HoSang provides transformative visions of racial justice
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Renewed attacks on anti-racist education and policies have centered on the contention that struggles for racial justice will inevitably disenfranchise and even humiliate those who have benefited from the dominant systems of racial inequality. Yet a long tradition of social movements, intellectuals, artists, and cultural formations have argued that the abolition of white supremacy can produce the foundations for a universal liberation. Rather than seeking “equal rights” within failed systems, these efforts generated new visions that embraced human difference, vulnerability, and interdependence as core productive facets of our collective experience. From the nineteenth century’s abolition democracy and efforts to end forced sterilizations, to the twentieth century’s domestic worker organizing campaigns, to the twenty-first century’s environmental justice movement, these transformative visions of racial justice have produced conceptions of freedom and interdependence never envisioned in the nation’s dominant political framework.
Daniel Martinez HoSang expands on these ideas in his talk “A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone” on Wednesday, December 1, 2021 at 4 p.m. (PST) via Zoom, as the 2021–22 Lorwin Lecturer on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
HoSang is an associate professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and American Studies at Yale University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Political Science and serves on the Education Studies Advisory Committee. Prior to joining the faculty at Yale in 2017, HoSang was an associate professor (and department head) of Ethnic Studies and Political Science at the University of Oregon.
His book A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone (University
of California Press, 2021) provides a survey of transformative visions of racial justice in the United States. HoSang brings together stories of the social movements, intellectuals, artists, and cultural formations that have centered racial justice and the abolition of white supremacy as the foundation for a universal liberation. He taps into moments across time and place to reveal the longstanding drive toward a vision of universal emancipation. HoSang reveals a bold, shared desire to realize the antithesis of “a philosophy based on a contempt for life,” as articulated by Martin Luther King Jr. Rather than seeking “equal rights” within failed systems, these efforts generated new visions that embraced human difference, vulnerability, and interdependence as core productive facets of our collective experience.
HoSang’s other publications include the forthcoming Under the Blacklight: The Intersectional Vulnerabilities that Covid Lays Bare (Haymarket Press, Spring 2022, co-edited with Kimberele Crenshaw), Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity (University of Minnesota Press, 2019, co-authored with Joseph Lowndes), and Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness Across the Disciplines (University of California Press, 2019, co-edited with Kimberle Crenshaw, Luke Harris and George Lipsitz).