BLACK HISTORY MONTH with DCC 2021 Calendar Black History Month of Events Visit for Details and Registration

CELEBRATE BLACK HISTORY MONTH WITH DCC 2021 Calendar Black History Month of Events Visit www.sunydutchess.edu/bhm for details and registration.

SUNY Black Faculty and Staﬀ Collective Black Solidarity Conference FEBRUARY 19 & 20 DCC’s Black History Committee and the SUNY Black Faculty and Staff Collective (BFSC) present the inaugural SUNY BFSC Black Solidarity Conference. The 2021 THEME: “Good and conference focuses on the late Congressman John Lewis’ call to embrace getting into Necessary “Good Trouble and Necessary Trouble” to make the United States and the world a Trouble” better place. Visit www.bfscblacksolidarity.com to learn more and register. FRIDAY, FEB. 19 10 - 11 a.m. Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Teachers College, Columbia University and Shamari Reid, doctoral student 11 a.m. - noon Jordan Bell, Dutchess Community College 12:10 - 1 p.m. Student Solidarity Lunch with Prof. Edward Lawson, SUNY New Paltz 1 - 2 p.m. La Juana Chambers Lawson, MPA, PMP, LSSGB, Tacit Growth Strategies 2:10 - 2:30 p.m. Day 1 Closing

SATURDAY, FEB. 20 11:10 a.m. - noon Dr. Charles Mills, CUNY 12:10 - 1 p.m. Break 1 - 2 p.m. Keynote: Dr. Sylvester James Gates Jr., Brown University 2:10 - 3:10 p.m. Day 2 Closing Vision of SBFSC Hanif Abdurraqib FEBRUARY 25 | 12:30 P.M. | LIVESTREAM Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is the author of a New York Times best-selling biography on A Tribe Called Quest called “Go Ahead in the Rain” (University of Texas Press, February 2019). He has also written “A Fortune For Your Disaster” (Tin House, September 2019), “The Crown Ain’t Worth Much” (Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press, 2016), which was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award, “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), named a best book of 2017 by NPR, Pitchfork, Oprah Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Slate, Esquire, GQ, and Publisher’s Weekly, among others. He is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow, a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine and a member of the poetry collective Echo Hotel with poet/essayist Eve L. Ewing. Abdurraqib has a forthcoming book that is a history of Black performance in the United States titled “A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance” (Random House, 2020).

ALL EVENTS ARE FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC www.sunydutchess.edu/bhm SUNY BLACK FACULTY & STAFF COLLECTIVE (BFSC) Black Solidarity Conference Good and Necessary Trouble

February 19 & 20 | Space is limited. Visit www.bfscblacksolidarity.com to register for these events!

Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz & Shamari Reid FEBRUARY 19 | 10 – 11 A.M. YOLANDA SEALEY-RUIZ is an award-winning associate professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research focuses on racial literacy in teacher education, Black girl literacies, and Black and Latinx male high school students. A sought-after speaker on issues of race, culturally responsive pedagogy, and diversity, Sealey-Ruiz works with K-12 and higher education school communities to increase their racial literacy knowledge and move toward more equitable school experiences for their Black and Latinx students. Sealey-Ruiz appeared in Spike Lee’s “2 Fists Up: We Gon’ Be Alright,” a documentary about the Black Lives Matter movement and the campus protests at Mizzou. Her fi rst full-length volume of poetry, “Love from the Vortex & Other Poems” was published in March 2020 (Kalediscope Vibrations). Learn more about Dr. Sealy-Ruiz at yolandasealeyruiz.com, @yolie_sealeyruiz (Instagram) and @RuizSealey (Twitter). SHAMARI REID often refers to himself as an ordinary Black Gay cisgender man from Oklahoma with extraordinary dreams. Currently, that dream involves completing his doctoral at Teachers College, Columbia University, in the department of Curriculum and Teaching, where he focuses on urban and teacher education. Before starting his doctoral program, Shamari completed a B.A. in Spanish Education at Oklahoma City University and an M.A. in Spanish and TESOL at New York University. He has taught Spanish and ESL at the elementary, secondary and post-secondary levels in Oklahoma, New York, Uruguay and Spain. In addition, he has spent the last few years teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on Urban Education, Teaching Developmental Reading, and Literacy, Language and Culture at CUNY-Hunter College. His research interests include Black youth agency, advocacy, and activism and transformative teacher education. He is completing his dissertation on the agency of Black LGBTQ+ youth in New York City. Oh, and he has a small addiction to chocolate chip cookies. You can engage more with him and his work on his website: shamarireid.com.

