Racist by Design with author Kelly Lytle Hernández
About this Event
Join award-winning historian Kelly Lytle Hernández in conversation on her latest book, Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control.
In Racist by Design, Lytle Hernández reveals how generations of lawmakers and law enforcers built the American immigration system to encourage white immigrants while targeting nonwhite migrants for exclusion, punishment, and removal. The goal, often explicitly stated by the system’s architects, was to create a permanent caste of undocumented and criminalized workers to provide cheap labor for the American economy.
Many Americans’ understanding of the immigration system begins with the Chinese Exclusion Act of the late nineteenth century. Lytle Hernández expands that history by a full century, showing how the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s inspired not only America’s first immigration bans (to prevent news of a free Black republic from reaching our shores) but also its first refugee resettlement program (to welcome and support Haiti’s evicted enslavers.) Lytle Hernández calls Racist by Design "an act of sabotage," a book that will expose the blueprints of the system, so it can be dismantled. A nuanced, concise, and brilliant work that will outrage and inflame readers, Racist by Design is a major work by one of our most important historians.
About the Speaker
Kelly Lytle Hernández is the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA. She is a MacArthur "genius grant" recipient and the author of Racist by Design, National Book Award finalist Bad Mexicans, and several other award-winning books about race, immigration, policing, and the carceral state. She lives in Los Angeles.
Members: $5
Non-Members: $15
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 7.18 to USD 17.85
