Amherst College: Virtual Black Alumni Week 2021

A Conversation with Kellie Jones ’81, H’18 and Thomas W. Mitchell ’87

rdiehl — Mon, 19 Apr 2021 20:26:00 +0000

A Conversation with Kellie Jones ’81, H’18 and Thomas W. Mitchell ’87 Roberta L. Diehl Monday, 4/19/2021, at 4:26 PM

A conversation hosted by Ayo Lewis ’21 with 2016 MacArthur Fellow Kellie Jones ’81, H’18 and 2020 MacArthur Fellow Thomas W. Mitchell ’87 about their work and their Amherst experiences.

Purple

Gray

Video Callout

April 12, 2021

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 12:00:00 +0000|April 19, 2021

[Transcript of Conversation with Kellie Jones and Thomas Mitchell]

rdiehl — Mon, 19 Apr 2021 20:29:00 +0000

Roberta L. Diehl Monday, 4/19/2021, at 4:29 PM

Purple

Gray

Expandable Article (Compact)

Text

Click to open the transcript: Kellie Jones and Thomas Mitchell

- Good evening, thank you all for joining us tonight. Even though I can't see you, I'm sure you all look amazing. My name is Jeremy Thomas, Amherst College class of 2021. I'm a former chair of the Black Student Union, and I would like to welcome you to the first event in our Black Alumni Week. Tonight, we are in for a treat, a conversation between two of not only Amherst's, but the world's, smartest people, MacArthur Genius Grant recipients Dr. Kellie Jones and Dr. Thomas Mitchell, hosted by Ayo Lewis, the current chair of the Black Student Union. This evening would not have been possible without the work of many people, and I extend my gratitude to Traci Wolfe, Carol Allman-Morton, Norm Jones, Emily Ravis-Brining, and the Black Student Union's event coordinators, Kalaria Okali and Ernest Collins, Amherst classes of 2022 and 2023, respectively. Black alumni, please do not forget to join us throughout the week at all the spectacular events we have planned, without further ado, our moderator for the evening, Ayo Lewis, is a senior neuroscience major, from New York City, she hopes to pursue reproductive healthcare with a focus on combating racial inequities in Obstetrics & Gynecology. She's currently a researcher for both Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and the world health organization. On campus, she's an active member of Amherst College Hillel executive board and has held many positions on Amherst College Black Student Unions, executive board. She is currently the senior chair of the BSU. Dr. Kellie Jones, Amherst College class of 1981, is the Hans Hofmann Professor of Modern Art in the department of Art History and Archeology and African-American and African diaspora studies at Columbia university. Her research interests include African-American and African diaspora artists, LatinX and Latin American artists, and issues in contemporary art and museum theory. Dr. Jones, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has also received awards for her work from The Hutchins Center for African and African-American research, Harvard University, and The Warhol Foundation, in 2016 she was named the MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Dr. Jones' writings have appeared in a multitude of exhibition catalogs and journals. She's the author of two books published by Duke University Press, EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art, and South of Pico: African-American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, which received the Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award from the American Book Award Foundation in 2018, and was named best book of the decade in 2019 by Art News, best art book of 2017 in the New York Times, and a best book of 2017 in Art Forum. Dr. Jones has also worked as a curator for over three decades and has numerous major national and international exhibitions in her credit, her exhibition, Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles in 1960 to 1980, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, was named one of the best exhibitions of 2011 and 2012 by Art Forum, and best thematic show nationally by the International Association of Art Critics. She was co-creator of Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the 1960s, which was named one of the best exhibitions of 2014 by Art Forum. Last but not least, we have Professor Thomas Mitchell, Amherst College class of 1987. A professor at Texas A&M University School of Law, where he also served as interim Dean in 2017 to 2018. at Tex A&M, he co-directs the program in Realistic and Community Development Law. Prior to doing Texas A&M, he served on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin Law School as a full professor with a chair in law. He's a national expert on property issues facing disadvantaged families and communities, and has published leading scholarly works addressing these matters. Professor Mitchell has done extensive law reform and policy work, most prominently serving as the principal drafter of a widely adopted model state statute designed to substantially enhance the ability of disadvantaged families to maintain ownership of their property. Professor Mitchell has also helped develop federal policy proposals, working with some in Congress and others in the executive branch to help disadvantaged farmers and property owners. In 2020, he was named as one of 21 residents of the MacArthur Fellowship in recognition of this substantial impact his overall professional work has had in assisting disadvantaged farmers and property owners, farmers and owners who are disproportionately African-American and other people of color. In 2021, he was awarded the Howard University award for distinguished post-graduate achievement, an award that Thurgood Marshall, Vice-President Kamala Harris, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Civil Rights icon James Farmer Jr., among many other Howard luminaries have also received. Professor Mitchell is a graduate of Amherst College, The Howard University School of Law, and the University of Wisconsin Law School, where he received an LLM, and served as a William H. Hastie Fellow. Please join me in giving the warmest Zoom welcome to our guests.

- Thank you, Jeremy, for that welcome, I am super excited to dive into this conversation with you guys today. So let's start off by what was your experience in general as Black people at Amherst, and how did that shape your trajectory afterward?

- I'm waiting for you Kellie. So Ayo, who do you want to take this?

- Oh, either of you could respond.

- You can go ahead Thomas, because I just froze, hopefully this is not going to happen all night, but go ahead.

- So I think that this is going to be one of the first times I'll share this and it's something sometimes I wanted to share with my law students who sometimes put me on a pedestal and think that what I, whatever I've achieved, they can't. So part of my Amherst experience was just informed by some personal family issues. I come from a family sometimes of great strengths but you know, a fair amount of kind of dysfunction, and some of that manifested itself when I started at Amherst in terms of some pretty severe financial issues that put at risk my ability to even start at Amherst or stay there, and so one of the things that I have to give a shout out to is the Amherst financial aid office, Dean Joe Paul Case, Kate Gentile, who fundamentally made my ability to stay in college possible as opposed to dropping out, but you know, some of those experiences kind of, on the other side of the track, you know, really ended up building some real resilience for me, and not that I'd want other folks necessarily to go through what I experienced, and in some ways I think just being resilient and making the best out of a bad situation, so if I had had my druthers, if I had not had some of the familial challenges, I probably would have studied Environmental Science with focusing on some issues of Environmental Justice, I would've stayed in Anthropology, but I ended up becoming an English major at Amherst, and it's just a wonderful department, and had great mentors and professors, and people like Barry O'Connell and Kim Townsend, and decided just to try to hone my writing skills, my analytical skills, my critical thinking skills and those very kind of skills, even though, when sometimes you're an English major, you don't know if you're actually learning something, I've used to this very day. I think the other thing, and I'll leave on this is that at Amherst, I became an activist, I had been a football recruit at a number of Ivy League colleges, went to Amherst, wasn't recruited, thought they did recruit, and encountered pretty serious racial issues in the athletic department, and that's drawing on one of my strengths in my family, and the way I was raised was to not accept kind of second best, and I ended up kind of leading a movement to address, some of the racial issues in the Amherst athletic department, and there were skills that I used and developed in that very process that I use to this very day. The importance of building allies, I got to know people in the Dean's office, the President, the Board of Trustees. I used the media in terms of writing op-eds or whatever they were called, letters in the Amherst Student, and then very much developed kind of a bottom up and top-down kind of approach, making sure that there were key allies in place that I could call upon who were in a position to help kind of change the conditions on the ground, and so in some ways, even though I thought, you know, I'd be kind of, I imagined a college experience where I, athletics would play a much more substantial role in terms of the kind of enjoyment. I mean, ironically for me, I'm actually glad that I experienced what I experienced because, A, it raised my consciousness about certain issues of race that I had not been fully aware of, I would say, and it actually gave me kind of a training ground that proved useful, and the success we achieved gave me confidence in other venues in life where I've been, that issues that were perceived as being beyond the ability to reform actually can be reformed. So, let me just stop there.

- Well, when I came to Amherst, of course I was in the second class of women to matriculate from being a freshman, if you still say that a frosh, and there was only one more year before that for transfers, and I have to shout out my crew, my girls who were still, even in the pandemic, you know, brought us back together closely I think, Inez Corbello, Wendy Blair, Victoria Casa, but of course it was a school for men, and I have to say that there were men who welcomed us even though we were kind of messing up their game because Amherst was a men's school, and you had Smith, Mount Holyoke, and so we just kind of stomped in. But there were men that welcomed us like Kimball Smith, and Raymond Allen, who I'm still pretty close with today. I think in terms of, you know, Thomas brings up a great point about activism, I came from New York and my family were activists and poets, and so I, you know, that was just part of my nature, I didn't even think that I was really doing anything special by going to the school and being one of the first Black women to come here. I didn't even think about it, I just thought, oh, this is life, and met some people from Los Angeles and have become obsessed with Los Angeles ever since, and you know, had good friends from New York. What it did allow me to do is, why I still think a Liberal Arts education is so beneficial, because it just allowed me to explore, Amherst allowed me to do what I wanted to do, I came in wanting to be a diplomat, I've said this many times, and I kind of got stuck with my French classes, Spanish was fine, but French, because I really thought, well, French isn't just about France, it's about Africa, it's about the Caribbean, and that's not really what was happening here at the time. So I went back to my art roots and realized, I never wanted to necessarily be an artist because I didn't want to be that broke, that's what I said to myself, but then I discovered being a curator, writing, and I started to pursue that, and I was able to basically craft my own interdisciplinary major with Black Studies, Latin American Studies, and Art History, and I've been basically doing that ever since and teaching that, it wasn't really a field, I had to make it up. I mean, people were teaching, don't get me wrong, and I had a great teachers, Professor Pemberton in African Art, Asa Davis in Black Studies, my advisor was Andrea Benton Rushing, she was an English professor and I wrote a senior thesis with her. Jim Maraniss was my other reader in the Spanish department, these are all people who supported me, and I just kind of made my way believing these things because I'd grown up around artists, I'd grown up around Black artists of all kinds, and even though they weren't in books that I read, I knew they existed, so I just kept on down that track and Amherst allowed me to explore, but also to make my own major and something that has clearly impacted the world.

