Working together since 2003, a diverse group of UCSB faculty, based both in traditional social science and humanities departments and in various ethnic studies departments, has developed and organized the Center for New Racial Studies (CNRS). Graduate students, undergraduates, and university staff are also involved in the effort. Our New Racial Studies endeavor is at once an educational undertaking, a research initiative, and a movement project.

Demand is increasing for innovative approaches to the study of race. A breathtaking amount of creative research is being done, across a wide variety of disciplines. New work on the racialized body, North-South global dynamics as racial matters, the recrudescence of empire, incarceration and repression, race/class/gender intersectionality, whiteness as a racial category, ethnic cleansing as racial policy, racial "disaccumulation" and heightening inequality, mixed-race identities, and a score of other topics that could mentioned, suggests the ongoing vitality of racial studies. Yet a notable gap persists between these pathbreaking research initiatives and their theoretical synthesis. The New Racial Studies Project seeks both to draw attention to this burgeoning field of inquiry, and to contribute to that synthesis. Our ultimate goals involve networking widely; we hope ultimately to influence the research agenda, pedagogy, and public discourse about race and racism on a national level. And we are deeply committed to ongoing inquiry: we want to foster both "micro-level" approaches (that address racialized experience and identities) and "macro-level" work (for example, comparative/international approaches to the subject).

Teaching and learning also matters to us. Our students are race-conscious and many are anti-racist. But in the post-civil rights era, the era of globalization, they -- and the country at large -- are less certain about what race means and less clear about how to challenge racism. In the 1960s students, especially college students, played a crucial role in galvanizing the civil rights movement. Let us remember their work (and the crucial role of Ella Baker) in organizing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the sit-ins that began with students at Greensboro and moved forward from there, the movement efforts in Nashville, Albany, Lowndes County, and elsewhere (North as well as South), and the 1964 Freedom Summer in Misissippi, to name but a few crucial examples. Students were central in all of that.

Today, however, the anti-racist movement is uncertain of direction, beset by contradiction: consider the role played by the issue of "colorblindness" in student (and national) race-thinking; consider the limits of nationalism in the age of diaspora and globalization; consider the complex interactions of gender and race, the new dilemmas of whiteness, the racial implications of US intervention in Iraq and elsewhere. How would Dr. King have approached these problems? What would he have said to students today? (If King had lived he would have been 75 in 2004: think of the leadership he could have provided!)

In bringing New Racial Studies into being, our primary commitment is to develop and support new research and teaching initiatives in respect to race and racism. We also expect to generate new training opportunities for graduate students and new ways of reaching out to undergraduates. Our goals are strategic: to model what a research/teaching center in the general area of racial studies can be; to foster the production of new knowledge and new approaches to contemporary dilemmas of race and racism, to establish pathways for promising students, both graduate and undergraduate, to pursue intellectual paths, and movement-oriented paths in racial studies; and to promote racially diverse faculty hiring.

Briefly put, in the post-civil rights, post-apartheid, and postcolonial era the vast issues of race and racism sometimes seems to have been incorporated, controlled, tamed. Race has acquired a quotidian and "normalized" status. In part because of this, and in part because previous racial conditions of inequality, exclusion, etc. still obtain, new racial conflicts are emerging both nationally and globally. The racial "problem of the 21st century" is also shaping numerous local polities, cultures, and identities. A notable lag has emerged between the experiences of the post-WWII period, when long-established patterns of white supremacism and eurocentrism both came under attack and underwent reform; and the current sociopolitical configurations of race. The latter are characterized by more (if hardly adequate) mobility, both geographic and socioeconomic; by more inclusive models of citizenship and political recognition; and by more acknowledgement of global racial networks (diaspora, media-driven globalism,etc.).

Under these conditions racially-based movements of the civil rights and nationalist type have lost some of their previous momentum. The past accomplishments of these enormous mobilizations were hardly negligible, but they were also insufficient to the enormous objectives they had themselves nurtured. Achievement of national independence and decolonization, for example, did not generally lead to democracy and development. The dismantling of segregation and apartheid did not achieve substantive racial equality. Indeed in many respects the racial reforms accomplished by these movements have ironically consolidated the basic patterns of inequality that they sought to overcome.

These comments -- all too brief and inadequate -- are offered only as a set of signposts on the long journey we are on: we are traveling toward greater racial justice, toward more freedom and equality. The Center for New Racial Studies is an effort to contribute resources, principally intellectual ones, to those who are on that journey.

New Racial Studies begins not only with a recognition of the dilemmas posed by the current (aka "post-civil rights") racial situation that exists in the US, but also with a firm conviction that researching and teaching these problems -- confronting these contradictions openly -- is the best way of equipping students, other universities and colleges, and the nation as a whole, with new understandings of race and racism.

A considerable amount of work has already been done: significant interest has been manifested at UCSB. The outlines of a replicable model are definitely emerging. At the same time networking is already in progress with numerous other universities and organizations: we have received expressions of support from other UC campuses, from innovative ethnic studies programs around the country, and from several critical race studies programs in the social sciences, the humanities, and the law. This effort is also networking with such projects as the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, and the Affirmative Action Research and Policy Consortium.

Thank you for your interest.