Dr. Nancy López, Co-founder and Director of the Institute for the Study of “Race” & Social Justice, housed in the RWJF Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico, traveled to D.C. as a guest speaker for the Smithsonian.

Her talk, “What’s your “Street Race-Gender”? draws attention to the ways in which we can self-identify on forms versus how we are treated on the street based on how we look/how others see us and ties the racial and ethnic data compiled from the census data to its uses in Civil Rights legislation.

Dr. López proposes the concept of  “street race-gender” , meaning your race or gender as viewed on the street, as a practical and innovative use-inspired measure that can be used to monitor and enforce Civil Rights legislation and advance equity-based policy research and practice that has to potential to capture the increasing racial and ethnic diversity of urban communities in the U.S. and beyond.

I invite all that are thinking about interpretations of race, ethnicity, racial performance, self-representation, identity, and group identification to watch her powerful presentation below.