From Japanese American Redress To Black Reparations: A Conversation with John Tateishi and William Darity/A. Kirsten Mullen
February 3, 2021 @ 4:00 pm
Streaming live: Register here
A conversation between former national JACL Executive Director John Tateishi (author of Redress: The Inside Story of the Successful Campaign for Japanese American Reparations and Duke University Professor William Darity and Independent Scholar A. Kirsten Mullen (co-authors of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century — UNC Press, 2020). The conversation will be introduced by Duncan Ryuken Williams (USC Ito Center) and moderated by Susan Kamei (USC). This event is brought to you by the Ito Center in partnership with Densho, the Japanese American National Museum, and Tsuru for Solidarity and is part of the Ito Center Black + Japanese American Reparations event series and book club.
Please note that the event will start at 4 PM PST
About the Speakers
John Tateishi
John Tateishi, born in Los Angeles in 1939, was incarcerated from ages three to six at Manzanar, one of America's ten World War II concentration camps. He studied English Literature at UC Berkeley and attended UC Davis for graduate studies. He played important roles in leading the campaign for Japanese American redress, and as the director of the Japanese American Citizens League, he used the lessons of the campaign to ensure that the rights of this nation's Arab and Muslim communities were protected after 9/11.
William A. Darity, Jr.
William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. He has served as chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and was the founding director of the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality at Duke. Darity’s research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, schooling and the racial achievement gap, North-South theories of trade and development, skin shade and labor market outcomes, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, the history of economics, and the social psychological effects of exposure to unemployment. He and A. Kirsten Mullen are the authors of the recent publication, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century (2020).
A. Kirsten Mullen
A. Kirsten Mullen is a folklorist and the founder of Artefactual, an arts-consulting practice, and Carolina Circuit Writers, a literary consortium that brings expressive writers of color to the Carolinas. She was a member of the Freelon Adjaye Bond concept development team that was awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s commission to design the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Under the auspices of the North Carolina Arts Council she worked to expand the Coastal Folklife Survey. As a faculty member with the Community Folklife Documentation Institute, she trained students to research and record the state’s African American music heritage. Kirsten was a consultant on the North Carolina Museum of History’s “North Carolina Legends” and “Civil Rights” exhibition projects. Her writing in museum catalogs, journals, and in commercial media includes “Black Culture and History Matter” (The American Prospect), which examines the politics of funding black cultural institutions. She and William A. Darity, Jr. are the authors of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-first Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
