s Your Street Race? Why We Must Add a Street Race Question in Federal Standards and Beyond for Advancing Equity in Black Diasporic Communities
October 13 @ 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm EDT
The Baton Foundation will host a lecture about the perception of race in U.S. society and how we must rethink it. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Program
This presentation will focus on the urgency of employing intersectionality as a transformational and ethical vision for data infrastructure that can illuminate inequities within heterogenous Black diasporic communities. Dr. López will discuss policy-relevant research on outcomes in health, education, employment, housing, poverty, wealth, etc. that shows that race is a social status that has a visual, ocular and corporeal component and ethnicity as a cultural background. An intersectional understanding recognizes that race and ethnicity are simultaneous, yet they are analytically distinct positions in society that require separate questions because they are not concordant. Imagine if intersectionality as praxis and inquiry became a normative ethical principle for revising Office of Management and Budget (OMB) federal guidelines on race and ethnicity and a street race question was added to all institutional data collection? How can we engage in what Crenshaw calls “mapping the margins” and what Collins calls intersectional “flexible solidarity,” when it comes to data collection, that makes the invisible visible within Black Diasporic communities and beyond?
About the Speaker
Dr. Nancy López is professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico. She co-founded and directs the Institute for the Study of “Race” and Social Justice. Her scholarship, teaching and service are guided by the insights of intersectionality–the importance of examining the simultaneity of race, gender, class, ethnicity and other systems of inequalities across a variety of social outcomes, including education, health, employment, and housing for developing contextualized solutions that advance social justice. Dr. López is author of Hopeful Girls, Troubled Boys: Race & Gender Disparity in Urban Education (2003); co-editor of, Creating Alternative Discourses in the Education of Latinas & Latinos (2003), Mapping “Race”: Critical Approaches to Health Disparities Research (2013); and QuantCrit: An Antiracist Approach to Education Equity (2023). Her current research, “Intersectionality as Inquiry and Praxis: Race-Gender-Class-Ethnicity for Student Success in STEM,” is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) program. Professor López is a Black Latina, New York City-born daughter of Dominican immigrants with a second-grade education rich in cultural wealth. She is the first woman of color tenured in Sociology and the first woman of the African Diaspora tenured in the College of Arts and Sciences (2008) and promoted to full professor (2018) at UNM.