Brown Bag Seminar: Teaching and Talking About Race

Teaching about race is an extraordinarily difficult task: not only are most people uncomfortable with the subject, but people with different racial and ethnic associations often have different-even antagonistic-perspectives on what the nature of and solution to the problems of racial inequality might be. Moreover, although there exists a great deal of excellent research and scholarship on topics related to race and ethnicity, much of it has yet to penetrate the public sphere in discussions about race.

In this Brown Bag forum, professors Hazel Markus and Paula Moya present work from their recently published co-edited volume Doing Race, and argue that teaching about race is both necessary and possible. They propose that teaching about race has to begin with talking about race in an entertaining and non-threatening way, incorporating the serious scientific research and scholarship that has been produced over the past few decades. Beginning with a discourse analyses of some pervasive cultural products, Markus and Moya lay out eight common conversations that U.S. Americans have about race. They end by describing some challenges and possible solutions for educators faced with the job of teaching and talking about race.

Hazel Markus is the Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Previously, at the University of Michigan, she was a faculty member in the Department of Psychology and a research scientist at the Institute for Social Research. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Society and the American Psychological Association, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a former John Simon Guggenheim fellow, former President of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), and the 2002 recipient of the Donald T. Campbell award from SPSP for contributions to social psychology. For a full biography, please visit her web page.

Paula Moya is an Associate Professor of English at Stanford University. Her publications include Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (UC Press, 2002) and Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century (W.W. Norton 2010), the latter co-edited with Hazel Markus. She is a founding organizer and coordinating team member of The Future of Minority Studies research project and, at Stanford, has been the faculty coordinator or co-coordinator of several faculty-graduate student research networks sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and the Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. For a full biography, please visit Moya's web page.