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What
are the trends? What future do we want, and how do
we shape it? What public policies and private practices
are most promising?
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On the cusp of the 50th anniversary of Brown
vs. Board of Education—and 100 years after W.E.B. DuBois
predicted that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem
of the color line—The Civil Rights Project will lead a
vital national debate about the past, present and future of racial
integration in the United States: What are the trends? What future
do we want, and how do we shape it? What public policies and
private practices are most promising? The need for fresh data
and insights is particularly pressing in light of the growing
complexity of our nation’s racial makeup; evidence of persisting,
even increasing, racial inequalities; and the simultaneous steady
erosion of civil rights protections and guarantees in courts
and legislatures.
The Color Lines Conference at Harvard
University will explore the implications of these new multiracial
realities and challenges.
Co-sponsored by the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for
Afro-American Research, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin
American Studies, the Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research
Program, the Harvard Immigration Project, and the UCLA Asian
American Studies Center.
As many as 1,000 researchers, civic and business
leaders, journalists, activists, and policymakers will engage
each other in the course of more than forty panels and numerous
presentations exploring how major institutions — from
corporations to schools to media conglomerates to religious
institutions to federal, state and local governments, and
more — are responding and should respond to our nation’s
racial challenges and changes. We will have rigorous debates
over research findings, key value judgments, and policy prescriptions.
The conference will also provide opportunity for informal
exchanges. The goal is to hold a civil rights convening unprecedented
in its intellectual breadth and richness. In view of the high
quality, broad disciplinary scope, and huge topical range
of the approximately 120 research papers commissioned, we
hope to make a historically significant contribution to the
realm of research as well as the arena of national discourse
on the future of racial integration and the integration ideal.
In addition to the conference itself, we foresee
the production of a series of related publications, broadcasts,
and interactive products. Preliminary plans include:
- Publication of leading papers on our web site, with links
to a range of other sites;
- Publication of multiple volumes of edited papers and
commentary;
- Efforts to promote magazine special editions, features,
and interviews;
- Customized publications geared for specific industries,
sectors, and institutions;
- Publication, or web-publication, of a monograph
for a more general audience, summarizing the conference
in
a popular,
accessible format;
- Broadcast coverage focused on
the more policy-oriented panels and plenary sessions;
- Promotion
of key panelists
for PBS, NPR
and commercial broadcast interviews;
- Selective
web site digital video streaming and archiving;
- Book and
ancillary web publications for use in college and high
school courses of excerpted
conference materials
and proceedings.
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