The 2021 Mitchem Fellow Lecture will be rescheduled for early in the spring semester. More details will be available soon.
Brandon Render from the University of Texas will present “Colorblind University: Racial Inequity and Higher Education in the 20th Century.” This lecture traces the intellectual genealogy of racial colorblindness through admissions policies, departmental structures and curriculum design in the United States. Black student activism and university policies during the midcentury civil rights struggle forged a colorblind intellectual movement that fundamentally reshaped interpretations of race. This argument draws upon student organization records, university policy, state and federal legislation and legal records. Taken together, these documents prove that colorblind logic emerged out of a feedback loop of social interaction, legal interpretations, cultural production and access to political power — on campus and beyond the ivory tower.
