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Patriot League holds anti-racism speaker series

The Patriot League hosted Boston University assistant professor and historian Paula Austin to premiere its Anti-Racism Speaker Series Wednesday with the talk “Understanding Racial Regimes in United States History.”

Austin teaches history and African American studies with several focuses, including the history of social science and the history of race and racism. 

The Patriot League began its Anti-Racism Speaker Series Wednesday with a lecture led by Boston University assistant professor Paula Austin. ILLUSTRATION BY HANNAH YOSHINAGA/ DAILY FREE PRESS STAFF

The Patriot League established its Anti-Racism Commission in July 2020, which is composed of around 70 members and several working groups.

“This series is an initiative that’s grown out of one of the working groups of the league’s Anti-Racism Commission,” Patriot League Commissioner Heppel said. “They started speaking last summer about a type of speaker series that would really focus on anti-racism work from the educational perspective.”

The Educational Initiatives and Engagement working group created the speaker series. In the fall, the group worked with civic engagement and voter registration. 

“This particular group … right off the bat, one of their action items was this type of speaker series,” Heppel said. “We’ve had a variety of initiatives coming out of these groups, and some of them have been more public than others.”

The goal of the speaker series is to educate, through perspective and context, on the issues that the world is facing, according to the Patriot League.

“It was looking initially at how we wanted to broadly structure the series, so that the speakers developing the topics and allowing the speakers to flow and to make sense,” Heppel said. “It’s been this sort of ‘from within’ selection and identification of speakers and then it was just a matter of ordering them within the overall spectrum of the discussion that we want to occur.”

The Patriot League felt it was important to not only establish the Anti-Racism Commission within the League, but to also create the speaker series in order to become a more anti-racist community, Heppel said.

“The speaker series really is a way to present that important educational component of becoming leaders and contributors to society and to the communities as students develop through their time at our institutions,” Heppel said. “It’s the opportunity to continue to learn about what it means to pursue anti-racism, to what an anti-racist society and environment looks like knowing that we certainly are not there.”

The League sees the series as a way to continue  fostering learning throughout all of their institutions, as well as create leaders — not only in the Patriot League community, but beyond, Heppel said.

“It really is about life-long learning that starts well before we’re in college, but as a Patriot League, we focus on the leadership development and the creation of students and development of students as important members of our community,” Heppel said. “It’s the educational value and learning, life-long learning for everyone about the history of racism.” 

In her speech, Austin gave a brief overview about the history of racism in the country. She included information about the role race plays as a social construct.

“[Race is] this concept, it’s not real, it signifies identities … there are these perceived usually visually but can also be orally, markers of difference,” Austin said. “It is a fundamental principle of social organization, and really that begins at a particular moment in U.S.colonial history.” 

Austin also detailed the difficulty that conversations about race may present, due to widespread difference in experience. 

“Sometimes when we’re trying to have these conversations we’re sort of talking about race at different registers because of its multiplicity and the multiplicity that is built into its history,” Austin said. 

Evan Haber, a freshman in the Questrom School of Business, said the event was important for the BU community.

“I think it’s a great idea,” Haber said. “It’s a great initiative for the players and fans, and even coaches in the Patriot League. It’s great to promote stuff like that.” 

The next speaker in the series will be Karsonya “Kaye” Whitehead from Loyola University of Maryland, speaking about the topic “Uprooting Racism and Inequality: Exploring What it Means to Practice Antiracism Feb. 24.

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