Students and instructors alike often struggle with strong emotions, and many people have robust preexisting beliefs about race. At the same time, this is a moment that demands a clear understanding of racism. It is important for students to learn how we got here and how racism is more than just individual acts of meanness. Students also need to understand that colorblindness is not an effective anti-racism strategy.

In this book, Cyndi Kernahan argues that you can be honest and unflinching in your teaching about racism while also providing a compassionate learning environment that allows for mistakes and avoids shaming students. She provides evidence for how learning works with respect to race and racism along with practical teaching strategies rooted in that evidence to help instructors feel more confident. She also differentiates between how white students and students of color are likely to experience the classroom, helping instructors provide a more effective learning experience for all students.

The 1619 Project is The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning reframing of American history that placed slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. The project, which was initially launched in August of 2019, offered a revealing new origin story for the United States, one that helped explain not only the persistence of anti-Black racism and inequality in American life today, but also the roots of so much of what makes the country unique. 

On March 30th at 2:00pm in the Student Union Theater, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, most famous for her work on the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, will be in conversation with UConn history professor Manisha Sinha. They will discuss Hannah-Jones' work as an advocate for people of color in journalism and as a writer working to change the way we think about race in the United States.

This event is restricted to the UConn community. Please register with a UConn email address. All registrations without UConn email addresses will be canceled. If you are part of the UConn community but do not have a UConn email address, write to us at uchi@uconn.edu.