Please join us tomorrow (Wednesday) at 8pm est for a new Under the Blacklight panel discussion which will examine the events of January 6 – both the Georgia victory and far-right capitol takeover – in the context of both democratic struggle and white supremacy. With:
Kimberlé Crenshaw, the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum, and the Founder and Director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia. She is the host of the groundbreaking Under the Blacklight: The Intersectional Failures that COVID Lays Bare, launched in 2020 to bring together analytical conversations in the midst of twin pandemics: COVID and structural racism.
Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University, and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury, 2016), a New York Times Bestseller and the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award winner for criticism.
David Blight, Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University, and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Simon & Schuster, 2018).
Anoa Changa, a movement journalist, deeply influenced by grassroots-led electoral organizing. Host of the podcast, “The Way with Anoa,” tackling politics and current events through a Black progressive feminist perspective, Anoa also has bylines in The Independent,The Nation, Dame Magazine, Huffington Post, and Rewire.News.
Joe Lowndes, Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon, researching and publishing on right-wing politics, race, populism, social movements, and U.S. political development. His recent book, Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) with Daniel Martinez HoSang, explores the complex racial politics of the contemporary U.S. right from the militia movement to the Alt-Right to the mainstream Republican Party.
More details and rsvp below.
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As 2021 began, we made plans for the struggle ahead by examining what happened in 2020 — specifically regarding the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic racism. We embarked on this retrospective by releasing a series of reflections across our social media platforms and uplifting the most salient moments from our 2020 season of Under the Blacklight. Now, as we ring in a new year, we are faced with an entanglement of historic and tragic events, leaving us determined to take up the intersectional lessons we learned from a year of immense pain. But as the horrifying events of January 6 unfolded, it became clear that we needed an urgent reckoning with the continuing effects of racism, domestic terrorism, and the insurrectionary damage that threatens to unravel democracy and undermine a fragile consensus to protect America’s experiment in racial and gender justice. As our Executive Director, Kimberlé Crenshaw, stated in her recent piece in The New Republic and in an interview for WNYC, even after Donald Trump is out of office, he will still lead a multimillion-person political movement determined to protect and defend a white nation-state. Deeply aggrieved, self-righteous, and well-armed, a substantial percentage of these belligerents harbor a far greater commitment to whiteness than to American democracy and the failed strategy of appeasement towards them is not going to work. To gain an effective, insightful analysis on these continuing crises, we have invited the best minds, hearts, and souls to speak on our first Under The Blacklight of 2021. Join us tomorrow, Wednesday January 13, 8:00 p.m. ET (5:00 p.m. PT), for “If Hindsight is 2020, Why Are We Still Not Saved? The Truths That Must be Told to Navigate the Path Ahead.” Our guest panelists will examine events of the past year and developments of the past week to help us grasp this “Sankofa” moment — a moment where we can only move ahead by reclaiming the past. This week’s Under The Blacklight features veterans of our 2020 season discussing their most prescient and pressing observations from the year that was. Carol Anderson, David Blight, Anoa Changa, and Joe Lowndes will join Executive Director Kimberlé Crenshaw to answer burning questions, and provide the insights necessary to navigate all that comes next. As the United States shifts from the electoral arena, overwhelmed hospitals, and healthcare sites to ideological battlefields and the seats of government, we know that intersectional lessons provide critical antidotes to the diseases we face. We have to ask, finally: Can a nation in which more than 70 million people voted for a candidate who embraced white supremacists and white nationalism be saved? We are not better than this, but we can be. Hindsight is 2020…or so the saying goes. We hope you can join us. To register, please RSVP at bit.ly/UTB-21.
In solidarity, The AAPF Team
Please follow AAPF on Instagram (@AAPolicyForum), Twitter (@AAPolicyForum), and Facebook for more updates. You can also follow our E.D. Kimberlé Crenshaw @sandylocks on Twitter, and @kimberlecrenshaw on Instagram.
