Brown Bag Seminar: Education for Racial Understanding: Prejudice and 'The Race Problem' in Mid-Century America

Debate over how to create more equitable education systems is not simply a recent phenomenon in the United States. Scholars and activists have been arguing over the meanings of racial justice and the significance of integration throughout the twentieth century. The evolution of perspectives on educational equity from the 1930s through the 1950s are the focus of the talk, "Education for Racial Understanding: Prejudice and 'the Race Problem' in Mid-Century America," presented by Professor Leah Gordon as part of the SCOPE Brown Bag Seminar Series.  

In her talk, Professor Gordon will examine shifting concepts of racial justice and equality in the mid-20th century, looking at the influence of civil rights activism, World War II, McCarthyism, and the growing power of psychology. She shows how thinkers who demanded the redistribution of educational resources in the 1930s came to more narrow objectives by the mid 1940s: anti-prejudice education and integration to produce tolerance. Gordon's lecture is drawn from her book on the concept of prejudice in the mid-twentieth century United States, The Question of Prejudice: Social Science, Education, and the Struggle to Define 'the Race Problem' in Mid-Century America.

Leah Gordon is Assistant Professor of Education and (by courtesy) of History at Stanford University. She received a B.A. in History from Brown University and a joint-Ph.D. in History and Education from the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Gordon is an intellectual and cultural historian whose scholarship integrates the history of American social thought, the history of American education, and African American history. She is interested in the social science of race relations, in school desegregation, and in shifting conceptions of social justice and equality in the twentieth century United States. More broadly, her research examines the politics of knowledge production, the relationship between expert and popular social theory, and the American tendency to "educationalize" social problems.

Professor Gordon's current book project, entitled Not Love but Justice: Prejudice and “the Race Problem” in Mid-Century America, shows how individualistic social theories—which posited white attitudes, morality, and discrimination as the roots of racial oppression—gained traction in mid-century social thought. This study reveals how a particular framework for progress in race relations became dominant through an examination of networks: the social, institutional, and financial ties linking universities, philanthropic foundations, religious organizations, and civil rights activists. Debates about the causes and significance of prejudice at the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Chicago, Fisk and Howard Universities, and the National Conference of Christians and Jews provide the source material and organizational structure for this analysis.