Tonight, the Elon University Center for Law and Humanities is very fortunate to present our inaugural guest lecture, by Prof. Frank Wu, author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, and former Dean at Wayne State University School of Law.

This morning, Elon Law faculty and students had the chance to meet and chat with him at an informal gathering. He offered a brief overview of his talk, which concerns his research on race and the law. He spoke about his own experience as the first Asian-American to hold a full-time faculty position at Howard University School of Law, explaining that he would routinely be subject to questions from well-meaning folks intrigued by the notion of an Asian-American teaching at an historically Black school. In contrast, Wu noted, his wife Carol Izumi, a professor at the George Washington University School of Law, was never asked how it felt to teach at an “historically white” school. The lesson is that, in common discourse, race in the U.S. is a “black and white” issue, with “white” being treated as the norm.

Wu’s work seeks to interrogate and challenge the “black/white” binary conception of race and to highlight subtle, covert forms of racism and racial prejudice that persist despite the perceived (if not entirely real) decline of overt racism. His talk, coming one week before an election in which the U.S. may elect a person of color to the nation’s highest office, is particularly timely.