While hosting a conference may not seem like the typical celebration for an anniversary, today’s festivities at Annenberg Auditorium aren’t typical for an anniversary either: To celebrate its first 10 years, the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) invited educators from across the country to examine how today’s unprecedented diversity is shaping American lives.

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Masaru Oka

Gloria Ladson-Billings of the University of Wisconsin-Madison spoke yesterday on racial issues in recent legal decisions. She was the keynote speaker of the “Embracing Diversity”conference.

Running through 5:30 p.m. this evening, “Embracing Diversity: Making and Unmaking Race, Ethnicity and Difference in the 21st Century” is both a celebration of CCSRE’s 10th anniversary and a discussion of its core interests. With speakers on the topics of education, immigration, religion and cultural discourse, the conference addresses an interdisciplinary audience of scholars from a number of universities.

The discussion is meant to confront the challenges in becoming a diverse — and just — society. Free and open to the public, the panels feature topics such as “Muslims in America and Religious Tolerance, Immigration Policies, Education and Equity in the Post-Brown Era” and “Producing and Diversity in the Public Sphere: Reproducing Power and Performance in Dominant Culture.”

In yesterday’s opening remarks, CCSRE professors spoke briefly about their work with the Center.

Founding director of the Hiphop Archive Marcyliena Morgan, a professor in the department of communication, addressed the movement of hiphop into the academic sphere.

“Students began to offer classes and conduct research projects. They wanted input from their professors,” Morgan said. “They kept going ‘till we as faculty realized we needed to step up, and they insisted we bring [the intellectual arguments] to archive. So many students have an intellectual passion to learn more about race, gender and class.”

The path echoes that of CCSRE itself, which was established in November 1996 in the wake of protests and student demands for expanded ethnic studies. Several professors worked together to create a center that would be capable of leading the development of fields in African and African-American, Asian-American, Chicano, Jewish and Native American studies into the next century.

Now serving as an umbrella organization for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Research Institute of CSRE, Hiphop Archive, African and African-American Studies program and Taube Center for Jewish Studies, CCSRE features more than 100 faculty from 15 departments and five schools across campus.

The subsidiary CSRE program offers an undergraduate minor and major, which in 2007 had eight graduates — a number which has been growing since the program’s inception.

“I think the importance of studies in race and ethnicity will only continue to increase,” said Olga Medina ‘08, a double major in CSRE and Political Science. “There is no doubt in my mind that the CSRE department and the talented scholars it produces will play an influential role in spearheading and continuing the academic work on these topics while informing the public discourse on them.”

In the past few years in particular, the program has worked to establish an open community forum. Also in yesterday’s remarks, Sociology Prof. Lawrence Bobo — who, along with Morgan, his wife, is leaving Stanford for Harvard in January — addressed the need to discuss urgent subjects as the department did two years ago with its “Confronting Katrina: Race, Class and Disaster in American Society.”

“We live in a protective cocoon of the Bay Area,” Bobo said, going on to summarize a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle describing Morgan Stanley’s recent $16 million settlement in a race bias suit filed by Black and Latino brokers.

“If that’s happening here, imagine what’s happening in areas where we think they are not progressive,” Bobo added.

The sentiment was contrasted by keynote speaker Gloria Ladson-Billings, a professor of curriculum educational policy studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Focusing on education in a Post-Brown Era, her talk, entitled “When the Court is No Longer a Friend,” addressed reverse discrimination.

“Even though African Americans have relied on the court to obtain their civil rights, the court is no longer a friend to minority communities,” she said, arguing that the progress made in the civil rights movement has regressed in recent legal decisions, where race is being turned on itself.

Similar discussions will continue today, with events being held at Annenberg Auditorium from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.