The University of California, Irvine is hosting a “White Privilege” musical performance and lecture.
The event will run from Friday to Saturday, and will feature a “performative lecture by Thomas DeFrantz with live sound design and electronic music by Quran Karriem.” The musical performance, titled “White Privilege,” “engages white privilege as a discourse, casting the performative space as an opportunity to enlarge care and do better.”
The “performative lecture,” which takes place Saturday, will be preceded on Friday by a panel discussion about the “creative heritage of the work and its importance to the ongoing conversation about equity within institutions.”
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The University’s Claire Trevor School of the Arts Dean Tiffany López is set to moderate the panel.
DeFrantz and Karriem also staged their “White Privilege” performance in Northwestern University in 2022, during which they used “Synthball” made by Karriem.
DeFrantz is a professor at Northwestern University, where his faculty page describes him as committed to “our shared capacity to do better and engage creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, proto-feminist, and queer affirming.” He works at Northwestern University’s Performance Studies Theatre, where his “areas of expertise” are “Black studies, Dance, Musical Theatre, [and] Queer theory.”
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Duke University has also previously hosted DeFrantz in 2018, when he delivered the same “lecture performance” on “White Privilege.” The university described it as a “dialogic manifesto-lecture-performance” that “offers strategies for constructing a shared, useful understanding of white privilege and its implacable effects in the world.”
Campus Reform has contacted the University of California, Irvine, Thomas DeFrantz, and Quran Karriem for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
