From Minority to Majority, Invisible to Envisioning: Margin Notes on Diversity Challenges and Other Evils

Helen Zia, Journalist, Social Activist "One of the Most Influential Asian Americans of the Decade," named by A. Magazine

Helen Zia is an award-winning journalist and scholar who has covered Asian American communities and social and political movements for decades. She is the author of Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, a finalist for the prestigious Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. President Bill Clinton quoted from Asian American Dreams at two separate speeches in the Rose Garden. She is also co-author, with Wen Ho Lee, of My Country Versus Me, which reveals what happened to the Los Alamos scientist who was falsely accused of being a spy for China in the "worst case since the Rosenbergs." Zia is former Executive Editor of Ms. Magazine. Her articles, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, books and anthologies. Helen Zia has received numerous journalism awards for her ground-breaking stories; her investigation of date rape at the University of Michigan led to campus demonstrations and an overhaul of its policies, while her research on women who join neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations provoked new thinking on the relationship between race and gender violence in hate crimes. A second generation Chinese American, Zia has been outspoken on issues ranging from civil rights and peace to women's rights and countering hate violence and homophobia. In 1997, she testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on the racial impact of the news media. She traveled to Beijing in 1995 to the UN Fourth World Congress on Women as part of a journalists of color delegation. She has appeared in numerous news programs and films; her work on the 1980s Asian American landmark civil rights case of anti-Asian violence is documented in the Academy Award nominated film, "Who Killed Vincent Chin?" and she was profiled in Bill Moyers' PBS documentary, "Becoming American: The Chinese Experience." Zia received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the Law School of the City University of New York for bringing important matters of law and civil rights into public view. She is a graduate of Princeton University's first graduating class of women. Informal Dialogue with Helen Zia—2:00-3:00 p.m.

Giving the Newcomers a Chance: Educating Latinos in an Era of Immigration

Roberto Suro, Director of the Pew Hispanic Center, Washington, D.C.

Roberto Suro is director of the Pew Hispanic Center, a Washington-based research and policy analysis organization. The Center is a project of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication where Suro is on the faculty as a research professor. The Center was founded in July, 2001 with support from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Through public opinion surveys and a variety of research projects, the Center serves as a source of non-partisan information on the rapid growth of the Latino population and its implications for the nation as a whole.

            A former journalist, Suro has nearly 30 years of experience writing on Hispanic issues and immigration. He is author of Strangers Among Us: Latino Lives in a Changing America, (Vintage) as well as numerous reports, articles and other publications regarding the growth of the Latino population. During his career in journalism Suro worked for TIME Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications. He worked extensively in Washington, did tours as a domestic correspondent in Chicago and Houston and was posted as a foreign correspondent in Latin America, Europe and the Middle East.  He is a graduate of Yale University (BA, 1973) and Columbia University (MS, 1974).

Envisioning a Future Across Cultural Lines

Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne & Hodulgee Muscogee), President and Executive Director of The Morning Star Institute, Washington, D.C.

