"From mass incarceration to mass deportation, our nation remains in deep denial." -- Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Register through Zoom.
Stacy Seward, Executive Director of The Dream Network in Lawrence will facilitate a virtual conversation based on Michelle Alexander's compelling 2013 talk which addresses the issue of mass incarceration - The future of race in America: Michelle Alexander at TEDxColumbus. Attendees are encouraged to watch Alexander's talk ahead of time. Hosted by Courageous Conversations, in collaboration with Memorial Hall Library and Haverhill Public Library. Alexander's January 17, 2020 opinion piece in The New York Times revisits the issues she raised in 2010 with The New Jim Crow and in 2013 at TEDxColumbus.
About the facilitator: Stacy Seward (she, her, hers) holds a Master's Degree in Rehabilitation Psychology and Counseling from UNC Chapel Hill. She has also earned a Certificate of Advanced Graduate Study (CAGS) in Counselor Education and is an experienced clinician and instructor. Stacy has earned a mediation certificate and is a diversity professional whose practice centers around the social and psychological dimensions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I). In 2018, Stacy was elected to the Lawrence School Committee and spent her time there advocating for educational and racial equity for LPS students. She has consulted with multiple schools and non-profit organizations assisting them with DE&I initiatives leading to institutional shifts. Stacy provides equity centered technical assistance for Department of Justice grantees in programs across the nation, while helping connect systemic racism, incarceration, and reentry to root cause factors. Finally, Stacy is the Executive Director of The Dream Network in Lawrence Massachusetts. Her role is to use growth mindset ideology to impact racial, social, economic, educational, and environmental justice movements in her community.
Michelle Alexander is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, legal scholar and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness — the bestselling book that helped to transform the national debate on racial and criminal justice in the United States. Since The New Jim Crow was first published in 2010, it has spent nearly 250 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and has been cited in judicial decisions and adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads, and has inspired a generation of racial justice activists motivated by Alexander’s unforgettable argument that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”
Over the years, Alexander has taught at a number of universities, including Stanford Law School, where she was an associate professor of law and directed the Civil Rights Clinic. In 2005, Alexander won a Soros Justice Fellowship that supported the writing of The New Jim Crow and accepted a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University. Currently she is a visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.
Upcoming programs in the series:
3/10/2021 @ 7:00 PM - We Need to Talk About An Injustice: The Work of Bryan Stevenson
4/14/2021 @ 7:00 PM - What Positive Justice Looks Like: A Panel Discussion with UTEC (United Teen Equality Center) (Breaking Barriers to Youth Success)