The Race and Ethnicity Studies Program offers a minor designed to examine race and ethnicity as categories of difference and as forms of lived experience, and attends to how these categories intersect and overlap with other forms of difference (such as gender, nation, indigeneity, class, religion, ability, sexuality, etc.).

The minor approaches race and ethnicity as constructs in particular historical contexts from interdisciplinary, comparative, intercultural and transnational perspectives. It also develops a critical awareness of colonial and Eurocentric influences on both the construction of these categories and the scholarly discourse about them. The minor thus provides a critical lens on a variety of historical and contemporary issues and debates generated by specific racial and ethnic formations. At the same time the minor takes note of mobilizations and liberating cultural expressions that have emerged both in response and as alternatives to dominant racial and ethnic structures.