Harriet Beecher Stowe Center
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Hartford, CT 06105
860-522-9258
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Inspired by Stowe Prize winner Ta-Nehisi Coates‘s article, “The Case for Reparations,” Stacey Queen, Education Associate at The Amistad Center for Art & Culture, Shawn Salvant, Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, and Woody Doane, Professor of Sociology at the University of Hartford, led the conversation. Reparations compensation for descendants of individuals enslaved in the U.S. Ms. Queen and Professor Doane traced the history of racism in the U.S., from slavery to Jim Crow to housing segregation to mass incarceration, and the ways this history causes vast disparities in income, education, and social location between black and white Americans. Coates argued that this history justifies reparations to address historic and contemporary inequities. Professor Salvant said that conversations on reparations stall because people focus on the difficulty or impossibility of acting on reparations.
Inspiration to Action