Suzan Shown Harjo is a poet, writer, lecturer, curator and policy advocate, who has helped Native Peoples recover more than one million acres of land and numerous sacred places. She has developed key federal Indian law since 1975, including the most important national policy advances in the modern era for the protection of Native American cultures and arts: 1996 Executive Order on Indian Sacred Sites; 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act; 1989 National Museum of the American Indian Act; and 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act. Ms. Harjo is the president of Morning Star Institute, a national Native rights organization founded in 1984 for Native Peoples' traditional and cultural advocacy, arts promotion and research. A leader in cultural property protection and stereotype busting, Morning Star sponsors the Just Good Sports project, organizes the National Day of Prayer to Protect Native American Sacred Places and coordinated The 1992 Alliance (1990-1993). Suzan Shown Harjo is one of seven prominent Native Americans who filed the Morning Star-sponsored lawsuit, Harjo et al v. Pro Football, Inc., regarding the name of Washington's professional football team, before the U.S. Patent & Trademark Board in 1992. They won in 1999, but their victory was reversed in federal district court in 2003, and is pending before the federal appeals court, which heard oral argument on April 8, 2005. Ms. Harjo's essay on the case, Fighting Name-Calling: Challenging "Redskins" in Court, is published in Team Spirits: The Native American Mascots Controversy (University of Nebraska Press, 2001). She also authored Just Good Sports: The Impact of Native References in Sports on Native Youth and What Some Decolonizers Have Done About It, a chapter in For Indigenous Eyes Only: Decolonization Workbook (SAR Press, 2005). As Columnist for Indian Country Today, she was recipient of the Native American Journalists Association's 2004 First Place Award for Best Column Writing. Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians (1984-1989), she also was Special Assistant for Indian Legislation & Liaison in the Carter Administration and Principal Author of the 1979 President's Report to Congress on American Indian Religious Freedom. The School of American Research's 2004 Dobkin Artist Fellow, Ms. Harjo received unprecedented back-to-back fellowships and was a SAR 2004 Summer Scholar. A 1996 Stanford University Visiting Mentor and a 1992 Dartmouth College Montgomery Fellow, she was the first Native American person selected for the honor by Stanford's Haas Center for Public Policy and the first Native woman chosen for the prestigious Montgomery Fellowship Award. Informal dialogue with Suzan Shown Harjo–2:30-3:30 p.m.

Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?

Michael Eric Dyson, Ph.D., The Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies, The University of Pennsylvania, University Park, Pennsylvania

Dr. Michael Eric Dyson—who was named by Essence magazine as one of the 40 most inspiring African‑Americans, and by Ebony magazine as one of the 100 most influential black Americans—is one of the nation’s most renowned public intellectuals. The Philadelphia Weekly contends that Dyson “is reshaping what it means to be a public intellectual by becoming the most visible black academic of his time.“ In his 13 books written, Dyson has taken on some of the toughest and most controversial issues of our day, including Martin Luther King, Jr.’s radical legacy, in I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.; the virtues and crises of hip‑hop culture in Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur; racial conflict and black identity in Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line; and most recently the political and racial fallout from Hurricane Katrina in Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster. Dyson is the recipient of two prestigious NAACP Image Awards for his book, Why I Love Black Women (2004), and for his New York Times bestselling book, Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? (2006), which dissects class warfare in black America. Dyson’s New York Times bestselling Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves and Demons of Marvin Gaye, was optioned for a major motion picture. Dyson not only has taught at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities such as Brown, Chapel Hill, and Columbia, but his influence has carried far beyond the academy into prisons and bookstores, political conventions and union halls, and church sanctuaries and lecture stages across the world. Dr. Dyson has also taken the media by storm through appearances on “The Today Show,“ “Nightline,“ “O’Reilly Factor,“ “The Tavis Smiley Show,“ “Real Time with Bill Maher“ with his star appeal on such shows as “Rap City,“ “Def Poetry Jam,“ and “The Colbert Report.“ Dyson is also the host of the syndicated radio show, “The Michael Eric Dyson Show,“ which addresses social, cultural and political issues in a contemporary vein. Dyson’s powerful scholarship has won him legions of admirers and has made him what the Washington Post terms a “superstar professor.“ His fearless and fiery oratory led the Chronicle of Higher Education to declare that with his rhetorical gifts he “can rock classroom and chapel alike.“ Dyson’s eloquent writing inspired Vanity Fair magazine to describe him as “one of the most graceful and lucid intellectuals writing on race and politics today.“ Dr. Dyson is presently the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania. His legendary rise —from welfare father to Princeton Ph.D., from church pastor to college professor, from a factory worker who didn’t start college until he was 21 to a figure who has become what writer Naomi Wolf terms “the ideal public intellectual of our time “—may help explain why author Nathan McCall simply calls Dyson “a street fighter in suit and tie.“ 

Informal dialogue with Michael Eric Dyson and Book Signing—5:00-6:00 p.m.

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