Personally Speaking Series: Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, The Law, and The Making of a White Argentine Republic

UNC Charlotte College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is presenting several free events for the public. Each of these is a virtual event.

Follow each link, below, for more information, and for a registration link. The descriptions below are from UNC Charlotte College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ website.

Loy H. Witherspoon Lecture Series: “Spiritual Madness: American Psychiatry, Race and Black Religions” featuring Judith Weisenfeld, Ph.D.
Thursday, February 3rd, 2022
7 to 9 p.m.

Judith Weisenfeld, the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion at Princeton University, will deliver her lecture, “Spiritual Madness: American Psychiatry, Race and Black Religions,” for this year’s Loy. H. Witherspoon Lecture series. The event is presented by the Department of Religious Studies on Thursday, Feb. 3, at 7 p.m. It will be virtual and free to the public.

Shortly after Emancipation, the emerging discipline of psychiatry gained momentum at the same cultural moment that African Americans strived to assimilate into free society. Dr. Weisenfeld argues that the diagnosis of insanity was thus routinely used to deprive African Americans of their freedom. These authoritative judgments were based on assumptions made about African American spiritual practices at the time, which included incantations, making potions, or displaying talismans for protection and healing.

Weisenfeld contrasts traditionally accepted religious practices with those deemed to be morally impoverished or indicative of mental imbalance and the effects that had on society. She continues the discourse by examining how these disparities persist today, but in the context of 21st century issues such as COVID-19 and American medicine in general.

Personally Speaking Series
Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, The Law, and The Making of a White Argentine Republic
Tuesday, February 8th, 2022
7 p.m.

Black erasure can be seen all around us and remains a bedrock of systematic racism. The refusal to see Black lives that matter propels our need to understand the making of race and its legacy. UNC Charlotte Department of History faculty member Erika Denise Edwards contends that black women—concubines, wives, mothers, and daughters—are instrumental in understanding the construction of race in Argentina. She argues that these women strategically escaped the stigma of their blackness by recategorizing their racial identities as “white.” She delves into the intimate lives of black women, tracing the origins of the popular mischaracterization of a “black disappearance” and demonstrating how these women shaped their own destinies.

Join us on Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2022 at the next Personally Speaking series event, “Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic,” which is free, virtual and open to the public. It will especially appeal to community members with an interest in Black history, Latin America, women’s and gender studies, race, and anti-Blackness.

 

Upcoming Events in the Charlotte area

Check out our full events calendar, where you can enter any date, or look at the events for the next few days here: