Blurring the Color Line Chinese in the Segregated South

Crystal Kwok, Director

Crystal Kwok is an award winning filmmaker who established her career in Hong Kong as an actress, writer, director, and talk show host. She won the audience choice awards at the 2000 Deauville Asian Film Festival for her debut feature length film, The Mistress. She was commissioned by Canal Plus to document “A Day in the Life of Jackie Chan” as part of the centennial celebration of international directors. She wrote and has staged several original plays about sensitive women’s issues. As a strong women’s advocate, her talk show on Cable TV and RTHK Radio3, “Kwoktalk” broke boundaries in Hong Kong with conversations about women and sexuality. Having moved back to American soil after being overseas for a couple of decades, Kwok now embraces issues closer to home — that of her Asian-American heritage. Kwok is currently a PhD student at the University of Hawaii in Performance Studies and a recipient of the prestigious East West Center Scholar awards. She also hosts a radio talk show and podcast, “Kwoktalk” on KTUH 90.1fm, addressing racial and gender issues with a multicultural perspective.

Suzanne Lee, Educator/Community Leader

Paula Austin, Associate Professor of History and African American Studies, Boston University

Paula C. Austin is a U.S. historian with a focus on African American history, the history of race and racism, visual culture, urban, education, and women’s history, the history of social science, and the history of childhood. She is particularly interested in interiority and broadening the narrow definitions of intellectual history. Her book, Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life (NYU Press, 2019) is a social and intellectual history of poor and working class young black people in early twentieth century, racially segregated Washington, D.C.

She was the co-editor of Radical Teacher (Vol 106), special issue on “Teaching #BlackLivesMatter,” is the author of “‘Conscious Self-Realization and Self-Direction’: New Negro Ideologies and the Confines of Visual Representation,” in Journal of African American History (Summer 2018), “For Women, Life is Right Hard,” in a special issue on Black Love in Gender, Women, and Families of Color Journal (Fall 2019), and was a contributing author to Colonize This! Young women of color on today’s feminism, eds. Daisy Hernandez and Bushra Rehman, (Seal Press, 2002, 2019).

Deanna Pan, Moderator; Reporter, Boston Globe

Deanna Pan is a features and enterprise reporter on the Globe’s Express Desk. Prior to joining The Boston Globe in 2019, she wrote for The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C. and The Pacific Northwest Inlander in Spokane, Washington. In 2019, she was honored as a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing for a series she co-authored on the unjust execution of 14-year-old George Stinney Jr., the youngest person put to death in modern U.S. history. Deanna grew up in the suburbs of Cincinnati and graduated from Ohio State University, where she changed her major almost a dozen times before settling on English.