Tag Archives: race

Historically Black Colleges and the Struggle for Citizenship in America

“Historically Black Colleges and the Struggle for Citizenship in America”

Professor Cally Waite (Columbia University)
National Director, Mellon Mays Graduate Initiatives Program, Social Science Research Council

Thursday, March 16, 2017
4:30pm
Kohlberg Hall Room 228
Swarthmore College

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos recently described historically black colleges and universities as “pioneers” of the school choice movement, with HBCU leaders from across the United States meeting with President Trump.

How do we contextualize these developments? What is at stake for the historic struggle of Black Americans for citizenship and social justice?

cally waite jpg

Organized by Peace and Conflict Studies, Sponsored by the Black Cultural Center, the Intercultural Center, Black Studies, Education, History, Sociology & Anthropology, Political Science, and the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility.

Race, War, and Police Power in the American Century

Race, War, and Police Power

Nikhil Pal Singh
(New York University)
Tuesday, November 15th
4:15 pm Sci 101

Drawing on his forthcoming book Exceptional Empire: Race, War and Sovereignty in U.S. Globalism (Harvard University Press 2017), Nikhil Singh will speak on the topic of race, war and police power in the ‘American Century.’

Nikhil Pal Singh

Dr. Singh is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University, where he also directs the NYU Prison Education Program. He is the author of Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard UP, 2004), which won several prizes, including the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for the best book in civil rights history from the Organization of American Historians in 2005.

He is the editor of Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: the Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell (University of California Press, 2010). Author of numerous essays on race, empire and U.S. liberalism, he is a member of the editorial board of the American Crossroads Book Series at the University of California Press.

Sponsored by the Department of Political Science, Black Studies Program, Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, English Literature, Peace and Conflict Studies, and Sociology and Anthropology

Contact: obalkan1

Redefining Revolution & Nonviolence: Re-imagining Solidarity Across Race

As part of Black History Month activities, Matt Meyer, organizer, author, and editor of We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism (PM Press) discussed revolutionary nonviolence, privilege, solidarity, and alliance building in higher education.

Wednesday, February 10, 2016
7:00 – 8:30 p.m.
Scheuer Room in Kohlberg Hall at Swarthmore College
This event was free and open to the public.
Download a flyer at http://bit.ly/meyerflyer
Matt Meyer flyer
photo credit: Consuelo Kanaga

Video of the event is now available.

Audio of the event is now available.

A native New York City-based educator, activist, and author, Matt Meyer is coordinator of the War Resisters International Africa Support Network, and a United Nations/ECOSOC representative of the International Peace Research Association. The founding Chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Association and former Chair of the Consortium on Peace Research, Education and Development (COPRED), Meyer has long worked to bring together academics and activists for lasting social change.
Matt Meyer at Swarthmore College
Matt Meyer spoke in the Scheuer Room on February 10, 2016

Meyer’s work in K-12 public education and teacher training included ten years of service as Multicultural Coordinator for the NYC Board of Education’s Alternative High Schools & Programs, as well as a stint as Union Leader of a local section of the United Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO. He helped found and direct a mini-school in collaboration with St. Luke’s/Roosevelt Hospital’s Child and Family Institute (CFI), and led a psycho-educational CFI research delegation on re-integration and treatment of child soldiers in West and Central Africa and related work in “inner-city” USA; he also helped in the early development of the Harvey Milk High School, the first US “safe space” school for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth. Twice-decorated as “teacher of the year” by two Community School District Superintendents, Meyer’s continuous efforts as a high school-based historian and peace educator have spanned over 30 years.

Matt is an outstanding scholar-practitioner and leader in the field of peace and justice studies and is an accomplished Africanist scholar and educator, and has done much to bring critical race theory into dialogue with peace and conflict studies. You may read his recent co-authored piece “Refusing to Choose Between Martin and Malcolm: Ferguson, Black Lives Matter, and a New Nonviolent Revolution” at Counterpunch.org.

