Friday, December 9, 2022 | 5:30pm to 7pm
Video Not Available at Request of Speaker
The majority of Asian Americans are immigrants, with most directly from Asia. This means that we carry ideas of race embedded within our cultures and homelands. We also pass them on explicitly, or implicitly, to our American-born children. How do our frameworks then impact how we understand and interpret race in the United States, and our location within the U.S. racial structure? Based on her CUNY FORUM essay, sociologist Prema Kurien shows how ideas of race, colorism, and religion among others, influence how Indian Americans and South Asian Americans more broadly situate themselves in American society and how they interact with other groups. She argues that in addition to educating ourselves on the history of race and racism in the U.S., as part of our anti-racist education it is crucial for us to confront ideas of race within our communities by making them explicit and thinking critically about how they developed.