- Wow, thank you both for your answers, what unique and beautiful paths, I'm sure all of our Black students and Black alumni on the call right now can relate to both of your paths. So for those on the call who aren't as familiar with both of your works, can both of you give a lay person summary of your work, your research and what you're doing with your life right now.

- Go ahead, Thomas, go ahead.

- Essentially, I look at a variety of legal structures and mechanisms that have disadvantaged African-Americans and other disadvantaged communities in terms of their properties and, you know for African Americans, there have been dynamics both in terms of substantial loss of rural land and agricultural land that African-Americans have owned, but on the urban side, we sadly, 50 years after the enactment of the federal Fair Housing Act, we're at a time in 2021 where there is the largest gap in Black-white home ownership since the federal government began collecting data decades ago. So I kind of look at well, what are the explanations, what are the factors that have contributed to these differential experiences with property ownership or property rights can be mental, and then what I've tried to do is leverage my scholarship to reform laws or, and help put into place policies to address those issues, issues that have contributed to the racial wealth gap, and so I've done that on the state and federal level. So on the state level I'm the principal drafter of this model, state property statute that has been enacted into law thus far in 17 States including eight Southern States and the U.S. Virgin islands, and we have a number of states in play in 2021, and on the federal level, I've worked with Congress on some bills to help Black landowners and Black farmers and other Socio-economically disadvantaged landowners and farmers, and also I'm currently working with some of the leadership in USDA, some policies as well.

- Amazing stuff, I always think this is the real work, but what I've been doing is, well, I started out when I left Amherst, I went to the curatorial field. I started really on a trajectory working at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and worked for various other organizations, I would say that at that time, you know the places where I could get hired were nonprofit, you know, municipal, federally funded, things like that, and ethnically or culturally specific institutions. And so at that point, then I started getting other smaller things, but then I said, well, you know, the best way to get to the top of this field is to get a PhD. So that's when I started on that path and I fully intended, I actually had a position while I was going to graduate school, I'd pick up a position at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which was, you know, still is arguably one of the very important contemporary art museums in this country. And, you know, I was doing my dissertation and doing that part-time and doing these other things and got to, you know, still, always doing shows. I was able to go to South Africa and do The second Johannesburg Biennale while I was still in graduate school 'cause that was not a job I was going to turn down, it was my first trip ever to Africa and to do a show in a place that had just been three or four years out of apartheid, it was really, strange to say, a dream come true, but it was to just be able to see that everything you thought was hard was really not hard at all. Then when I finished my PhD, actually one of my last years finishing, I was a Fellow at Amherst and I was teaching, and I had the opportunity to apply for a job at Yale, which was my PhD alma mater, and I said, okay, well I'll just try this and go back into museums, and then I really made the move to do that in a way, because I figured I can really reach as many more people you know, in museums, you maybe have a few internships and you can look for people of color, and this way I figured I could impact all people to talk about art of the African diaspora, art of Latin America and so on, and I just had a bigger platform, so then I found myself being a professor, still doing shows on the side, because museums kept calling me, but it's interesting, my last show was about seven years ago, and I think that's because you see the change in the climate now, where so many Black people, are being hired finally by mainstream museums, and if you think back to the sixties, when among other protests, and what people were fighting for, one of the things was to be represented in museums, and while these institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, like the Whitney Museum of American Art, or even the Metropolitan Museum of Art, would buy works by these artists as a kind of a form of reparations I would say, they would never hire people, and that was kind of the last hurdle, it was things that artists and others were asking these institutions to do, but at the time people would say, oh, but why do you need that, we, you know, we can study this work just as well, but that wasn't the point, but I'd say, even in the last few weeks you see the Whitney Museum of American Art has hired the head of curatorial affairs as a Black woman, the Guggenheim has done the same, so these are new times, but at that time we were just trying to get the word out there.

- Thank you both for giving such robust overviews of your work. So I'd want to dive into a question, you guys, oh, you can't see my bookshelf here, but I have a whole heck of a lot of James Baldwin on my bookshelf, and I recently just re-read Baldwin's A Talk to Teachers, in which he says this famous line, "One of the paradoxes of education was that precisely the point when you begin to develop a conscious you must find yourself at war with your society. Is it the responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person." So to the both of you as professors yourselves, what do you think the responsibilities of teachers are, and Professor Jones, do you want to start with this one?

- Sure, I think I didn't even realize I was a teacher as I said, until we had the opportunity, you know to start teaching art history on the graduate level, and I never really imagined myself as a teacher, but then I realized even every show I had done was really teaching people how to see this work and see that African-Americans, people of the diaspora, had a whole culture and history that had been overlooked and was not in books necessarily. So I think that's, you know, Baldwin is of course spot on with that, and he calls it at war with I guess you could say that, I just always think it's changing people's minds, as I said, I wanted to originally, when I went to Amherst, I thought of myself as a diplomat, running all around the world, learning languages and changing the world in that way through different kinds of mediation and arbitration and things like that, but what a friend of mine who's a diplomat told me is that, you know you were actually doing it with your work in culture, that you were doing cultural diplomacy, and that made me feel like, okay I didn't just give up on that first dream that I had, but I think absolutely, you know and I won't speak for Thomas, but I will invoke his great example that this is the work that we've been called to do, is that the world needs changing, the things need changing and we're changing it in our ways in our fields, and I'm happy to say that I've been an optimist and I'm happy right now, at least to some degree, that the museum field and those things are changing. Of course we have a long way to go with other things, but I'm glad to see these changes in my lifetime, at least.

- Yeah, I would say that just with any of my students, I just try and make sure that I can do what I can to help my students develop to their full potential, and recognize in some case, that they come into my classroom, or my interactions with them with some deficiencies, you know, I think some of the challenges I had in my life gives me empathy for my students, and I try to, you know, sometimes you just have to be honest with them about where they're at, the potential they have but, where they can get to, but sometimes some remedial stuff that they need to address. I think I'm very much a fan of robust experiential learning so that they have an understanding of the world that is not purely academic. And then sometimes as part of that, to the extent possible I try to help stimulate, or develop, or further develop a sense of my students to have empathy, empathy for others, empathy for those who have not had the opportunity structure that almost by definition, if we're an Amherst student or Alum that we have, and to use that empathy to live a life of service to others and service to society, you know, in some ways I did that early in my career, is after stumbling upon some of the legal problems that African-American families had with their land, and this wasn't anything that appeared in any property case books or textbooks that I studied or anybody else that studied in law school for generations, it came through from my bottom up research of spending a lot of time in the rural South with families, in churches, town halls, in their homes and having them share their experiences with me, and which painted a picture of a completely different picture of their interaction with the legal system than we had been taught in case books. And then I realized that in addition to my scholarship when I left these communities, they still had a substantial lack of access to legal services, which was going to further place obstacles in their way of maintaining whatever property rights they had. So then I kind of, on the side, it was kind of crazy, folks thought, I developed a like summer clinical or externship program where I placed law students to work for many disadvantaged communities, mostly in rural America, but it was in the rural South, it was in Indian country, it was in Appalachia, it was on the Texas-Mexico border, and part of that experience, is I didn't just want the students to have this kind of missionary complex, where they were working in New York or Chicago or wherever they were working and just working from a distance, I actually required the students to live in the very communities that they were serving so that they could actually have, walk a mile in the shoes of the people that they were serving, and my idea was in addition to the technical experience, that they would, their knowledge of the world in general of the world, that many people on this planet live, who are not privileged would be expanded, and then maybe that would serve as a spark for at least a subset of them to devote their lives, to try and to address the challenges that many disadvantaged people who have a lack of access to basic resources face, so that's kind of, I'd say three of my goals.

- Wow, so on the topic of devoting your life's work, I know we have a lot of graduating seniors and young alumni who are currently thinking about how turn their passions into a job. So for those who struggle with turning their passions into a vocation, you both have done so, so how do you feel or what do you feel enabled you to do so, and Professor Mitchell, would you like to start with that?

- Sure, so I think, in my case. I'm sorry about that ping there, but you know, in my case some of the difficulties I had with my family and some of those difficulties that caused, it actually in some ways, ironically, I think, nothing that I'd recommend for necessarily everybody else, but it kind of got me off the track, 'cause, just being, I want to be super successful, not necessarily thinking broader, except for I want to be at the top, whatever the top meant. So it kind of got me off of this very kind of pre-professional track just being competitive for competitive sake, and it kind of, you know, it kind of knocked me down and it kind of stripped my ego out of the process. And when I kind of got knocked off of that track, I actually did start thinking about some broader things, I mean, I had experienced things in my life that I didn't think I was going to experience when I was younger. They were tough, but it also made me realize there's a whole bunch of good people in this society, who have had half the opportunities I've had, right, this is their daily experience, what I'm experiencing, and I knew at that time that it wouldn't, in my case last forever, so I think it's just that, you know, taking the ego out, really kind of doing things for the right reasons, developing a sense of concern for others outside of yourself. But, you know, and then I think when I had these other experiences that just further kind of stimulated. I had experience when I was in college, junior year, my grandfather died in Newark New Jersey. For a variety of reasons I had never met my extended family and my father was estranged from his father, but he asked me to go to my grandfather's funeral in Newark. And that part of our family truly lives on the other side of the tracks, I mean, they have lived in desperately poor circumstances, and I just spending the time with them, just really was one of those But For the Grace, There Go I moments, they had photos going back to America's origin, Southwest Georgia, where family's from, and where they were enslaved, and Jim Crow, and I think that just really built this kind of passion. But the passion by itself is not sufficient. One of the things that I also learned is, one needs mentors, and I was fortunate to have a number of mentors in my life, some were Black Alums at Amherst who I met and befriended, Dr. Tuffy Simpkins and his wife, Diane, I could name a number of Alums, but two of my professors at Howard law school, were Michael Newsome and George Johnson were Black Alums from Amherst who very much looked after me, helped, they were resources for me, as I was kind of thinking about what I wanted to do with my professional career. And so I very much have cultivated this group of mentors during my life, that when I was at a crossroads I can go to, and say, listen let me run some stuff by you and get your input. And then, you know, I don't, for me, I'm just incredibly resilient, and I don't know how you tell somebody or you get somebody to be resilient, but I never, when I get knocked down, I'm just, I see it as a temporary setback and get back up, 'cause I know what I, I know what the goal is, and I know it sometimes can be a long, windy road, but I ultimately have faith, as Kellie mentioned herself, is I'm kind of an optimist. I'm a pragmatic optimist, the way I kind of describe it.

