Lecture by Wendy Moore: "The Right to be Racist on Campus"

"The Right to Be Racist on Campus: Racist speech, White Institutional Space, and the First Amendment," by Wendy Moore, associate professor and director of graduate studies, Texas A&M University

Throughout the post-civil rights era, colleges and universities across the United States have experienced periodic explicitly racist incidents on their campuses. From the hanging of nooses on campus, to students donning Ku Klux Klan outfits, to “ghetto parties,” these incidents challenge the notion that modern racism has changed to a more subtle form, referred to as “color-blind racism.” Placing these incidents within a broader context of racialized institutions, Moore suggests that racial narratives that develop around such events must be examined through the lens of the institutional contexts in which they take place. Specifically, there exists a connection between overt racist expressions and the more covert elements of color-blind racism. Dicussing the administrative, policy, and legal responses to racist incidents in colleges and universities, Moore suggests that explicitly hostile racist expressions operate in tandem with color-blind narratives in educational institutions and the law to mark and re-inscribe colleges and universities as white institutional spaces.