What We Know about Race—For Sure is the topic of this year’s Penn Faculty Teach-In. It will be held on Wednesday, April 10, 6-8 p.m. at the Free Library–Central Parkway Branch, 1901 Vine St. in the Skyline Room on the 4th floor. It is free and open to all.

The Teach-In is supported by the Free Library of Philadelphia and the Penn Faculty Senate. See www.upenn.edu/teachin For more info, write senate@pobox.upenn.edu

This is an encore of 2018’s very popular Teach-In event, the event will be a repeat of the very compelling 90-minute panel discussion that included professors John Jackson, Jr., Dorothy Roberts and Sarah Tishkoff speaking about race and the creation and dissemination of knowledge. It will again be moderated by WHYY’s Tracey Matisak.

How should the University engage with the community and the nation in the 21st century? Penn’s 2019 “mini Teach-In” will be taken from the campus into the community. It will again feature a spirited and open discussion with three distinguished panelists who bring unique perspectives on these issues.

• John Jackson, Jr. has drawn from the power of storytelling through image and sound to generate new perspectives across traditional categories: technology and religious studies, culture and economics, anthropology and new media, and Africana studies and linguistics.
• Dorothy Roberts’s head-turning critique of race-based genomic science—an argument that racial identity is a social and political invention, not a biological fact coded in DNA—has helped change the national conversation and led to powerful insights at the intersection of law, social justice, science and health.
• Sarah Tishkoff has created the world's largest database of African diversity derived from genetic samples of more than 9,000 people from 200 distinct ethnic groups and brought it to bear in novel integrations of research in linguistics and anthropology.

Together the panelists will bring into sharp focus, using anecdotes viewed through the prisms of their own wide-ranging investigations, the rigors of knowledge creation in this fluid century, the particular challenges of communicating it in an era of social media and fake news, and the dramatic and exaggerated impacts it can have in a time of instantaneous communication. The conversation will once again be moderated by WHYY's award winning journalist, Tracey Matisak, who brings to bear wide-ranging experience as anchor, reporter, and broadcaster through two decades of work in major market radio and television including Fox Philadelphia, PBS, NPR, and WHYY and KYW Newsradio.