This award supports exploratory and pilot work for a multi-year and multi-disciplinary project entitled `How Race Matters:...` (HRM) The project seeks to facilitate a significant national re-thinking of racism's economic legacies and policy implications. It draws life from the belief that a substantive reassessment of racism's economic history is a necessary component of the ongoing effort to address the nation's unfinished racial business. The HRM initiative will document and clarify how race and ethnicity have mediated the workings of national economies, starting with the United States. Because it will critically engage the often ignored scholarship of African-American, Latino, and Asian-American economists, the HRM initiative will deepen the knowledge base available to scholars, policy makers and activists grappling with matters of race, policy, and political economy. The research team also will draw critically from multiple intellectual traditions within the social sciences. The investigator intends that the research and analysis produced will be made available and accessible to policy makers, social justice advocates, teachers, and academics. The project will foster the political consensus needed to establish social policies that will sustain humane communities in the transnational economy of the twenty-first century. This POWRE award is an exploratory effort designed to bring the project closer to full fruition. During the year of POWRE funding, the investigator will begin the compilation of a first draft of the bibliography for the 'race and public policy' subcommittee. She also will finalize the committee membership and the team of scholar consultants. If additional funds become available, she will begin organizing a first 'mini-retreat' for this subcommittee.
