Us for this important conversation. First, i want to start with the most important acknowledgment. There are some things that its 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 widely known as the man behind the highly famous linders bagel he would say the family behind the highly famous and successful lenders bagel. I am grateful that the codirectors of the center are with us tonight, professor kenda phillips, and and i am grateful to them and to lenders for making this event possible as well. This year we are celebrating Syracuse Universitys 150th anniversary year. This milestone has us, across the campus and across the world, reflecting on times when our university has been at his best, and times when we have been humbled. It is in this context we have assembled this amazing panel of prominence museum and memorial directors, critical scholars, 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. The experts 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 genocide in an array of circumstances. On the of Syracuse University, i on behalf 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. I am a faculty 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. It is 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 understand what we mean as social justice. That remains the ongoing work of our center, recognizing social justice is not a singular focus, nor is it a thing that one does. We 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 fellowships that will lead teams with a faculty fellow to explore social justice issues, develop innovative approaches, and implement sustainable initiatives. This year as a way of an comer uncovering social justice trends. You want to Pay Attention because well announce we will announce the fellows soon. Media, visitsocial our website, so you can learn about the program and all the activities. Our goal is to support Innovative Research on issues related to social justice and into interdisciplinary conversations. Like the one we will have in a few moments with our panelists. Involve e to invite my colleagues. It is our panel. Thank you. [applause] now, i do not need to introduce myself. Add thanks to the amazing staff. All the folks who have made this room comfortable. I really appreciate it. [applause] ralph, in his 1959 and say, begins with this. That we do is what we are. That which we remember is more often than not what we would like to or hope to be. Tale told byever a inattentive idealists. I think this sentiment lies at the heart of what we in the academic circle call the study of public memory, not so much concerned with the official Public Record of history, but more our idea of the past, stories, and underlying this with a notion the past 20 years, this effort has been loosely project, around this several academic books, collaborate with around the world, including the college of london, university of copenhagen, this evening classes symposium is part of this longer standing work. We have a particular focus on the relationship between public memory and social justice. We remember justly . How can we engage memories of past injustices, and how can we honor differences. Is from across the country. We asked each of them to make a brief Opening Statement about their perspective on the broader topic. We hope to use the majority of our time watching a conversation panelists, andg if i can keep track of time, we will have time at the end so the audience joins in with questions and comments. As each speaker to give their Opening Statements and then move on to the other speakers. We will begin with dr. Carson, professor of hiphop, department of he is awardwinning scholar, educator, and for performance and performance artist. He has produced numerous essays, poems, and mix tapes, including his dissertation, which is a album. K thanks. I appreciate you all having me here. This is kind of dope. This was kind of a script i could live in that said choose your own adventure. It is hard for me to say. Nonstop, when do we see the play. This does not apply to me. Its really disgusting. What you do with memories that are not quite memories vice pres. Pence but the factual pattern of actual events that might never get around. Not so much difficult memories, but the almost impossible. Eality built on top of it how do we find our way to what we dont know we have forgotten or are forgetting. What do we know to be a process of active imagining. This is somehow to rearticulate terror as triumph, with little or no interest in attending to change or how the story gets 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 difficult in the remembering. Folks 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. I do not engage or be engaged in 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. When police fired 55 shots at 20 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. Nothing i read about his death 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 worthy, as valuable, mattering 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. It is the antieverything you believe you stand for, that a man stores in his hands, im 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. If you rise and your fall, they said hiphop is dead. I said it must be a joke because that that is really the truth, that means im talking to ghosts. And i aint about believing in what people cannot see, but i cannot believe in it if it dont believe in me. So what are you . [applause] thank you, professor carstens. Our next panelists is judith 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 Syracuse University and the lenders and 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 that you work across silos and try to work across silos and i think that is an area of 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 or deaf, or 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 lgbtq community, 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 whom 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. As a disabled person, as an 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 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 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 understand what it is and how it impacts us, as minor or major as it is. For families trying to get their children in school and are hiding what their children need because they fear if they talk about what they need that their children will not get into school, for adults who are looking for jobs and are fearful of disclosing and accommodation they need, for an individual who is interested in being in a relationship with someone else where they have a disability and they are afraid of disclosing their disability, those are some of that myriad issues. But when i think about memories, for me it is the daily experience. And it is not just in disability. It is that daily expense for those of us who are marginalized in one or more ways, that we have to experience and address. And i think we need to be more public, as we are experiencing these forms of discrimination, to really not only defend ourselves, but really to help educate ourselves as a community, so that we are able to ensure that as we move forward we are developing a more common agenda. That common agenda can really bring us together as a people. [applause] thank you, ms. Heumann. Thats wonderful. Our next speaker, holds a phd, is most recently published book, honeypot, black southern women who love women. Professor. Is great to be here this evening and i also want to extend my thanks to the lenders and mr. Greenberg and all the people who made tonight possible. In my research on oral histories among black lgbtq southerners, i am invested in attending to storytelling as a coperformative event. In other words, an event that involves the storyteller and the one who bears witness to the story. Oral history in conjunction with performance is not only a recollection of historical events and facts in relation to the self, but also the interplay between the teller and the listener. Im also interested in the value of what the oral history performance does for the storyteller. This is not to say that im not interested in the actual historical contents of what the narrator shares, nonetheless i am not invested in an uncontested truth. So much as im invested in the validation of the person telling the story. Which, as i will demonstrate, is why performance might be a key to providing a way to deal with difficult memories. Many of the women i interviewed for my most recent book, honeypot, shared stories of sexual trauma and violence. These stories could be potentially triggering for women who are survivors of such violence. Yet, as i suggest, coperformative witnessing is one way that may facilitate healing. In the following excerpt from one of the narratives of my interlocutory, michelle, she tells the story of how she came fullcircle with her father who molested her as a child, when he is the person to help her when she is about to succumb to drug addiction, and addiction precipitated by her fathers violation. She says, on march, seventh, two thousand four, i was sitting in my backyard. Excuse me, it is still real. I was ready to blow my brains out. I had three options. I gave myself three options. Either i can go take another hit of that crack cocaine. Our can blow