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At this year's University Forum on February 16, 2018, Jonathan Holloway, Claudia Rankine, Jeffrey Prager, and I convened a panel discussion titled “Racism in America, Part II.” The panel was envisioned as a follow-up to last year's discussion of the current status of race and race relations in the United States. The previous panel came on the heels of the 2016 Presidential election and, not surprisingly, the comments of panelists Darryl Pinckney and Larry Bobo looked both inward and outward as they reflected on their personal reactions to the state of race relations in American society. One year later, we assembled again in February and assigned ourselves a slightly different task, one related to our various institutional roles.
Jonathan Holloway, previously a professor of history and Dean of Yale College, had just begun his appointment as Provost of Northwestern University. Claudia Rankine, the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University and recent winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for her 2014 poetry collection Citizen: An American Lyric, had just announced her intention to use her MacArthur “genius” grant to fund a Racial Imaginary Institute in Manhattan. Jeffrey Prager, Professor of Sociology at UCLA and former Dean of the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, served as the panel's discussant; and I, as chair of the panel, brought my experiences as Dean of the Humanities at Rutgers University, and as a cofounder of the Study Group on Race and Psychoanalysis at the William Alanson White Institute in New York.
Bridging the worlds of academia and psychoanalysis, the panelists’ collective institutional appointments and roles shaped our interest in focusing on the persistence of institutional racism, its causes and effects,