Columbia College Today

Carmen Van Kerckhove ’99 is co-founder of New Demographic, which trains people to fight racism.

Photo: courtesy carmen van kerckhove '99

Carmen Van Kerckhove ’99 co-founded and runs New Demographic (www.newdemographic.com), an organization that promotes anti-racism. She gives anti-racism training workshops at colleges and companies, hosts a weekly podcast program and writes three blogs to discuss aspects of race and racism.

Van Kerckhove, a political science major at the College who has since held jobs in marketing and finance, initially got involved with race issues in 2002 when she helped her sister, Iris, develop a website, EurasianNation (www.eurasiannation.com). Then she met her future business partner, Jen Chau, in New York through Chau’s group Swirl, a community for mixed-race people and interracial couples and families. Van Kerckhove and Chau are mixed-race, white and Chinese; Van Kerckhove has a Belgian father and Chinese mother and grew up in Hong Kong and elsewhere.

In 2004, Van Kerckhove and Chau founded New Demographic, which until recently focused on mixed-race and interracial issues through workshops, the podcast and their blogs. Chau recently left, and Van Kerckhove, who is pursuing an M.B.A. part-time at Baruch and still holds a day job as an executive assistant at a hedge fund, repurposed the company as an anti-racism training firm.

“Carmen and Jen’s work is path-breaking,” says Joseph Graves, professor of biological sciences at North Carolina A&T State University and author of The Race Myth. “They are attempting to educate people concerning time-worn misconceptions around the social and biological meanings of race.”

New Demographic conducts an average of two workshops a month on college campuses for audiences of 30–100 and recently added corporate anti-racism training events. In the workshops, Van Kerckhove usually leads a discussion about racial stereotypes and how they affect our everyday lives. “We use lots of examples from pop culture and we show TV clips from the previous week, so it’s not an abstract, academic discussion,” she says. “Especially college students appreciate how relevant it is. It’s not just dry historical text.”

Columbia’s Hapa Club, a group for students of mixed Asian heritage, sponsored a New Demographic workshop in Lerner, “Cute but Confused: Myths and Realities of Mixed Race Identity.” Examples of other programs presented by New Demographic are “Never The Twain Shall Meet: Interracial Relationships on the Big Screen” and “Geishas and Math Nerds: Challenging Stereotypes about Asian-Americans and Understanding Their Origins.”

While New Demographic aims to break down stereotypes, Van Kerckhove says that attempting to erase racial identity — she gives the example of people saying, “We don’t notice color, it’s all good” — also is a mistake. “We each have a balance of advantages and disadvantages. We’re trying to make the point that it’s not a black and white issue,” she says. “We’re trying to move it to the realm of a little more complex, a little more nuanced.”

The blogs and podcasts are ways to expand the discussion. The blogs include Anti-Racist Parent (www.antiracistparent.com), which has columnists who are parents; Racialicious (www.racialicious.com), about the portrayals of race in popular culture and the media; and Race Changers (www.racechangers.com), which posts weekly “assignments” anyone can do to help them be anti-racist, such as reading an article on the topic or starting a conversation about racism with friends or family.

The weekly podcast show, “Addicted to Race” (www.addictedtorace.com), available on iTunes or Podcast Alley, features news, commentary and interviews with authors and other experts who work on issues relating to race. Science fiction writer Octavia Butler, one of the first and few female African-American authors in the genre, was a guest on “Addicted to Race” shortly before she passed away in February 2006. A show segment on race in the workplace prompted much feedback and input from the audience, which by counting the number of downloads of each episode ranges from 2,000–3,000 people per week. The podcast is required material for race and ethnic studies classes at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, and North Carolina A&T State University.

“The podcasts are timely, sometimes funny and always on point,” says Jacquelyn Lewis-Harris, director of the Center for Human Origin & Cultural Diversity at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, who uses the material in her graduate class, “Examining History, Community, and Social Justice in Education.” “Many times I have students who think that racism is dead and minorities have no reason to complain. Just playing a portion of a podcast in class starts an intense class discussion,” she notes.

The goal, Van Kerckhove says, is to “change the way we talk and think about race in this country.”

Shira Boss-Bicak ’93, ’97J, ’98 SIPA is the author of Green with Envy: A Whole New Way to Look at Financial (Un)Happiness, out May 22 in paperback. Learn more at www.shiraboss.com.

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Carmen Van Kerckhove ’99 Works To Stop Racism