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Article

Abstract

In this address, Professor Robert Chang discusses how the current racial paradigm has become naturalized so that race in America is generally understood to mean black and white. It is this notion of race that limits people understanding and willingness to engage with the history and current state of Asian Americans and Latinos in the United States. Instead of being interested participants, they are seen as interlopers. Yet this status as interloper is precisely why Asian Americans and Latinos are important in discussions of race-our existence disrupts the comfortable binary of the black/white racial paradigm in which the black racial subject is produced by and through its opposition to the white racial subject, and vice versa. The presence of other racialized bodies problematizes this notion of the construction of both black and white racial subjects. Professor Chang argues that inclusion of Asian Americans and Latinos operates to denature-denaturalize- the current paradigm.

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