The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America

Posted in Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States, Videos on 2016-07-10 22:55Z by Steven

The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America

The Aspen Institute
2016-07-02

As Michael Eric Dyson notes in the introduction to his 2016 book, “[President] Obama provoked great hope and fear about what a black presidency might mean to our democracy. White and black folk, and brown and beige ones, too have had their views of race and politics turned topsy-turvy.” Join Dyson and The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart for a look at how the politics of race have shaped Obama’s identity and groundbreaking presidency. How has Obama dealt publicly with race—as the national traumas of Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and Walter Scott have played out during his tenure? What can we learn from the president’s major speeches about his approach to racial conflict and the black criticism it provokes?

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Poet Natasha Trethewey Explores Public and Personal Histories of Race in America

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, United States, Videos, Women on 2015-01-14 18:16Z by Steven

Poet Natasha Trethewey Explores Public and Personal Histories of Race in America

The Aspen Institute
2015-01-13

Caroline Tory, Program Coordinator
Aspen Words, Aspen Colorado

On a recent winter night, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey addressed an Aspen Words audience in Aspen, CO, on the intersection between art and activism. “[I am] a poet interested not only in the sounds of language and in its beauty, but in its ability to help us deal with our most difficult knowledge and help us move towards justice.”

Trethewey is the author of four collections of poetry: “Domestic Work,” “Bellocq’s Ophelia,” “Native Guard,” and “Thrall,” as well as a work of nonfiction, “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.” She served two terms as the 19th US poet laureate from 2012 to 2014, and is currently poet laureate of the state of Mississippi. Trethewey also directs the creative writing program at Emory University in Atlanta, where she is Robert W. Woodruff professor of English and creative writing…

…Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, the daughter of parents whose mixed-race marriage was illegal in the state at the time. Her writing includes many references to her father, a poet, professor, and Canadian immigrant, as well as her mother, who was a social worker. Trethewey’s poems weave together the story of her own interracial roots with the history of race in America, while also balancing this narrative with lyricism.

“It is where the poems shade toward the lyrical that I’m able to get closer to the emotional truth of a poem,” said Trethewey in her talk. As an example, she referenced the poem “Incident” from her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection “Native Guard.” In it she tells the story of the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross on her family’s yard after her grandmother hosted a voter registration drive for disenfranchised African Americans in the 1960s. Reworking an initial draft of the poem, Trethewey restructured it to capture the entire story of the incident in the first four lines. This freed her to use the rest of the poem to highlight other emotional truths, such as the need to remember, which are at least as important as the particular facts of what happened.

Trethewey read a number of poems that use art as a reference point, including a series from her most recent book “Thrall.” Titled “Taxonomy”, this series of poems is based on a group of Casta paintings from 18th century colonial Mexico, which portrayed mixed blood unions in the colony…

Read the entire article here.

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State of Race 2013: Presentation on the Demographics of Race

Posted in Census/Demographics, Media Archive, United States, Videos on 2013-05-08 17:40Z by Steven

State of Race 2013: Presentation on the Demographics of Race

The Aspen Institute
Washington, D.C.
2013-04-24

Presenter:

Paul Taylor, Executive Vice-President and Director of Social and Demographic Trends Project
Pew Research Center

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