MIZZOUDIVERSITY SUMMIT
2010 Keynote Speakers
"The Role of Business and Education in the Growth of the Hispanic Community"
Carlos Gomez
President and CEO, Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Greater Kansas City
Carlos Gomez began his duties with the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Greater Kansas City and with the Hispanic Collaborative on Jan. 29, 2007. The Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Greater Kansas City represents 500 businesses in the Kansas City metropolitan area and works to provide assistance, procurement opportunities and resources for the hispanic business community. Under Gomez's leadership the Chamber is now the 10th largest chamber in the Kansas City metro area—an area with a hispanic growth rate 11 percent higher than the national average—according to Ingram’s Magazine.
Gomez’s focus for the Chamber is to ensure that it is meeting the needs of the small business community (in particular the Spanish-speaking business owner), lobbying for comprehensive immigration reform and the National Dream Act, and connecting corporate America, government and others to the hispanic business community and the hispanic consumer. Successful initiatives include "Procurement One on One" which takes place quarterly and matches small businesses to corporate, government, medical and educational buyers, and the Latino Leadership Institute which teaches hispanics and women how to serve on boards and commissions. The Chamber has also launched a series of workshops and seminars that are facilitated in Spanish to serve the needs of the growing Spanish-speaking business community.
Recently, Gomez was elected to the American Chamber of Commerce Executives national board of directors
, which is comprised of predominately majority chamber CEOs. He also serves on the Board of Regents for Avila University and was appointed to the Board of Governors of the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education.
"Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights"
Kenji Yoshino
Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law, New York University
Dubbed "the face and voice of the new civil rights" by Barbara Ehrenreich, Kenji Yoshino presents a new paradigm for civil rights, articulating the victories and limitations of the movement, while pointing a way forward. Yoshino's landmark book, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, fuses legal manifesto with autobiography, and marks a move from more traditional pleas for civil equality to a case for individual autonomy in identity politics. In it, he argues that each of us "covers" — that, bending to societal pressure, we tone down an aspect of our personality to gain acceptance from the mainstream. A "common read" on many campuses, Covering was hailed by Publishers Weekly for its "tremendous potential as a touchstone in the struggle for universal human dignity." His latest book, A Thousand Times More Fair, takes 10 Shakespeare plays and ties them to a contemporary question of justice.
Kenji Yoshino is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at the NYU School of Law. Previously, he taught at Yale, where he was the Deputy Dean and the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law. A specialist in constitutional law, civil rights and employment law, and law and literature, he has written for academic journals as well as The New York Times and Slate. He has appeared on Charlie Rose and The O'Reilly Factor. Currently, he is working on two new books, A Thousand Times More Fair, and a look at diversity in corporate America.
