Free and open to the University of Michigan community. Please RSVP. Lunch will be served starting at 11:45am.

Please join us for a lunchtime conversation about "White Fragility" with Professor Alford A. Young. This lunchtime conversation is designed to prepare attendees for Robin DiAngelo's March 13th visit to the University of Michigan. From a public policy lens, Professor Young will evaluate the impact that public policies—both current and historical—have on racial and/or ethnic inequalities and discuss how it relates to other dimensions of social life.

Alford A. Young, Jr. is the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the Departments of Sociology and Afroamerican and African Studies, with a courtesy appointment at the Ford School of Public Policy. He serves as associate director of U-M's Center for Social Solutions and faculty director for scholar engagement and leadership at Michigan's National Center for Institutional Diversity (NCID). He has pursued research on low-income, urban-based African Americans, employees at an automobile manufacturing plant, African American scholars and intellectuals, and the classroom-based experiences of higher-education faculty as they pertain to diversity and multiculturalism. He employs ethnographic interviewing as his primary data collection method. His objective in research on low-income African American men, his primary area of research, has been to argue for a renewed cultural sociology of the African American urban poor. Young received an MA and PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago.