In this dynamic, participatory conversation, we’ll deeply explore the inspiration and forces that source our stewardship of land, ecology, food, and communities. We’ll examine how imperialist strategies that were devised to disconnect us from, and harm us through land weren’t successful, and the bodies of existing work that are helping us reconnect, repair, and reclaim our ecological-human relationships.
This conversation, the second in a series of Braxton Institute Dialogues on Resisting and Thriving, will be led by three Black justice workers: Tracy McCurty (Black Belt Justice Center), Amirio Freeman (Being Green While Black) and Richael Faithful (Folk Healer/Braxton Institute). An anchor to the event’s conversation is the new anthology, Land Justice: Re-imagining Land, Food, and the Commons, to which Tracy and Richael are contributors.
This event is open to the public. No registration is required.
Panelists:
Amirio Freeman, from Hampton, Virginia and currently residing in Washington, D.C., is a writer, intellectual activist, and recent graduate whose interests reside at the intersection of race, space, and Afro-Diasporic healing modalities. Freeman received a B.A. in Public Policy and a minor in Africana Studies from the College of William & Mary, where he first began to critically interrogate healing interventions that would repair the relationship between the natural world and Afro-Diasporic communities in the U.S. Currently, Freeman is a Bill Emerson National Hunger Fellow with the Congressional Hunger Center, doing work related to domestic anti-hunger advocacy. In his down time, Freeman enjoys eating, exploring the District, and updating his blog, “Being Green While Black”--a Tumblr-based digital humanities project that “visually reclaims the greenness of Blackness.”
Tracy Lloyd McCurty, Esq. is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Black Belt Justice Center (BBJC), a legal and advocacy nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and regeneration of African American farmlands and land-based livelihoods through effective legal representation, advocacy, and community education. For over a decade, Tracy has served as a legal advocate on a range of issues disparately impacting the African Diaspora community; however, her most cherished work has been in service of multigenerational farm families living on the land in the rural South. Through her socio-political lens, Tracy regards the southern Black agrarians’ utilization of various solidarity economic models as worthy of immense study and replication to address the deleterious conditions confronting both people of color communities and working poor communities in the United States. Certainly, her work through the BBJC reflects the wisdom of both her grandmother and other southern Black agrarians who rejected the European constuction of individual property rights and the commodification of land. Collectively, our ancestors advanced the Black family land commons (commonly referred to as heir property) to neutralize the economic suffering and land scarcity caused by racialized capitalism. Our ancestors knew what has been poigiantly captured by Toni Morrison, "little people with finite lives love to play games with the infinite." Thus, the reductive commodification of land erases the non-commodifable valuations that our ancestors envisioned with the creation of the Black family land commons: collective landownership, economic autonomy, self-sufficiency, ancestral homeplaces, and kinetic epicenters of cultural, spritual, medicinal, and supernatural expressions.
Richael Faithful is a folk healing artist from the African diasporic tradition of conjure, healing justice practitioner, and lawyer.
Join us for a powerful evening of spirit-connected movement-building!
About Dialogues on Resisting and Thriving:
The Braxton Institute Dialogues on Resisting and Thriving engage justice-activists with the nitty-gritty issues that can undermine our success, such as conflicts within our movements, burnout, internalized oppression and benevolent paternalism. The Dialogues prioritize the wisdom and leadership of women of color, and resource our effectiveness through break-through conversations, and by exploring and re-imaging the spiritual resources that have fueled and sustained powerful social change movements—including folk healing, meditation, rituals for empowerment, celebration, and more
