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Join us as Crystal M. Fleming discusses her new book with author and writer Morgan Jerkins, and organizer, educator and curator Mariame Kaba!
Crystal M. Fleming, PhD, is a writer and sociologist who researches racism in the United States and abroad. She earned degrees from Wellesley College and Harvard University and is associate professor of sociology and Africana studies at Stony Brook University. Fleming writes about race, sexuality, and politics for publications including The Root, Black Agenda Report, Vox, and Everyday Feminism, and she has tens of thousands of followers on social media. She is the author of Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France.
How to Be Less Stupid About Race is your essential guide to breaking through the half-truths and ridiculous misconceptions that have thoroughly corrupted the way race is represented in the classroom, pop culture, media, and politics. Centuries after our nation was founded on genocide, settler colonialism, and slavery, many Americans are kinda-sorta-maybe waking up to the reality that our racial politics are (still) garbage. But in the midst of this reckoning, widespread denial and misunderstandings about race persist, even as white supremacy and racial injustice are more visible than ever before.
Combining no-holds-barred social critique, humorous personal anecdotes, and analysis of the latest interdisciplinary scholarship on systemic racism, sociologist Crystal M. Fleming provides a fresh, accessible, and irreverent take on everything that’s wrong with our “national conversation about race.” Drawing upon critical race theory, as well as her own experiences as a queer black millennial college professor and researcher, Fleming unveils how systemic racism exposes us all to racial ignorance—and provides a road map for transforming our knowledge into concrete social change. 
With Robin D.G. Kelley, Vijay Prashad, and Christina Heatherton. At Verso Books in Brooklyn, May 24, 2018.
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In his short life, Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the foremost thinkers and activists of the anti colonial revolution, leading movements in North America, Africa, and the Caribbean, Wherever he was, Rodney was a lighting rod for working-class Black Power organizing. His deportation sparked Jamaica’s Rodney Riots in 1968, and his scholarship trained a generation how to approach politics on an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding the Working People’s Alliance in Guyana, the thirty-eight-year-old Rodney was assassinated.
Walter Rodney’s “The Russian Revolution” collects surviving texts from a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Dar Es Salaam, an intellectual hub of the independent Third World. It had been his intention to work these into a book, a goal completed posthumously with the editorial aid of Robin D.G. Kelley and Jesse Benjamin. Moving across the historiography of the long Russian Revolution with clarity and insight, Rodney transcends the ideological fault lines of the Cold War. Surveying a board range of subjects—the Narodniks, social democracy, the October Revolution, civil war, and the challenges of Stalinism–Rodney articulates a distinct viewpoint from the Third World, one that grounds revolutionary theory and history with the people in motion. 
Keisha N. Blain discusses her book, the first to examine how black nationalist women engaged in national and global politics in the mid twentieth century, with NYU professor Thomas J. Sugrue.
In 1932, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon spoke to a crowd of black Chicagoans at the old Jack Johnson boxing ring, rallying their support for emigration to West Africa. In 1937, Celia Jane Allen traveled to Jim Crow Mississippi to organize rural black workers around black nationalist causes. In the late 1940s, from her home in Kingston, Jamaica, Amy Jacques Garvey launched an extensive letter-writing campaign to defend the Greater Liberia Bill, which would relocate 13 million black Americans to West Africa. Gordon, Allen, and Jacques Garvey—as well as Maymie De Mena, Ethel Collins, Amy Ashwood, and Ethel Waddell—are part of an overlooked and understudied group of black women who take center stage in Set the World on Fire.
Historians of the era generally portray the period between the Garvey movement of the 1920s and the Black Power movement of the 1960s as an era of declining black nationalist activism, but Keisha N. Blain reframes the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War as significant eras of black nationalist—and particularly, black nationalist women’s—ferment. In Chicago, Harlem, and the Mississippi Delta, from Britain to Jamaica, these women built alliances with people of color around the globe, agitating for the rights and liberation of black people in the United States and across the African diaspora. As pragmatic activists, they employed multiple protest strategies and tactics, combined numerous religious and political ideologies, and forged unlikely alliances in their struggles for freedom. Drawing on a variety of previously untapped sources, including newspapers, government records, songs, and poetry, Set the World on Fire highlights the flexibility, adaptability, and experimentation of black women leaders who demanded equal recognition and participation in global civil society.
Keisha N. Blain is an award-winning historian who writes on race, politics, and gender. She obtained a PhD in History from Princeton University and currently teaches history at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and co-editor of Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism and Racial Violence (University of Georgia Press, 2016). Her work has been published in several academic journals such as the Journal of Social History and Souls; and popular outlets including the Huffington Post, The Washington Post, and The Feminist Wire. She is the president of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) and senior editor of its popular blog, Black Perspectives.
Thomas J. Sugrue is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History, the founding Director of the Collaborative on Global Urbanism, and the Director of the Program in American Studies at New York University. The author of four books and editor of three others, he contributes to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Nation, and Salon. He is a frequent commentator on modern American history, politics, civil rights, and urban policy. Sugrue has given over 350 public lectures throughout the United States, as well as in Europe, South America, the Middle East, and Asia. 
Join us Soraya shares and discusses her new book with writer Samhita Mukhopadhyay.
Soraya Chemaly is an award-winning writer and activist whose work focuses on the role of gender in culture, politics, religion and media. She is the Director of the Women's Media Center Speech Project and organizer of the Safety and Free Speech Coalition, both of which aim to curb online abuse, increase media and tech diversity, and expand women's freedom of expression. After occupying various leadership positions in corporate marketing and founding her own consulting firm, she returned to her writing and advocacy work full time. Her articles appear frequently in TIME, The Guardian, The Nation, Huffington Post and The Atlantic.
