Currents in Conversation: Race, Racism, and Immigration

January 22nd, 2018
Minor Hall 125

Since the beginning of his tenure, President Trump has actively targeted immigrants through executive orders, calls to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and, most recently, incendiary comments referring to nations in the African diaspora as “s***hole countries.” Amid the bombastic rhetoric and unconstitutional executive orders, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have detained immigrants in record numbers. According to The New York Times, “the agency arrested more than 28,000 ‘non-criminal immigration violators’ between Jan. 22 and Sept. 2, a nearly threefold increase over the same period in 2016.” In recent weeks, ICE has also targeted immigrants’ rights activists detaining Ravi Ragbir and Amer Othman Adi, and deporting Jean Montrevil and Jorge Garcia. In light of these events, the Woodson Institute reprises its occasional “Currents in Conversation” series on January 22nd 2018 in Minor Hall 125 at 7:00 pm with a forum entitled “Race, Racism, and Immigration.” The Currents in Conversation fora are designed to explore issues and topics dominating the headlines, airwaves, and social media platforms with implications for the study of race. The January 22nd panel will situate the recent comments and events in the research and expertise of University of Virginia faculty working in Africa, Haiti, and the U.S.

Panelists include:

Robert Fatton Jr. is the Julia A. Cooper Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. Born and raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, he is the author of several books and a large number of scholarly articles, the most of recent which is “Haiti: Trapped in the Outer Periphery.”

Marlene L. Daut is Associate Professor of African American and American Studies at the University of Virginia. She specializes in early Caribbean, 19th-century African American, and early modern French colonial literary and historical studies. Daut is the co-creator and co-editor of H-Net Commons’ digital platform, H-Haiti, and she has developed an online bibliography of fictions of the Haitian Revolution from 1787 to 1900.

Sabrina Pendergrass is an assistant professor of sociology and African American and African Studies. Her research and teaching interests include race, inequality, internal migration, cultural sociology, and the U.S. South.

Kwame E. Otu is an assistant professor of African American Studies at the University of Virginia. His research transects issues of sexual citizenship, gender, human rights NGOs, and neoliberal racial formations in postcolonial Africa.