Conversation on Racism and Capitalism

Wednesday, November 20 at 4pm at Howard University

Howard University Research Building - 1, 1840 7th Street, NW, Room 123.

(1840 7th St NW, Washington, DC 20004 is adjacent to Shaw Metro.)




Since the decline of Marxist scholarship in the 1970s, scholars of race in the United States have shied away from talking about capitalism. In this mini-conference at Howard University, we will bring together a group of scholars to re-ignite a discussion on racism and capitalism.

This conference is designed to be more of a conversation than a presentation of formal research papers. In that vein, we are asking our panelists to offer five to seven minute reflections on two questions:

• What is the relationship between racism and capitalism?
• What does racial justice look like?

After each panelist has offered their thoughts, we will open the discussion up to the audience.

The panelists will be:

- Ruth Wilson Gilmore
- Tamara Nopper
- Johnny Eric Williams
- Gavin Mueller
- Louise Seamster
- Peter James Hudson

Moderator: Tanya Golash-Boza
Presider: Rodney Greene

I look forward to seeing you at Howard University on Wednesday, November 20, at 4pm.

Tanya Golash-Boza, Convener

- Event sponsored by: The Howard University Center for Urban Progress and The Economics Department

Participant bios.

Rodney D. Green has served as a professor of urban economics at Howard University since 1977 and, since 1995, as Founder and Executive Director of the Howard University Center for Urban Progress, a unit designed to strengthen the University’s urban research, program evaluation, community service, and community development agenda at local, federal, and international levels. He also serves as Chair of the Howard University Department of Economics. He has authored three scholarly books (including a study of racial and economic segregation in public housing) and over 50 journal articles. He has served as Principal Investigator in over 60 externally funded projects with a value of over $30 million. He has actively participated in labor, social justice, and anti-racist movements since 1968.

Tanya Golash-Boza is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. She is the author of three books: 1) Due Process Denied (2012), which describes how and why non-citizens in the United States have been detained and deported for minor crimes; 2) Immigration Nation (2012), which analyzes the impact of U.S. immigration policy on human rights; and 3) Yo Soy Negro: Blackness in Peru (2011).

Johnny E. Williams is Associate Professor of Sociology at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. His research investigates how culture (i.e., shared beliefs, values and meaning systems) maintains and challenges social order. He is the author of African-American Religion and the Civil Rights Movement in Arkansas (University Press of Mississippi 2003) and numerous articles examining how culture shapes human action and thought. His forthcoming book Decoding Racial Ideology in Genomics (Lexington Books 2014) examines the complex role racialized culture plays in genomic research. Concurrently, he is currently writing a third book examining the persistence of racial thinking and racism in sociology entitled The Persistence of White Sociology (Palgrave Macmillan 2016).

Gavin Mueller is a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Studies at George Mason University. His research interests include global political economy, new media, and the restructuring of labor in media and cultural industries. Gavin is on the editorial board of Jacobin Magazine and Viewpoint Magazine. His writing on popular culture has appeared in numerous popular and scholarly publications.

Louise Seamster is a PhD candidate in sociology at Duke University. Her research focuses on new forms of economic and political exclusion in the twenty-first century, particularly in the areas of urban development, privatization, and citizenship. Her dissertation will investigate the racial politics of emergency management and economic development in Benton Harbor, Michigan.

Peter James Hudson is an assistant professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He is completing the manuscript _Dark Finance: Wall Street and the West Indies, 1873-1933_ and his essays have appeared in Race & Class, Small Axe, Radical History Review and other journals. He is also the editor of The Public Archive: Black History in Dark Times: thepublicarchive.com. Dr. Hudson's recent essay, “African Diaspora Studies and the Corporate Turn” [pdf], addresses many of the themes of this symposium.

Tamara K. Nopper has a PhD in sociology and is a lecturer at Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on race and ethnic relations, immigration, economic inequality, and the history and sociology of Asian Americans. Her publications have examined the impact of globalization on racial and economic inequality in the United States, race and immigration enforcement, minority business development and immigrant entrepreneurship, and Black-Asian American conflict. She has worked in non-profits and community activism in the areas of immigrant rights and counter-military recruitment work.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a Professor of Geography at the City University of New York, is known as an activist as well as an intellectual. She is a past president of the American Studies Association (ASA). She has examined how political and economic forces produced California’s prison boom in Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007), which was recognized by ASA with its Lora Romero First Book Award. Gilmore’s wide-ranging research interests also include race and gender, labor and social movements, uneven development, and the African diaspora. She was previously at the University of Southern California, where she taught courses in race and ethnicity, economic geography, and political geography, was the founding chair of the department of American studies and ethnicity, and won the USC-Mellon Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring. She also works regularly with community groups and grassroots organizations and is known for the broad accessibility of her research. She holds a Ph.D. in economic geography and social theory from Rutgers University.