Johnson C. Smith University, an HBCU located in Charlotte, North Carolina, has brought African-American history and culture to China with the opening of the Center for American Culture and Race at Guangdong Baiyun University.
The Center for American Culture and Race (CACR) is one of 16 active American Culture Centers (ACC) in China funded by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing with the purpose of introducing Chinese
people to American culture. Some centers have a specific focus, such as sport or technology. As a historically Black university, Johnson C. Smith University (JCSU) has developed the only ACC to focus on race.
While lectures at the CACR are given in English, as much of audience is made up of English majors and international faculty, establishing the center did provide an interesting challenge right from the start. For one thing, the Chinese do not use the term race the way it is commonly used in the United States. They use words more akin to ethnicity or culture.
“In the African-American experience, race is used to distinguish between Black, brown, White, etc.,” says Dr. Brian Jones, dean of the College of Arts and Letters at JCSU. “We needed to convey that in Chinese, and we had to discuss with our Chinese counterparts … about what that word meant and how to translate it.”
Assisting in the process was Anna Wood, a grants officer in the Office of Government Sponsored Programs and Research at JCSU, who is a native Chinese speaker. She assisted not only with language translation, but was also a program participant.
Guangdong Baiyun University is a private college with approximately 15,000 students, 10 percent of whom are English majors, in Guangzhou, China. JCSU wanted the CACR to be unique in how it addressed race head-on. Jones says that, as an HBCU, JCSU is an excellent position to lead an international dialogue about the experience of race in the United States.
