History is something we take with us, not something we leave in the past.
Boston attorney José López got the inspiration to turn that figurative lesson into a literal one thanks to a trip down to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
From The Embrace monument to festivals such as Embrace Massó ¡Con Salsa!, our work emphasizes the larger role of culture in public life, one that extends beyond entertainment.
To understand that role, we have to look more closely at the relationship among the arts, our shared stories, and our democratic society in America, which can function only when we all participate together.
As we commemorate Hispanic Heritage Month through October 15, Lorna Rivera, Ph.D., of the Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Boston urges us to recognize how othering manifests in the context of racial bias in the Latin community—and what we must do to counter it.
“The greatest commandment is to love one another, is to love God and to love your neighbor as you love yourself. And if that’s what we preach, then that’s what we have to live.”
Embrace’s Imari Paris Jeffries traces the Federal Reserve Bank’s recently released estimated racial wealth gap back to its source: redlined lending, restrictive covenants, and a century of policy that determined who was allowed to own something long enough to pass it down.
“A democracy that has to answer to all of its people, not just the ones already inside the tent, is the strongest one we can build. Parties and candidates accountable only to themselves get weak, get complacent, stop listening. Accountability is what makes us stronger.”
Music has never been just entertainment. For communities pushed to the margins, it has been a way to claim space and survive the constant pressure of othering. The rhythms born on plantations, in barrios, and in public housing projects carried stories that governments tried to erase but could never silence.
Historic New England, with inspiration from the Stolpersteine memorials in Europe that honor victims of the Nazi regime, has a different mission: immortalize formerly enslaved people, too often voiceless and forgotten, as a way of reminding New England (and America) where we’ve been and how far we have still to go.
It is in its retelling that history becomes part of public memory—public memory is the successful transformation of history from a static record into a dynamic narrative that circulates among people in the present moment.
The 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence has inspired the revisiting of stories from our shared past.
It is in its retelling that history becomes part of public memory—public memory is the successful transformation of history from a static record into a dynamic narrative that circulates among people in the present moment.
For many people, America’s rapid authoritarian turn came out of nowhere.
Not Ibram X. Kendi.
The author of Stamped From the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist shows in his new book Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age that America’s anti-democratic policies are part of a worldwide trend—one that long predates the current administration.
