Goodbye and Thank You
This is our final offering of THIS WEEK IN RACE. After more than three years and 165 offerings, we say farewell for now and urge our readers to continue to be meaningfully engaged in issues that reside at the intersection of race, politics and language.Others Have Stepped UpPartly because we have never taken advertising in this space and partly because of our interest in collaboration and solidarity with those who share

NCA Preview: New Research Related to Race and Political Communication
THIS WEEK, the National Communication Association will meet in Chicago, Illinois for its annual conference. As we did prior to the American Political Science Association meeting in September, we scoured the program and put together a schedule of the panels that will most likely be of interest to our readers.If you are attending the meeting, we very much encourage you to search through the online program to see what pa

Teaching Tool: The Advantages and Limitations of a Race-Themed Political Cartoon
Humor can be an effective vehicle for delivering a serious message. Whether it is in the form of satire, parody or simple ridicule, the most powerful statements are sometimes delivered in a way that makes us laugh before we think.On the RaceProject Facebook page THIS WEEK, we reposted (from a tweet from SocProf) a link to a book review that contains a political cartoon by

The Limits of Racial Optimism
It is no surprise that the nation's first president of color has been a lightning rod for discussion of race and racism in America. For those who struggle for racial justice, this inevitability has had positive and negative components. For a nation that often wishes to ignore the deep racial problems that permeate society, Barack Obama's election has forced us to confront, on a regular basis, the ugly truth that Martin Luther King's dream has not been realized. On the other hand, President Obama has had unrealistic expectations placed on him with respect to his ability to mend the country's racial wounds. We argued

Does It Still "Take a Village?": Multiple Perspectives on a Chicago Encounter
We look to our children as promises for the future, to progress beyond previous generations' limitations, failures and injustices. We recognize and dream about "their world" -- the one we'll live in when we are seniors, the one that embodies some of our wishes and the fruits of our labor and energy. But we also know that for these goals to be reached, there must be a context within which our young people can learn, grow and thrive. We agonize over how we can improve conditions for young Americans whose future is so instrumental to ours, and we worry about kids who seem to be heading in a direction that can undermine those aspirations.THIS WEEK, we have assembled a small panel o