Haymarket Books Live

Join us for a conversation with education activists about the current struggles in public education for safe and equitable schools for all. Sponsored by: Baltimore Teachers Union, Boston Teachers Union, Chicago Teachers Union, Journey for Justice, Little Rock Education Association, Massachusetts Teachers Association, National Educators United, and United Teachers Los Angeles. ————————————————— A conversation with some of most dynamic teacher union leaders, community and student organizers in the country, will invite dialogue on pressing issues impacting public education in this unprecedented moment. They will discuss the importance of a burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement to defund police and the need to replace them with counselors, social workers, nurses and restorative practices in our schools. Intimately connected to this question is how we can ensure that our students and communities are provided with the schools they deserve if and when they reopen in the Fall. ————————————————— Speakers: Priyana Cabraal is a Leaders Igniting Transformation fellow and an incoming junior at Milwaukee School of Languages in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She recently led the fight to get MPD out of MPS and is determined to do more for other Black and Brown youth in her city. She is passionate about creating a significant shift in leadership that results in the dismantling of all systematic discrepancies. She hopes to become a defense attorney after high school to defend those unlawfully prosecuted due to factors such as race, sex, economic status, and immigration status. Eventually, Priyana hopes to run for Congress and advocate for her community. Cabral is of Black and Asian heritage and enjoys visiting her family in Sri Lanka every year. Moira Casados Cassidy is a teacher and activist in Denver, Colorado. She has worked to advance social justice and liberation in Denver schools as a member of the Caucus of Today’s Teachers. Cecily Myart-Cruz is a teacher, activist and the United Teachers Los Angeles President. The first woman of color in the union’s 50-year history – having previously served as NEA Vice President for six years. Cecily has taught for 26 years, at both elementary and middle school levels, most recently at Angeles Mesa Elementary. As a UTLA Area leader, she has worked with schools, parents, students and the community to oust 23 “bully principals”. Cecily has collaborated with school communities in initiating the year-long boycott of district periodic assessments in protest of excessive testing of our students. She is no stranger in taking direct action, whether it is fighting against co-locations, demanding Ethnic Studies for our students, declaring the end the criminalization of youth, local and statewide lobbying efforts and much more. Jonathan Stith is a founding member and National Coordinator for the Alliance for Educational Justice, a national network of intergenerational and youth-led organizations working to end the school-to-prison pipeline. He has 20 years of experience working with youth and community organizations to address social inequities. As the former Executive Director of the Youth Education Alliance (YEA), he was a critical leader in the School Modernization Campaign that won 3.2 billion dollars for school renovation and repair in the District. He was also a steering committee member of the Justice for DC Youth Coalition that successfully organized youth and their families to win critical juvenile justice reforms in the District. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/KJilE6uOFEw Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join us for a virtual teach in on police, surveillance, and technology with Ruha Benjamin and Dorothy Roberts ---------------------------------------------------- With calls for “defunding police” on the rise, invisible, tech-mediated surveillance continues to penetrate every area of our lives – workplaces, schools, hospitals, and of course policing itself. How does this relate to a longer history of surveilling Black life and how are people mobilizing against this New Jim Code? From everyday apps to complex algorithms, technology has the potential to hide, speed, and deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to racist practices of a previous era. In this conversation, Dorothy Roberts and Ruha Benjamin explore a range of discriminatory designs that encode inequity: by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies, by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions, or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. They take us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provide conceptual tools to resist the New Jim Code with historically and sociologically-informed skepticism. In doing so, they challenge us to question not only the technologies we are sold, but also the ones we manufacture ourselves. ---------------------------------------------------- Ruha Benjamin is Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founder of the Just Data Lab, and author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (2013) and Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019) among other publications. Her work investigates the social dimensions of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity, health and justice, knowledge and power. Professor Benjamin is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Institute for Advanced Study, and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. For more info visit www.ruhabenjamin.com Dorothy Roberts, an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law, joined the University of Pennsylvania as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School where she holds the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander chair. She is also founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society in the Center for Africana Studies. Her path breaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent social justice issues in policing, family regulation, science, medicine, and biopolitics. Her major books include Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century; Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. ---------------------------------------------------- Get a copy of Ruha Benjamin's book Race After Technology: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781509526406 Order Dorothy Roberts' book Fatal Invention: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781595588340 Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/tf0nEQTLw04 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join Jesse Hagopian, Amelia Blair-Smith, and Khury Petersen-Smith for a discussion of this summer’s uprising and how we can envision and build a revolutionary future. This event is part of the Socialism 2020 Virtual conference. Register for the conference at www.socialismconference.org. The racist police murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless others have catalyzed a massive nationwide rebellion like nothing experienced in many of our lifetimes. The rebellions of this summer have achieved immediate wins and also faced harsh repression. We know these upsurges are not going away, though, because the causes of oppression and police violence have not gone away. This panel will discuss how we build on the mass anger and mobilizations of the present rebellion to carry out a full-scale, revolutionary transformation of our society. Socialism 2020 is sponsored by Haymarket Books, Jacobin, and the Democratic Socialists of America. