Kenyon Farrow’s Testimonial on NO! A Documentary on
May 19, 2008
“I don’t know if I have seen a more nuanced and comprehensive film dealing with rape and sexual violence in the Black community.
Aishah Shahidah Simmons’ NO! forces us to deal with the lasting trauma Black women survivors have to endure, but also forces us to confront our own ambivalence about the rape of Black women as men, and an entire Black community.
This film gives us the language and the context by which we can examine the racism, sexism and homophobia within the Black community, but also helps us see the way Black women have struggled to heal, and what we as allies to Black women can do to end sexual violence in our communities.
NO! is a gift to those of us who who know that there can be no Black liberation where women cannot be self-determining.”
Kenyon Farrow, essayist, organizer, media and communications specialist, and board co-chair for Queers for Economic Justice.
Joy James’ Testimonial on NO! A Documentary On Violence Against Women
May 8, 2008
“If state violence is ‘genocidal’ then what do you call this violence against women and girls? Any words strong enough? Any liberation agenda brave enough to break a frozen alliance between grief, predation and silence? ‘NO!’ clearly calls out the struggle for mass resistance-moving us towards being whole.”
Joy James, Humanities, Williams College | CAAAS, University of Texas at Austin
African American Scholars, Activists and Artists Gather at Temple University
May 2, 2008
Stand Up! The New Politics of Racial Uplift
A Public Philosophy Symposium
Temple University
Friday, May 2nd, 2008
9am to 5pm
Kiva Auditorium and Tuttleman Learning Center, Room 101
For information about participants, schedule, and work by participants and material relevant to symposium themes, go to our website:
http://www.temple.edu/philosoph
Purpose of Symposium:
The Millions More Movement, Cosby’s ‘call-outs,’ and other recent trends renew an old approach to black political thought and practice. The racial uplift tradition tries to improve the conditions of black life by insisting on moral refinement and race-based organization. Uplift ideology and practice have a long and storied past, but critics of the tradition worry over its limitations. Some express concern that it is anti-democratic, intolerant, elitist, sexist, and heterosexist. Others think it focuses too much on personal morality and cultural pathology and not enough on social justice and political economy.
The participants in the ‘Stand Up!’ symposium will think through the risks and rewards of this new racial uplift politics. This interdisciplinary exercise in public philosophy will explore the implications of a social phenomenon with broad ethical significance. The new politics of racial uplift emerges from a widely shared conviction that something is deeply wrong in American society. Our public philosophy conference will take this judgment seriously, and subject this politics to searching and critical scrutiny.
Confirmed Participants:
Angela D. Dillard, Afroamerican and African Studies and Residential College, LSA, at the University of Michigan
Kenyon Farrow, essayist, organizer, media and communications specialist, and board co-chair for Queers for Economic Justice
Kevin Gaines, Afroamerican and African Studies and History at the University of Michigan
Kathryn T. Gines, African American and Diaspora Studies and Philosophy at Vanderbilt University
Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University and the Jamestown Project
Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Women’s Research and Resource Center and the Women’s Studies at Spelman College
Joy James, Humanities and Political Science at Williams College and Senior Research Fellow in the Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas-Austin
Adolph Reed, Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania
Jared Sexton, African American Studies and Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine
Aishah Shahidah Simmons, AfroLez® Productions and award-winning African-American feminist lesbian documentary filmmaker, international lecturer, writer, activist, and producer, writer, and director of the internationally acclaimed documentary NO!
Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard University Law School and the Jamestown Project
Paul C. Taylor, Philosophy at Temple University and the Jamestown Project
Sponsors:
Temple University Department of Philosophy, the Office of the Provost, the College of Liberal Arts, the Center for Humanities at Temple, the Ira Lawrence Family Fund, and the Jamestown Project
The symposium is free and open to the public.
For more information, contact Tamara K. Nopper, assistant organizer, at tnopper (at) temple.edu
Kevin Powell’s Poem “NO!” Addresses Violence Against Women
May 1, 2008
NO!
for Aishah Shahidah Simmons
By Kevin Powell*
Will us boys ever learn that power
can’t be pulled from the meat of our third leg
like the last taste of malt liquor sucked from the
bottom of a bottle? Will we ever cease to find
our torsos slow-dragging with death, our dance
a series of grenades aimed at the bellies of our
mothers’ daughters? Will us boys ever break ranks
with the devil, his bible telling us it is mad cool
to rape women because the master does it, and
don’t we, too, yearn to be masters? Will we ever
be able to glue back the hair, unswell the eye,
dab away the blood, and stitch up the holes of the women
we have knifed, repeatedly, with our hatred and
fear? Will us boys ever be able to admit that
some of us have become predators, our prey the
neighbor, the girlfriend, the wife, the sister,
the niece, the granddaughter whose life is an
unguarded prison cell loaded with screams,
paranoia, and a body unsure why it now eats itself?
Friday, December 31, 1999
*Kevin Powell is a political activist, poet, journalist, essayist, hiphop historian, public speaker, and entrepreneur. He is running, as a Democrat, for a seat in the United States Congress in the 10th Congressional District here in Brooklyn, New York.
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