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.

Cosponsored by the Office of Institutional Diversity, the U.S. Latino Studies Fund, and the Swearer Center for Public Service.

Free and open to the public. Reception to follow. Wheelchair accessible. 

Speaker

Ian Haney López is one of the nation’s leading thinkers on racism’s evolution since the civil rights era. He holds an endowed chair as the John H. Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches in the areas of race and constitutional law; he is also a Senior Fellow at Demos. Ian has been a visiting law professor at Yale, New York University, and Harvard, and is a past recipient of the Alphonse Fletcher Fellowship, awarded to scholars whose work furthers the integration goals of Brown v. Board of Education. His most recent book, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, lays bare how over the last half century politicians have exploited racial pandering to build resentment toward government that in turn leads many voters to support policies that favor the very wealthiest while hurting everyone else.

Series Information

The Third Rail Series aims to address some of the most thorny and contentious social, political and cultural issues related to race and ethnicity in contemporary society. Charged yet pivotal subjects such as affirmative action, welfare, immigration amnesty, reconciliation over slavery and Native American sovereignty, genocide, structural racism, colorblindness, cultural/racial/ethnic stereotype, mass media imagery and everyday racism will be addressed by respected scholars on the subject. Their accessible and yet sophisticated public presentations will be designed to inform and move public discussion forward.