When ‘Fun’ Isn’t Funny: Racist Entertainment, from Ghetto Parties to American Indian Mascots, April 23

Event: Dr. D. Anthony Tyeeme Clark (Meskwaki) of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will deliver the lecture: “When ‘Fun’ Isn’t Funny: Racist Entertainment, from Ghetto Parties to American Indian Mascots.”

When: 7 p.m., Monday, April 23, 2007

Where: University of Texas at Austin, Thompson Conference Center auditorium (TCC 1.100)
http://www.utexas.edu/maps/main/buildings/tcc.html TCC is next to the LBJ School at Red River and Dean Keeton. Plenty of free convenient parking in the large lots along Red River.
 
Background: Debates on university campuses have raged in recent years about the political and moral issues arising from white people’s use of images or symbols from communities of color for entertainment. D. Anthony Tyeeme Clark, an American Indian Studies professor at the University of Illinois, will explain that for many American Indian peoples, racist entertainment opens and reopens the grief -- the intergenerational post-traumatic stress -- of historical oppression that stretches back to the birth of the United States. From children’s literature and school-sponsored activities such as “sitting like an Indian” to Scouting and Y-Indian Guides and Princesses, the dominant culture conceals complicity in the ongoing colonization of Indian peoples. In his talk, Dr. Clark shows how popular culture shapes this process starting in childhood and how adults refashion, disseminate, and reinforce it through experience and hearsay in day-to-day conversation and in mass media communications. Using the athletic cheerleader Chief Illiniwek as an example, he shows how this is embodied in symbols of institutional history and values, as well as embedded in everything ranging from school and university curricula to law.
 
The program, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Senior Fellows Honors Program and Diversity Issues Committee of the College of Communication; and the Centers for African and African American, Asian American, and Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Contact: Robert Jensen

(512) 471-1990

rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu