Marxe Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee

Navigating and Resisting White Institutional Spaces

Funded by BRESI

Date: March 10, 2023

Workshop Recording

This event was sponsored in collaboration with the Coalition to Undo Racism at Baruch (CURB).

Featured Speaker(s)

Dr. Wendy Leo Moore is a sociologist and lawyer whose work focuses on the provocative intersections of race, law, and legal institutions. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Minnesota (2005) and her J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School (2000), and she is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Texas A&M University. Her award winning book Reproducing Racism; White Space, Elite Law Schools and Racial Inequality (2008), analyzed the racial dynamics in elite U.S. law schools using a critical race theory lens and in this book Dr. Moore created a cutting edge a theory of white institutional space. Though Dr. Moore first explicated her theory of white institutional space in Reproducing Racism, she has since published a wide range of research that articulates the racialized mechanisms in other organizational contexts that create and perpetuate white space.

Dr. Moore’s current research focuses on how color-blind abstract laws of the post-Civil Rights era continue to facilitate racial hierarchy and white supremacy. She has published widely on the First Amendment and racist speech and on U.S. Supreme Court race jurisprudence. Dr. Moore is currently working on her second book, tentatively entitled The Legal Alchemy of White Domination, which examines how the United States Supreme Court deploys a structurally decontextualized white racial logic that discursively signals commitment to racial equality under the law, but functionally stalls progress toward racial equity, thereby providing continuous legal support for white domination. Dr. Moore is a previous Chair of the American Sociological Association (ASA) Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities and she has served on the ASA Council, ASA Executive Committee, and the ASA-SREM publications committee.

Resources Shared

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