Annual Symposium on Race and Racism

When: Wed, Feb 24 2021 8:00am - Wed, Feb 24 2021 4:30pm 

Where: Zoom

The American social structure is composed of a resilient, symbiotic network of the formal and informal institutions that operate to maintain an equilibrium toward White privilege. Across time and place, changes in one institution can reverberate through other institutions, and importantly, when we attempt to intervene toward equity in one institution, other institutions can move to restore this toxic equilibrium. Cultural racism, which encompasses the socially accepted ideologies, values, and behavioral norms determined by the dominant power group, sets this equilibrium. Particularly insidious as it operates on the level of our shared social subconscious, the processes that comprise cultural racism are invisible to many because they are our “givens”, our assumptions, our defaults – but the result shapes our answers to the question: Whose life counts?

For our 6th annual University of Michigan RacismLab Symposium on the Study of Racism, we pay tribute to the legacy of Dr. James Jackson, whose mentorship guided our 1st annual symposium in 2015 and resulted in our guest edited Social Science and Medicine special issue on cultural and structural racism. In the introduction to this special issue, we called for all scholarship on race and health to be grounded in interdisciplinary frameworks of cultural and structural racism and critical race theory.

Link: Registration link