All are welcome to a very important lecture at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Admission is free. Join me!

The speaker is a pioneer of critical race theory.

Professor Soo Hong, chair of the Education Department at Wellesley, released the following announcement.

We are thrilled to announce that our 2024 Ravitch Lecture in Education will be presented by Professor Patricia Williams ’72, University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University. Professor Williams’s talk is titled, “Burying the Bodies: Book-Banning and the Legacy of Anti-Literacy Laws in Constructing Erasures of History.”

This is a topic that feels relevant now more than ever. 

The lecture will be held on Thursday, April 18, 4:30 PM in Jewett Auditorium. Please share the details of this event widely!

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Description of “Burying the Bodies: Book-Banning and the Legacy of Anti-Literacy Laws in Constructing Erasures of History” 
We live in an oddly contradictory moment: politicians who position themselves as supporters of “absolute” freedom of speech simultaneously enact laws that restrict access to books about race, gender, or critical theory, and seek to constrain conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion. There have always been “culture wars” in America—it is not surprising that conversations about traumatic histories and contested historical perspectives might be fractious. In a civil society, we commit to arguing our way to consensus, however noisily or uncomfortably, and even if it takes generations. But it is the mark of an uncivil—or authoritarian—society when we find ourselves without the right to speak, hear, write, publish, dissent, or share common space even in our disagreement. The First Amendment rightly allows us to curtail speech that poses an “imminent threat of physical harm.” But recent “anti-woke” laws banish from public spaces books and ideas that merely might inspire “shame,” “guilt,” or “discomfort.” This lecture will ponder the conceptual chasm between those two notions of constraint upon speech. What power imbalance, what uses of force are rationalized in erasing whole histories from collective contemplation? What civic dispossession is enacted when certain lives or lived narratives are discounted as intolerable, unknowable–whose mere recounting is silenced as illegal?

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Soo Hong

The lecture will be taped and available online at a later time.