ROUNDTABLE BREAKFAST: Slavery's Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation

ACR-GNY & CUNY Dispute Resolution Center at John Jay College present:

NOTE ROOM CHANGE: 630!!!!!

SLAVERY'S DESCENDANTS:

SHARED LEGACIES OF RACE AND RECONCILIATION

Race remains a potent and divisive force in our society. Whether it is the shooting of minority people by the police, the mass incarceration of people of color, or the recent KKK rallies that have been in the news, it is clear that the scars from the United States’ histories of slavery and racial discrimination run too deep to simply be ignored. But what are the most productive ways to deal with the toxic and torturous legacies of American racism?

Slavery’s Descendants brings together contributors who are members of a national racial reconciliation organization called Coming to the Table, to tell their stories of dealing with America’s racial past through their experiences and their family histories. Some are descendants of slaveholders, some are descendants of the enslaved, and many are descendants of both slaveholders and the enslaved. What they all have in common is a commitment toward collective introspection, and a willingness to think critically about how the nation’s histories of oppression continue to ripple into the present, affecting us all.

The stories in Slavery’s Descendants deal with harrowing topics—rape, lynching, cruelty, shame—but they also describe acts of generosity, gratitude, and love. Together, they help us confront the legacy of slavery to reclaim a more complete picture of U.S. history, one cousin at a time.  

This book presentation will discuss Slavery’s Descendants and Coming to the Table's basis in restorative practices and Circle Process. We will do an interactive activity with a chapter from the book during the event. 

DIONNE FORD is co-editor of the anthology, Slavery's Descendants:Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (Rutgers University, May 2019) and author of the forthcoming memoir, Finding Josephine (Putnam 2019). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, LitHub, More, Rumpus and Ebony among other publications. She has won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists and the Newswomen’s Club of New York. She is a 2018 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing. She lives in New Jersey with her family. 

JILL STRAUSS, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College CUNY where she teaches conflict resolution and communications. Her research involves the arts and restorative practices, analysis of narratives of difficult or contested histories, memory, and reconciliation.  Her doctorate is from Ulster University  in Northern Ireland where she lived while doing her research and fieldwork and she is a Fulbright Scholar.