Featured series 
Tag: Race
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Nation & World
Harvard, ETS to study diversity at predominantly white colleges
Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, has announced a collaboration with the Educational Testing Service (ETS) on a study of the experience of undergraduate members of racial and ethnic minorities on predominantly white college campuses.
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Nation & World
‘Passing’ in colonial Colombia
Radcliffe Fellow Joanne Rappaport gave a glimpse of her work last week (Feb. 4) during a talk at the Radcliffe Gymnasium, where 80 listeners were drawn in by her intriguing title: “Mischievous Lovers, Hidden Moors, and Cross-Dressers: The Meaning of Passing in Colonial Bogotá.”
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Nation & World
Panel of experts addresses Lincoln’s legacy
On Monday (Feb. 9), a team of experts assembled at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (HKS) to examine the history and profound impact of the tall, awkward, self-taught man from rural Kentucky who is credited with bringing about an end to slavery and saving the nation’s cherished founding principle of democratic rule.
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Nation & World
‘Nation-shaking’ racial, ethnic changes
Real earthquakes are slow to build and fast to erupt. Other, metaphorical, quakes, can follow the same pattern — and be just as earthshaking.
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Nation & World
Marla Frederick talks about faith, God, and money
Not long ago, Harvard cultural anthropologist Marla Frederick sat on a wooden bench in a slum of Kingston, Jamaica. She was interviewing local churchgoers about the Christian “prosperity gospel” often promoted by American televangelists. It offers up a simple (and controversial) idea: The more you give, the more you receive.
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Nation & World
Probing an unlikely friendship
Theirs was an unlikely friendship. One man was a black abolitionist, orator, and journalist who had been a slave from Maryland, the other a white politician from the backwoods of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois.
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Nation & World
Health disparities in Boston focus of talk at HSPH Community Partnership Day
Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino and the city’s top health official, Barbara Ferrer, speaking at the Harvard School of Public Health’s (HSPH) 18th Annual Community Partnership Day, said efforts to end racial health disparities must go forward in the city even as the nation’s economy falters.
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Nation & World
John U. Monro portrait is unveiled at PBH
The Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations has unveiled a ninth portrait in its Minority Portraiture Project. The latest honoree on canvas is John U. Monro, former dean of Harvard College. Monro’s portrait, painted by Stephen Coit ’71, was unveiled last week (Oct. 16) in Phillips Brooks House.
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Nation & World
Cooper: Doctor-patient relations cause health disparities
In the United States, a black man can expect to die, on average, 10 years earlier than his white counterpart. For black women, that racial gap in life expectancy is five years.
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Nation & World
Undergrads spend summer studying international law, child soldiers
Trevor Bakker ’10 spent this summer at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, the world’s first permanent war crimes court.
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Nation & World
Charles V. Willie presents at NAACP conference
Charles W. Eliot Professor of Education Emeritus Charles V. Willie addressed the education workshop at a recent convention (July 14) of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Cincinnati.
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Nation & World
Gates documentary series receives $12M in funding
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) recently announced funding in the amount of $12 million for three, new public television documentary series in which Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. will explore the meaning of race, culture, and identity in America.
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Nation & World
The complex legacy of slavery in Brazil
On Thursday (April 17), Lilia Moritz Schwarcz joined Zephyr Frank, assistant professor of Latin American history at Stanford University, for a lunchtime conversation about race in Brazil in both the era of the slave trade and today. The event, titled “Slavery, Abolition and Race in Brazil,” was part of an ongoing series in the Brazil…
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Nation & World
Chute on graphic narratives — they’re not just comic books anymore
The title of Hillary Chute’s Nov. 29 lecture, “Out of the Gutter: Contemporary Graphic Novels by Women,” has a double meaning. It refers to the elevation of graphic narratives — comics — from the lowest, most disreputable level of artistic expression to a form worthy of New York Times best-sellerdom, literary prizes, and academic attention.
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Nation & World
K School celebrates Ida B. Wells with poster
The Kennedy School of Government (KSG) recently celebrated the launch of poster reproductions of the portrait of Ida B. Wells that hangs in the School’s Fainsod Room. The painting of Wells — a fierce anti-lynching crusader and journalist — was installed in April 2006 next to Winston Churchill. It marked the first commissioned oil portrait…
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Nation & World
Politics of pain — from Percodan to Kevorkian
On a rainy Tuesday afternoon (Nov. 6), physicians, historians of science, and members of the general public gathered in the gymnasium at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study to hear about pain.
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Nation & World
Symposium addresses American Indian health
Sunshine Dwojak, a fourth-year Harvard Medical School student, was 26 when her mother died of heart disease, leaving behind three children. Dwojak’s mother was 48.
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Nation & World
Borderless America
Sometimes what we call something changes the way we see it. Steven Hahn wants to call the groups of escaped slaves who found refuge in the northern United States prior to the Civil War “maroon communities.”
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Nation & World
Closing the ‘achievement gap’
The achievement gap in American K-12 schools is well-documented, and is characterized by racial and class differences.
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Nation & World
Edelman pumps up Memorial Church crowd
On Oct. 19 at the Memorial Church, while a heavy rain pelted down outside, Marian Wright Edelman pelted a near-capacity audience with facts about America’s social failings. An American child is abused or neglected every 36 seconds, said the founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, and every 42 seconds a child is born…
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Nation & World
Harvard Foundation honors Andy Garcia
Acclaimed actor, producer, and director Andy Garcia was honored by the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations on a recent (Oct. 16) visit to the University. The special invited guest was recognized for his work with at-risk youth and people with cancer. Garcia is the director of the feature film “The Lost City,” in…
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Nation & World
Harvey Mansfield on politics, the humanities, and science
Harvey Mansfield wants to reintroduce the concept of thumos into political science. As employed by Plato and Aristotle, thumos refers to the “part of the soul that makes us want to insist on our own importance.” Mansfield believes that modern political science has excluded thumos, and as a result has narrowed its understanding of what…
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Nation & World
Provocative Civil War exhibit at Fogg to coincide with inauguration
An exhibition opens at the Fogg Art Museum this Saturday (Oct. 6) that will have lots of people talking.
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Nation & World
Newsmakers
Renowned Egyptian activist Nawal El Saadawi has been selected by the Harvard Committee on African Studies to deliver its annual Distinguished Harvard African Studies Lecture. Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics Eric Mazur and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, 300th Anniversary University Professor, were recently named Phi Beta Kappa (PBK) Visiting Scholars for the 2007-08 academic…
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Nation & World
Little Rock Central: 50 years later
It’s been half a century, but it feels like just yesterday for at least one member of the “Little Rock Nine.” “I can’t feel this so strong, it doesn’t make sense … you are supposed to be over it,” says an emotional Minnijean Brown Trickey in the opening of the film “Little Rock Central High:…