You. [applause] cspanhistory. A panel of scholars and Museum Officials discuss approaches for addressing difficult aspects of u. S. History. They share ideas for how to remember and learn from topics such as lynching or the holocaust, or about the cultures and experiences of groups such as native americans and the disabled. The event took place in washington, d. C. And Syracuse Universitys greenberg house and Lender Center for social justice hosted the discussion. Good evening. Syracusehancellor of university and i think everyone for attending tonights roundtable discussion. I am pleased youre able to join us for this important conversation. First, i want to start with the most important acknowledgment. That itssome things important that somebody says. And there are some things that its important that everybody says. I want to ignore the shoshone people, on whose ancestrals Ancestral LandsSyracuse University now stands. I would also like to acknowledge and thank Syracuse University trustee paul greenberg, who is joining us this evening. Paul established the greenberg Speakers Series to highlight programs and initiatives that are at the core of our universitys mission. Hand it is right here at home in washington, d. C. , where syracuse has a powerful presence with nearly 15,000 alumni. I would also like to thank Marvin Lender and his wife elaine who are here tonight. He is the chairman of ultimate street management, even more the man behind the highly famous linders bagel he would say the family behind the highly famous and successful lenders bagel. That theeful codirectors of the center are with us tonight, professor kenda amllips, and and i grateful to them and to lenders for making this event possible as well. This year we are celebrating Syracuse Universitys 150th anniversary year. Us, acrossone has the campus and across the world, reflecting on times when our university has been at his best, and times when we have been humbled. Context we have assembled this amazing panel of prominence museum and memorial scholars, critical and advocates for tonights topic difficult memories. Our goal to night is we have a timely conversation that promotes dialogue about how we may productively and respectfully engage with our shared past and learn from it. With us tonight study difficult aspects of history and Current Society from the standpoint of people whose identities are often ignored, or who have been in potential he targeted for violence or in an array of circumstances. On the of Syracuse University, i think our wonderful panel for participating in this dialog and i think our audience for being with us for this important discussion tonight. Thank you so much. [applause] good evening. And welcome again to the greenberg speaker series, in partnership with the Lender Center for social justice. I also want to thank the Greenberg Family and house for bringing us all together. Member in the school of education at Syracuse University as well as one of the codirectors of the Lender Center for social justice along with my colleague, why will introduce in a moment. I want to begin by acknowledging and expressing deep appreciation for helene and Marvin Lender. Their commitment to social justice that has created this. We were launched last fall with our inaugural symposium where we brought together alumni and Community Members to engage with us in a necessary and important dialogue about what it means to do good in the world and how we aserstand what we mean social justice. The ongoing work of our center, recognizing social justice is not a singular focus, nor is it a thing that one does. Aspire to foster proactive, innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to justice, equity, and inclusion through various activities and programming. Central to our work is the support of faculty and student teamsships that will lead with a faculty fellow to explore social justice issues, develop innovative approaches, this year we recently announced our first inaugural faculty gibson of the gandhi an assistant professor of african literature and studies in the college of arts and sciences. Shell be leading a team of lender student fellows on a project focusing on the social justice project, a digital humanities study. Professor gibsons project is aimed at utilizing social media platforms as a way of uncovering social justice trends. We also recently selected our first cohort of lender student fellows, which you want to Pay Attention because we will be announcing those fellows pretty soon. Please follow us on social media my visit our website so that you can learn more about the fellowship program, and also the activities of the center. Our goal is to support Innovative Research and engagement on issues related to social justice and to help collaborative and to host collaborative interdisciplinary conversation centering justice, equity and inclusion, like the one will have in moments with our panelist heard i would like to invite my colleagues, kendall phillips, professor of can occasion and rhetorical studies in the college of visual and performing arts. Codirector of the Lender Center for social justice to introduce our panel. Thank you. [applause] dr. Phillips now i dont need to introduce myself. Thanks to pauly greenberg and the lender family and the amazing staff here at the National Press pub just made our symposium on difficult memory fabulous and great and i appreciate the labor of folks who made this room operable and nice and we appreciate that. [applause] ralph ellison, in his 1959 essay on the jazz age begins with the quote, that which we do is what we are. That which we remember is more often than not, that which we would like to have been or that which we hope to be. Thus, our memory and identity are often at odds. Our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists i think this sentiment