Multiracials and Civil Rights: A Reading and Book Signing

In Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination, Tanya Katerí Hernández explores the question of how to pursue racial equality in a growing multiracial world. The growth of a mixed-race population has lead some commentators to proclaim that multiracial discrimination is distinct in nature from the racial discrimination that non-multiracial persons experience, and that as a consequence a whole new approach to civil rights law is required. Hernandez describes her own experience as a mixed-race person and then shares how she tracked down the court case narratives of multiracial discrimination and the story of racial privilege they revealed. The stories she uncovered convey how the tale of why multiracial discrimination is thought to challenge traditional understandings of civil rights law has much to teach us about how to move towards a more egalitarian society.

Tanya Katerí Hernández, is the Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law. Professor Hernández, is an internationally recognized comparative race law expert and Fulbright Scholar. Hispanic Business Magazine selected her as one of the 100 Most Influential Hispanics of 2007. Professor Hernández’s scholarly interest is in the study of comparative race relations and anti-discrimination law, and her work in that area has been published in numerous university law reviews like Cornell, Harvard, N.Y.U., U.C. Berkeley, Yale and in news outlets like the New York Times, among other publications including her book Racial Subordination in Latin America: The Role of the State, Customary Law and the New Civil Rights Response(including Spanish and Portuguese translation editions). Her most recent publication is the book Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination.

FMI: https://nyupress.org/books/9781479830329/

Minkah Makalani is associate professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of the book, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939, and co-editor (with Davarian Baldwin) of Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem. His work has appeared in The Journal of African American History, Souls, Small Axe, Social Text, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Women, Gender, and Families of Color, as well as the collections Outside In: The Transnational Circuitry of U.S. History, and C.L.R. James’ Beyond a Boundary Fifty Years On. He is currently working on a study of C. L. R. James’s return to Trinidad in 1958-1962, which is tentatively titled, Calypso Conquered the World: C.L.R. James and the Politically Unimaginable in Trinidad, which examines how his work on West Indies Federation reflected his sense of the possibilities for democracy in the Caribbean postcolony