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The Racial Justice and Criminal Justice in Oneida & Herkimer Counties Series continued on Oct. 7 with its third installment titled “Why is Diversity Not Enough?: Training and Best Practices for Policing Reform.”

Utica College Professor Anthony Baird, Hamilton Professor Todd Franklin, and SUNY Polytechnic Institute Professors Mark Montgomery and Ronni Tichenor spoke in a webinar addressing “What is Systemic, or Institutional Racism?” on Sept. 30. This event was part of an ongoing series focused on Racial Justice and Criminal Justice Reform in Oneida and Herkimer Counties.

Utica City Councilman Delvin Moody and Utica College Professors Clemmie Harris and Bernard Hyman spoke in a Zoom webinar titled “Black Lives Matter: The Movement and Its Importance to All of Us” on Sept. 23. The webinar, which was also broadcasted on WUTR, was moderated by Hamilton Professor Frank Anechiarico and sponsored in part by the Levitt Center Law and Justice Lab.

Traci Burch, associate professor of political science at Northwestern University, gave Hamilton’s annual Constitution Day Lecture with a talk titled “Public and Media Attention to Officer-Involved Killings.” The lecture detailed the constitutional right to protest, and examined the effectivity of protests in holding police accountable for officer-involved killings, drawing on the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement.

“The motto immortalized on the Hamilton seal is ‘Know Thyself,’” said Todd Franklin, professor of philosophy, at a virtual panel discussion on June 17 about the history and implications of systemic racism. “Part of knowing thyself, however, is knowing how you are situated. Now is the time to really make a concerted effort to know yourself in relation to race and the context of our nation’s racial situation.”

The Hamilton College Summer Program in Philosophy (HCSPiP) recently welcomed George Yancy to campus for a public lecture and discussion on “A Letter of Love: And the Return of White Backlash.” Yancy, a professor of philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery Fellow in Residence at Dartmouth College, is one of the most influential thinkers today on critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, and the philosophy of race.

A recent TIME magazine article reflecting on the Martin Luther King Jr.’s last campaigns included the observations of James S. Sherman Professor of Government Philip Klinkner.

Few would argue with the assertion that racism unfortunately persists in America. However, some do contest the prevalence of racism in the criminal justice system. Syracuse University Law School Professor Paula Johnson shed some light on the issue in a lecture on Nov. 10. She explained that we see and experience racism not only when police officers use excessive and unjustified force against black individuals, but we see it also in the lack of accountability for these assaults and killings. Johnson traces this pattern of ignoring racist killings to the death of Emmett Till in 1955, whose killers were acquitted of all charges.

In modern day America, it’s sometimes said that racism no longer exists. Three decades after the Civil Rights Movement, our country elected its first black president, seemingly validating this view. However, John Dovidio, the Carl Iver Hovland Professor of Psychology and the Dean of Academic Affairs of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences at Yale University, disagrees.

John Dovidio, the Carl Iver Hovland Professor of Psychology at Yale University, will present a lecture titled “The Subtlety of Contemporary Racism:  Implications for Intergroup Perceptions, Interaction, and Policy” on Tuesday, Sept. 9, at 4:15 p.m., in the Bradford Auditorium, KJ. The lecture is free and open to the public.