lies at the heart of what we call the study of public memory. Not much concerned with the Public Record of history that our idea of the past. Our images of it. Our stories. Our mind units. Underlying this story is a civil notion that the way we remember andpast frames are present, within our conception of the future. Syracuse university has long been at this forefront of studying public memories. Over the past 20 years this effort has been organized around what we call the public memory project, which has produced several books, conferences, speakers, Community Engagement anjects and collaborated International Consortia with universities around the world including University College of london, york st. John university, the university of copenhagen and Massey University in new zealand. This evening symposium is part of this longstanding work. Tonight we have a focus on the relationship between public memory and social justice. How can we remember justly . How should we engage with memories of past injustices . And how can we honor differences in our accounts of the past . Our panelists are leading scholars, activists and partition errors from across the country. With vast each of them and practitioners from across the country. We have asked each to make a brief statement on how we should deal with difficult memories. And then watching a conversation unfold among our panelists and we will try to have time at the end to let our audience joined with questions and comments. Speaker andduce a ask them to introduce the opening speaker and we begin with dr. A. D. Carson, a professor of hiphop in the global south in the mcintyre department of music at the university of virginia hes an awardwinning scholar, educator and performance artist tools a phd in rhetoric munication and information design from clemson university. He has produced numerous essays, posts and mixtapes including his mick dissertation which eight which was a 34 track rap album entitled owning my masters, the radix of rhymes and revolutions. The rhetoric of rhymes and revolutions. [applause] thanks, kendall. I appreciate you having me here. This kind of dope. A ledger and on alleged i was an egg or when they did it, kind of like the script it said shoes your own adventure but sure that i would die or be imprisoned. They called it the american dream. It was a scare of a scene and my character was synonymous with terrible things. Have you thinking that i was doomed on the page, that i was written on and scribbled out like, who is writing the sentences they had given out . Because this is hard for me to say, like if work is nonstop then went to see the play, right . I want to talk to the author and give whoever that is some suggestions i could offer. Stuff youre saying is justice and dont apply to me when they beat and hurt and cuff us. It is playing on the stage and really disgusting. What do you do with memories that are not quite memory that projections or expectations that fit a factual pattern of actual events, that have and might continue to occur, even if the historical narrative never gets around to docking them accurately . Documenting them accurately . Memoriesch difficult but the almost impossible reality built on top of them. How do we find our way to a we do not know we have forgotten or are forgetting . Or what we know to be undergoing a process of active reimagining, intentional forgetting, in the moment, to attempt to somehow tree articulate terror as tribe is little or no interest in attending to change terror as triumph, with little or no interest in attending to change or how the story gets cold a string its told. When people asked what i do i tell them im a rapper. I teach and write a number of forms but theres something about claiming my work in the way i crafted an intended to be engaged in a moment and we are asking questions about how we remember, what we remember in the ways we contend with what we find it occult in the remembering. Find difficult in the remembering. I call colleagues who call me the same, say to me or to others on my behalf, they see no significant difference between what i do and what a poet or any other kind of artist who works with words does. I almost always appreciate the attempt. But there is a significant difference. Engaged ingage or be some kind of academic or artistic sleightofhand that makes rappers and rap music legible through squeezing artists and our art, whatever our shape, through the square peg hole they call poetry. And that is not a comment on poetry, violence done in its name. How does duty to provide cover for what keeps getting omitted from this discussion. For the ways a rearticulate who and what it is it describes. Not because rap is not the portrait hiphop, or wraps are not poetic, because poetry does not do important work,. But because at least part of the important work for me is to ask what we lose, what we are intentionally forgetting, in those rare articulations. For me to be called one thing and then another while no one really wishes to hear what i call myself. For what makes some of us invisible. For what rappers and wraps say and do that calling us poets and our work poems, blunts. At 20olice fired 55 shots year willie mccoys car and that vallejo, california, talk about parking lot on ferry night, 2019, while he was asleep and it, everything i read about his death described a rapper killed by police. Deathg i read about his used poetry to describe him. The same goes for 38 rolled eric reason, killed in the same town this past sunday, by an offduty Police Officer and a valero gas station parking lot. The headline, offduty richmond officer shoots and kills rapper in vallejo. I cannot help but suspect the word rapper is doing a peculiar kind of work in the descriptions of the deaths of willie mccoy and eric reason and so many other read letting rappers who will