In 2013, Soraya won the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s (AEJMC)'s Donna Allen Award for Feminist Advocacy and the Secular Woman Feminist Activism Award. In 2014, she was named one of Elle Magazine's 25 Inspiring Women to Follow on Twitter. She serves on the boards of several organizations dedicated to improving media diversity, including Women, Action and The Media; In this Together Media, No Bully, and the Women's Media Center. She writes and speaks regularly about gender, media, tech, education, women's rights, sexual violence and free speech. Learn more at @schemaly or womensmediacenter.com.
Following in the footsteps of classic feminist manifestos like The Feminine Mystique and Our Bodies, Ourselves, Rage Becomes Her is an eye-opening book for the twenty-first century woman: an engaging, accessible credo offering us the tools to re-understand our anger and harness its power to create lasting positive change.
Contrary to the rhetoric of popular “self-help” and an entire lifetime of being told otherwise, our rage is one of the most important resources we have, our sharpest tool against both personal and political oppression. We’ve been told for so long to bottle up our anger, letting it corrode our bodies and minds in ways we don’t even realize. Yet our anger is a vital instrument, our radar for injustice and a catalyst for change. On the flip side, the societal and cultural belittlement of our anger is a cunning way of limiting and controlling our power.
We are so often told to resist our rage or punished for justifiably expressing it, yet how many remarkable achievements in this world would never have gotten off the ground without the kernel of anger that fueled them? Rage Becomes Her makes the case that anger is not what gets in our way, it is our way, sparking a new understanding of one of our core emotions that will give women a liberating sense of why their anger matters and connect them to an entire universe of women no longer interested in making nice at all costs. 
Charlene A. Carruthers is a Black, queer feminist community organizer. As the founding national director of the Black Youth Project 100, she has worked alongside hundreds of young Black activists to build a national base of activist member-led organizations of Black 18-35 year olds dedicated to creating justice and freedom for all Black people. She has led grassroots and digital strategy campaigns for national organizations including the Center for Community Change, the Women's Media Center, ColorOfChange.org and National People's Action, as well as being a member of a historic delegation of young activists in Palestine in 2015 to build solidarity between Black and Palestinian liberation movements.
Join us as she reads a piece of her new book Unapologetic and discusses her struggles and inspirations with organizer, educator and curator Mariame Kaba.
Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This book provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development. It also offers a flexible model of what deeply effective organizing can be, anchored in the Chicago model of activism, which features long-term commitment, cultural sensitivity, creative strategizing, and multiple cross-group alliances. And Unapologetic provides a clear framework for activists committed to building transformative power, encouraging young people to see themselves as visionaries and leaders. 
Charlene A. Carruthers is a Black, queer feminist community organizer. As the founding national director of the Black Youth Project 100, she has worked alongside hundreds of young Black activists to build a national base of activist member-led organizations of Black 18-35 year olds dedicated to creating justice and freedom for all Black people. She has led grassroots and digital strategy campaigns for national organizations including the Center for Community Change, the Women's Media Center, ColorOfChange.org and National People's Action, as well as being a member of a historic delegation of young activists in Palestine in 2015 to build solidarity between Black and Palestinian liberation movements.
Join us as she reads a piece of her new book Unapologetic and discusses her struggles and inspirations with organizer, educator and curator Mariame Kaba.
Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This book provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development. It also offers a flexible model of what deeply effective organizing can be, anchored in the Chicago model of activism, which features long-term commitment, cultural sensitivity, creative strategizing, and multiple cross-group alliances. And Unapologetic provides a clear framework for activists committed to building transformative power, encouraging young people to see themselves as visionaries and leaders. 
With Yasmina Price, David Correia, Tyler Wall, Alex Vitale, and tag. At Verso Books in Brooklyn, on May 31, 2018.
Co-sponsored by the NYC DSA Racial Justice Working Group.
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What tools and language do we need to arm activists with in the struggle to dismantle the police state? How can we connect the struggles against police violence with the legacy of US colonial oppression and the militarization of borders? How can we link current policing practices as tools of social control to their racist origins?
Join panelists Yasmina Price, David Correia, Tyler Wall, Alex Vitale, and tag for an in-depth discussion on the origins of modern policing, how the language of policing reinforces oppressive structures, and strategies for working toward police and prison abolition. We need to move beyond the limits of reform, in language and policy, to work across movements toward a society free from police violence and from police entirely.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
YASMINA PRICE is a Brooklyn-based organizer committed to the development of robust networks of leftists from the African diaspora and abolishing prisons, police and all oppressive structures. Growing up in Niger, France, and Italy, she is dedicated to working towards to dismantling the international mechanisms of racism, imperialism and colonialism. She is on the Racial Justice organizing committee of NYC-DSA and is one of the founders of its National Afro-Socialist & Socialists of Color Caucus. She is currently employed by New York Communities for Change, a local community organization fighting against racial oppression and economic injustice.
DAVID CORREIA is an associate professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Properties of Violence: Law and Land Grant Struggle in Northern New Mexico.
TYLER WALL is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee.
ALEX S. VITALE is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project there. He has spent the last 25 years writing about policing and consults both police departments and human rights organizations internationally. He is also a frequent essayist, whose writings have appeared in the New York Daily News, New York Times, Nation, Gotham Gazette, and New Inquiry.
tag is a prison slavery abolitionist from Harlem who works with organizations engaged in Abolitionism such as The Campaign to Bring Mumia Home & IWOC-NYC. He currently resides in the Bronx, where attacks on public housing in the form of "gang raids" have been rampant in recent years.
