On Friday, April 10th from 6:00-9:00 pm at University Church, CRLN will be hosting a viewing of the film Afraid of Dark followed by a panel discussion. This film is an official selection of the (In)Justice for All Film Fest, sponsored by the Next Movement of Trinity United Church of Christ. Afraid of Dark contextualizes the creation by white society of black men as brutes and mandingos against whom white society, and white women in particular, needed to be protected. Mya B. reasons that these images persist today and are the basis for social controls on black men, carried out through mass incarceration, surveillance and police violence.
We will have the film showing and a panel discussion immediately following the movie to explore the economic systems that created the U.S. slave society, how racial stereotypes were internalized by African-American men and continued after the end of slavery, and the ripple effects caused by this phenomenon both within the U.S. and beyond its borders. We will discuss how this historical, economic and white supremacist legacy intersects with the struggles of other marginalized communities (e.g., immigrants, Indigenous peoples, women, LGBTQIA communities) and ways that these communities can find common struggle as we continue to seek alternatives to massive transfers of wealth, criminalization of communities and militarization of police as means of social control.
Some of our participants are Mark Clements, a survivor of torture at the hands of John Burge and the Chicago Police; Mario Venegas, a survivor of torture at the hands of the Pinochet regime in Chile and Veronica Morris-Moore, who identifies the denial of trauma care to young black men as just one of many genocidal tactics used against black men.