We Have Not Been Moved

Co-sponsors: Peace and Conflict Studies, President’s Office, Black Cultural Center, Black Studies Program, Intercultural Center, History Department, Educational Studies Department, Sociology and Anthropology Department

This event builds on a theme the Peace and Conflict Studies program initiated last semester with the American Friends Service Committee poster exhibit in McCabe Library, “All of Us or None: Responses & Resistance to Militarism.”

AFSC Exhibit Fall 2015

Decolonizing Education

From our friends in Educational Studies and the Native American Students Association

Discussion: Decolonizing Education

Educational Studies and the Native American Students Association present a discussion between Professor Edwin Mayorga and Dr. Sandy Grande on the role of education in colonialism and the process of decolonizing the education system.

November 19, 4:30-6PM, SCI 101.

Weblinks here: http://critedupolicy.swarthmore.edu/decolonizing-education/ or http://bit.ly/1Skb83V

sandygrandeSandy Grande is an Associate professor and Chair of the Education Department and the Director of the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) at Connecticut College. Her research and teaching are profoundly inter- and cross-disciplinary, interfacing critical Indigenous theories with the concerns of education. Her book, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004) is currently being published in a 10th anniversary edition. She has also published several book chapters and articles including: “Accumulation of the Primitive: The Limits of Liberalism and the Politics of Occupy Wall Street,” The Journal of Settler Colonial Studies. ”Confessions of a Fulltime Indian,” The Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, “American Indian Geographies of Identity and Power: At the Crossroads of Indigena and Mestizaje,” Harvard Educational Review; and, “Red-ding the Word and the World” In, Paulo Freire’s Intellectual Roots: Toward Historicity in Praxis. Bloomsbury Academic. New York, New York. Eds. Robert Lake & T. Kress. (2013).

Edwin MayorgaEdwin Mayorga is an Instructor in the Educational Studies Department and Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) program at Swarthmore College. His research focuses on cultural political economy, U.S. Latinos and urban education & policy, racial/ethnic studies, teacher-lead social movements, and teaching for social justice. Much of his energies are focused on the Education in our Barrios Project, a digital, critical participatory action research (D+CPAR) project that centers on working alongside youth in Latino core communities in Philadelphia and New York City. He is co-editor of the book: What’s Race Got to Do with It? How Current School Reform Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality (Peter Lang; 2015; co-edited with B. Picower). At Swarthmore he is also co-leading the Critical Education Policy Studies group. Prior to Swarthmore, he was an elementary school teacher in New York City and was a member of the educator-activist group, the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE).

Sonia Sanchez on Social Movements such as #BlackLivesMatter

From our friends at the Black Cultural Center

Fall 2015 Special Lecture
An Evening with Poet and Activist Sonia Sanchez
Discussing Social Movements such as #BlackLivesMatter

Award-Winning Poet, Playwright, and Activist. One of the most prominent writers of the Black Arts movement, Dr. Sonia Sanchez speaks internationally on black culture and literature, women’s liberation, peace, and racial justice.

November 18, 2015
7:00PM
LPAC Pearson Hall Theater
Swarthmore College (Directions)
Book Sale & Signing *Cash Only

Co-Sponsored by: Office of the President, Black Studies Program, Dean’s Office, English Literature Department, Intercultural Center, LatinX Heritage Month Committee, Swarthmore African-American Student Society (SASS)

Sanchez Swat F2015

Ultra-Nationalism and the Divinity of Bureaucracy in Israel

Mizrahi Mothers, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Ultra-Nationalism and the Divinity of Bureaucracy in Israel

ASmadar Lavie
Professor of Anthropology
University of California, Berkeley

Thursday, October 29, 2015
4:30 p.m.
Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall, Swarthmore College (directions)

