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Date/Time
Date(s) - 06/06/2016
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm

Location
First UU - Parlor

Categories


Treyvon Martin. Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Freddy Gray. Tamir Rice. The deaths of these unarmed black men and boys at the hands of police and civilians and the media’s recent attention to them have set in stark relief the structures of profound racial violence and discrimination that run through the 21st-Century American society that some pundits had so eagerly hailed as “post-racial.” In this reading group we will read a number of recent books written in shadow of these revelations, but also from out of the deeper shadows of pain, anger, and trauma of the unremarked, unreported losses, injuries, and injustices of black lives living in the U.S. today. We will read sections of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s award winning essay, written in the form of a letter to his son, Between the World and Me, Claudia Rankine’s stunning book of poetry, Citizen, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and the UUA’s common read book, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson. For our first meeting I will distribute PDFs of a short selection of Claudia Rankine’s prose poems and a chapter or two of Coates’s book. In addition to educating ourselves about the realities of in our society and its effects on the lives of black men, women, children, and communities, we will also be working to develop our own intercultural competency—the cognitive, affective, and behavior skills that can enable us to work, play, worship and engage with those from different racial, ethnic, and class cultures without shame and fear and, if not without pain, then with the tools to address the pain and injuries we experience and cause. Our first meeting will be Monday, Dec. 7, 7:00-8:30 in the Parlor at FUUSS. Please contact

for readings (). If you cannot attend the first meeting but our interested in the group, please let Claudia know as well.