Racism and Colorism in the International Context

Date: April 1, 2022

Workshop Recording

Featured Speaker(s)

Dr. Gay McDougall is a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Award, McDougall has spent her career working on issues of race, gender, and economic justice in the US and global context. With a commitment grounded in the experience of growing up in the Jim Crow era in Georgia, she desegregated a previously all-white college as the token sole Black student to break the color bar, registered first-time Black voters in rural South Carolina shortly after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and traveled through Alabama and Texas to identify civil rights violations with the US Commission on Civil Rights. Those experiences led her to law school to become a civil rights lawyer.

Early in her legal career she worked for the National Conference of Black Lawyers and among other involvements she represented the organization at the United Nations to express solidarity with the struggles for decolonization, particularly in southern Africa.   Considering those issues through a lens of human rights law, led her to London for an LL.M. degree in International Human Rights Law and to work with the research committee of the African National Congress of South Africa.

For the next 15 years, as Director of the Southern Africa Project of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, McDougall worked closely with South African lawyers to secure the release of thousands of political prisoners from jail. When the end of apartheid was near, she was appointed one of the 16 members of the South African governmental body created to administer South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, which established Nelson Mandela as President and ended apartheid. In 2015 the Government of South Africa bestowed on her their national medal of honor for non-citizens, the Order of O.R. Tambo Medal for her extraordinary contributions to ending apartheid.

Her next 14 years were spent as Executive Director of Global Rights, a human rights group that worked with activists in over 10 countries. By establishing a long-term presence in each of those countries she sought to help emerging human rights organizations determine their own priorities and develop ways to leverage international public attention and pressure to amplify their demands.

She has been a leader on human rights within the UN for over three decades. She was the first UN Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues. Serving for 6 years she traveled to 17 countries for the UN to study discriminatory laws and practices. President Biden recently nominated her to serve a third four-year term on the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) that oversees compliance with the International Convention on Racial Discrimination. She was nominated by President Clinton to be the first American to serve on the Committee in 1997, re-nominated by President Obama in 2015 and from 2018-2019 was Vice Chair. In 1996 she was UN Special Rapporteur on systemic rape and sexual slavery during war and in 2001 she played a leadership role in the UN Third World Conference against Racism in Durban. 

During her previous four-year term on the CERD Committee, among other achievements, she led the Committee in its evaluation of the policies Canada, Australia, New Zealand with respect to the rights of Indigenous Peoples; China’s detention of its Uyghur (Muslim) population; and South Korea’s treatment of immigrant workers.

McDougall received a J.D. from Yale Law School and an LL.M. from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has honorary Doctor of Law degrees from nine universities including Georgetown University Law Center, Emory University School of Law, the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa), and the University of London. She is currently Distinguished Scholar in Residence with the Leitner Center on International Law and Justice at Fordham Law School and the Center on Race, Law & Justice.

Dr. Rubia R. Valente is an Assistant Professor at the Marxe School. She is a research fellow at the Washington Brazil Office and serves on the Executive Committee of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA). Before joining Baruch, she was a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University and a Research Associate at the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas). 

Dr. Valente’s research seeks to produce scientific inquiries that measure and evaluate public policies and practices, with a focus on understanding social issues related to economic, political, and social development. She applies advanced quantitative methods and socioeconomic theory to investigate the impact of policies on underrepresented and marginalized groups, providing empirical support for formulating policies addressing socioeconomic inequalities due to race, class, and gender in social, political, educational, and religious institutions. Dr. Valente has published in several peer-reviewed journals including Regional Studies, Race Ethnicity and Education, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, Cities, Journal of Happiness Studies and the Latin American Research Review. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, her family immigrated to the United States when she was a sophomore in High School. 

Professor Sonia R. Jarvis is an accomplished attorney and scholar whose research and teaching have focused on race, politics, and the media.  Her legal practice focuses on civil rights, civil liberties, minority businesses and counseling nonprofit organizations. She served as a law clerk for renowned Federal Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. when he was the US District Court Judge for the Middle District of Alabama and also when he was elevated to become a US Circuit Court Judge for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Professor Jarvis has written several book chapters and papers and is currently focused on voter suppression in a book she is co-authoring entitled “States of Confusion: How New Voter ID Requirements Fail Democracy and What to Do About It” (under contract with NYU Press).  An active member of several professional associations and academic organizations, she has served, most recently and notably, as the Executive Director of the National Coalition on Black Voter Participation, Inc., and Managing Director of the Center for National Policy Review Clinic. Professor Jarvis has testified before Congress and has been interviewed by almost every major media outlet in the country. Prior to joining Baruch, she served as a Senior Consultant for the President’s Initiative on Race in the Clinton White House tasked with drafting its final report.

Professor Jarvis has taught courses on race and politics, public policy, intergroup dialogue, communications and media analysis, law and public policy, and women’s rights. She has served as the Ackerman Visiting Distinguished Associate Professor of Equality and Justice in America and as Director of the Center for Equality, Pluralism and Policy. Professor Jarvis graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in Political Science with Honors and Distinction, and a B.A. in Psychology, followed by a J.D. from Yale University Law School. She was recently acknowledged by Stanford University as its first African American Female Varsity Athlete in university history when she served as Captain of the Stanford Women’s Basketball Team.

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