WATCH: UChicago race center presentations on 'Black Penis’ and ‘transracial adoption’

The mission of the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture (CSRPC) is to be “a hub of research and an incubator of anti-racist practice.” Speaker presentations hosted by CSRPC have ranged in subject from the “Black Penis” to the alleged racism of “transracial adoption.”

[RELATED: UChicago announces ‘The Problem with Whiteness’ course]

The recent transracial adoption (TRA) presentation was given by UChicago Professor Gina Samuels. She prefaced her talk by saying, “People assume, because I take such a critical stance on adoption, that somehow I had a horrible experience. I actually didn’t have a horrible experience. My horrible experience was more around racism.”

Samuels proceeded to present a slide that read, “Being a family formed through TRA is not neutral … it is a personal experience, grounded in a racialized, racist, classist, and gendered global history.”

She went on to speak about how many people in her life talked about her adoption as being something that was lucky for her to have. Samuels called this assumption a “classist, racist, colonialist trope.”

Samuels argued there is a dominant idea among “white” and “upper-middle class” families who adopt of “white supremacy, rainbow families, color blindness. Where we’re just all people, and love will conquer all.” She insisted that considering oneself colorblind and that love will conquer all signals that one is racist.

Samuels, aside from being a professor of UChicago, is also the faculty director at CSRPC. 

A different presentation from Associate Professor Calvin Warren from last year focused on the “Black Penis.”

Warren’s talk centered around “rethink[ing] the Black penis without the phallus, gender, and ontological narcissism.” He argued that the Black penis represents nothingness. 

He elaborated on this point in the presentation, saying, “It is the phallus that determines the intensity of existence within the world … The Black penis is the very thing from such a great distance from the phallus, with an intensity of zero. Black existence is inexistent.”

Warren quoted the Marxist psychoanalyst and philosopher, Frantz Fanon, who said that when the Black penis is characterized in such a way that four of them would “fill an entire cathedral,” others are “no longer aware of the Negro but only of a penis … He is a penis.”

“To be turned into a Black penis is the work of anti-Black violence reducing the intensity of existence to zero, rendering anatomy abject, out of place, and without a place,” Warren said.

[RELATED: University asks students if they’ve ever ‘gagged on a penis’]

Warren then discussed two tragedies: a report where a Black woman was denied help from a homeowner in a hurricane because he thought the woman was breaking into his house, and another case in which a Black man who was mistakenly identified as a burglar was killed. Warren said, in both these tragedies, the people were “transformed, at the moment of a crisis, into a Black penis.”

All parties involved in this story have been contacted for comment by Campus Reform. This article will be updated accordingly.