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/AWm3KS3tLd8 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join Bill Fletcher Jr., Dina Gilio-Whitaker, and Symone Baptiste to discuss reparations for slavery and settler colonialism, a part of the Socialism 2020 Virtual conference. Register for the conference at www.socialismconference.org. The past few years has seen passionate political debate over what the United States government owes to the descendants of slaves as well as demands from Indigenous communities for rights to land that has been and continue to be taken from them by American settler colonialism. This discussion centers the voices of those most impacted by racism and settler colonialism in the conversation about what is owed and how we can repair the harm that has been done. Socialism 2020 is sponsored by Haymarket Books, Jacobin, and the Democratic Socialists of America. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/uwuvF7c2PrA Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join Robin D.G. Kelley, Grace Blakeley, and Brian Jones for the opening plenary of Socialism 2020 Virtual. Register for the conference at www.socialismconference.org. We open the conference with a panorama of our present political landscape: a global pandemic, racialized health disparities backed by racist police violence, and the likelihood of a major economic crisis. This panel will situate our moment and prepare us for what is to come by explaining the contours of the new world we are entering, and how it has been shaped by the racialized capitalist system we still have with us. The conference will open with a performance of Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Socialism 2020 is sponsored by Haymarket Books, Jacobin, and the Democratic Socialists of America. Learn more at socialismconference.org. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/L0sAiaJf-A8 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join us for a discussion on abolishing the police and policing with Mariame Kaba, Maya Schenwar, and Victoria Law. ——————————————————— Recent Black Lives Matter protests have already gained some significant victories, reaching further toward abolition than many may have thought possible in this lifetime. As we stand on the precipice of so much potential change, there’s an understandable impulse to reach for “replacements” -- institutions to fill in for police and prisons. Yet we can’t simply call for social workers to replace police. As we fight to defund or abolish police and imprisonment, we need to be wary of ways that strengthen other forms of surveillance and control. Drug courts, mandatory psychiatric treatment, and sex worker “rescue” programs might seem like better alternatives to our current system but they still disproportionately target Black, Brown and marginalized people, keeping them under coercive systems. Meanwhile, social workers, teachers and medical professionals--while vital to a flourishing society--can’t be called upon to simply “replace” police, thus drafting them into roles of surveillance and punishment. We must also beware of the ways in which “community”-based forms of policing, including neighborhood watch programs and the expansion of the child welfare system’s mandated reporting, replicate many of the same oppressive dynamics as traditional policing. A just society will not be achieved until we stop looking for ways to make policing and prisons more humane and focus on building the society we actually want to live in. Join abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba and journalists Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law, authors of the forthcoming book Prison By Any Other Name, for a discussion of the urgent need to use this moment for transformative change. Many thanks to Sarah Waltcher for the transcription of this video, which facilitated accurate captions. ——————————————————— To get a copy of Prison By Any Other Name: https://thenewpress.com/books/prison-by-any-other-name Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/qt-JDtL0OnE Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join Cornel West, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., and Maya Marshall for an indispensable conversation about James Baldwin's America and its urgent lessons for our own. ames Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil rights movement to force America to confront its lies about race. In our own moment, when that confrontation feels more urgently needed than ever, what can we learn from his struggle? We live, according to Eddie S. Glaude Jr., in a moment when the struggles of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by the election of Donald Trump, a president whose victory represents yet another failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race. From Charlottesville to the policies of child separation at the border, his administration turned its back on the promise of Obama's presidency and refused to embrace a vision of the country shorn of the insidious belief that white people matter more than others. We have been here before: for James Baldwin, these after times came in the wake of the civil rights movement, when a similar attempt to compel a national confrontation with the truth was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In these years, spanning from the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963 to that of No Name in the Street in 1972, Baldwin transformed into a more overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional and personal cost. But from that journey, Baldwin emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair. In the story of Baldwin's crucible, Glaude suggests, we can find hope and guidance through our own after times, this Trumpian era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Mixing biography—drawn partially from newly uncovered interviews—with history, memoir, and trenchant analysis of our current moment, Begin Again is Glaude's endeavor, following Baldwin, to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in America today. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America. Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is a scholar who speaks to the black and blue in America. His most well-known books, Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, and In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America, take a wide look at black communities and reveal complexities, vulnerabilities, and opportunities for hope. He is the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies and chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Cornel R. West is Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard Divinity School. He is best known for his classics Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. He is the host with Tricia Rose of a new podcast, The Tight Rope. —————————— To order Glaude’s Begin Again from Labyrinth Books, please visit labyrinthbooks.com and enter the discount code Baldwin at checkout to receive free shipment on your order. Order a copy of Cornel West's memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Outloud: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781401921903 Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/RdHlORnIqT0 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

