For Immediate Release Contact: Barbara K. Laskin
April 13, 2004 Doug Stone
(651) 696-6203

Annual Mitau Lecture on "Black-White Relations in Europe and the Americas" at Macalester, Thursday, April 15, 2004

St. Paul, Minn. - Orlando Patterson, the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, is appearing at Macalester College for the 23rd Annual G. Theodore Mitau Endowed Lecture, which honors the Minnesota scholar and educator who graduated from and taught at Macalester. Patterson's lecture, "Black-White Relations in Europe and the Americas: Four Modes of Ethnic Stratification," will be on campus at 8 p.m., Thursday, April 15, Weyerhaeuser Memorial Chapel, 1600 Grand Avenue, St. Paul, Minn., and is free and open to the public.

Patterson received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the London School of Economics in 1965. After faculty appointments at the London School of Economics and the University of the West Indies, he moved to Harvard in 1969-70 and was appointed professor the following year.

An early interest, mainly historical and literary, in Jamaican slavery matured into a sociological fascination with slave society as a system of total domination, posing empirically the Hobbesean problem of order. His dissertation, The Sociology of Slavery: Jamaica, 1655-1838, was published in 1967. From this source his academic interests moved in three main directions: the comparative study of slavery, aimed at an understanding of power and its limits on both the personal and systemic levels; the study of its antithesis, freedom; and the study of socio-economic underdevelopment, with special reference to Jamaica and the Caribbean Basin.

Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study was published by Harvard Press in 1982. He has also written papers on the problem of underdevelopment in the Caribbean, and many policy-oriented reports prepared for the government of Jamaica during his tenure as Special Advisor to Prime Minister Michael Manley (1972-1980).

The convergence of his primary interests led to an exploration of the problem of ethnicity, resulting in the publication of Ethnic Chauvinism: The Reactionary Impulse (1977). The first of a two-volume historical sociology of freedom was published in June 1991, titled Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. He is presently completing the second volume of Freedom, dealing with the modern world.

At the same time, he is shifting the focus of his research to contemporary America with special emphasis on the intersecting problems of race, immigration and multiculturalism. The first two volumes of a trilogy in this area, The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America's "Racial" Crisis and Rituals of Blood: The Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries, have appeared.

Patterson was awarded the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award of the American Sociological Association in 1983 (The Sorokin Prize), and was co-winner of the Ralph Bunche Award of the American Political Science Association for the best scholarly work on the subject of pluralism. In 1991 he was awarded the National Book Award in non-fiction for Volume 1 of Freedom. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Annual G. Theodore Mitau Endowed Lecture honors the Minnesota scholar and educator who immigrated to the United States from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Mitau graduated from Macalester in 1940. He taught political science at the college until 1968, when he became chancellor of what was then the Minnesota State College System. The lecture upholds Mitau's concerns for human liberties and active participation in political life and his hope that Macalester would continue to examine the vital issues of the day.

Macalester is a private liberal arts college with a full-time enrollment of 1,810 students. Macalester is nationally recognized for its commitment to academic excellence, internationalism, diversity and service to society.

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