A Conversation About Race, Caste, Bias, and Human Rights

Content

Suraj Milind Yengde will meditate on the questions of democracy and the pitfalls of hyper-identity social discourse that have paved the way for the rise of right-wing populism. Drawing from his experience as a Dalit lawyer and a scholar of caste and color, Yengde will examine race, caste, color, and their engagement with democratic politics in the contemporary era. The political takeover of the State and its institutions by ideological mandates guarded by the invasive private capital is a classic tale of the failure of democratic accountability. In this talk, Yengde will talk about this and how new politics based on the models of Dalit engagement with political democracy can help us to recover the promises of equality and freedom.

About the Speaker:

Suraj Milind Yengde is a W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at Harvard University. He is also an incoming Ford Foundation Presidential Fellow and a visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written nearly 200 articles in academic and public scholarships. He is the author of the forthcoming Caste A Global Story, which is an ethnographic study of over 15 countries in North America, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. The book theorizes transnational Dalit universality in the framework of cosmopolitan Dalit universalism. It critically looks at the distant activism of Dalit and Black movements. 

This event is co-sponsored by the SBS Dean's Student Advisory Council, the Center for Justice, Law, and Societies, SBS RISE, and the UMass Amherst Foundation.