Racing The Classics: Ethos and Praxis

In 2017, we founded the international conference series Racing the Classics to challenge foundational assumptions about knowledge production and race within the discipline. The inaugural event invited participants to unabashedly center race and ethnicity in their research in order to counter the dangerously universalizing pretensions of "Western Civilization" and other white supremacist ideologies suffusing the academy. Over time and subsequent iterations, we have pushed participants, ourselves included, to depart even further from the habits and normative scripts that circumscribe what gathering together to do this kind of work looks like now or could be in the future. We here reflect on the origin and progress of the conference series and offer practical suggestions for differentiating abstractly "inclusive and equitable" goals from targeted transformations of racializing practices.