Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
To really grasp race, we must accept a double paradox. The first one is a truism of antiracist educators: we can see race, but it’s not real. The second is stranger: race has real consequences, but we can’t see it with the naked eye. Race is a power relationship; racial categories are not about interesting cultural or physical differences, but about putting other people into groups in order to dominate, exploit and attack them. Fundamentally, race makes power visible by assigning it to physical bodies. The evidence of race right before our eyes is not a visual trace of a physical reality, but a by-product of social perceptions, in which we are trained to see certain features as salient or significant. Race does not exist as a matter of biological fact, but only as a consequence of a process of racialisation.
Pulitzer Prize winner and current Mississippi and United States Poet LaureateNatasha Trethewey will read her poetry at Jackson State University at 3 p.m. Sept. 20 in room 166/266 of the Dollye M.E. Robinson College of Liberal Arts Building.
This event will be hosted by the Margaret Walker Center at JSU and is free and open to the public.
In January, Trethewey was named the Mississippi Poet Laureate for a four-year term. Soon after, she was named the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress. Trethewey is the first person to serve simultaneously as a state and U.S. laureate.