New Scholarly Center on Racial Issues Opens at UCLA

The Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics at the University of California at Los Angeles had its official opening recently with a lecture on racial politics in Brazil by Professor Michael Hanchard of Northwestern University.

Mark Q. Sawyer, an associate professor of political science at UCLA, is the center’s first director. “The center will move the understanding of race in the United States — with its constantly changing ethnic makeup — beyond the black/white paradigm,” Sawyer says. “It will also push the study of race beyond the boundaries of the United States and into an international and comparative context.”

Sawyer is a graduate of the University of Illinois and holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago. He is the author of the new book Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba.

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