Professor Jordan Bell The Fungibility of the Black Body in Media and Education FEBRUARY 19 | 11 A.M. – NOON Saidiyah Hartman has spoken of the afterlife of slavery. It is in this afterlife that fungibility framed Blacks as a commodity of exchange for whites. While this exchange has historical antecedents that date back to the antebellum era, the forms of exchange have changed over time. Today, Black fungibility manifests in media and education spaces in the ways that exploit. While the case of contemporary fungibility will be made clear, the question is, how can we collectively disrupt and abolish the 21st century legacy of Black fungibility. JORDAN BELL is a professor of English at Dutchess Community College.

ALL EVENTS ARE FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC www.sunydutchess.edu/bhm Professor Edward Lawson Student Solidarity Lunch FEBRUARY 19 | 12:10 - 1 P.M. EDWARD LAWSON, JR., JD, MBA, is a committed change agent and transformative leader with over 25 years of experience in community mobilization. Mr. Lawson has been eff ective at providing technical assistance, capacity building and consulting to help local and national organizations construct and implement child and family strengthening programming. He has led and participated in grant-writing and fund development eff orts that have resulted in more than $60 million in awards. He has designed and managed Responsible Fatherhood, Healthy Marriage and Relationship, and Re-entry programs. He has also played an active role in the promotion of President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Community Challenge, and was instrumental in establishing the Yonkers MBK Plan, MBK Stakeholder Summit, and the Lower Hudson Valley MBK Alliance. He served as the grant writing team lead and the inaugural Program Manager for Yonkers MBK Impacting Communities Grant, which was selected as 1 of 10 of the Obama Foundation MBK National Impact Communities. In 2016, Mr. Lawson established Family and Community Engagement Services, Inc. (FACES). As president and chief equity offi cer, Mr. Lawson developed a Diversity Equity and Inclusion Framework (DEIF), which has helped a broad range of community stakeholders (including education, law enforcement, philanthropy, non-profi ts, local and federal government) to envision, develop and implement local action plans designed to improve communication and engagement. Mr. Lawson believes when individuals and organizations engage in practices that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, all stakeholders prosper, grow, heal and thrive. New and innovative ideas fl ourish in environments that encourage collaborative problem solving and value diverse perspectives. Mr. Lawson has adapted the DEIF to assist the Ulster County Sheriff department develop a comprehensive DEI Local Action Plan that would be responsive to Governor Cuomo’s recent New York State Police Reform and Reinvention Collaborative Executive Order, and serve as a sustainable community engagement strategy. On January 13, 2021, Mr. Lawson presented the Ulster County Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Framework Virtual Symposium in partnership with the Ulster County Sheriff ’s Offi ce and the Verizon Foundation to help develop and implement a successful diversity, equity, and inclusion plan for Ulster County. Through his role with the FACES, he continues to provide implicit-bias training to educators, communities and law enforcement. www.NYFACES.com Mr. Lawson also serves on the faculty at the SUNY (New Paltz) as an adjunct professor in the Black Studies Department. The Student Solidarity Lunch presentation seeks to explore strategies that move millennials beyond the use of online social media to engage in social causes to in-person (face-to-face) social activism to create more diverse, equitable and inclusive on-campus communities. Specifi cally, we will investigate strategies that seek to direct and swell millennial activists as opposed to rejecting and quelling their activism. Guiding millennials to unify around intent, cause, spirit, method and etiquette.

La Juana Chambers Lawson FEBRUARY 19 | 1 – 2 P.M. MRS. LA JUANA (LJ) CHAMBERS LAWSON, MPA, PMP, LSSGB, as seen in O, The Oprah Magazine, Entrepreneur, Forbes, and VoyageDallas, is the Owner, CEO, and Principal Consultant of Tacit Growth (TGS) Strategies LLC, a nationally awarded and internationally recognized project management fi rm leading individual and organizational success one project at a time. LJ is a highly sought-after consultant, undergraduate and graduate school professor, grant writer and reviewer, startup advisor and investor, and project management evangelist.

