The first panel of Part IV of the Transitional Justice in the USA Speakers Series is scheduled to take place remotely on Thursday, October 19 (12-1:30 EST) entitled: Do Memory Battles About Contemporary and Historical Racial Injustice in U.S. Undermine the Right to Truth?The Center for International Law and Policy co-organized this panel with the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA | School Of Law and Memria.Org.

This panel explores how local and state efforts to ban books, to forbid education about racism including through critical race theory as well as to limit the discoverability of online information undermine the right to truth and a full accounting of racial violence both as a historical fact and of contemporary realities.  Panelists will explore how this strategic attack signifies a key battle in either promoting or marginalizing a robust memory in the telling of the “American story.”  The panel will ask how the outcome of this struggle for memory may shape a national narrative that justifies, or not, reparations and other forms of justice.  A comparative look will share how such struggles for memory constitute a critical step in advancing the quest for a true reckoning of past wrongs.  

We have a wonderful group of speakers, including: Louis Bickford – Co-Founder, Biografika, and CEO/Founder, Memria.org (who will moderate), Taifha Natalee Alexander – Project Director, Critical Race Theory Forward Project, UCLA School of Law, Karlos K. Hill – Regents’ Associate Professor in the Clara Luper Department of African and African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma, Nadine Farid Johnson – Managing Director of PEN America Washington and Free Expression Programs, Clara Ramírez-Barat – Director of the Warren Educational Policies Program, Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide.

There is a registration link to the panel on the Speakers Series website:  http://bit.ly/TJintheUSA