In the Baltimore Sun, Julia Blount has an article that will be discussed on Monday, May 4, at 7 p.m. at the monthly forum, Continuing Conversations on Race and White Privilege at the Princeton Public Library, third floor. She writes:

I am not asking you to condone or agree with violence. I just need you to listen.

You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to, but instead of forming an opinion or drawing a conclusion, please let me tell you what I hear:

I hear hopelessness
I hear oppression
I hear pain
I hear internalized oppression
I hear despair
I hear anger
I hear poverty

If you are not listening, not exposing yourself to unfamiliar perspectives, not watching videos, not engaging in conversation, then you are perpetuating white privilege and white supremacy. It is exactly your ability to not hear, to ignore the situation, that is…

I grew up in St. Joseph, Missouri, San Francisco, and Shawnee, Kansas. These three places are drastically different from one another for several reasons. Besides having superior barbecue, in Kansas and Missouri my neighborhoods were almost entirely made up of Caucasian people. I can count on one hand  the number of black students that were in my honors high school classes in Kansas. Conversely, while living in San Francisco my best friends were Filipino-American, Japanese-American, African-American and Arab-American.

Ferguson is a short 3-hour drive from my home in Kansas City.  I recently moved to Taiwan and even though I am thousands of miles away I can still feel the tension.

I have a friend whose father is white and has worked in the police force in STL for decades; he feels that white police officers have been judged too harshly. I have several friends from college who are black and are so

“Winner of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival’s Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Talent, Dear White People is a sly, provocative satire of race relations in the age of Obama. Writer/director Justin Simien follows a group of African American students as they navigate campus life and racial politics at a predominantly white college in a sharp and funny feature film debut that earned him a spot on Variety’s annual “10 Directors to Watch.”  The movie has its commercial release on Friday, October 17–unfortunately not in the Princeton area.  In the meantime, take a look at the trailers.

A. O. Scott, in his review of the movie, in the New York Times says, “This is in part a movie about racism, about how deeply white supremacy is still embedded in institutions that congratulate themselves on their diversity and tolerance.”

Terry Gross interviewed director, Justin Simien, on NPR’s Fresh Air on October…

John Gager, one of the Freedom Riders who took a Trailways bus to Mississippi during the summer of 1961, will speak at Princeton United Methodist church on Sunday, November 9, at an 8 a.m. breakfast in the Fellowship Hall.

Gager participated in the civil disobedience protests against discriminatory Jim Crow laws and was arrested and jailed. “By pushing the boundaries, the civil-rights protests opened up space where people could think and act differently. The greatest changes come about not through changes in law, but in attitude,” said Gager in an interview with Princeton Alumni Weekly.

He retired in 2006 as the William H. Danforth Professor of Religion after 38 years on the Princeton University faculty.

This program will complement the traveling exhibit, “Risking Everything: A Freedom Summer,” which will be at the John Witherspoon Learning Commons, 217 Walnut Lane, from November 16 to 23 and at the Carl A. Fields Center from November 25…