ALL EVENTS ARE FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC www.sunydutchess.edu/bhm Charles W. Mills FEBRUARY 20 | 11:10 A.M. - NOON CHARLES W. MILLS works in social and political philosophy, particularly in oppositional political theory as centered on class, gender and race. He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as five books. His first book, “The Racial Contract” (1997), won a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award for the study of bigotry and human rights in America. It has been adopted widely in hundreds of courses across the United States. His second book, “Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race” (1998), was a finalist for the award for the most important North American work in social philosophy of that year. He is author of “From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism” (2003); “Contract and Domination” (co-authored with Carole Pateman, 2007); and “Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality: Race, Class and Social Domination” (2010). His sixth book, “Black Rights/ White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism,” is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Mills is also the co-editor of “Philosophy: The Big Questions” (2003) with Ruth Sample and James Sterba; a special issue of the Du Bois Review on “Race in a ‘Postracial’ Epoch” (Spring 2014) with Robert Gooding-Williams; and “Simianization: Apes, Gender, Class and Race” (2015) with Wulf D. Hund and Silvia Sebastiani. Mills received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. Before joining the Graduate Center, he taught at the University of Oklahoma, the University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University.

Keynote: Dr. Sylvester Jim Gates FEBRUARY 20 | 1 – 2 P.M. SYLVESTER JAMES “JIM” GATES, JR., (born December 15, 1950) is an American theoretical physicist. He received two B.S. degrees and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the latter in 1977. His doctoral thesis was the first one at MIT to deal with supersymmetry. In 2017, Gates retired from the University of Maryland, and is currently the Brown Theoretical Physics Center director, Ford Foundation Professor of Physics, an affiliate mathematics professor, and a Faculty Fellow, Watson Institute for International Studies & Public Affairs at Brown University. While at the University of Maryland, College Park, Gates was a University System Regents Professor, the John S. Toll Professor of Physics, the Director of the String and Particle Theory Center, and affiliate professor of mathematics. Gates served on the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, contemporaneously on the Maryland State Board of Education from 2009-2016, and the National Commission on Forensic Science from 2013-2016. He is known for his work on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory. In 1984, working with M.T. Grisaru, M. Rocek and W. Siegel, Gates co-authored “Superspace,” the first comprehensive book on the topic of supersymmetry. In 2017, working with Frank Blitzer and Stephen Jacob Sekula, he co-authored “Reality in the Shadows (Or) What the Heck’s the Higgs?” In 2019, together with Cathie Pelletier, he co-authored “Proving Einstein Right: The Daring Expeditions that Changed How We Look at the Universe.” He is a past president of the National Society of Black Physicists, and is a NSBP Fellow, as well as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Institute of Physics in the U.K. In 2013, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, becoming the first African-American theoretical physicist so recognized in its 150-year history. On November 16, 2013, Gates was awarded the Mendel Medal by Villanova University “in recognition of his influential work in supersymmetry, supergravity and string theory, as well as his advocacy for science and science education in the United States and abroad.” President Obama awarded Gates the National Medal of Science, the highest award given to scientists in the U.S., at a White House ceremony in 2013. During 2014, he was named the Harvard Foundation’s “Scientist of the Year.” In 2018, he was elected to serve in the presidential line as vice president of the American Physical Society. In 2019, he was invited to serve on the American Bar Association Steering Committee for the Annual Prescription for Criminal Justice and Forensic Science.

ALL EVENTS ARE FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC www.sunydutchess.edu/bhm QUESTIONS? Contact Willie Morris at [email protected]. B

L Jordan Bell, Co-Chair A

CK HIST Willie Morris, Co-Chair

Shinelle Espaillat

Dr. Jessica Geer o R

Y C O Jacqueline Goffe-McNish

Shalon Hallager MMITTEE Ahmed Ismail

Kevin Lang

Dr. Weldon McWilliams