never be described by poetry or as poets. As people now so generously do on my behalf too, i assume, justify my life and my art and my work as where they, as bible, as much as others my work as , matteringvaluable as much as others. To explain why i am in the room and how i got there. Maybe theres something viable and interrogating these descriptions and on his behalf they are employed and how they might help us remember or forget. I do not think this is just about genre and embodiment and the power of descriptors we use when discarding ourselves and others. It is also about the content contained in the form. The life lived and lost. Forgotten, overlooked, retold in different terms. And it is a challenge to us to maybe listen a little more intensely. Everything you believe you stand for, that a , imtores in his hands saying what im writing is sickness. What im writing is vision. What i am writing is healing. What im writing as a flashes of across the ceiling, to believe that when you move it is the true you. Bootie dance from whose hands expand reality, puppet tearing from when you hear it you do it naturally and actually. I am the reason even you are breathing. E yo [applause] thank you, professor carstens. Is judithanelists chipman, an international distilled rights advocate, the 20172018 Senior Ford Foundation fellow. An internationally leader in social justice she successfully sued than york board of education in the 1970s and became the systems First Teacher and wheelchair. She served in the obama admins duration as the First Special advisor for international u. S. Disbelief rights in the u. S. Part of state. Thank you. First i want to thank sears Qs University syracuse andersity and the lenders to greenberg. Not just for the event tonight, but probably many of you are not aware that Syracuse University, and the early 1970s, again to do work on the issues of disability. They began to take into some of the deeper issues around institutionalization that disabled people were experiencing and beginning to break open some of the myths around disabled people and what in particular people with intellectual and develop mental abilities were able to do. That work has really carried forward to today. I visit many universities and one thing i have found really refreshing about syracuse is and you work across silos try to work across silos and i ofnk that is an area disability critically important. Whom i talking about . I had polio in 1949. People in the United States no longer require polio. Disability is a very broad topic. It covers from birth to seniors. Covers visible and invisible disabilities. It covers people who are blind deaf, or death hard of hearing or have epilepsy or multiple sclerosis or hundreds of other labels. We also have in common is that we cut across all categories in society so we have disabled people from the africanamerican community, the asian community, on and on. The lgbtqnity trinity, rich, poor, everywhere. What we also have in common is stigma around disability, fear of acquiring disabilities, and as a result of that, marginalization of disabled individuals. And while the cdc says there are 56 million disabled people in the United States, one in four people in the world bank and the World Health Organization says that there are at least 15 of the World Population who have disabilities, 80 of whom live in developing countries, 70 of ,hom children are not in school we still do not see the outrage in our communities from any other community about the status of disabled people. So when i think about difficult memories, i live it every day. In preparing my thoughts for today, i was brought to the event last night, where we gathered for dinner. There was a step into the restaurant. There was a ramp on the side. The ramp led to two double doors. That could not be opened. And there was no electric door and no buzzer. Whether or not i would say summing about that, it was summing i had to think about. I did Say Something about it. Today i was lobbing on the hill for the day. The amount of additional steps that people had to walk, because the capital, while having been modified, still is nowhere near the degree of accessibility. Why do i mention that . I mention it because we have many laws in the United States, many of those laws have really made a dramatic improvements. The reality of the situation is, as i have said. Ana disabled person, as activist, as a loudmouth person, as one who speaks what i think and works with hundreds of thousands of disabled people in many ways, the reality is we are still have a difficult memories every day of our lives. Everyone of us in some way or another, when we are dealing with issues of discrimination, a restraint of defining it as just commit nation. Quent a wearing about defining it as discrimination. Wearing about what it will mean for us to disclose something has adversely affected us, especially if we have an invisible disability. Many people with invisible disabilities absolutely do not disclose on the job not disclose in their communities, for fear will happen. A number so those people are in this room. Because when we are talking about 20 of the population are 22 of the population in the United States, some of you are here. So what we are really needing to do that are doing on a daily basis is looking at ways that began collaborating together and sharing our experiences from our different backgrounds, and recognizing we, under an umbrella umbrella is determination. It is not just those scrim and nation the umbrella is discrimination. It really needs to be all people in the United States and internationally who are facing different forms of discrimination. We need to have unity in our believe that discrimination against anyone is discrimination against all of us. In order to be able to address discrimination, we need to be able to u