The stories we tell, and those we don’t, have serious consequences for our reality and our future.
Through all means of communication, the Trump administration and its billionaire backers are manufacturing a false narrative about the history, people, and current reality of the United States to justify their racist, xenophobic, patriarchal, and colonial agenda for people in the US and across the world.
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, the Trump administration and its billionaire backers are using this moment to launch an all-out attack on history and truth, intending to replace it with a false narrative that justifies their racist, xenophobic, patriarchal, and colonial agenda for people in the US and across the world.
They glorify the parts of history that serve their racist program today, while censoring the histories of heroic resistance, solidarity, and multiracial unity that shaped the people and history of the United States. They persecute those who tell the truth about the horrors of slavery and the fight that abolished it. They erase the history of Jim Crow and dismiss the millions who rose up to dismantle legal apartheid in this country. The examples are in the thousands.
This is a blatant attempt to weaponize a distorted version of US history to make their extreme right-wing project appear natural, popular, and uncontested. But their story is based on lies. Not only is their agenda completely and massively unpopular, their version of history is so manipulated that it is more fiction than fact.
It is up to us to expose these lies. We must become the arbiters of truth, and tell the stories of our people, our heroes, the millions who have fought oppression and exploitation and demanded a better world.
This seminar series is part of reclaiming that history. We will uncover just a fraction of the hidden and mostly unknown people’s rebellions that have shaped the history of the United States. These are the people on whose shoulders we stand, and these are the stories we need to know.
The battle over history is not a symbolic one. When we know the people who rose up before us—who organized across race, gender, and religion, who fought back and forced change— we gain the confidence and the certainty that we too can rise up and fight for a better world.
WHEN
This series will run from January 27 to March 17, meeting once a week with a few exceptions. The full schedule is below.
