KPFA Radio 94.1 FM & Marcus Books present:
Michael Eric Dyson: A Zoom Event
Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America
Hosted by Sabrina Jacobs
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Tuesday, March 23, 2021, 7PM
Building on Tears We Cannot Stop, a passionate call to America to finally reckon with race and start the journey to Redemption, Michael Eric Dyson’s new book, LONG TIME COMING: Reckoning with Race in America grapples with the cultural and social forces that have shaped our nation in the brutal crucible of race. In five chapters—each addressed to a contemporary martyr from Breonna Taylor to Rev. Clementa Pinckney—Dyson traces the genealogy of antiblackness from the slave ship to the street corner where Floyd lost his life—and where America gained its will to confront the ugly truth of systemic racism.
The night of May 25, 2020 changed America. George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was killed during an arrest in Minneapolis when a white cop suffocated him. The video of that night’s events went viral, sparking the largest protests in the nation’s history and the sort of social unrest we have not seen since the sixties. While Floyd’s death was certainly the catalyst, (heightened by the fact that it occurred during a pandemic whose victims were disproportionately of color) it was in truth the fuse that lit a powder keg that has been filling since America’s promising but perilous beginning. In LONG TIME COMING, Dyson examines the cultural imperatives of black death, the plague of police brutality, the white theft of black bodies and opportunities.
MICHAEL ERIC DYSON – Distinguished University Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies, College of Arts & Science, and of Ethics and Society, Divinity School, and Centennial Professor at Vanderbilt University— is one of America’s premier public intellectuals, and the author of seven New York Times bestsellers.
SABRINA JACOBS is the producer and host of KPFA’s popular show “A Rude Awakening” In addition she is a frequent host and interviewer on KPFA’S Zoom webinar series with contemporary authors.