- Well, yeah, passion, that's the only way you can continue in a area that people just look at you and say, well, what are you doing? I think one of the things that Amherst taught me, or I've learned when I got there, is I was always, as I mentioned, surrounded by artists of all kinds, dancers, poets, painters, et cetera, and mostly many people of color, when I got to college, and as I said, looking at the books, people didn't even know these people existed. I was like, wait a minute, hey wait, and so I realized that this was something real and that I was uniquely positioned to do this because I knew it, and I trained myself. I started out with doing exhibitions and said I wanted to go onto the next level to get right to the top, did that, then I said, hmm, well maybe teaching isn't that bad, I'll do that too, and just along the way, part of it was trying to get as many people to know about this as possible, and it also allowed me to do the things I wanted to do as a diplomat in the end, travel, speak languages, I've done shows in Brazil, I've done shows in South Africa, in London, as well as all across the United States, and you know, my students look at me like, why would you give that up to just teach, that seems kind of boring, and I said, well, because you can do it now. You can do it now, and part of my teaching is not only in the classroom, which is exciting, but to have to mentor younger people on projects, to get people writing texts for my projects, or being an assistant on the project, to work on my books with me, I mean, I think all of these experiences students really hunger for in the end, so, and there's a lot of work to do. But I also still enjoy it very much, and really, I enjoy, as I said, seeing how the field, this field is changing and really it's, I'd have to say, it's because of protests, Black Lives Matter, because, again, as I mentioned, in the sixties when things started to change at another point, for let's just say African-American artists, it was because of protests, it was because people were protesting the museums. I think people don't really realize that the reason why we have free nights at museums is because artists protested, because they said some people can't afford these fees and they need to see this, and other people said, you know what, we're taxpayers. You can't have a museum that's all white men, it's not going to, we're paying taxes too. You've got to change that. All the protests now, where we're talking about, aspects of voter suppression and corporations weighing in, well museums, these artists made the museums weigh-in to this because of, you know, they were taxpayers, and that's when things changed. But they didn't change, they changed to a certain point. Oops, sorry about that, and so, now what I see in terms of what's happening, in 2020, the museums have changed again, and so, and they've gone further and they've realized that the diversity aspect is with the people who work there. While I had my, you know, once I got my PhD and I was working as a professor, I still was doing a lot of shows, I did shows at the Brooklyn Museum, I did shows at the Hammer Museum, Now Dig This, which won a lot of awards, I did shows at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and, you know, for the mainstream institutions or larger institutions, it was because they had nobody doing these kinds of, with this kind of ideas. For me now, there are so many more people out there, that I can kind of retire from that, although people say, okay, when is your next show, but there are just so many new young voices and new ideas to look at. Again, the ideas of gender parity, and LGBTQ issues in museums, in art, in art history, that is a new horizon that our scholarship needs to address as well. Those are stories that haven't been told. So I think so much has come out of this last year that is again, shining the light on culture and how culture has to expand and add new voices, and I'm excited about those things and possibilities.

- Yeah, can I just say, share one thing also, 'cause.

- Yeah.

- About just the critical importance of having a passion. worked at a large law firm in Washington, DC., and a lot of type A people, a lot of people who had been 4.0 students, they had every kind of the elite kind of qualification, but I didn't find a number of folks I work with, if you sat down and said, well what are you passionate about, they really struggled. They were, you know, I'm passionate about being considered successful, but it, you know, if you kind of went beyond that, a lot of them, fundamentally, you're talking about people in their mid to late twenties, thirties, could not fundamentally answer that question, I mean, and so for me, I left Washington, DC., where I had practiced, to do this fellowship at Wisconsin, I remember a partner at the firm said, he's trying to get me to stay there, I said, I want to go this academic route. I was very polite. But he said, oh, that's great, 'cause the firm I worked at, turns out if you look at law professors in the country who have worked in a large law firm, more have worked at that law firm, so it was not an unusual thing for people to leave the firm to become a law professor. So he said, oh, that's great, so what are you interested in studying, 'cause it was a two year master's program where you wrote a lengthy thesis. I said, well, I'm very interested in the challenges that African-American families have had in terms of maintaining their land in the rural South, and the partner said, he looked shocked, and he said, you know, what you've just described is what we refer to as career suicide. Nobody leaves this super elite firm to go try to be a law professor to do whatever that is you've just said, and obviously you're burnt out. You need to go to the Caribbean, lay up on a beach for three weeks, and then come back to Washington, DC., in a frame of mind to make quote unquote, appropriate career decisions. And I just remember driving out from DC., to Madison, Wisconsin to start my LLM program, my master's program, thinking my God, could I have picked a more irrelevant marginal fringe issue? It was a program that most people became law professors, and I was like, I think I told somebody before that, I, you know, basically I called my friends and said I'd be lucky when this program is over, to get an interview at YMCA night law school in central Mississippi, but for whatever reason, I'm passionate about these issues. I love going to the rural South and sitting in people's homes, or at churches, or diners, and talking to them. I think that was my, the anthropologist side me or the sociologist I couldn't take advantage of it at Amherst, and so I said, I just love using my critical thinking skills, but also being on the ground, meeting with people, learning about their lives, learning about the history. You know, the interesting thing is, I ended up finding out that, well maybe not in the large law firm world it was valued, but you know, within a couple of years, some of the work I was doing was considered pathbreaking and next thing I know, I'm getting vice-presidents at the Ford foundation asking me to come to New York and meet with them, which I totally didn't see that happening, right. And so, most of the things, based upon where the baseline was, on in terms of the feedback I was getting in DC., just didn't seem possible, but it turns out that there were many other stakeholders who had different kinds of value structures or interests, and so, just the point is, you got to have confidence, and you got to enjoy what you're doing and not be thinking about what are the accolades that you're going to get from that work. Sometimes the accolades happen, sometimes they don't, but you should just enjoy what you're doing because you feel like you're living your own life, you're pursuing your passions and you're making a contribution in whatever way that may be.

- Wow, I am so glad that you did not listen to that partner for one. Well, before we do some of my last few questions, I do want to remind the audience that you can drop your own questions in Q&A box, and we will get to them in just a few minutes, but before then I, Professor Jones, you did mention your exhibition, Now Dig This, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and it seems to bridge these disciplines, your disciplines of Art History and Archeology, a very Amherst combination. So what are your thoughts on the contemporary movement to take down confederate monuments and what is the role of art in protest?

- Well, that's a great question, and I know if my sister is looking on tonight, she'll be saying, aha, somebody's going to get you with that monument question. Well, the role of art in protest goes back, of course centuries, you know, if we think of even the Mexican Revolution for independence from Spain. Part of that was people marching with an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, right, as their symbol. So art has always been a part of symbolizing what change means, and if we go, you know, we can look at the '30s where you have, in this country, social realism, which was about showing the American worker, the working body of men and women, to the '60s where you have the great poster movement, so obviously, you know, art is part of change, always, just if you think of the idea of the poster itself, what people, the placards that people carry, even with our current situation with Black Lives Matter, and the George Floyd assassination, shall we just say, that situation, you can see all the murals all over the world that have come about with his image on it. Black Lives Matter in Brazil, Vidas Negras Importam, with images of George Floyd, so, I mean, you just keep going. Now, we can turn to the Confederate monuments. Early on in that kind of debate, my idea was that you can really just move them out of the public eye and into their own precinct. That was one thinking that I had. Well, first of all, let's start with the idea that we need more monuments to more people. Let's just start there. But then I thought, okay, some of these, as an art historian, some of these images have been made by people who are well-known American artists, maybe we should put them somewhere. But I think after last summer, what became clear to me is that people will continue to use those. Well, I'll back up slightly to say, my thinking in that is, if you go there and start removing these images all together, it's a slippery slope to get to removing Frederick Douglas, say in Rochester, which started to happen last year also, where people are saying, other monuments that we might be more interested in, or I might be more interested in, that are not about hate per se, some other people see in another way. So you would have a slippery slope to that, but I think now, I see no matter where you move images of hate, people may rally around them. So I'm still somewhat confused about it. First, I'll just say that we need more, and then I do think maybe some of these, maybe keep just one or two, but it's, yeah, it's a challenging situation, but let's start with, let's have more images of this country, what it really is to represent our world and deal with those. Take those other things down. We'll deal with them. That's where I am. I'm still thinking.

- Still a great response, and I agree with you, we have to have more monuments to our history heroes and the true history of the United States. So we're actually going to dive into an audience question with my last question, not the last question of the night, but audience member, actually great minds think alike, we had the same question. Renee, class of '06, said, what do you think of Biden's relief package which gave $1 billion of 9 billion total to Black owned farms which have declined to less than 40,000 from 1,000,000 in 1920. So of course this is to you, Professor Mitchell.

- Yes, I have to say that I'm very hopeful about the Biden administration, I was on one of their policy committees looking at challenges that Black, indigenous, other people of color farmers and landowners faced during the election. But what I've seen in the administration is really the most robust attempt to address decades long systemic discrimination against Black farmers and landowners. So it's both the administration, so, it was actually the COVID bill was a $5 billion, $4 billion dollars of debt relief, a billion dollars to use for other programs or services. I've actually, was in a meeting with the secretary [unclear], and his special senior advisor for racial equity a few weeks ago, kind of helping, working with them to think about how that might can best be spent. But also you have in Congress, you have Corey Booker, Senator Booker, Senator Gillibrand, and Senator Warren, introduced a bill called The Justice for Black Farmers Act, which also is the most expansive attempt to address the hundred years of discrimination against Black farmers. That bill won't pass as a whole, but it actually is currently informing the USDA and parts of it could pass, and other states are taking that up, so the focus on addressing this, you know, many, many, many decades of unbroken discrimination, is the most robust attempt, there's, so I think that there's some, you know, there's some real excitement. The one thing I will say, is that I'm part of a research team that has looked at the economic consequences of this massive loss of Black owned agricultural land, one of the people on it is Darrick Hamilton, who's a leading public intellectual at the youth school, and some others, and our preliminary estimate of the impact on Black wealth of this loss of land is 300 billion, that's just the land itself. We are continuing that study to look at the impacts of losing that land in terms of not having property as collateral to send your kids to for higher education and other impacts, and that, kind of a more expanded estimate, is going to be at least 300 billion, maybe 500 billion or more. So it's great what the Biden administration is doing now, but I also think we need to have a reckoning of what is the true scope of harm that had been done, to not just Black farmers but the Black community in general, as a result of this discrimination against Black farmers and landowners.