At its start, the Syrian Revolution in 2011 was a mass popular uprising for democracy and equality against Bashar al-Assad’s brutal dictatorship. It included people from all ethnicities and religious groups who liberated sections of the country and tried to build a new democratic society. This panel will discuss the causes, nature and trajectory of this struggle for liberation, and the reasons for its defeat. ———————————————————— Anand Gopal is an award-winning journalist and assistant research professor with the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict and the Center on the Future of War at Arizona State University. Loubna Mrie is a Syrian photographer, journalist, and writer. She covered the Syrian war as a photojournalist for Reuters from 2012 to 2014. Her work has been published in The Nation, Time Magazine, Vice, and The New Republic. She is currently writing her first book, about the war in Syria, for Penguin Random House. Yasser Munif is a Sociology Assistant Professor in the Institute for Liberal Arts at Emerson College. He is the author and co-founder of the Global Campaign for Solidarity with the Syrian Revolution ———————————————————— Co-sponsored by Haymarket Books: https://www.haymarketbooks.org Pluto Press: https://www.plutobooks.com/ ———————————————————— Order a copy of Anand Gopal's book, No Good Men Among The Living here: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781250069269 Order a copy of Burning Country: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745337821/burning-country/ Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/uMaRawAa9WY Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Join us for a conversation with organizers from #8toAbolition about why abolishing the police and prison system can't wait.- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Abolition can’t wait. While communities across the country mourn the loss of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Jamel Floyd, and so many more Black victims of police murder, Campaign Zero released its "8 Can’t Wait campaign", offering a set of eight reforms they claim would reduce police killings by 72%. As police and prison abolitionists, we believe that this campaign is dangerous and irresponsible, offering a slate of reforms that have already been tried and failed, that mislead a public newly invigorated to the possibilities of police and prison abolition, and that do not reflect the needs of criminalized communities. We honor the work of abolitionists who have come before us, and those who organize now. A better world is possible. We refuse to allow the blatant co-optation of decades of abolitionist organizing toward reformist ends that erases the work of Black feminist theorists. As the abolitionist organization Critical Resistance recently noted, 8 Can’t Wait will merely “improve policing’s war on us.” Additionally, many abolitionists have already debunked the 8 Can’t Wait campaign’s claims, assumptions, and faulty science. Abolition can’t wait. The 8 Demands of #8toAbolition: 1. Defund the Police 2. Demilitarize Communities 3. Remove Police From Schools 4. Free People from Prisons and Jails 5. Repeal Laws That Criminalize Survival 6. Invest in Community Self-Governance 7. Provide Safe Housing for Everyone 8. Invest in Care, Not Cops Find out more here: https://www.8toabolition.com Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/QfSm7JDhGL4 Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

A conversation with Bettina Love, Gholdy Muhammad, Dena Simmons and Brian Jones about abolitionist teaching and antiracist education. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- What would freedom look like in our schools? How can abolitionist educators make the most of this moment to fight for humane, liberatory, anti-racist schooling for black youth and for all youth? The coronavirus pandemic has transformed the US education system overnight. The antiracist rebellion in the streets has shown a light on the deep racial inequality in America. Educators and activists who have nurtured radical dreams for public schools now face an unprecedented moment of change, and the challenge of trying to teach and organize online in the midst of unfolding crises. Scholar and author Bettina Love’s concept of abolitionist teaching is about adopting the radical stance of the movement that ultimately overthrew slavery, but persisted and insisted on freedom long before that victory. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bettina L. Love is an award-winning author and the Athletic Association Endowed Professor at University of Georgia. She is the author of We Want To Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom and Hip Hop’s Li’l Sistas Speak: Negotiating Hip Hop Identities and Politics in the New South. Dr. Gholnecsar (Gholdy) Muhammad is an Associate Professor of Language and Literacy at Georgia State University. She also serves as the director of the GSU Urban Literacy Clinic. Dr. Muhammad’s scholarship has appeared in leading educational journals and books. Some of her recognitions include the 2014 recipient of the National Council of Teachers of English, Promising New Researcher Award, the 2016 NCTE Janet Emig Award, the 2017 GSU Urban Education Research Award and the 2018 UIC College of Education Researcher of the Year. She is the author of Cultivating Genius: An Equity Model for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy. Dena Simmons, Ed.D., is an activist, educator, and student of life from the Bronx, New York. She is the Assistant Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and an Associate Research Scientist at the Yale Child Study Center. She writes and speaks nationally about social justice and culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy as well as creating emotionally intelligent and safe classrooms within the context of equity and liberation. She is the author of the forthcoming book, White Rules for Black People (St. Martin’s Press, 2021). Brian Jones is the Associate Director of Education at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He writes about black education history and politics. Co-sponsored by: Haymarket Books: https://www.haymarketbooks.org The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture: https://www.nypl.org/locations/schomburg Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/uJZ3RPJ2rNc Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks