In this historic moment of heartache - the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, COVID 19, and white nationalism in the White House - Dr. Fania Davis explores how the nation is reckoning with the terrible truths of our history like never before - considering reparations, abolishing structures that systematically brutalize Black people, and building anew.

Systems of policing and public safety have terrorized Black people for 401 years. Fania asserts that history asks us to not only upend and reimagine systems of policing and public safety but to also re-envision justice. Addressing the intersectionality of race and the U.S. criminal justice system, she explores how restorative justice has the capacity to disrupt patterns of mass incarceration through effective, equitable, and transformative approaches. The multiple appeals today for truth and reconciliation gesture toward a new, more capacious justice that requires a collective reckoning.

Fania asserts, truth and reconciliation processes cannot be top-down. They must be homespun, informed but not defined, by truth and reconciliation processes from other times and places.

Our best hope, she argues, are restorative justice-informed truth processes that are bottom-up, radically-inclusive, community-driven, and rooted in Indigenous insights about humanity, collectivity, responsibility and the earth.

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Dr. Fania E. Davis is a leading national voice on the intersection of racial and restorative justice. She is a long-time social justice activist, civil rights trial attorney, restorative justice practitioner, and writer and scholar with a PhD in Indigenous knowledge. Founding director of Restorative Justice of Oakland Youth (RJOY), her numerous honors include the Ubuntu Award for Service to Humanity, the Dennis Maloney Award for Youth-Based Community and Restorative Justice, the Tikkun Olam (Repair the World) Award, the Ella Jo Baker Human Rights Award, the Bioneers Change Maker Award, and the EBONY Power 100 Community Crusaders Award. She is a Woodrow Wilson fellow, and the Los Angeles Times named her a “New Civil Rights Leader of the 21st Century.”

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TICKETS ARE SLIDING SCALE $5 - $25 to benefit SpeakOut and our Youth Summit coming up October 3, 2020.

All who register will receive a link to watch live or later at their own convenience.

Closed caption.