- Thank you. That was amazing. So we are embarking on the start of Black Alumni Week, and we have a question here from the audience that says, when you think of your time at Amherst, what is your most vivid memory? Either of you can answer that one and it can fall into any bin of memories.

- Wow. I think I have too many, but I, you know, just the place. I came from new York's lower East side, not that I had never been to the country, but, and Amherst was a little bit more rural at that time, not as ex-urban per se, I just think spending time with my friends who I mentioned, Wendy Blair, Inez Corbello, Vicki Casa, and others, and just learning about myself and what my purpose would be and developing that passion. I think if anything, we could talk about fun little events we had, but I think the core of the memory at this point is about how I made myself into the person that I am today through this experience and with great friends along the way, always.

- Yeah, I think for me, just kind of growing up, I grew up in San Francisco. You know, my parents were professionals. I would describe it as, we lived on, my experience with Black community, we were on the outskirts. My dad was a doctor who had, most of his patients were poor African-Americans, but in terms of my direct experience, and I think for Amherst, to me to come and have the kind of the group of Black students in all their talents, academic talents, humor, this kind of sense of the community. Amherst was the first time I ever had a Black teacher, never had had that growing up, and then the Alums, and learning about the history. And I think this manifested, I mean, I think, this kind of came together during Black Alumni Weekend, which was weekend, right, not week, and I just thought the just incredible collection of talents, the humor, the dance, the music. And I remember that. I think the second thing, just in terms of my activism was a friend of mine who worked in the Dean's office told me about a meeting the Board of Trustees was having at the Lord Jeff, and essentially that they were there to study, to evaluate the racial climate on campus, but there were not many students of color invited to that, and so I kind of snuck into the meeting and by the end of the meeting I think one of the members of the Board of Trustees, I think it was CEO of the Bank of Boston said, listen, I really hear your issues. I'm committed to changing them, and he gave me his business card with his personal home number and said, we're going to work through this, call me anytime, and we did.

- Wow, that's incredible, and speaking of student activism now it's no longer the Lord Jeff but Boltwood Inn.

- What is it?

- The Boltwood Inn. The Boltwood Inn now, yeah. So now we have another question from class of '81, I think Professor Jones, you'll recognize this name, Vicki Kassa asks. How has mentorship, either to you or by you, been a part of your journey, and Professor Jones, would you like to start with that one?

- Yes, well, Vicki Kassa is a teacher, she's just getting ready to retire this year, amazing, so she's really knows about mentorship. Yeah, I'd say the professors that mentored me, Andrea Benton Rushing, Doug Davidson, Asa Davis, Jim Maraniss, those people, and a lot of my bosses, shall we say, my supervisors going forward in the museum world, were all women. Kathy Hallbreich, Mary Schmidt Campbell. Kathy Hallbreich was at Walker Art Center, Mary Schmidt Campbell at Studio Museum in Harlem, that kind of having a strong female role models in executive positions I think was amazing. You know, I think mentorship, yeah that's what you do, when somebody signs up to do their PhD with me, I am all in with them and whatever they need, whatever letter they need, because it's really about people following their passion for what they need to do, and even, of course I've mentored people who are not working with me at Columbia University, but elsewhere. So I really believe in that, because I think that that's a part of how this thing is driven, as Thomas has pointed out, but shout out to Los Angeles and Victoria Kassa.

- Professor Mitchell?

- Yeah, so I think that, earlier, I indicated that if you want to make meaningful change you've got to have passion, but you also have to have mentors, and I think Amherst, as I mentioned there, sometimes through Black Alumni Weekend, I actually got Black alums who ended up becoming mentors for me, and I think that increased my sense of responsibility for paying it forward when I would get into position to mentor other people. There's also, I mentioned this LLM program at the University of Wisconsin I went to, it was founded by the University of Wisconsin Law School's first minority professor, first African-American Professor, just a giant, a guy named Jim Jones, who really became a hero of mine in terms of developing, I mean, in all kinds of ways, but it's represents the most, the longest lasting pipeline program in existence, it's existed since 1972, to try to diversify the faculty at law schools all across the country. And so I just think that between these mentors and observing their examples and learning at their feet, I just recognized that it's my responsibility to mentor other folks, to, you know, help them, like, as I said, realize their full potential, but with no fixed notion of what path they need to take, but just try to help expose them to things that they maybe hadn't been exposed to, be there for them when they wanted professional advice, try to give them the cost and the benefits of the various options that they have laid out for me, and then try to sometime help build their networks by introducing them to people in important positions I know in a variety of different realms. So I just think that that's just key that notion of paying that forward.

- Yes, yes, paying it forward is so important, I, as I graduate Amherst, I hope to do that for future classes. Well, I'm keeping my eye on the clock and I see that our time is coming to a close, so I'm going to ask you guys one last question, and that question is, what brings you both hope, both in your scholarship and in the day-to-day? Professor Mitchell, would you like to start or either one of you, whoever feels compelled.

- Kellie, you want to go?

- I'll jump in, you know, people like yourself, Ayo, you got me on this call today, you know because I'd known Ayo and then all of a sudden she's graduating from Amherst as a neuroscience major. What? So, that, I mean, I think about teaching, that is the most wonderful part is to see people do their thing, do their passion. I always tell people when, I'm not one of those professors that tells you what to write your dissertation on, because you're in the future, you're seeing things about the world that I don't even see yet, so I'm very happy to, you know, what brings me hope is young people, and I'm going to shout out Jeremy Thomas, the New Rhodes Scholar. Hello. Fantastic.

- I would say with me, you asked about my scholarship, so when I started, a little more than 20 years ago, 20, almost 25 years ago, what I was studying was considered backwater, the fringe, the marginal, in legal academia, in property law scholarship. I've been very happy to see that, at least in terms of the interest in these issues, they've grown. There's far more casebooks and textbooks now, that at least in parts of the course actually talk about these issues, talk about the perhaps differential experience folks who are racial minorities or ethnic minorities face, then it was when I started, I don't want to say it's nirvana, believe me, there's so much more work that needs to be done, but there's actually some issue that had been invisible and now are kind of being addressed. And then also I realized that outside of the legal academia, where sometimes can have a kind of a narrow wavelength, that there are many other stakeholders in the nonprofit world and state and local governments and others that really do have an incredible interest in this, that's just something I just never would've thought would have been the case. And then I think just in the personal, I think there's a couple things. One, in my professional work, the legal reform of this particular property law that responsible for substantial loss of property on African-Americans and others, was considered, was a centuries old law, it was considered that it could never be changed, and the fundamental notion was, yeah, it's unjust but those who are negatively impacted fundamentally lack political and economic power, so the assumption was, what state legislature, especially in the South, is going to change this law to benefit African-Americans and others, you know, and, you know, as I indicated, there's eight Southern states, and in my work, and this surprises me, I've, there's equal number of red states and blue states that have enacted an equal number of legislators who are Republican and Democrat, have been sponsors of my bill, and at some level, surprisingly, I've been able to have some very human conversations with them and rational conversations where I've been able, they've given me the opportunity to make the case, which, that does surprise me. The second thing is, five years ago there, it seemed that all we were going to do is write the history of how Black people, in terms of owning land or farms, became extent, that nothing could be done, and there's just an amazing outburst in the last few years of this social movement of all kinds of organizations, rural and urban and sometimes urban farming that just seemed unimaginable like a few years ago, and that gives me hope. In some ways it seemed like it came out of nowhere. And then last thing, like Kellie said, I'll just do it the personal. I have a 10 year old daughter, and you know, it's not that she doesn't have her challenges and there are challenges that are raised, but when I look at her group of friends, it's a very diverse group of friends, and I see how they kind of interact. It does give me some hope that there can be a greater sense of kind of unity, than maybe in the past, I don't know, right, like I said, I'm a pragmatic optimist. I do see some of the racial issues she faces, but to me it represents progress at least from the past.

- Well, I want to thank you both for such a wonderful evening for your insightful responses and what an extraordinary way to kick off Black Alumni Weekend, I also do want to extend my thanks to the executive board of the Black Student Union, with special thanks to Jeremy Thomas, E.J. Collins, and Kalaria Okali. I want to thank the president's office and alumni and parent programming, and last but not least, I want to thank you all the audience for tuning in tonight, being a part of our conversation. I hope everyone has a great night. Thank you.

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 12:00:00 +0000|April 19, 2021

Keynote Speaker Dr. Angela Y. Davis

rdiehl — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 18:42:00 +0000

Keynote Speaker Dr. Angela Y. Davis Roberta L. Diehl Wednesday, 4/21/2021, at 2:42 PM

Keynote Speaker Dr. Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz; moderated by Kimberly Bain '14, John Holmes Assistant Professor in the Humanities, Tufts University.

