Race, History, and Obama’s Second Term

After Barack Obama put his hand on the Lincoln Bible and took the oath of office this week almost exactly 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, it’s appropriate to ask: Where is America now, a century and a half after Lincoln signed that celebrated document? Have we progressed as much as we like to think? What disparities in health, wealth, education and incarceration do people of color still face? What might Obama accomplish in his second term to narrow these disparities? And in an age of mass downward mobility, can policies that help minorities also profoundly benefit the majority? 

The New America Foundation and the Washington Monthly magazine invite you to a discussion about these and other critical questions with a panel of distinguished authors and experts including Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Taylor Branch. The conversation will draw on articles featured in the Washington Monthly‘s recent “Race, History, And Obama’s Second Term” issue.

Participants

Taylor Branch
Author, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement

Dr. Gail Christopher
Vice President for Program Strategy, W.K. Kellogg Foundation

Douglas Blackmon
Author, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
Contributing Editor, The Washington Post

Elijah Anderson
Author, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life
William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Sociology, Yale University

Paul Glastris
Editor in Chief, Washington Monthly