Past Event

Racism and Anti-racism in Multicultural Families

This event is free and open to the public. Free pizza will be served.

Join the Public Square at the Illinois Humanities Council for a conversation with France Winddance Twine about how multicultural families face and challenge racism. Twine will draw on 10 years of research on racism and anti-racism in the U.S., Brazil, and Britain to discuss the strategies employed by white members of multiracial families to negotiate and counter the multiple forms of racism that their children of African descent encounter in the public and private spheres.

France Winddance Twine is Professor of Sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economicsand Political Science. She received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a post-graduate degree from the Universidade Federal in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Twine is an African American and American Indian (Creek nation) native of Chicago. She teaches comparative racial studies, feminist theory, critical race theory and qualitative research methods at UCSB, where she designed and taught the first course devoted to "Girls Culture" and girlhood in the University of California system.

A feminist ethnographer, Twine has conducted field research in Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Her works include Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil, which details how black Brazilians conceptualize and respond to racialinequalities in Rio de Janeiro. Her other works include Feminism and Antiracism: International Struggles for Justice, "Antiracist Activism in Ecuador: Black-Indian Alliances," (in Race and Class, 2000) and A White Side of Black Europe (forthcoming) on the intersections of race, sexuality, and nationality in Britain and the U.S.

Copies of Twine’s books will be available for purchase at this event.

This program is part of Know More: Conversations That Matter and is made possible by the generous support of the Joyce Foundation.

The "Know More: Conversations that Matter" series is designed to bridge the gap between the arts and social issues that are of current concern to Chicago’s Englewood community. Programming has included visits from Chicago Sun-Times columnist Laura Washington; Professor Lisa Brock Africana Studies scholar William Santiago Valles; performer Will Power; and poet Elizabeth Alexander.

For more information, please call 312.422.5580.