Purple

Gray

Video Callout

April 15, 2021

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 12:00:00 +0000|April 21, 2021

[Transcript of Angela Davis]

rdiehl — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 18:43:00 +0000

Roberta L. Diehl Wednesday, 4/21/2021, at 2:43 PM

Purple

Gray

Expandable Article (Compact)

Text

Click to open the transcript of Angela Davis

- Good evening. Thank you all for joining us tonight. My name is Jeremy Thomas, Amherst College Class of 2021. I'm our current student body president, and former chair of the Black Student Union. I'd like to begin this event by acknowledging that Amherst stands on Nonotuck land. I'd also like to acknowledge our neighboring indigenous nations, the Nipmuc and the Wampanoag to the East, the Mohegan and the Pequot to the South, the Mohican to the West, and the Abenaki to the North. We cannot begin this event without acknowledging the slew of police killings in the past week alone. 20-year-old Daunte Wright, 13-year-old Adam Toledo, and each and every one of the many thousands gone deserve justice. Justice is acknowledging that the police cannot be reformed, and justice means that the police must be abolished. I would be similarly remiss not to acknowledge the recent work of the Black Student Union. On Tuesday, 400 students joined the Black Student Union in an organized walkout to demand that the college takes seriously the proposition that Black minds matter, take seriously its promise to Terras Irradient, and to make Amherst a campus worthy of all of its students, but especially, its Black students. Once again, welcome to the spectacular evening and to Black Alumni Week. Tonight, as you know, we are in for a treat, a conversation between Dr. Kimberly Bain and Dr. Angela Davis. This evening would not have been possible without the work of many people, and I extend my gratitude on behalf of the Black Student Union to student activities, the Multicultural Resource Center, Traci Wolf, Carol Allman-Morton, and the BSU's event coordinators, Kalaria Okali and Ernest Collins. Black students alumni, please do not forget to join us throughout the week, and all of the spectacular events we have planned. Without further ado, let's begin. Dr. Kimberly Bain is the John Holmes Assistant Professor in Humanities at Tufts University. She received her BA in English and Asian languages and civilizations from Amherst College in 2014. She went on to earn a PhD in English and interdisciplinary humanistic study from Princeton University. In her scholarly work, her most pressing and urgent concerns have consolidated around the questions of the history, theory, and philosophy of the African diaspora, race, gender, environmental and medical racism, and Black arts and letters. Her first book project entitled "On Black Breath" take seriously the charge of I can't breathe, and considers breath as more than mere metaphor rather as also a somatic and socio-political phenomenon that has resonance in the wake of enslavement to the contemporary moment. Her second book project entitled "Dirt, Soil and Other Matters" built on her first projects methodological commitments to multi-temporal and non-chronological avenues of inquiry that trace the development and deployment of the mundane, revising the impulse through the middle passage as the singular heuristic for understanding black movement, migration, and mobility throughout history. She turns to dirt for understanding contemporary Black diasporic relations. Dr. Bain, I turn it over to you.

- Thank you so much, Jeremy, for that wonderful welcome and also, you know, description of my own work. I really appreciate it. So to begin, I'd like to offer land acknowledgement. So the land from which I join you all today is the traditional unceded territory of the Mashpee Wampanoag, Aquinnah Wampanoag, Nipmuc and Massachusetts people who have stood at this land for hundreds of generations. Today, Boston is home to thousands of indigenous people from across Turtle Island, and I am grateful for the opportunity to live and work here, yet the painful history of genocide and forced occupation of their territory remains unresolved. The repeated violations of sovereignty territory and water perpetuated and perpetrated by invaders that have impacted the original inhabitants of this land for hundreds of years demands reparations. But the promise of justice does not need to come in a different time and place. It can begin here and now. I'd like to offer a couple of logistical announcements before we really begin, and I get to invite our wonderful esteemed guest to be in conversation. Today's conversation will have a Q&A. At the very bottom of the screen, if you look at the live submissions area, it's serving next to the boxing next to the live street theme. If you have questions or if you'd like to drop comments, you're welcome to do so. Throughout the conversation, we will be collecting them, and then at the end of the conversation, we'll have time to actually respond to some of them. So I really do encourage you all, even if it's a sort of just a hype statement, or if you'd just like to drop a comment or a question, please do so. Tonight's conversation is going to be, I think, a really wonderful one. I'm going to be in conversation with Angela Davis or more like I get the opportunity and the beautiful chance to be in conversation with Angela Davis, and I think the conversation is meant to be particularly relevant for today's issues, I think, you know, the recent killings of Daunte Wright, as Jeremy pointed out, the ongoing trial of Derek Chauvin, the extreme police brutality and violence that has been ongoing in this country for hundreds of years, I think is something that's really going to be centering a lot of the discussions and the questions we're going to be addressing today. And I hope you all can have some sort of input in it. So I really do encourage you all to drop questions and comments. But without further ado, I want to introduce our guest, the wonderful, esteemable, amazing, Angela Davis. So Angela Davis is a feminist and a writer first and foremost. Through her activism and her scholarship over many decades, Dr. Davis has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world. Her work as an educator, both at the university level and in the larger public sphere has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice. Professor Davis' teaching career has taken her in very far ranging places from San Francisco State University, to Mills College, to UC Berkeley. She has also taught at UCLA, FAFSA, Syracuse University, the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University. And, you know, the mentioning of all the different institutions she has taught at is actually sort of showing the kinds of what Octavia Butler would call earthseed that she spreads, you know? She is spreading a sort of, I think, way of moving through the world of seeing abolitionist impulse through different institutions and I think that's really amazing and something that I'm really excited to talk more about. Most recently, she spent 15 years at the University of California Santa Cruz where she's now the distinguished professor emerita of history of consciousness, an interdisciplinary PhD program, and of feminist studies. Angela Davis is the author of 10 books and has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. In recent years, a persistent theme of her work has been a range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws upon her own experiences in their early seventies as a person who spent 18 months in jail and on trial after being placed on the FBI's 10 most wanted list. She has also conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender, and imprisonment. And her recent books include "Abolition and Democracy" and "Are Prisons Obsolete?" about the abolition of the prison industrial complex, a new edition of the narrative life of Frederick Douglas, and a collection of essays entitled "The Meaning of Freedom". Most recent book of essays called "Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement" was published in February of 2016. She is a founding member of the Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex. Internationally, she's affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia, that works in solidarity with women in prison. And like so many educators, Professor Davis is especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system then to the educational institutions. And she has really helped to populize the notion of a prison industrial complex, and she now urges her audiences, which is going to be us tonight, to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons, and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement. So I hope you can all join me in welcoming Angela Davis, despite us not being able to all see each other. And Professor Davis, thank you so much for being in conversation with us, for being here tonight. I know it's been, I mean, for so many of us, it's been a, it's not just been a week. It's been a number of decades. It's been a while that we've been really working through the questions and the pain and I think the trauma of what it is to be in a society that really is so embedded in its carceral logics. And so I wanted to actually sort of begin the conversation by having us think a little bit about what abolition means, right? What does it look like today? What does it look like for our futures? Because personally, I think of myself as deeply pessimist, but a pessimist with a lot of optimism, and my pessimism comes from optimism, and that optimism is that there is a hope, there is a sort of abolitionist's issue we can turn to. But I want to just open it up and ask you, what does abolition look like for you? What does it sound like? What does it move like? What does it feel like? What could it be as we're thinking about the sort of current moment, but also where we can go in the future?

- Well, that's a very big question to begin with. We could probably spend the rest of the hour talking about the meaning of abolition. And I should tell you that I just submitted a manuscript with my three collaborators for a small book that's entitled "Abolition. Feminism. Now." And in the course of writing that book, first of all, it's really hard to write with four people. And I think as scholars, we tend to assume that the work is solitary work, and it's so important to have the experience of working with others, of constantly discussing and doing collective research. It's been an amazing experience, and we still love each other.

- That's very rare. That's very hard to find, you know, working together with folks, it's just like things were up together, you know?

- You know, but I think it's because all four of us, and it's Beth Richie, Erica Meiners, Gina Dent, and myself, have been involved for a very long time in these movements. So it's not simply our ideas as individuals, it's about attempting to generate the collective notion of what it means to struggle for abolition. But I would say, first of all, that people have to recall that abolition has been proposed within various contexts. You know, there was this struggle against slavery, and there were actually people who argued that slavery could be reformed, that it could be transformed into a humane institution, that you could get the masters to be better masters. And of course the abolitionists argued that slavery is not an institution that can be reformed. It has to be abolished in order for us to be able to move in the direction of some kind of democracy. Yeah. The abolitionist movements that have been in existence for a long time around capital punishment. You know, there are those who argue that well, capital punishment can be reformed. We can meet our capital punishment on a basis of equality. We can execute as many white people as we do black people.

- So that's not a problem. I'm sure. Right, right, right.

- But obviously, that makes no sense at all. And so we're applying the same kind of logic to the prison system to the existing system of policing. And we know that there have been calls to reform the prison system for the entire duration of the history of the prison as the dominant mode of punishment. And the response to calls for reform perhaps there's been some changes, but if one looks at the larger picture, one sees that what has been produced throughout this history is a more permanent institution, is a more repressive institution, is a more racist institution. And as a matter of fact, the reforms have precisely helped to consolidate an institution that really is not capable of meaningful reforms. And the same thing is true of the police. There have been efforts to reform the police ever since the origin of the institution of the police, and we have to remember that the origins are actually in this country in slavery, the slave patrollers. So, what we say is that if we want a better world, we will have to dismantle these institutions, and not so much replace them because then people think that we're using the footprint of the prison or the footprint of policing. What we're suggesting is that society has to be differently organized in order that we create conditions that no longer require the existence of these institutions of violence. So to be an abolitionist is to call for a better world, housing and healthcare and education, and all of the things that human beings need, things that will hopefully ultimately make it unnecessary to use such a violent institution. So it's about a revolutionary trajectory. At the same time, and I'm going to make one other comment, because this has the potential of taking up all the time.

- Yeah.

- You know, abolitionism is also a way of being, a way of organizing. It requires recognizing that the future can be different. But at the same time that we have to ask ourselves, how have we been affected by the existence of these institutions? How have we internalized the ideologies and the impulses associated with these institutions? And how can we begin to extricate impulses for retribution from our own emotional makeup? So it's about changing ourselves as we go about changing the world.

