Black Lives Matter at UU: Creating Change

In this talk, Younge will show that Black lives not only matter in contemporary Europe but that they have always mattered in Europe, despite having been ignored and repressed in Europe’s public memories and official histories. This repressed history ranges from African and Asian soldiers fighting for European countries during both World Wars to the co-creation of contemporary Europe by waves of postcolonial migrants since the 1960s and 70s; from Blackness as a means of othering and racializing minorities to the implicit and explicit privileging of Whiteness; and from the cultivation of colonial amnesia to the foregrounding of racism in the United States the better to obscure that of Europe.

Younge’s keynote will be the starting point for a broader conversation about how the Black Lives Matter movement can help us reimagine our institutions, including universities, in a panel led by Nina Köll with Caribbean-Dutch artist and anti-racisms activist Quinsy Gario.

Gary Younge
Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and a professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. He was a US-correspondent and editor-at-large at The Guardian, editorial board member of the The Nation magazine and has also written for The New York Review of Books, Granta, GQ, The Financial Times and The New Statesman. He has written five books: Another Day in the Death of America, A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives; The Speech, The Story Behind Martin Luther King’s Dream; Who Are We?, And Should it Matter in the 21st century; Stranger in a Strange Land, Travels in the Disunited States and No Place Like Home, A Black Briton’s Journey Through the Deep South.

Quinsy Gario
Born and raised in Curaçao and Sint Maarten, Gario is a performance and visual artist and writer. As a student at Utrecht University Gario’s scholarship was situated in media and cultural studies and Postcolonial and Gender Studies. As a performance artist he became internationally known for his 'Black Pete Is Racisme' artwork. Much of his work focuses on decolonial remembering and the Dutch colonial archive and institutions.

You are invited to join the conversation via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKNm3jW-CZs&feature=youtu.be