UW Professor and WID-Sponsered Lecture Help Kick Off Black History Month Activities

Professor Robin Marcus among the panelists at one of the Black History Month events at GW

UW20 professor Robin Marcus was among the panelists at "Working with Race: Black Representations and Black Identity in Society and in the Classroom" on February 2, 2010. Several dozen students and professors attended, and offered a lively discussion of various experiences addressing race issues and racism in the classroom. The event was sponsored by the Multicultural Student Services Center.

The event was followed that evening by the Black History Celebration Keynote Address and Inaugural Writing in the Disciplines Distinguished Lecture given by Professor Tricia Rose, Chair of Africana Studies at Brown University. Prof Rose is also a frequent guest commentator on radio and television shows such as PBS’s The Tavis Smiley Show, MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, NPR’s Talk of the Nation, and CNN’s The Jeff Greenfield Show. Her books include Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Wesleyan University Press), which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and was named one of the top 25 books of 1995 by the Village Voice and one of the “Top Books of the Twentieth Century" by Black Issues in Higher Education, and The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop—and Why It Matters (Basic Books). In her talk, "Teachable Moments: What We Can Learn from Social and Political Situations that the Media do not Teach," Prof Rose's lecture, in which among other things she encouraged us to be aware of the social contexts surrounding the information we receive through the media and to ask the unasked questions that lay beyond "the facts," was delivered to a standing room only audience in the Marvin Center Betts Auditorium.