- Yeah. I mean, I really love that too, because you know, one of the things I frequently tell my students is abolition is a project of ending the world. And that world is the world that we live in and its logics, but also it's like the worlds that we have invited into ourselves. We have to invite new ones, right? Like creating new ones. And so I love that what you're seeing, like it is about a trajectory that we're on, and in order to get there, it's actually a process, an ongoing process. It's hard work, it's labor. It is going to be painful at times, but that's what growth is, you know, that is what emerging from certain kinds of carceral logic means. Like in order to do that, you have to actually do hard work and it has to be constant, you know? And you can think about, I mean, just even thinking back to the Black Lives Matter protests of last summer, right? Where thousands and millions of people, not just in the US, but also across the globe were marching in solidarity and protesting the sort of murder of George Floyd, and then sort of several months later where people became fatigued and sort of just didn't find the sort of same impetus and reminding folks of how actually this is a long haul process that we're in. It's not just simply the one march we have to think about, but actually extend this as a long-term goal of our lives. It's like work that we've got to do. I was actually thinking as you were talking, one of the things that has been really, well, one of things I think you draw out in your book in "Freedom Is a Constant Struggle" and sort of Ferguson and Palestine, but I think also has been sort of caught up of the longer as you saw revolutionary trajectory, has been sort of global coalition building, the necessity of that. We can't just sort of in a reduced or enclosed sense of what it is to be within a nation. We can't think of us ourselves as soon as sort of siloed within certain nations. We have to actually think across borders. We have to sort of break down, I think the divides that sort of have built up by virtue of imperialism, by virtue of et cetera, right? And I don't know, I've been thinking a lot about that in particular, about how we can understand and actually produce space for coalition building. That's not just within sort of national boundaries but across borders that are international across language even when it's not really necessarily urgent to our immediate lives. So it doesn't feel urgent. I think it's always urgent to our lives even if we don't recognize it, when it doesn't feel urgent, right? And what does that look like? Right? And in particular, does something like social media provide a space for that, or does it actually feel us in certain crucial moments? I think these are questions that people were struggling with way long ago. And I think in definitely in the sixties, seventies, eighties, certainly in the fifties, when you have the Bandung Conference, you know, when you have all of these like Black intellectuals were meeting together, and also not just black and collaterals from the US and the Caribbean, but also meeting up with intellectuals and revolutionaries in Asia, et cetera. So I wanted to know, like what is your thought about how we think about abolitionists, or abolition of carceral logics, abolition of racism, et cetera, all these things? How does that look in a global scale, right? How do we build community across nation? How do we build community across language? Are there platforms we're building that right now? Are they providing the sort of ground that we need to actually get traction, or are they, you know, impediments? And I can think of, there are many impediments the way that that's just how capital works. Capitalism does its job of like ensuring that how any sort of resistance that we might form is slowly incorporated in it's machinations. But I just want us to know, like what are your thoughts about how the contemporary, and particularly the contemporary moment, how does global networking? How does global coalition building really function? Is it really functioning in any way that's different perhaps than, you know, 60, seventies, eighties?

- Well, of course, I think it's rather ironic that during this era when we have the technological capacity to communicate with ease across oceans, across borders, we don't do nearly as much of that work of connecting as was done in the forties and the fifties and the sixties when basically everything had to be done through snail mail, when it was too expensive to make long distance calls. There was a vibrant internationalism. Of course it had to do with the fact that there were communist parties all over the world, and those communist parties, you know, had connections with each other even if they had to communicate by letter. But there were many international conferences and agendas that were agendas for peace for example. When one considers the role that women's organizations played in struggling for peace and the role that Black women, you know, like Lorraine Hansberry and Claudia Jones and so many others had and these international movements. So it's rather ironic that we have to build a new infrastructure, it seems to me, for internationalism that is different from the past, because of course, we don't have the same kinds of party infrastructures. But at the same time, I think that if we make the effort, it's not difficult to reach out and connect with people in other places. I mean, for example, I'm a part of a project that is headquartered in Chicago. And so we were talking about the fact that we needed some international dimension. All we really had to do was get in touch with some people in Brazil, because there's a huge movement against police violence, there's a huge Black fairness movement in Brazil. And I don't understand why we don't have more interrelationalities with those movements. But we can do it, and it's absolutely necessary. We should recognize that there is a very strong movement against racist police violence in France now. And as a matter of fact, France is in the process of examining its long history of using universalisms as a way to prevent people from thinking about the concrete and the ideological impact of racism and Islamophobia. So I think that we in this country could benefit from participating in those debates and watching the ways in which other people engage in struggles against the militarization of the police. Palestine is another question that if we want to know where this militarization of police departments all over the country emanates from, you know, look at the role that Israel has played in training police departments to engage in the same kind of maneuvers that ended up killing George Floyd. So absolutely, I think internationalism is so important. There is so many issues around immigrants, you know, ways in which we have to think about protecting the planet, or preserving this planet as a place that will be around for the next period so that if we win any of these social justice struggles, there will be a place for people to be able to enjoy those victories.

- You're so right. All right? Literally, nothing that we're doing is going to actually make a difference if we don't have a natural earth to like actually land on and have at the other end of the day. And I'm also really glad you brought up France because of course, as you were saying, they've endured a long history of masking Islamophobia under the sort of guise and secularism. But also, if there's been a lot of, I guess, attribution of the sort of like revolutionary impulse. There are sort of protests that are on the streets right now in France. To universities in the US and leftist politics, you know, and sort of leftist professors who are out here, you know, spewing the sort of whatever agenda it might be and, France's ideas, like as it were. And so that really brings me into the question. And so as we're thinking about how do we build worldwide coalitions, one of the things that I think you have been so great about teaching others about, not just in your work, but in the actual practice of ideally, you know, existence, but I think also we can look back to history as sort of pointing to this as the importance of building communities of intellectual struggle as well where you're actually contributing ideas to each other, working through tough texts, thinking through these questions, and actually, that is actually the work of dreaming. The future is what abolition looks like on the other end. And I think the sort of radical imagination of those kinds of spaces is actually really crucial. And so I guess my question is sort of somewhat, there's a two part question to this then. So on the one hand we have this attack, not just in France, but also in the US on the university as a sort of site of reading, quote unquote, abolitionists leftists, you know, politics, and that being sort of downfall of civilization, et cetera, et cetera. We can think of all of the sort of skim on the taxes that are used. And so I guess, what is your thought? What do you think the role of the university is, or at least not even the university as an infrastructure, but rather spaces of learning and teaching in sort of revolutionary abolitionists, growth in revolutionary abolitionist practice. I think often [unclear] happen outside of the university, and I can think of, for example, Noname's Book Club, that is something that has really blown up recently, or not even that recently. I mean, it's been around for a little bit now. On Twitter where the [unclear] name is actually, you know, encouraging folks to join her in reading, you know, really crucial, important abolitionists black texts, you know, and then having conversations about it, and, you know, sending free books to folks who can't afford it otherwise. Sending books to those folks who are currently incarcerated. And so that's actually a space, I think, that is modeling certain kinds of genealogies of what it means to be in a coalition. What it means to be in community with others who are committed to sort of not just abolition of, you know, the sort of ending systems and structures, but also ending systems and structures that live within us within our sort of own responses to what, you know, the society does, our own responses, our own reactions to how we relate to others. But why do you think that space sort of fits into this? And I can think also too of the fact that unions were so crucial historically for sort of helping build the revolutionary impulse, you know, and the ideas of communism are really important. And now, you know, sort of the dismantling of unions has actually also dismantled those kinds of spaces. We can even think about how black spaces of sociality have been dismantled over the decades, right? And how those spaces are so crucial to developing certain kinds of ability, the ability to connect, to share networks of knowledge, to build new kinds of, you know, futures that we imagine. So what does that exist now? Like, are there spaces like that right now still going on? Where do people find them? Are they actually siloed or sort of secretive within or sort of working from the underground and institutions like the university? I'm thinking here of like [unclear] perhaps of the undercommons, right? Where are the undercommons where we can actually gather? What do they look like? And then also, if they are within the university at least in some parts, I don't think all of it, but if they're in some sort of small parts of the university, you know, where we have scholars and intellectuals who are also committed abolitionists, if there is attention, how do we rectify the tensions between I think those two positionalities of being with an intellectual who teaches theory, who talks, you know, about literature or who reads really difficult texts, what students, and then also what it means to be an abolitionist in the sense of trying to actually move systems, most systems of power. So it's kind of a two-part question there.

- Well, you know, first of all, intellectual work is absolutely essential.

- [Kimberley] Yeah.

- And in that respect, the work that we do within universities is essential. You know, I was talking to a group of students in the Black Student Union in Amherst before this event, and one of the points that I was trying to make was that we have to learn how to work within contradictions. We have to learn how to inhabit contradictions. We cannot allow conflict and contradiction to deter us from doing the work. And as a matter of fact, contradictions, as Audre Lorde pointed out, can often be productive and creative. And so as someone who has spent the vast majority of my life on the campuses of universities, you know, people often ask me, well, how can you spend time in such a reactionary space? And I pointed out, well, I've been, first of all, any space can be potentially a terrain for struggle. And so I see the university in the very first place as a terrain of struggle, struggle over ideas, struggle over who gets to participate in the production of ideas, struggle over the acknowledgement of the epistemological value of other spaces, and pointing out that, you know, sometimes the struggle for interdisciplinary programs is the revolutionary struggle on the campus or the university where the traditional disciplines are still the anchors of university education. And it's only been in the last 50 years or so that we've seen the development of really important interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge, Black studies programs, Indigenous studies programs, feminist studies, cultural studies, all, you know, all of those fields that have studies at the end. And I think that that struggle to guarantee that we preserve these new ways of engaging in the production of knowledge is absolutely essential because it also means that we can construct interdisciplinarity in a much broader fashion and a much more capacious way. And we can recognize that interdisciplinarity is not only about the existing disciplines, but it's about acknowledging other sites for the production of knowledge. And that, you know, for example, the field, critical prison studies, the foundational knowledge for that field comes from people who are incarcerated, intellectuals within prison. And I think we have to learn how to see the prison, this institution we want to abolish also as a site for the production of knowledge. Abolition as we know it today was really first raised dramatically during the uprising of the Attica brothers in 1971. So yeah. I think the university is valuable, but it's valuable to the extent that we acknowledge it as a site of subversion, a site of struggle, and intellectual struggle matters. I was happy to hear about the demonstration that took place last week at Amherst. Black minds matter. They, you know, [unclear] matter, knowledge matters. And knowledge actually should be connected to processes of transforming the world, because it seems to me the value of knowledge can be measured by the extent to which it helps us to create a better place, not only for humanity, but for all of our non-human companions and for the entire earth. So yeah. I think intellectual work is essential. We cannot succumb to the kind of anti-intellectualism that assumes that things happen, you know, simply because of a kind of action that is not informed by thought and by understanding and the kind of deep apprehension, not only of what is, but of what can be in the future.

