America and the colonial project

Understanding how race intersects with public policy has never been more important. This requires examining the racial foundations of public policy in the United States—the focus of an inaugural series convened by the Center for Racial Justice (CRJ) this fall—and how race impacts policy choices and consequences at the global level. This winter, the CRJ is partnering with the International Policy Center and Weiser Diplomacy Center to host a series on race in international relations. The series will be moderated by Professor John Ciorciari and Ambassador Susan Page and will explore topics including the role of race in the development of the international relations discipline, the racial dimensions of international governance interventions, and the growth of a transnational BLM advocacy network.

Please join us in February for the first event in that series—a conversation with the noted historian Brenda Gayle Plummer. She will share insights in dialogue with Ford School Professor John Ciorciari on the ambivalent, inconsistent role the United States played in the colonial enterprise and its links to racial oppression within the United States. Among other issues, she will discuss U.S. policy and practice during and after the uprising and eventual independence of enslaved Haitians, the era of the U.S. occupations of Haiti and the Philippines, and the period of decolonization during the Cold War.

About the speaker

Brenda Gayle Plummer is a professor of history and professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is a historian whose research includes race and gender, international relations, and civil rights. Her work ranges from essays on Haitian-American relations to studies of Afro-Americans, race, and foreign affairs. Plummer has taught Afro-American history throughout her twenty years of experience in higher education. She has taught at historically black Fisk University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Minnesota. She is the author of three books of original scholarship, including In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and has received book prizes in Afro-American history and diplomatic history respectively from the American Historical Association, and the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations. She has also published widely in leading journals and edited collections on international and diplomatic history.

Faculty conveners

This series is part of the Ford School’s broader initiative, led by the Center for Racial Justice, on the Racial Foundations of Public Policy. The series is convened by Professors Celeste Watkins-Hayes, Susan D. Page, and John Ciorciari.

Faculty Expert

Celeste M. Watkins-Hayes

Joan and Sanford Weill Dean of Public Policy; Jean E. Fairfax Collegiate Professor of Public Policy; University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor; Professor of Sociology

Watkins-Hayes is an internationally-recognized scholar and expert widely credited for her research at the intersection of inequality, public policy, and human service institutions, with a special focus on HIV/AIDS; poverty; and race, class, and gender studies. Dr. Watkins-Hayes has published three books, numerous articles in journals and edited volumes, and pieces in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Chicago Magazine.

Faculty Expert

Susan D. Page

Professor of Practice in International Diplomacy at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and Professor from Practice at the University of Michigan's Law School. Director; Weiser Diplomacy Center

Page applies her vast foreign policy experience to the Weiser Diplomacy Center. She has served the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the United Nations, and non-governmental organizations in senior roles for decades, across East, Central, and Southern Africa, and in Haiti and Nepal. Page was the first U.S. ambassador to the Republic of South Sudan and served as Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations in Haiti.

• Brenda Plummer
• Celeste Watkins-Hayes
• John Ciorciari
• Susan Page
• Center for Racial Justice