October 17, 2018
Doors 7:00 pm
Forum 7:30-9:30 pm
Free Admission
Location / Co-Presenter:
Gavin Brown’s enterprise
Harlem
439 W 127th St
New York, NY 10027
gavinbrown.biz
Photo: Nancy Stone
IF THEY COME FOR ME IN THE MORNING:
Town Hall Forums On the Legacy of State-Sponsored Xenophobia
Curated by Brian Tate
Produced by The Tate Group
DAY 4: What Will Be Different for Holocaust Survivors?
PANELISTS
TBA
ABOUT THE CONVERSATION
In recent years, the last generation of witnesses to two very different events - Japanese American Incarceration Camp Survivors, and Holocaust Survivors – have voiced concerns that have much in common. Political rhetoric that vilifies people on the basis of ethnicity or religion, they say, and government policies to detain, deport, or ban such people as a group, have conjured past episodes of state-sponsored xenophobia.
Some find the analogies hyperbolic, cautioning that America’s constitutional protections and ethnic diversity make it a vastly different place at a very different time. But others express unease and even anger that with the march of torch-burning Neo-Nazis, the wave of mass deportations, and the criminalization of asylum seekers, the history they experienced is being swept aside.
What can those survivors tell us about America today? Will be different for them – and us - if the lessons of history are lost?
ABOUT THE SERIES
The recent U.S. policy of separating and jailing immigrant families strikes at America’s image as a champion of diversity, democracy, and human rights. But the practice is not new, and it evokes historic episodes of state-sponsored xenophobia and bigotry. Today, as the deportations continue and the fates of scores of immigrant children remains unknown - and as America braces for a White Nationalist rally to be held across the street from The White House - it is worth asking: What can we learn from past traumas when political leaders used corrosive remarks and the power of government to define entire populations of people as security threats, noncitizens, or less than human?