- I want to snap the entire time you were talking. I mean, I've been wanting to snap the entire time, but you know, got to restrain myself from doing that. But, you know, you're still right. And I think about that because for I think so many of us, the question of imagination or like radical imagination, which I always turn to when I speak to my students, and also just thinking about my own sort of way of moving through what knowledge is, what epistemology is, what I'm learning and teaching is. Like, I think radical imagination can only emerge from struggle, and like radical imagination is necessary to think about what abolition is, and it's through the sort of struggle of reading and trying to improve. And it's sort of struggle of actually being in a room with others, right? If we allow it to be a space of struggle, if we allow it to be a space of growth that we actually can really build, I think really wonderful possibilities. And there's something I find to be extremely beautiful about those moments where you just sort of see and you're just like, ah, that was what I was missing, or ah, that was what was like the hump that I needed to get over in my own sort of thinking around what is possible, you know, and breaking the rules and all these things. And it really makes me think, you know, as a small side note. I was once teaching a class and I had my students. We were playing that board game Trouble. You know the board game Trouble? It's, you know, you've got different colors, and you've got a little button in the middle. You press and each person goes around the room and everything, and I think about that game a lot because I was playing with my students and I started these like arbitrary rules, you know? I was like, oh, you know, the blues can only go every five turns, or oh, the greens can only go every one turn, et cetera, et cetera. And they all went around and they just played the game and they all got frustrated as one does when there's inequality or when there's like, you know, unfair logics set up in a game because everybody's competitive, maybe they won't admit it. And at the end of the game, I was like so what you guys think, and everyone was like, oh, it's terrible, et cetera, et cetera. I was like, yeah, that's true, that's true. It's really bad, and be like, oh, this is a really poor analogy for like what it means to be in a racial inequality, you know, society has, yeah, that's true. It's analogy can be really terrible sometimes, et cetera. And then one of those students was just like, "But actually none of us had to actually listen to those rules you set up." And I was like, that's it, you know? Like, what does it mean to actually sit there and to rethink what the structures of the world is? And like, you can only do that I think when you're actually in conversation with others, whether it's on the page or with others in the classroom if we allow it to be that kind of space and that's just really beautiful. We're right about at time to start taking some questions and comments from the audience. But I wanted to ask one last one last question from me. This is my own personal one. Are there organizations or books that you want to hype for us as things to check out, to donate to, to read, communities to get involved with. Like, what's on your mind of late that's something that you would want to share with the audience for us to look at? And then, I'll turn it over to everyone else's questions.

- Well, you know, I see these struggles that so many people have been drawn to over the last period. I would say since the emergence of Black Lives Matter as so important, and of course it's been a flourishing of new books, and new ideas, and new organizations, and I think that everybody should try to contribute, join an organization or become connected, you know? Read books. There is, well, I mean, I could probably spend the rest of the time we have allotted just offering the names of authors or the titles of books, like Robin Kelly, and Mariame Kaba, and Edith Mary Brown, and Keeanga-Yamahtt Taylor. But also, let's think about issues that aren't so central to our understanding of the kind of abolitionist moment, you know? What about disability? Yeah. Liat Ben-Moshe has an amazing book which is entitled "Decarcerating Disability", which allows us to understand the ways in which this treatment of disabled people has helped to consolidate systems of incarceration that are involved in the production of the prison industrial complex. There's some amazing films too, popular films and films that aren't so popular. There's one that you may not have heard about, a documentary by Gilda Sheppard. It's called "Since I Been Down". So have you seen that film?

- Yeah.

- It's so powerful. If you want to understand the meaning of education, the meaning of knowledge, watch that film. You know, I told her I'm still haunted by the words of this young man who taught himself how to be a teacher, and was teaching his brothers in that prison because they weren't allowed to participate in the regular course curriculum. And he said, you know, "When I'm teaching, sometimes I almost feel free."

- I remember that play.

- Yeah. And it lets you know how important, again, in relation to the question you asked before about intellectual work, how important it is for people behind bars to discover are the joy of learning and knowledge. Then I like, I actually like "Judas and the Black Messiah". I think that's a popular film. It's got a lot of things that one could be critical of, but I think it's important that people recognize that we're doing this work along a trajectory that stretches back and that will move forward. And yeah. And as I said before, not only, you know, get involved in organizations and perhaps create new ones, create new ones on college campuses. I just recently read an amazing book by a philosopher, young man from Martinique. And it is called "Decolonial Ecology". And in the book, I don't think it's been published in English yet, it exists in French. And it's about the connections between assaults on the planet and misogyny and racism and how environmental justice, it's not about adding environmental concern to existing justice struggles, but recognizing the interrelationality from the very outset. So yeah. We can continue the discussion forever.

- Yeah. We're good. Don't worry about it. Okay. So I'm going to turn to the wonderful questions that our audience members have provided. I'm just going to start with a question that was offered by Jesse Wilcox. The question was what was helpful to your ability to reconcile a call for abolition, knowing that meant not calling for cop convictions? And I think that is a real important and I think extremely urgent question particularly, you know, right now, given the Derek Chauvin trials going on, et cetera. So what is your response to that question?

- Well, you know, we have to be strategic in developing abolitionist agendas. And of course, people have been calling for the conviction, the arrest, the trial, the conviction of police who commit these horrendous murders. And this has been going on forever. And I mean, as long as I can remember, as long as I've been active in the movement, you know, I can remember these calls to convict the police. And well, of course, a few of them have been convicted, but even if they're convicted, what's going to change? I think what's different in this moment is that even though we are watching the trial of Derek Chauvin and we're focused on the ways in which these issues play out within the legal system, but there is an increasing awareness of the fact that that's not going to change anything. So what if he is convicted? And unless we think about justice as retribution, as vengeance, it will have little or no effect on what happens in the future. Now, I'm not saying that these people shouldn't be rendered accountable, they certainly should, but we have to figure out other modes of accountability for individuals who engage in these terrible, violent assaults. And we have to perhaps use a much broader framework to think about what can we do in order to guarantee that this does not continue to happen. It has happened over and over and over again. They can't help themselves. They can't even help themselves in Minnesota. So, you know, how is it that someone can kill Daunte Wright as the trial around George Floyd's death is unfolding? So I think these are clear messages that we have to even if we feel that we may experience some emotional satisfaction from someone being convicted, we have to figure out what is going to bring about lasting change, and how we can imagine new modes of justice, new forms of justice, non-retributive forms of justice, restorative justice, transformative justice, you know, at the same time as a calling for the creation of conditions that will likely minimize the possibility that the police will continue to do this, to engage in these actions that lead to such tragedies.

- This question comes from... I will go with... So the question comes from Madison Green. So I think this ties into what you're just saying, right? The question is people who don't understand why prisons should be abolished or transformed, what would you say? And I think it's heightened to that is the question that comes in from Makayla Boxley who's asking also does pushing for reform, because abolition seems currently unavailable or unfeasible, detract from the ultimate goal of abolition. And I'm just thinking, you know, even from those two questions, the Black Lives Matter protest of last summer and how calls for abolishing the police were in many ways restructured around defunding the police, right? And now of course we have politicians who are calling none of those things to happen, right? So what are your thoughts around like, how do we speak to folks who don't quite understand why prisons should be abolished? You know, who calls for and who will protects us then? And then how do we deal also with the sort of so ramping down what occurs when we have folks who qualify abolition and then the message that gets transmitted is actually a message of reform or a message of defunding rather than radically changing.

- Well, you know, changes don't happen overnight. Radical change in general happens as a consequence of continued engagement, you know. I was telling the group before that, you know, sometimes we feel like we're broken records because we say the same thing over and over and over again, and then we get upset that change doesn't happen. Sometimes we do have to sound like we have broken record. We can't have to, I mean, I feel like I've been saying the same thing since 1970, since I first became aware of the possibility of using an abolitionist framework. But I know that there arrive these moments, these conjunctures that are not predictable. And such a conjuncture occurred in the course of the pandemic when people began to recognize the structural character of racism finally. I mean, how many times have we talked about structural racism, institutional racism, systematic racism? And it didn't begin to stick until we could see that people were dying in indigenous communities and Black communities precisely because of the structural racism of the healthcare system. And the fact that people of color were acknowledged as the most essential workers in our society. Now, this could have never been predicted. But I mean, I've always said that we have to act as if those moments will arrive in the future, and we have to do the work we're doing in order to prepare for such a moment when suddenly people who have been hearing us, you know, over and over again, and who just weren't moved by it, didn't get it. But suddenly, there's a kind of epiphany that happens and they remember all of the things that they've heard. And so, you know, I think it's so important to recognize the protracted character of this struggle that you don't know whether the work you do now is going to have immediate consequences. You don't know how long it was going to take for it to have consequences, but if you're serious and dedicated about doing the work, and I'm not talking about individuals. I'm talking about communities and collectives and creating legacies and passing the work down to the generations that come, then change will happen. This is what we witnessed last summer. And another thing. I think it's important to realize that movements don't always unfold within the context of the most dramatic expressions. So just because millions of people aren't out in the streets again, although quite a number of people are out in the streets in Brooklyn Center in Minnesota, but the mobilizations of demonstrations apply to possibilities, and they don't constitute the movement per se. They constitute the demonstration that a movement is in the process of being organized. And so a lot of the work happens in spaces that are not so public, in spaces that are not so dramatic, and I think now, this is precisely the time when we need to do the work of encouraging institutions to identify the ways in which they have been involved in the reproduction of racism. Now, that's not going to be in the news. That's not going to be broadcast everywhere. It may be on social media, but not so much. But that is the real work of transformation. And, you know, let's recognize that just because we're not being acknowledged by the media that the work we're doing is not important. So, you know, I think this is the time when we really should be involved in doing the transformative work. As, you know, the students walked out a couple of days ago at Amherst and had a set of demands that they're presenting to the administration. That should be happening everywhere.

