Nancy López, Ph.D., professor of Sociology at the University of New Mexico, visited Metropolitan State University of Denver this week as the 2023 Richard T. and Virginia M. Castro Distinguished Visiting Professor. López led a powerful and engaging discussion and set the tone for her keynote address by highlighting her three cultural truths:
- Don’t let anyone rob you of your rights or your joy.
- Don’t wait for the money to take action.
- Ask who’s afraid of keeping the data.
López is the director and a co-founder of the Institute for the Study of “Race” and Social Justice and founding coordinator of the New Mexico Statewide Race, Gender, Class Data Policy Consortium. Her 2003 book “Hopeful Girls, Troubled Boys: Race and Gender Disparity in Urban Education” details her research, which has shown that graduation odds varied widely when accounting for race, socioeconomic status and gender disaggregated from standalone data points.
“We have to talk about place, space and history. … That includes race, class and gender — we have to look at it all together,” she said.
López noted that this perspective often contrasts with the unidimensional approach of other statistical analyses, which often inaccurately conflate data points, such as treating household income as a proxy for racial gaps. She urged attendees to look at data on multiple levels, adding that researchers have “an ethical commitment to addressing intersectional equity gaps and making the invisible visible.”
“There’s a visceral opposition to looking at the simultaneity of all elements together,” she said. “What are you afraid you’ll learn?”
In discussing “street race” — a person’s perceived racial status — López noted how the U.S. census confuses race with ethnicity and country of origin, effectively nullifying intersectionality, as detailed in her 2018 article in The Conversation. As a counterexample of “street race,” she cited localized survey results that showed that one in five participants responded as simply “brown.”
“Why has there been such a push to test questions that don’t use the word ‘race’?” López asked. “What does that mean when assuming Latinidad can only look one way?”
López also asked attendees to consider one or two personal action items for advancing justice and to think about their domains of influence, specifically their abilities to cultivate flexible solidarity, navigate resistance to change and advance intersectionality as inquiry and praxis.
“It’s not just curriculum; it’s pedagogy,” López said. “It’s ‘both and.’ … The difference is centering cultural wealth and creating community, love and compassion.”