racial justice

Posts Tagged ‘racial justice’

Study & Stuggle: Abolition Must Be Green

A conversation about centering climate justice, land, food sovereignty, and fighting environmental racism in the struggle for abolition.

About this event

Study and Struggle organizes against criminalization and incarceration in Mississippi through mutual aid, political education, and community building. We provide a bilingual Spanish and English curriculum with discussion questions and reading materials, as well as financial support, to over 100 participants in radical study groups inside and outside prisons in Mississippi. These groups correspond with groups from across the country through our pen pal program. We regularly come together for online conversations hosted by Haymarket Books. The curriculum, built by a combination of currently- and formerly-incarcerated people, scholars, and community organizers, centers around the interrelationship between prison abolition and immigrant justice, with a particular attention to freedom struggles in Mississippi and the U.S. South.

For our Fall 2021 four month curriculum, we have borrowed and augmented Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s argument that “abolition is about presence, not absence. It has to be green, and in order to be green, it has to be red (anti-capitalist), and in order to be red, it has to be international,” having added “intersectional” as a fourth analytical category that we hope moves us beyond “single-issue” organizing. Study and Struggle provides a bilingual curriculum to all our imprisoned comrades in Mississippi with the support of our friends at 1977 Books and makes it fully available online for other study groups to use as they see fit.

Our Critical Conversations webinar series, hosted by Haymarket Books, will cover the themes for the upcoming month. Haymarket Books is an independent, radical, non-profit publisher.

Our second webinar theme is “Green” and will be a conversation about what it means for abolition to be life-sustaining, and how abolition demands we center questions of climate justice, land, food sovereignty, and environmental racism.

While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of commissary and mutual aid for our incarcerated participants.

***Tickets are $0-25. Register through Eventbrite to receive a link to the video conference on the day of the event. This event will also be recorded and will have live captions available.***

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Speakers:

J.T. Roane is assistant professor of African and African American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. He received his PhD in history from Columbia University and he is a 2008 graduate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. He currently serves as the lead of the Black Ecologies Initiative at ASU’s Institute for Humanities Research. He is the former co-senior editor of Black Perspectives, the digital platform of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). Roane’s scholarly essays have appeared in Souls Journal, The Review of Black Political Economy, Current Research in Digital History and Signs. His work has also appeared in venues such as Washington Post, The Brooklyn Rail, Pacific Standard, and The Immanent Frame, Roane was 2020-2021 National Endowment for the Humanities/Mellon Foundation Research Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

Bigg Villainus is an artist, musician, founder of Overthrow Media and a radical revolutionary who has been dedicated to radical struggle and revolutionary growth for over a decade. Currently an organizer with Fight Toxic Prisons they bring a lot of abolitionist and direct action history and experience to the table. As well as a lumpen proletariat perspective and Analysis.

They are firm advocates of bottom-up organizing. As well as having a firm decolonial Praxis. They have a long history of organizing with groups such as black Frontline movement, outside agitators, black lives matter, occupied, and many more. They are currently on a national tour, networking, spreading abolition and music.

Abolition, Cultural Freedom, Liberation

The Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize for 2020 was awarded to Angela Y. Davis for her lifetime achievements as a public intellectual advocating for racial, gender, and economic justice; to Mike Davis for his life’s work as a public intellectual who encourages critical analysis of society in the service of constructing an alternative, post-capitalist future in both theory and practice; and Ruth Wilson Gilmore for a lifetime of achievement as a public intellectual working toward the decarceration of California, the United States, and the world. Join all three, along with acclaimed author Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor for an urgent conversation on abolition, cultural freedom, and liberation.

***Tickets are $0-25. Register through Eventbrite to receive a link to the video conference the day before the event. This event will also be recorded. Live captioning will be available via the webcast.***

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Mike Davis, professor emeritus of creative writing at UC Riverside, joined the San Diego chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality in 1962 at age 16 and the struggle for racial and social equality has remained the lodestar of his life. His City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles challenged reigning celebrations of the city from the perspectives of its lost radical past and insurrectionary future. His wide-ranging work has married science, archival research, personal experience, and creative writing with razor-sharp critiques of empires and ruling classes. He embodies the Lannan vision of working at the intersection of art and social justice. Davis has also helped to develop the theory of the prison industrial complex.

Angela Y. Davis is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Davis grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and has been an activist and Marxist-Feminist in the Black Power and abolitionist movements since the late 1960s. In the 1980s, her book Women, Race and Class helped to establish the concept of intersectionality. She also helped to develop the concept of prison abolition, especially in her books Are Prisons Obsolete? and Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire. Recently, Dr. Davis has written about the international movement in solidarity with Palestine in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Her work helped to lay the theoretical groundwork for the #DefundthePolice movement. Davis’s memoir will soon be published in a new edition by Haymarket Books.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press). Recent publications include “Beyond Bratton” (Policing the Planet, Camp and Heatherton, eds., Verso); “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence” (Futures of Black Radicalism, Lubin and Johnson, eds., Verso); a foreword to Bobby M. Wilson’s Birmingham classic America’s Johannesburg (U Georgia Press); a foreword to Cedric J. Robinson on Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism, and Cultures of Resistance (HLT Quan, ed., Pluto); and, co-edited with Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference (Duke). Forthcoming projects include Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Haymarket); Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (Verso). Gilmore has lectured in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. In April 2019 novelist Rachel Kushner profiled Gilmore in The New York Times Magazine. Recent honors include the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017); The Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2020); and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021).

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (a Lannan Cultural Freedom Especially Notable Book Award recipient, recently published in an updated edition by Haymarket Books) and editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Her third book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press, was a finalist for a National Book Award for nonfiction, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and professor at Princeton University.

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This event is a partnership between Lannan Foundation and Haymarket Books.

Lannan Foundation’s Readings & Conversations series features inspired writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as cultural freedom advocates with a social, political, and environmental justice focus. We are excited to offer these programs online to a global audience. Video and audio recordings of all events are available at lannan.org.

Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago. Our mission is to publish books that contribute to struggles for social and economic justice. We strive to make our books a vibrant and organic part of social movements and the education and development of a critical, engaged, international left.

Lannan Foundation is a family foundation dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity, and creativity through projects that support exceptional contemporary artists and writers, inspired Native activists in rural communities, and social justice advocates.

Moving BEYOND “White Fragility”: Honest, Effective Conversations About Race

Robin DiAngelo coined the phrase “white fragility” to describe many white people’s insistence that race conversations be comfortable and non-threatening for them.

Black writer Nanette D. Massey of Buffalo believes we are way beyond holding hands when it comes to talking about race. Massey presents her take on the book’s ideas in very practical terms. The goal is to leave audiences, black and white, with self-clarity and able to act within their own personal spheres of influence with genuine confidence, humor, and humility. Whether you’re new to this kind of forum or you “marched in the sixties”, you’re promised an evening of candor and revelation.

Nanette has presented this frank and revealing workshop for grateful audiences at East Aurora Unitarian Universalist Church, Visual Studies Workshop (Rochester), the Pittsford (Rochester) PTSA, and for staff at Rochester Institute of Technology as an accredited Continuing Education Unit.

Auditorium seating limited to 159, we will sell out.
$25 tickets can be purchased online before the event; $35 at door, day of

TO BE CLEAR, this presentation is NOT an invitation for debate. Forums exist for opposing ideas, this simply isn’t the purpose of this session.
Participants are expected to have completed reading the book prior to 10/6.
Burchfield Penney has a mask wearing mandate.