Ken Burns & Isabel Wilkerson: In Conversation
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- Опубліковано 17 тра 2024
- Our lens on history powerfully influences how we envision and shape the future. Join two of our country's most accomplished storytellers, Ken Burns and Isabel Wilkerson, as they discuss the complexities of the American narrative and how grappling with the past might lead us forward.
Journalist Isabel Wilkerson was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2016 “for championing the stories of an unsung history.” The first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, her book The Warmth of Other Suns, a sweeping and intimate examination of the Great Migration, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, examines the entrenched hierarchies that shape American life. Told through intimate personal narratives and deeply researched history, Wilkerson examines the ties between the American caste system and those in India and Nazi Germany, and points to ways America can move beyond our artificial and destructive human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.
Ken Burns has been making documentary films for over forty years. Since the Academy Award nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, he has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including The Civil War; Baseball; Jazz; The War; The National Parks: America’s Best Idea; The Roosevelts: An Intimate History; Jackie Robinson; Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson; The Vietnam War; The Central Park Five; and Country Music. His films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including sixteen Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, two Oscar nominations; and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. His new website UNUM rearranges clips from his past films into playlists to add historical context to the present.
This conversation will be moderated by Lynette Clemetson, Director of Wallace House, Knight-Wallace Fellowships and the Livingston Awards at the University of Michigan. A longtime journalist, she was a correspondent for Newsweek magazine in the U.S. and Asia, a national correspondent for The New York Times, and senior director of strategy and new initiatives at NPR. Wallace House works to sustain and elevate the careers of journalists, foster civic engagement, and uphold the role of a free press in democratic society.
This Penny Stamps Speaker Series event is part of the Democracy & Debate theme semester with support from Wallace House and the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA). Our Fall 2020 Series is brought to you with the support of our streaming partners, Detroit Public Television and PBS Books.
I so enjoyed this, thank you!!!
Ken, please do your magic with this magnificent book and do a documentary for PBS. What a creative combo for the benefit of the entire world!
An incredible gem! Thank you for bringing these 2 brilliant documentarians together ... they inspire hope through examination of the past.
Sincerely Appreciate the Work of Both! ⭐
Thank you. Best wishes, health, joy and wellbeing… 🖖🏼
Brilliantly moderated, enhanced by the quality of mind and heart of two human beings, Isabel Wilkerson and Ken Burns, that is a grace and challenge!
Brilliant.
This gives me 1984 chills
What struck me the most in her book was her statement, and I paraphrase, ‘you learn to be black when you emigrate from Africa’. That’s the narrative and mythology of European settlement 350 yrs ago.
Isabel is brilliant and beautiful! I was reading all the negative book review comments on Amazon and those complaining are exactly the people Isabel talks about in her book.
However, in today's society, negative reviews or criticism is often a sign you've hit a nerve of truth! Keep it up! Isabel is also correct in saying many Americans don't really know our history, they only know the mythology of America.
I’d love to hear Dr Cornel West be part of these discussions. A wonderful speaker.
Excellent conversation! Can't wait to dig into each of the guests' work!
Chrisstina! Didn't realize the Stamps Speaker Series is now on UA-cam. I'm looking forward to this conversation. :)
As an ADOS, American Descendant of Slavery, I just wonder where in the heart and mind of those who would crowd against first acknowledgment and a repairable act to address this. I am speaking to reparations. I will read this work, but Americans has to have this conversation. Being Black doesn't mean we all have the same history. ADOS, we have Our-Story vs. History and it's quite different than what we really want to acknowledge. 🙏🏿
So true!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thank you Isabel Wilkerson for bringing the inhuman Indian Caste system into a strong focus among other important achievements of this book. For all its technological advances, Indian higher castes are proudly upholding this system even specifying desirable caste for a potential bride or groom in the matrimonial classified section of their newspapers. This is almost a neutral example compared to the treatment of the "Untouchable" caste- by the sheer misfortune of birth -who are marked for only cleaning jobs that no one will touch - for their children's entire life also.
Stop propoganda. People r marrying into their tribes which is ok.
When the moderator says that our/AMERICA'S history is there (AVAILABLE and ACCESSIBLE), but for our WILLFULNESS to IGNORE IT! She reminds me of the punchline to a "Lone Ranger and Tonto" joke.
When the Lone Ranger tells his sidekick Tonto: "we're surrounded by Indians; and, WE'RE going to be killed!" Tonto, then, says to The Lone Ranger, "What do you mean WE, WHITE MAN!"
The responsibility of telling/ EXPOSING the IGNORANT to America's True history falls on those of us who have been blessed/BURDENED with ACCESS to that history, to make it AVAILABLE for the Unknowing/ IGNORANT, to REPAIR existing defects and MITIGATING more extensive damages to OUR house/AMERICA!
So, for all practical purposes, those of us who have been given much (America's True history), MUST NOT WILLFULLY IGNORE OUR RESPONSIBILITY, to then share that REPARATIVE HISTORY, far and wide, to all citizens required for America's (our house) upkeep, maintenance/COMPETITIVE IMPROVEMENT.
Thank you all, in advance, for doing your parts, teaching AMERICA'S NEEDED TRUELY REQUIRED REPARATIVE HISTORY!
The question ..or maybe the challenge... is how do you get those in the upper caste to see that it is in their best interest to invite all other caste up in to yours? ...or better yet...see the person in front of you as another human and not a member of a caste, and that if their lives are improved then so too yours.
For over 20 years I have shown students how it is in their best interests to move past the "labels" (castes)
Thank you so much for your educational books and films etc. I love you, and everyone, who tries to teach us about the pass, so if we learn, we can have a better future. We are not learning, so we will reap what we have sown.
I love you! Thank you for your talents, and sharing with us.
Put Americans first, or we will not have an American to steal from, and pretend to give foreign aid, and all the other BS to steal. GREED will destroy us. $29,000. checks and $2,000.00 per mont, and training for online jobs.
Genocides worldwide will end the world. God is angry, and he knows how to tcb big time.
TRUTH!!! PRAISE GOD!!! AND THANK YOU 🙏 UM STAMPS!!!
LET FREEDOM RING!!! p.s. Ken, I AM in a fetal position...hard to photograph from down here on the floor. I was a photography student of your Dad's many, many moons ago. Isabelle, brilliant! I will read "Caste". Lynette, superb moderation! Isabelle, Ken and Lynette for presidential administration!!! Do good trouble.
I approach this problem Scientific Point of View , skin color is Biological Adaption to UV Radiation, Race is a Social and Political Construction . The Education System has a Responsibility to teach the facts of what it means to be Human .
I stopped watching Ken Burns after reading a review in CounterPunch, I forget which history they were reviewing. They said these films were "edgeless". Very true. Snoozers. Perfect for PBS.
Ken Burns not a historian?!