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(Under) Counting Blackness Across The Globe: The Civil Rights Crisis of Census Racial Erasure

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Location: 300 O'Shaughnessy Hall, Sojourner Truth Commons

Join us for the Sojourner Truth Lecture 2026, featuring guest speaker Tanya Katerí Hernández, Associate Director and Head of Global and Comparative Law Programs and Initiatives at Fordham University School of Law's Center on Race, Law, and Justice.

Includes a book signing and light refreshments.
 

Professor Hernández will present on "(Under) Counting Blackness Across the Globe: The Civil Rights Crisis of Census Racial Erasure."

A nation’s census count of its population every ten years is viewed by many residents as an intrusive and mundane domestic administrative task with little relevance to the quality of their lives. Yet census taking is critical to power sharing in the pursuit of an effective multiracial democracy and the fair allocation of resources.
 
In the 234 years since its inception in the U.S., the accuracy of census taking has steadily improved, while the undercount of Black residents has remained a problem. Commentators suggest that the struggle to fully count people of African ancestry is simply a logistical matter. Black people are presumed to be inherently hard to count because of their distrust of U.S. government officials. However, the failure to fully count Blackness extends beyond U.S. boundaries and the specificity of its racial history.
 
Examining the problem of the Black census undercount from a transnational comparative perspective reveals what is rarely named in the analysis of census taking–- governmental anti-Blackness. The lack of governmental will in Latin America, Europe, and elsewhere to address the longstanding differential undercount problem has resulted in a civil rights crisis for Black people across the African Diaspora. (Under) Counting Blackness Across The Globe, will be the first book to assess the Black differential undercount as a global phenomenon, and to recommend that the best response to the problem is an international human rights approach. With an international right to be counted, Afro-descendants will be empowered to collectively call out the anti-Blackness of census undercounts on the international stage. Uniting Black people across the African Diaspora in their common struggle to be counted is the best path for addressing the hidden civil rights crisis of statistical erasure.
 

Tanya Katerí Hernández is the Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law, where she teaches Anti-Discrimination Law, Comparative Employment Discrimination, Critical Race Theory, Writing/Righting Race in the Public Sphere, The Science of Implicit Bias and the Law: New Pathways to Social Justice, and Trusts & Wills. She received her A.B. from Brown University, and her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she served as Note Topics Editor of the Yale Law Journal.

Professor Hernández is an internationally recognized comparative race law expert and Fulbright Scholar who has visited at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, in Paris and the University of the West Indies Law School, in Trinidad. She has previously served as a Law and Public Policy Affairs Fellow at Princeton University, a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University; a Faculty Fellow at the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, and as a Scholar in Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Professor Hernández is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, the American Law Institute, and the Academia Puertorriqueña de Jurisprudencia y Legislación. Hispanic Business Magazine selected her as one of its annual 100 Most Influential Hispanics and NYC Comptroller Brad Lander awarded her a Commendation for "extraordinary contributions to anti-racism." Professor Hernández serves on the editorial boards of the Revista Brasileira de Direito e Justiça/Brazilian Journal of Law and Justice, and the Latino Studies Journal published by Palgrave-Macmillian Press.

Professor Hernández’s scholarly interest is in the study of comparative race relations and anti-discrimination law, and her work in that area has been published in numerous university law reviews like Cornell, Harvard, N.Y.U., U.C. Berkeley, Yale and in news outlets like the New York Times, among other publications including her books Racial Subordination in Latin America: The Role of the State, Customary Law and the New Civil Rights Response (including Spanish and Portuguese translation editions), Brill Research Perspectives in Comparative Law: Racial Discrimination, and Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination. Her most recent book from Beacon Press is Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and The Struggle for Equality and its Spanish Translation edition Inocencia Racial: Desenmascarando la antinegritud de los latinos y la lucha por la igualdad. Currently under contract with Beacon Press, is her next book (Under) Counting Blackness Across the Globe: The Civil Rights Crisis of Census Racial Erasure.

Co-sponsored by American Studies, History, Institute for Latino Studies, and Africana Studies.

Originally published at raceandresilience.nd.edu.