"(Under)Counting Blackness Across the Americas: Census Racial Politics and the Civil Rights Crisis"
Location:
Moot Court Room,
Old College
Date/time
Mon 2 December 2024
14:00 - 16:00
About the event
This work-in-progress paper examines the struggle for accurate census counts of Afro-descendants across Latin American and the United States, and its relevance for enforcing equality laws. A nation’s census count of its population every ten years, is viewed by many citizens as a mundane domestic administrative task with little transnational relevance. However, for AfroLatinx populations across the Americas, census taking is a vitally important site for transnational support and racial justice activism. This is because the gathering of population statistics sits at the heart of racial politics. At its most fundamental level, the census count of residents by race makes clear that racially marginalized communities exist. Being counted on a census form is the first step towards making social justice demands that government entities incorporate formerly excluded racial groups into social policies. Moreover census racial data can make visible any racial disparities that exist in access to important public goods such as access to education, employment, housing, medical services, etc. In short, a census count of its population by race provides concrete data about racial hierarchies and exclusion. Without it, systemic racism is rendered invisible. This paper is part of a larger book project which traces the histories of undercounting Blackness on the census, the legal tools for addressing the undercount, and the civil rights crisis the contemporary undercount presents for the pursuit of equality and enforcement of anti-discrimination laws.
About the speaker
Professor Tanya Katerí Hernández is the Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law, where she serves as an Associate Director of its Center on Race, Law and Justice. She received her A.B. from Brown University, and her J.D. from Yale Law School. Professor Hernández is an internationally recognized comparative race law expert and Fulbright Scholar who has visited at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, in Paris and the University of the West Indies Law School, in Trinidad. She has previously served as a Law and Public Policy Affairs Fellow at Princeton University, a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University; a Faculty Fellow at the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, and as a Scholar in Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Professor Hernández is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, the American Law Institute, and the Academia Puertorriqueña de Jurisprudencia y Legislación. Hispanic Business Magazine selected her as one of its annual 100 Most Influential Hispanics. 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 books Racial Subordination in Latin America: The Role of the State, Customary Law and the New Civil Rights Response (including Spanish and Portuguese translation editions), Brill Research Perspectives in Comparative Law: Racial Discrimination, and Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination. Her most recent book from Beacon Press is Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and The Struggle for Equality, and its Spanish Translation edition, Inocencia Racial: Desenmascarando la antinegritud de los latinos y la lucha por la igualdad.