Join us in a conversation tracing the threads of belief connecting slavery, eugenics, book banning, and voter suppression with the threat of autocracy.
From Washtenaw Faces Race:
A VIRTUAL community conversation...
When Americans talk about “freedom,” are they all talking about the same thing? In American history, the notion of the freedom to own human property and pursue personal practices that are dangerous to the larger society has always existed in opposition to the desire for the freedom from being enslaved en masse or from being deprived of the collective right to vote.
Join Washtenaw Faces Race for our latest virtual community conversation, entitled, “Freedom?? Whose Freedom?” Local and national racial justice activists will gather for an online conference illuminating the historical threads of our two types of freedom in relation to slavery, eugenics, book-banning, voter suppression, the current imminent threat of autocracy, and more.
Yodit Mesfin Johnson will expand our context by introducing the invaluable skill of looking at the world from a broader, non-European point of view. La’Ron Williams will center us in U.S. history by exposing certain ideological roots that connect past practices to many of today’s threats to democracy. Nationally known racial justice educator Debby Irving will discuss the barriers preventing white people from fighting for racial justice, as well as ways to transcend them, as explored in her book Waking Up White. Rob Goodspeed and Jessica Letaw, members of Justice InDeed, will illustrate the role of racially restrictive covenants in maintaining segregated “Whites only” neighborhoods in the face of constitutionally outlawed racially segregated zoning laws.
Today, if democracy is to survive, it needs more than a handful of politicians or the nation’s most dispossessed. It needs all of us. Nor can we be satisfied with the weak form of democracy we’ve inherited over our nearly three-hundred-year history of struggle as a nation. Today, the vision of a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, pluralistic, compassionate, democratic union urgently needs all of us to be realized.
We are also delighted to include poet Isaac Pickell, who will read selected poems in a presentation titled Passing Through the Rooms of the House of Race.