A Mongrel-American Social Science: International Relations

I found this event to be rather engaging, especially because at the time, I was enrolled in a Race and Racism class. Mr. Robert Vitalis spoke about how the efforts of black international relations researchers and professors such as W.E.B DuBois, Alain Locke and Merze Tate, were and remain largely unacknowledged in the social science of international relations. Vitalis challenged students in the discipline to really think about potential blinders of their teachers and of authors whose books they read as racism had been so deeply ingrained in this area that many of them are unaware that they are teaching or writing based on biased materials. Perhaps it's because I wasn't raised in the US but the fact that I've only heard of W.E.B. DuBois, barely at that, shows how deprived we are of such information. And so, the most powerful thing I learned from Mr. Vitalis' presentation is how deeply racism has affects us. With that in mind, the question I have is can we truly overcome racism.

A Little More Blue: Art, Nation, Exile, Brazil

In this event, the speaker Fernanda Pitta who is a Senior Curator at Pinacoteca de Estado de São Paulo, talked mainly about three paintings and how they were received in Brazil or internationally and why they may have been received in that way. The painting she referred to the most was O Derrubador Brasileiro by José Ferraz de Almaide Júnior. She spoke of how controversial it was at the time because it showed a lumberjack of mixed race or at least clearly not just indigenous. What stuck out to me most however was the role of Bandeirantes in São Paulo's history. Bandeirantes, from my understanding, were people who took land from the indigenous people of  São Paulo so that they could make a new society there. For Brazilians, Bandeirantes are people they are very proud of because they are seen as the people how helped to advance São Paulo.

Paris Noir: African-Americans in the City of Light

At this event, we watched a documentary called Paris Noir: African-Americans in the City of Light. The documentary talked about how these particular set of black Americans ended up in Paris and how they fared. What I learned that stood out to me was that although African-Americans were treated relatively well by the French (compared to when they were in the US), the French did not treat black people in their colonies well, so much so that to this day, there is still some racism that black people of African and Caribbean descent face in France that black Americans never encounter.