Can We Talk About Racism?

Linda McClain will speak about her book “Who’s the Bigot? Learning from Conflicts over Marriage and Civil Right Law” via Zoom  on Wednesday, September 28.  The event is put on by Fordham University School of Law and will talk productively about race as a central problem in our divided nation. While some celebrate diversity and inclusion others feel excluded and fear being tarred as bigots. The hope spawned by Barack Obama’s election was followed by the angry resentments of Trump’s MAGA followers. Linda C. McClain’s Who’s the Bigot traces the themes and rhetoric of prejudice, bigotry, ignorance, and animus in the law and public debate over civil rights, marriage and recognition of the rights of of gays and lesbians. The Robert Kent Professor of Law at Boston University and a graduate of the University of Chicago Divinity School, Professor McClain’s careful history pays close attention to the participation of religious advocates in the developing law.

McClain, will be joined in conversation by two writers who have reflected on the problems of bias among American Catholics, and Latino Americans. LaSalle University Professor of Christian Ethics Maureen O’Connell plumbs her own family’s history in “Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness.” Tanya Kateri Hernandez too looks inward in her newly published “Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality.” The Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at Fordham, she is also the author of Multiracials and Civil Rights. George Conk, a Senior Fellow at Fordham Law School will moderate.

A recording of the discussion is available here.