LavieWrapped

Israeli-American anthropologist Smadar Lavie will discuss her new book, “Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture.” The Mizrahim are the Jews from North Africa and the Middle East who comprise Israel’s majority Jewish population. They suffer from systematic discrimination by Israel’s Ashkenazi Jews who drive Israeli policymaking. Lavie’s is the first English language ethnography about single mothers in the Middle East. This is one of the very few ethnographies about single mothers outside North America. The book explores Israel’s intra-Jewish racial and ethnic conflicts from a feminist perspective. It analyzes how the plight of Mizrahi single mothers relates to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, as well as its tensions with Iran and other neighboring Arab countries. Lavie uncovers the conundrum of loving and staying loyal to a state that
uses its bureaucratic system to repeatedly inflict pain on its
non-European majority who, despite this pain, is willing to sacrifice
their lives for what they conceive of as the state’s security.

Equating bureaucratic entanglements with pain—what, arguably, can be seen as torture, Smadar Lavie explores the conundrum of loving and staying loyal to a state that repeatedly inflicts pain on its
non-European Jewish women citizens through its bureaucratic system. The book presents a model of bureaucracy as divine cosmology and posits that Israeli State bureaucracy is based on a theological essence that fuses the categories of religion, gender, and race into the foundation of citizenship.

SmadarLavie1
Dr. Smadar Lavie

Sponsored by Peace and Conflict Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies

From Ferguson to San Francisco: Queer Liberation and Black Lives Matter

“From Ferguson to San Francisco: Queer Liberation and Black Lives Matter”
A conversation with Darnell Moore

Monday, October 5, 2015
7:00 p.m.
Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall, Swarthmore College (directions)

Darnell L. Moore is a Senior Editor at MicNews and Co-Managing/Editor at The Feminist Wire. Along with NFL player Wade Davis II, he co-founded YOU Belong, a social good company focused on the development of diversity initiatives. 

Darnell’s advocacy centers on marginal identity, youth development and other social justice issues in the U.S. and abroad. He has led and participated in several critical dialogues including the 58th Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women; the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington National Panel on Race, Discrimination and Poverty, the 2012 Seminar on Debates on Religion and Sexuality at Harvard Divinity School, and as a member of the first U.S. delegation of LGBTQ leaders to Palestine in 2012.

A prolific writer, Darnell has been published in various media outlets including MSNBCThe GuardianHuffington PostEBONYThe AdvocateOUT MagazineGawkerTruth OutVICEGuernicaMondoweissThought CatalogGood Men Project and others, as well as numerous academic journals including QED: A Journal in GLBTQ World MakingWomen Studies QuarterlyAda: A Journal of GenderNew Media & TechnologyTransforming Anthropology, Black Theology: An International Journal, and Harvard Journal of African American Policy, among others.

Darnell has held positions of Visiting Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Yale Divinity School, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University and the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. He is presently Writer-in-Residence at the Center on African American Religion, Sexuality, and Social Justice at Columbia University. He has taught in the Women and Gender’s Studies and Public Administration departments at Rutgers University, Fordham University, City College of New York City and Vassar College. Darnell has also provided keynote addresses at Harvard University, Williams College, Stony Brook University, New Jersey City University, Stanford University, and the New School.

Darnell received the 2012 Humanitarian Award from the American Conference on Diversity for his advocacy in the City of Newark, where he served as Chair of the LGBTQ Concerns Advisory Commission. He is the recipient of the 2012 Outstanding Academic Leadership Award from Rutgers University LGBTQ and Diversity Resource Center for his contributions to developing the Queer Newark Oral History Project. He received the 2013 Angel Award from Gay Men of African Descent and the 2014 Gentleman of the Year Award from the Gentlemen’s Foundation. He was listed as a one of Planned Parenthood’s Top 99 Dream Keepers in 2015 and was featured in USA Today’s #InTheirOwnWords multimedia feature on contemporary civil rights activists. He assisted in organizing the Black Lives Matters Ride to Ferguson in the wake of Mike Brown’s tragic murder.

