Cheryl Harris, a professor in civil rights and civil liberties at the University of California at Los Angeles Law School, spoke Friday to University students and community members about the issues of gender, race and class and how they are addressed in modern society.
Harris — also the UCLA Department of African-American Studies interim chair — discussed universities’ use of affirmative action and how race played into their decisions. Harris said the current “race-conscious” affirmative action measures used at universities do not fully or effectively level the playing field for disadvantaged applicants. She also said the process does not take into consideration social class or other factors which present a more holistic picture of each student.
“Race-conscious affirmative action…has left class out of the picture,” Harris said. “Race-conscious places black students in particular in academic situations in which they cannot succeed — affirmative action actually harms the intended beneficiaries.”
Harris also touched on the shift in thinking about racial equality over the past few decades from a conservative approach — based on people exercising “colorblindness” — to a more progressive approach in pursuit of what she called “post-racism.”
“[There is] a shift to thinking about race in a different way,” Harris said. “Civil rights becomes kind of like an old-school idea. The idea is that race need not be taken into account, that universalist measures are better. [It’s] not so much racial erasure but racial transcendence.”
Harris’ talk was organized by the University’s Women, Gender and Sexuality Program and co-sponsored by over a dozen other departments and student groups including the politics department, the Office for Diversity and Equity and the Black Student Alliance. Women, Gender and Sexuality Prof. Corinne Field helped organize the event and says she found it even more successful than she had hoped.
“It looked like students were very interested and asked interesting questions,” Field said. “We wanted to bring in people who are looking at the intersections of gender, race, and class — what gender scholars call ‘intersectionality’…She is an absolutely fabulous scholar looking at [these issues] in the US.”
Fourth-year Commerce student Arisa Koyoma, who attended the event, said she found the experience interesting and thought-provoking.
“I’m really interested in issues of intersectionalism,” Koyoma said. “I try to be really aware of how [gender, race, and class] intersect. What I really liked about it [is that] it leaves room for me to self-reflect. It really pushes me to think.”
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