Symposium Event – White Supremacy: Where Do We Go From Here?

 
Since November 2017, Somerville/Cambridge residents Diane Wong and Pharaoh Saunders have produced a live radio broadcast at Somerville Media Center (SMC) called Let’s Talk About Race (LTAR), inviting folks from a variety of demographics to engage in challenging conversations about racial justice. On January 19, 2019 SMC in collaboration with LTAR producers Wong and Saunders live streamed a symposium titled “Let’s Talk About Race: Where are we now?” featuring a diverse group of panelists presenting on racial issues followed by breakout race dialogues. Over 50 people attended, and many audience members were then invited to come on the LTAR radio show and continue the racial dialogues that began at the January symposium.
On June 8 from 11-1:30 at Somerville Media Center we will hold a follow up symposium to the January event titled “White Supremacy: Where do we go from here?” This symposium offers our first of four affinity groups (in this case white males) the opportunity to talk about their commitment to racial equity. Larry Aaronson, Bill Cavellini, Lew Gitelman and Alex Pirie join the discussion. All four panelists are white men who attended the January symposium and have been featured on the LTAR radio show.These four panelists will share ideas around how white folks can use their specific skills, work amongst themselves, form collaborations and find effective ways to engage the system to dismantle the structures and institutions of white supremacy.The event is free and open to the public, though we will be accepting donations to go towards the development of a 6 video series set that includes four separate affinity group panels (White Males/Black Males, Black Females/White Females) to discuss ways each group contemplates race-related concerns while seeking to engage in the dismantling of white supremacy. The event will also include a community meal and race dialogue, which participants are encouraged to attend.
 
Schedule of events:
10:30am: Doors open
11:00-12:00pm: Panel discussion
12:00-12:30pm: Community meal
12:30:-1:30pm: Breakout dialogues
Find out more about Let’s Talk About Race at https://soundcloud.com/healingwithdiane
Find out more about Somerville Media Center at www.somervillemedia.org
Panelist Bios:
Larry Aaronson was always a high school history teacher, always in public school, mostly in alternative set-asides. Larry is a teacher activist/community organizer for social and restorative justice, for race, class and gender equity. His main text was Howard Zinn’s “Peoples History of the United States.” He is a radical progressive, evolving Marxist socialist who believes that the public school is the citadel of our democratic citizenry.
Bill Cavellini grew up in a segregated housing project in the Bronx, NY. His father was a NYC police officer and his mother was a parochial school teacher. A community organizer all his adult life, in New York City, Atlanta, Georgia, Cambridge and Somerville, MA. Cambridge/Somerville. He drove a taxi cab for over thirty years at night in Cambridge to support his life as a community organizer during the day.
Alex Pirie is the Coordinator of the Immigrant Services Providers Group/Health, a member of the Sanctuary City Steering Committee, the Somerville Youth Workers Network, and the Tisch Center for Community Research at Tufts Steering Committees, the Health & Legal Immigrant Solidarity Network and a member of Our Revolution Somerville. He was gentrified out of Cambridge in the late 1970’s and moved to Somerville during its not so good old days.
Lew Gitelman is an educator. Growing up in neighborhoods of black and brown folks Lew was acutely aware of racism and the deadly effects it had on friends and people he knew. The turning point in his radicalization was the Black Power/Malcolm X movement and the murder of MLK. “I was at a Martha Reeves and the Vandellas concert when it was announced MLK had been shot and my good friend Porky Rainey said, “Lew that was the last hope for nonviolence. There is no turning back”. Yet here we are today and the fight for true equality and liberation still stares us in the face.”