Panel To Discuss Impact Of Minority Vote On U.S. Presidential Election

A panel discussion on race and ethnicity issues that have emerged in the U.S. presidential election will take place Thursday, Oct. 13, at Duke University’s Perkins Library.

The event begins at 5:30 p.m. in Perkins 217 and is free and open to the public. Parking is available in the Bryan Center lot and garage.

Hosted by the Duke Council on Race and Ethnicity (DCORE), “The 2016 Election in Black and Brown” will feature Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, an MSNBC and Telemundo political analyst, and Dorian T. Warren, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and a former MSNBC contributor.

They will join Kerry Haynie, an associate professor of political science and African and African American Studies at Duke, to discuss the impact of the minority vote, racism and xenophobia in election campaigns, and the potential consequences of a Clinton or Trump administration for racial and ethnic minority groups.

Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of black popular culture and co-director of DCORE, will moderate the discussion. A question-and-answer session  will follow. “The idea is to have a wide-ranging conversation about the central role that race and ethnicity are playing in the current election cycle,” said Haynie, who is also co-director of DCORE. “With the re-emergence of overt race-baiting appeals, xenophobia and attempted voter suppression, we are seeing in 2016 what looks like the Southern Strategy of the 1960s and 1970s. I think it is important that we take note of and try to understand these phenomena. .  

“In addition, we will discuss the importance of the black and brown vote, whether the Black Lives Matter movement is of any consequence to politics, and the impact, if any, of the many police shootings of black people that have occurred in recent years,” Haynie said.

DeFrancesco Soto is a professor at the University of Texas, where she teaches in the Department of Mexican-American and Latino Studies, and is a fellow at the Center for Politics and Governance at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. She received her Ph.D. in 2007 in political science from Duke while she was a National Science Foundation Fellow.

As a commentator on public affairs, Warren has appeared regularly on several major cable networks including CNN, ABC and NPR. He was host and executive producer of “Nerding Out” on MSNBC’s digital platform and has been published in the Huffington Post, Newsweek, Salon, Washington Post, New York Times and Ebony.com, among others.

Warren previously taught at the University of Chicago and Columbia University, where he was co-director of the Columbia University Program on Labor Law and Policy.

The event is co-sponsored by The Graduate School at Duke.

DCORE is an interdisciplinary association of centers, working groups and scholars who research the cultural, political, legal and social dimensions and consequences of racial and ethnic identity.  For more information, visit sites.duke.edu/dcore.