EVENT DETAILS

"Diversity with Racism: Los Angeles History from Above and Below"

Critical Visual Geographies Collective presents a workshop by Scott Kurashige

Historians will likely look back at the Obama Era as a paradoxical period in which the embrace of “diversity” reached unprecedented heights at the same time that racial oppression intensified and neoliberal restructuring widened class inequality. This development, however, must be seen as a historical process rather then epiphenomenon. Since World War II, Los Angeles has been at the forefront of thrusting the issue of racial-ethnic diversity into U.S. politics and public discourse, while exposing new contradictions in the process.

By tracing how the self-identified “white city” transformed itself into a “world city,” this workshop will use LA as a case study for understanding shifting paradigms of diversity from segregation to integration to multiculturalism. We will discuss how varying strategies for managing diversity have been linked to elite models of capitalist accumulation and top-down rule, while generating resistance, movement building, and polycultural community building among the grassroots.

Although our discussion will center on race, class, social movements, and urban space in 20th Century
LA historiography, there will be many opportunities for those studying related issues in other places or
time periods to connect to the conversation.

Scott Kurashige is a professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and Senior Advisor for Faculty Diversity and Initiatives at the University of Washington Bothell. He is the author of The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton University Press, 2008) and co-author with Grace Lee Boggs of The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2011). He received his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles and has been a fellow at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution.

RSVP requested