Wednesday, April 18, 2018

12:00-1:00pm

USC Doheny Memorial Library, DML 240

Lunch provided; RSVP req.: usc.edu/esvp, code: LAPD

V.N. Trinh investigates the interplay between racialized notions of citizenship and a rapidly transforming police force in Southern California. In doing so, he critically narrates the stories of black policemen and policewomen who saw in the LAPD a special opportunity to both defend their communities from crime and bear the uniform's respect. Building upon other scholarship on race and policing and using materials from USC Libraries, Trinh's project interrogates contemporary assumptions about racial liberalism, diversity, and affirmative action.

Trinh is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at Yale University. His dissertation-in-progress, "Burning All Illusions: Race and Rebellion in the City of Angels, 1950-1992," uncovers black and Korean Angelenos' entangled relationships with the police, with respectability politics, and with each other. 

This talk is sponsored by the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW), the USC Libraries Collections Convergence Initiative (CCI) and the USC Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study.