As debates swirl around colleges and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora cut through the noise, giving students the tools to see how race and power continue to shape the world today. Through research, schoolwide initiatives and teaching, the department equips students to untangle complex histories and social realities. Sarah Fong, assistant professor of studies in race, colonialism and diaspora embodies this mission, giving students both the tools to think critically and the language to speak with clarity.
Fong first encountered ethnic studies as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. Already interested in sociology, she found that this new field offered an inside look at the social structures that she cared about.
“It gave me a language to talk about things that I had already observed in the world and didn’t have a way to talk about,” Fong said.
Even after graduation, during short stints in other fields, those ideas stayed with her. She eventually returned to graduate school at the University of Southern California, where she earned both her M.A. and Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity.
Recently, Fong hosted a lecture as part of the Center for the Humanities at Tufts’ new University Ecologies and the Question of the Commons speaker series where she explored how agricultural education shaped Black and Indigenous land use and community life. The theme echoed her own research on placemaking and how race, colonialism and diaspora determine who gets to claim land and who is pushed out.
“Most people in the United States grew up in an area that was segregated in some ways, whether it’s by race or class, [and they] live on land that was taken from Indigenous people,” she said. “So if you don’t think about those things, you’re never going to fully understand the depth of the dynamics of the conflict.”
Her research has examined how white settler imaginaries have historically depicted Black and Indigenous peoples as ‘placeless,’ showing how racial and colonial discourse on land and belonging are deeply intertwined. She also has incorporated reflections from her time researching the Shuumi Land Tax in the San Francisco Bay Area and volunteering with the Indigenous women-led Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. For Fong, her research and the lived experiences of indigenous peoples are inseparable.
“The questions that I study in my research come from the communities I was a part of growing up. They’re not abstract intellectual exercises,” she said. “These are questions I know have material impacts on the lives of people every day.”
Fong also discussed, however, how the field has evolved over time.
When she was an undergraduate in the early 2000s, the dominant buzzword in her studies was ‘color blindness,’ a belief that racism was a thing of the past. However, ethnic studies, she realized, revealed the flaws in that thinking: Race-neutral policies hid the fact that racial structures still dictated where people lived, studied and worked.
For Fong, the value of RCD lies in its ability to track how conversations about race and power shift over time. Two decades later, the mood has shifted dramatically.
“Now we talk about race in a way that, in a lot of circumstances … has returned to talking openly about wanting to uphold or reinstate racial hierarchy,” she said.
Fong sees our current moment as part of a familiar cycle: progress followed by backlash, stretching from the Reconstruction era through the present.
Some explain this as backlash to milestones like Barack Obama’s presidency or the Black Lives Matter movement. But as a historian, Fong sees it in a longer arc.
“I think of this period historically, and to me, it seems like a real echo of the period after the Civil War,” she said. “Moments where the United States has moved toward greater equity have often provoked fierce backlash — whether after the Civil War, or in our own time, where many people feel that racial or gender equality has gone too far.”
When asked whether the cycle will ever end, she admitted she does not know. But she insists the work matters.
Fong explained how RCD demonstrates that today’s inequalities — capitalism, racial hierarchy and the occupation of Indigenous land — are not natural. They were built by people, and they can be dismantled by people.
“These systems that we live with now and think are natural were created by people over the course of hundreds of years,” Fong said.
Fong works towards examining and dismantling these inequalities through her teaching. In her Keywords in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora Studies project, students over the course of a semester investigate how concepts such as citizenship or diaspora take shape in many spaces, from classrooms and archives to protests and art.
“It’s important to me, because students get to practice the traditional skills of academic research, finding things at the library, reading peer reviewed scholarship, making an argument of their own. … But also recognizing that there’s other forms of knowledge besides the academic article or the academic book, and so looking to poets and artists and activists to [consider] how do these other kinds of thinkers and creators engage with these terms,” Fong said.
At the end of semester, students’ work is published online and becomes accessible to anyone in the community.
Fong emphasized how RCD equips students across a variety of disciplines with the tools to recognize the power dynamics that shape their disciplines and the possibility for imagining something different.
“You don’t have to be an RCD major,” she said. “Even one class can change how you see your field. If you’re pre-med, RCD can help you understand the power dynamics that shape medicine. If you’re in STEM, it can help you understand the colonial legacy of western science.”
She also explained how she knows the work can feel overwhelming. Once students start to recognize how deeply race and colonialism shape everyday life, it can be difficult to unsee. That’s why she pushes them to look beyond structures of power and to notice resilience, creativity and community.
“[I am] really trying to emphasize to students to pay attention to the way that people and communities have refused to be diminished and continue to try to live in art and music, raise families and build communities,” Fong said. “Those things matter just as much as having to analyze how the structures are powerful.”
For Fong, this is the heart of RCD, teaching students that history is not only a story of domination, but also of survival and possibility and that real change begins when we learn to see both.
