White supremacy and its roots in building the United States was a key topic of discussion at this year’s first Social Justice Lecture Series.

Albert Ponce, a Diablo Valley College political science professor, started the series with his lecture “White Supremacy and the United States of America.” Ponce is only the second speaker to give a lecture in the series.

The lecture series was started by Jackie Lorenz, the director of Community Education in spring 2017. Lorenz said that she started the series because she “wanted to create something where we brought community members together with DVC staff and faculty to have a talk, have a conversation about what is going on.”

Lorenz said that she saw this series as “an opportunity for faculty to craft a talk without being bound by a syllabus.”

Ponce discussed various philosophers who’s ideas the United States’ Constitution is based on and how, while their ideas seem all encompassing, they still harbored ideas of white supremacy.

“This country, the United States, was not built for the diversity of people,” said Ponce referring to the philosophies that the country was founded on.

James Spencer, a DVC student who attended the lecture said that the lecture was very informative and said that white supremacy is “hard to reject” because it’s “very ingrained in people of color.”

The full lecture can be found at https://youtu.be/t32xwMTDx9A