Resisting Cultural Erasure in America
A conversation with Jennifer Fang and Barrett Holmes Pitner
Ethnocide, a word first coined in 1944 by Jewish exile Raphael Lemkin (who also coined the term "genocide"), describes the systemic erasure of a people’s ancestral culture. Just as the concept of genocide radically reshaped our perception of human rights in the twentieth century, reframing discussions about race and culture in terms of ethnocide can change the way we understand our diverse and rapidly evolving racial and political climate today. Join us for a conversation with author Barrett Holmes Pitner and historian Jennifer Fang on ethnocide in America, and its particular impacts on Black and Chinese Americans, who have endured that erasure for generations. Pitner and Fang will discuss the personal lived consequences of existing within an ongoing erasure—and how to combat it.
Learn more: We encourage you to read Pitner’s book, The Crime Without A Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America and Fang’s article, Erasure and Reclamation: Centering Diasporic Chinese Populations in Oregon History, which appeared in the Winter 2021 special issue of the Oregon Historical Quarterly. A copy of the quarterly can also be purchased at the OHS museum store.
Upcoming Events: If you’re interested in learning more about Oregon’s early Chinese American history, join Oregon Historical Society’s event on June 1 with Jennifer Fang and Myron Louie Lee.
Jennifer Fang is the Director of Interpretation and Community Engagement at Pittock Mansion and an adjunct professor of history at the University of Portland. She earned a Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Delaware with a specialization in race and immigration during the Cold War. She was a founding staff member of the Portland Chinatown Museum and served as the Director of Education at the Japanese American Museum of Oregon. Along with Chelsea Rose, she guest co-edited of the Winter 2021 special issue of the Oregon Historical Quarterly about Oregon’s early Chinese diaspora.
Barrett Holmes Pitner is the Founder and Philosopher-in-Chief of The Sustainable Culture Lab. He is a contributing writer for The Daily Beast and the BBC, and a lecturer at the School of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University. His book The Crime Without A Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America, released in October 2021, was named by NPR as one of its top books of the year. He has a master’s degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and a bachelor’s degree in political science from Furman University.
This event is part of Rising Up for Human Dignity: Resisting Cultural Erasure, presented in partnership by:
