Lectures and Events

Earl Jones and Jeff Schneider of the End the New Jim Crow Action Network! (ENJAN) and Rae Leiner of Black Lives Matter Hudson Valley will conclude the On Mattering: Voices from the Movement and Beyond lecture series sponsored by the Africana Studies Program.

ENJAN, pronounced “engine,” is a group of Hudson Valley residents working locally to end the era of mass incarceration in this country. BLM Hudson Valley is the official chapter of the #BlackLivesMatter network in the Hudson Valley of New York.

On Mattering: Voices from the Movement and Beyond is a new prison studies-centered speaker series open to all within the Vassar community this Fall 2020, but is also designed as a half credit course for students interested in emerging activist knowledges mobilizing in response to state-sanctioned systems of anti-Black violence, especially police brutality and the killings of unarmed black and brown people in the name of public safety. To this end, On Mattering is lifting up perspectives from those working inside and outside the academy to build local and national grassroots-based accountability strategies to curb blatant and bureaucratic forms of white supremacy, decolonize safety, defund the criminalization of poverty, immigration, black, native, and brown lives, and reimagine protocols of public safety across the U.S. and throughout the world.

João H. Costa Vargas, a professor of anthropology, examines how antiblackness affects society as a whole through analyses of recent protests against police killings of Black individuals in both the U.S. and Brazil, as well as the everyday dynamics of incarceration, residential segregation, and poverty. Ultimately, he asks why the denial of antiblackness persists, whom this narrative serves, and what political realities it makes possible.

Molly McGlennen, Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies, and Carmen McGill of the Black History Project Committee will speak as part of the On Mattering: Voices from the Movement and Beyond lecture series sponsored by the Africana Studies Program.

Marisol LeBrón of the University of Texas at Austin will speak as part of the On Mattering: Voices from the Movement and Beyond lecture series sponsored by the Africana Studies Program.

Readings: 

• Marisol LeBrón, “They Don’t Care if We Die: The Violence of Urban Policing in Puerto Rico”

• Marisol LeBrón, “Puerto Rico, Colonialism, and the U.S. Carceral State”

Lisa (Tiny) Gray-Garcia and Leroy Moore will speak as part of the On Mattering: Voices from the Movement and Beyond lecture series sponsored by the Africana Studies Program.

Readings:

• A tale of two districts: history of Poughkeepsie schools
• Down Low
• The Cambridge Handbook of policing in the United States, Chapter 19: “Police”. (The Criminalization of LGBT People starts on page 374.)
• Sue Brooks, The Politics of Policing School Districts - Upstate NY,
  Educational Foundations, Summer–Fall 2006

Readings:

• Orisanmi Burton, “Organized Disorder: The New York City Jail Rebellion of 1970:”
• Orisanmi Burton, “Diluting Radical History”

Making our black lives matter is a political movement, a community movement, and a spiritual movement, and while Tawanda’s lane is police brutality, she knows hers is not the only one. There are so many others: street violence, memorials, and housing. She says, “We are facing legalized genocide on all levels and we need to change the whole system.”

Readings:

• “A Moment of Reckoning: Listening to Black voices in Baltimore.” Edited by Lydia Woolever.
• Wes Moore and Erica L. Green: Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City. (“Prologue,” & “Tawanda”)
• Bryan Crawford: “Bad cops, Bad Cops—The troubling and largely untold tale of Baltimore Police Dept. corruption.”
• Anjali Kamat, Thi Bui, Sarak Mirk, and Amanda Pike: “‘I have to be out there. They’re killing us.’”
• David Schuman: “‘It Needs to Stop’: National Mother’s March Calls for the End of Police Violence”