- Absolutely. This question comes from Dorothy Nketia. The question is, as an out lesbian, how do you see us going about integrating the needs of black queer community members in this movement? I think we can think about, for example, how black trans women are amongst some of the most brutalized by police brutality in the country, et cetera. Also how, you know, black queer theory, if we're thinking about an intellectual sense, actually structures and ways of thinking about sociality or theorizing sociality. So how do you think through these sort of space for black awareness within the movement and actually grounding the movement considering of course the long histories of black revolutionary struggle being historicized as being sort of very male-dominated, masculinist at times. Yeah.

- Well, you know, I think that one of the really important contributions of the Black Lives Matter movement has been to propose new paradigms of leadership, and to propose new paradigms of leadership within the context of feminist engagement with the intersectionality of struggles. And so for the first time in the history of Black struggles for freedom, you've seen movements emerge with queer black women at the forefront of those movements and incorporating struggles around sexuality, and as you pointed out the emphasis on recognizing the importance of supporting trans, especially trans women of color, who as you were pointing out, suffer more forms of violence than any other community of people. So if we are truly interested in ending violence against women, gender violence, then we have to recognize that it's trans women who are the ones who deserve to be most supportive. And these issues have to be in the forefront of our struggles. You know, oftentimes it's assumed that we gauge the importance of our struggles by the quantity of people involved. And if you say that trans populations are relatively small but the work that can be done in support of issues involving trans communities is going to have an impact on everyone. And I always like to point out that if it had not been for trans activism, we would not be in a position to so effectively challenge the binary structure of gender. And if we learn how to challenge the binary structure of gender, we learn also how to challenge the strictures within which sexuality has been contained, and then we also learn how to engage with other aspects of our lives that have been deemed normal within the context of existing ideologies. So that teaches us how to engage in ideological struggle around a whole range of issues. And that's why this period is so exciting. And I think it may be for those of us who are a bit older to point out to those who are a bit younger how exciting it is to be alive at this moment. And especially for young people to grow up with these, you know, new and revolutionary approaches how that is going to have an impact on the future.

- That's right. That's all right. Okay. We've got a couple more before we wrap. So this question is from anonymous, but the question is about bridging the gap. So how do we bridge the gap between notions, mainly present in academia, that lack accessibility to the general public? So how do we, you know, take terminology that's oftentimes, you know, coined by academics and intellectuals that are a little bit more peak, I think, for general public that we're trying to also work in tandem with to what abolition?

- Well, you know, I like to think in terms of translation because there's so many different languages. And, you know, if someone speaks say Wolof and, you know, someone else speaks, I don't know, another language in the world, German, you wouldn't expect those two people to be able to automatically communicate with each other without some mediation, without some form of translation. And I think it's important for those of us who have studied at universities and our scholars to recognize both the importance of the kinds of technical vocabularies that we develop, but it's the same time, the need to translate those ideas into a more accessible ways of thinking for those who don't have that preparation. There's nothing wrong with not being able to understand someone who has studied, you know, anthropology for years and years. There's nothing wrong with not being able to understand that specialized language. But the anthropologist has to recognize that it's her responsibility to try to place her ideas or express her ideas in ways that are accessible. I should tell you that years ago when I was involved in the creation of Critical Resistance conference, and we insisted that every panel be composed of people who would be able to speak across boundaries, across disciplinary boundaries, across boundaries that separate activists and university people love. So we asked everyone to pay attention to their mode of expression, and even for activists to recognize that as activists, we have vocabularies that aren't necessarily accessible to people who haven't been doing the work. And so to think deeply about how to convey those ideas in different ways, and to, yeah. I mean, this is often hard for scholars because, you know, they have a hard time thinking outside of the context of the theories and methodologies and vocabularies that allow them to produce the ideas that they have. But if we can engage in that translation, then what really is the value of the work if you can only talk to those who are closest to you, or who've been trained in the same way that you have? I think that is a major challenge. It is an important.

- It is. It is, you know, and as scholars, it's an ongoing challenge, you know, it's part of the work. Okay. We're at our last question, and it's going to be two questions rolled into one. So the questions come from Ella Hendrix and Ellie Han. And so the question is what keeps you motivated to continue the work of abolition? What in your life gives you strength? And then Ellie's part of it is what gives you hope, you know, for the future for abolition, et cetera?

- Well, for me, this current moment is a very hopeful moment despite all of the violence and the tragedy. But the fact that so many people now are aware of the fact that there's work to be done is very hopeful to me as someone who has experienced periods when very few people it's seen, we're really listening. I mean, I don't know how many times I was confronted with the idea that I had to be really out of my mind to be talking about abolishing prisons. You know, how can the world exist without these institutions? And I'm hopeful because I see that it's possible for people to come around for something like abolition to enter into public discourse which I never thought would happen in my lifetime. I know it what happen eventually, but I never imagined being able to actually witness of this process myself. And to me, that's a reason to be hopeful. I mean, of course one does not do work in order to receive public credit for it. That's not why we do this. We do this because we're concerned that human beings and our non-human companions shouldn't have the ability to live lives that have some joy and some happiness. And so I've been smiling a lot lately because it's just amazing to hear young people talk in a framework that I would have never expected. You know, it used to be that I've mentioned abolition, and how many people are familiar with it? Hardly anybody. But now everybody is, you know, which means of course that we have to continue to do the work to keep the level of understanding high. And, you know, we don't want abolition to become simply a way of expressing, discuss with existing systems, but it has to have the quality of encouraging people to engage in a collective imagining of a very different future and pointing out that it is possible now to engage in anti-racist work, anti-misogynist work that is going to have an impact on our futures and the futures of those who come after us.

- Yeah That was a beautiful, I think way to wrap up this conversation I think on a message of optimism, and optimism that is a very realist and very grounded one based on, you know, not just historical movements, but also I think the real work that young youth who are out in the streets and also who are just learning at home and really, you know, pushing forward and the importance of that sort of shared language as being built. I think that's really beautiful. We're unfortunately out of times nights. I thank you all and to the audience members for hanging out with us and then joining us in this conversation, and of course, thank you, especially to our wonderful and esteemed guest, Professor Angela Davis. I hope you all have a wonderful night, and to Professor Davis, I hope to see you very soon. Okay?

- Thank you very much. Thank you.

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 12:00:00 +0000|April 21, 2021

Virtual Black Alumni Week | April 12 – 18, 2021

callmanmorton — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 14:58:00 +0000

Virtual Black Alumni Week | April 12 – 18, 2021 Carol A. Allman-Morton (inactive) Wednesday, 2/24/2021, at 9:58 AM

Image

Join in Virtual Black Alumni Week, Monday, April 12 through Sunday, April 18! Connect with old friends and current students, join in conversations with, and lectures by, MacArthur Fellows and a legendary activist and make new connections. Whether you attend every event or choose to log on for just one or two, we hope you will attend!

Virtual Black Alumni Week will be facilitated through a Zoom-based virtual platform called Cadence. After registration, you will receive an email in advance of the event, inviting you to explore the platform and note which programs you hope to attend. You can also use the platform to chat with other alumni who are registered and connect in a virtual space.

Monday, April 12

7 p.m. EDT: A Conversation with 2016 MacArthur Fellow Kellie Jones '81, H'18 and 2020 MacArthur Fellow Thomas W. Mitchell '87
Join two of the College's most recent MacArthur Fellows for a conversation about their work and their Amherst experiences.

Tuesday, April 13

4 p.m. EDT: Conversation with Amherst Admission
Black alumni and their children are welcome to attend this overview of admission procedures at Amherst, led by Matthew McGann, Dean of Admission and Financial Aid.

8 p.m. EDT: Trivia Night!
Join the Multicultural Resource Center for a night of fun, with a team trivia competition, including questions about Amherst Black history!

Wednesday, April 14

7 p.m. EDT: Career Panel and Networking
Join the Loeb Center for Career Exploration and Planning for a panel discussion with Black alumni who work in career fields in which Black professionals are underrepresented. The panel will be followed by small breakout groups where alumni and current students can connect and talk about strategies for navigating and thriving in predominantly white workplaces. This event is intended primarily for current students and early-career alumni. Moderator: Adrianna M. Turner '14; Panelists include: George Beecham '18, Dr. Rebecca Cross '11, Jay Drain Jr. '18, Lola Fadulu '17, Nicholaus Mollel '10, Jillian Stockmo Chapman '13, and Tomi Williams '16.

Thursday, April 15

8 p.m. EDT: Keynote Speaker Dr. Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz
Moderated by Kimberly Bain '14, John Holmes Assistant Professor in the Humanities, Tufts University

Friday, April 16

6 p.m. EDT: Creating the Amherst Society of Black Alumni (with cocktails!)
Pour yourself a Dark and Stormy or your favorite cocktail and join us for a discussion about the creation of the Amherst Society of Black Alumni! Following the events both at Amherst and nationally, the Black Student Union and a group of Black alumni convened about the possibility of creating an association for Black alumni. We hope to engage in mutual professional development, interpersonal support and the cultivation of Black graduates both present and future, and develop and nurture a strong and engaged Black alumni community through activities and social engagement on- and off-campus.

Saturday, April 17

3 p.m. EDT: College Update
Conversation with President Biddy Martin; Norm Jones, Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer; and Amherst College Trustees Rev. Phillip A. Jackson ’85, Chantal E. Kordula ’94 and Kimberlyn Leary ’82.

4:30 p.m. EDT: Souls Release
In the spirit of Sankofa, we gather to share stories and invite alumni to share their experiences in response to questions from students. Facilitated by Ayodele Lewis '21.

5:45 p.m. EDT: Decades Receptions
Catch up and connect with other alumni in a time for open social gathering. Bring a snack or cocktail with you!

Sunday, April 18

1 p.m. EDT: Black Alumni Memorial Service
Remember and honor our brothers and sisters who have passed away since the last Black Alumni Weekend in 2019, and all Amherst College Black alumni, faculty and staff who have passed through and passed away since the beginning of the College. Facilitated by Everett "Skip" Jenkins ’75.