Racism

On June 2, 1892, in the small, idyllic village of Port Jervis, New York, a young Black man named Robert Lewis was lynched by a violent mob. The twenty-eight-year-old victim had been accused of sexually assaulting Lena McMahon, the daughter of one of the town's well-liked Irish American families. The incident was infamous at once, for it was seen as a portent that lynching, a Southern scourge, surging uncontrollably below the Mason-Dixon Line, was about to extend its tendrils northward. What factors prompted such a spasm of racial violence in a relatively prosperous, industrious upstate New York town, attracting the scrutiny of the Black journalist Ida B. Wells, just then beginning her courageous anti-lynching crusade? What meaning did the country assign to it? And what did the incident portend?

Donald Yacovone shows us the clear and damning evidence of white supremacy’s deep-seated roots in our nation’s educational system through an in-depth examination of America’s wide assortment of texts, from primary readers to college textbooks, from popular histories to the most influential academic scholarship. His new book is "Teaching White Supremacy."

"What the Children Told Us" by Tim Spofford is the story of the towering intellectual and emotional partnership between two Black scholars who highlighted the psychological effects of racial segregation.

The exhibition “Imprinted: Illustrating Race” is on display at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts through October 30. We joined Norman Rockwell Museum’s Deputy Director/Chief Curator Stephanie Plunkett and featured artist Shadra Strickland for a conversation in the galleries.

In the summer of 2020, as America underwent a reckoning with racism that was centuries in the making, Tiffanie Drayton wrote a provocative, personal, and widely shared New York Times essay called “I’m A Black American. I Had to Get Out.” In it, she reflects on her choice to leave the U.S. to return to her home island of Tobago, right before the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd—and how she felt grieving and raging for Black Americans from across an ocean. Now, in her powerful new memoir, "Black American Refugee: Escaping the Narcissism of the American Dream" (Viking), Drayton is telling her story – that of a woman coming to terms with how systemic racism has poisoned America, and ultimately deciding she has to leave the “land of the free” to be truly emancipated.

A long-running Berkshire County blues band has released a new single in response to a racist remark directed at its music online.

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is the Andrew Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University and the founding director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. Kendi was recognized as one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, and awarded a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the Genius Grant. He joins to to discuss his new book, "How to Raise an Antiracist" (One World).

The Poughkeepsie Public Library District and The Bardavon are presenting a Juneteenth event at the Bardavon in Poughkeepsie, New York on Sunday, June 19 with Imani Perry – a Princeton scholar of race, law and African-American culture who will speak about her new book, "South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation."Imani Perry joins us with a preview.

On June 2, 1892, in the small, idyllic village of Port Jervis, New York, a young Black man named Robert Lewis was lynched by a violent mob. The twenty-eight-year-old victim had been accused of sexually assaulting Lena McMahon, the daughter of one of the town's well-liked Irish American families. The incident was infamous at once, for it was seen as a portent that lynching, a Southern scourge, surging uncontrollably below the Mason-Dixon Line, was about to extend its tendrils northward. What factors prompted such a spasm of racial violence in a relatively prosperous, industrious upstate New York town, attracting the scrutiny of the Black journalist Ida B. Wells, just then beginning her courageous anti-lynching crusade? What meaning did the country assign to it? And what did the incident portend?

On May 25, 2020, the world was indelibly changed by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Floyd’s death set off a series of protests in the United States and around the world, awakening millions to the dire need for reimagining this country’s broken system of policing.But behind a face that would be graffitied onto countless murals, and a name that has become synonymous with civil rights, there is the reality of one man’s stolen life: a life beset by suffocating systemic pressures that ultimately proved inescapable.Placing George Floyd’s narrative within the larger context of America’s enduring legacy of institutional racism, the new book: His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice, is a landmark biography by prizewinning Washington Post reporters, Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa. Olorunnipa joins us.