Join us for a discussion that takes up questions of race in current U.S. political and public discourses. How does race continue to animate and inform American public perceptions of the United States and its place in the world? This discussion will ask us to consider the ways in which race continues to operate as a potent signifier of difference, but also as a means to justify inclusion and exclusion from the U.S. body politic. Who is American? Who deserves to be American? How has “race” framed these questions historically and in the present? How do we understand that the pejorative “playing the race card” seeks to obscure the very meaningful ways that racism continues to function in the United States.