Organized by Peace and Conflict Studies and co-sponsored by the President’s Office, the Black Cultural Center, the Intercultural Center, Sociology/Anthropology, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Black Studies.

Darnell_Moore_F2015

 

 

Engaging Human Differences: a teach in with Professor David Kyuman Kim

Engaging Human Differences:
teach in with Professor David Kyuman Kim

February 19, 2015
7:00 – 9:00 p.m. in Kohlberg Hall Room 116
Swarthmore College (directions)

Ferguson, Staten Island/NYC, Paris. Philadelphia. In this time of intensifying and proliferating tensions regarding how the law and the police state engage human differences of race, religion, gender, sexuality, and class (amongst many others), the need to find language and spaces of dialogue have become more urgent. ​

For this event, David Kyuman Kim (Connecticut College scholar of race, religion, and public life) will lead a teach-in with the Swarthmore community taking up these issues, especially as they effect the stakeholders of Swarthmore. A successful teach-in will take the temperature of the constituents of Swarthmore (students, staff, faculty, and local community) in regard to these tensions around race and the like, and build-up an organic dialogue that will serve as a catalyst for on-going conversations at Swarthmore and beyond.

David K. Kim

Sample questions:

  • How has Swarthmore engaged questions of race, religion, and public life?
  • How have Swarthmore’s initiatives around diversity helped and/or hindered an effective dialogue that enables students, staff, and faculty to engage what is happening in Ferguson, NYC, and beyond?
  • What discourses around race, religion, gender, sexuality, class, and state authority are working and which are not working at Swarthmore? And how might we begin a conversation to transform these discourses to help equip the community to be more effective in addressing these pressing issues?

This event is part of the ongoing residency: Radical Democracy and Humanism: Intersections between Performance and Action

1969: The Revolutionary Spring of Black Students by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi

1969: The Revolutionary Spring of Black Students by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is Professor of Africana Studies at University at
Albany, SUNY

February 5, 2015
4:30-6:00 p.m. 
Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall
Swarthmore College (directions to campus)

Kendi
Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is Professor of Africana Studies at University at Albany, SUNY.

From 1965 to 1972, Black students and their allies waged the most transformative antiracist social movement in the history of U.S. education. They organized, demanded, and protested for a relevant learning experience at more than five hundred colleges and universities in every state except Alaska. They pressed for a range of campus reforms, including an end to campus paternalism and racism, and the addition of more Black students, faculty, Black Cultural Centers, and Africana Studies courses and programs. The spring of 1969 was undoubtedly the climax semester of this social movement. From Swarthmore to Cornell, from Duke to Wisconsin, from UCLA to UC Berkeley, Black students and their allies revolutionized the course of higher education for decades to come.

Reception to follow.

This is a part of the Black History Month series of events for 2015. Please see The Black Cultural Center’s website for more information on this and other events.

Contact: history@swarthmore.edu

Using Class and Race Awareness to strengthen Social Action

Please be aware of this important upcoming workshop on “Using Class and Race Awareness to strengthen Social Action,” to be led at Pendle Hill by faculty and friends of our Peace and Conflict Studies program!

Invitation to Pendle Hill Workshop on Action Groups Moving Forward

George Lakey, Ingrid Lakey, and Sarah Willie-LeBreton will be leading a workshop at Pendle Hill entitled “Using Class and Race Awareness to strengthen Social Action,” beginning the evening of April 11 and concluding at noon on April 13, 2014.

We hope folks from Haverford, Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore Colleges will participate in this workshop. Commuters pay $230 for the workshop which includes meals. (Students at Swarthmore College can apply for up to $50 to support workshop attendance, through a form on the LC website.)

Here is a link to the workshop description. http://pendlehill.org/workshops/spring-2014/939-using-class-and-race-awareness-to-strengthen-social-action

Commitment to the entire workshop is required.