CSREA is delighted to partner with the Office of Institutional Diversity to bring Robin DiAngelo to campus as part of the Diversity & Inclusion Summit, and to serve as CSREA's annual Third Rail Lecture Series speaker. Her talk is entitled, "White Fragility and Its Impact on Diversity and Inclusion Efforts on Campus."

In his new book The Fight to Vote, Waldman tell the story of the struggle to win a meaningful right to participate in American democracy. It is a story of politics as well as social movements. Because it spans the whole 240 years of American history, it uses widely disparate sets of sources. From the Founding-era documents ... to the archives of the women's suffrage and African American civil rights movement ... to today's court pleadings, the story is accessible to all students. Remarkably, so much of it is now available online -- much more so than just two years ago, when Waldman wrote The Second Amendment: A Biography.

In his new book, The Fight to Vote, Waldman takes a succinct and comprehensive look at a crucial American struggle: the drive to define and defend government based on “the consent of the governed,” offering a current, readable history of voting rights in the United States. Waldman traces the full story from the Founders’ debates to today’s challenges: a wave of restrictive voting laws, partisan gerrymanders, and the flood of campaign money unleashed by Citizens United. Amid this topsy-turvy election season, Waldman’s book is a needed reminder that voting rights have never been – and are still not – a guarantee.

The prevalence of coded racial appeals in American politics invites us to reconsider racism, racial ideologies, and the social construction of race. In this seminar we'll talk about strategic and routine racism, colorblindness, and the interplay between dog whistle politics and a racially stratified society. Looking toward the future, we'll also consider whether demography will save us, or whether instead whiteness as an organizing principle in politics and society is likely to expand, for instance to incorporate many Hispanics and Asian Americans.

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Rejecting any simple story of malevolent and obvious racism, in this lecture Ian Haney López links the two central themes that dominate American politics today: the Republican Party’s increasing reliance on white voters, and the destabilization and decline of the middle class—white and nonwhite members alike.