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Jesse Hagopian

Teach Truth — Unbanning Books in Public Schools

Date:
Thu Jan 23, 2025
Time:
7:00 pm PST
Cost:
$10 - $35 Sliding Scale
Learn more about Sliding Scale tickets.

Venue

The Wyncote NW Forum
1119 8th Ave (Entrance off Seneca St.)
Seattle, 98101 United States
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Note: Town Hall events are approximately 75 minutes long.

Book cover of 'Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education' by Jesse Hagopian. The design features an image of a child with curly hair, shouting into a red megaphone. The bold title is in large green text, with a tagline above stating, 'A much-needed reckoning with the roots of the latest wave of censorship and an urgent call to action to defend education.'
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Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education

Elliott Bay Book Company

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Headshot of Jesse Hagopian (with brown skin and black buzzcut with facial hair)
Civics

Did you know that the Seattle Public Library offers any U.S. resident a “Books Unbanned Card,” which allows you to check out banned audiobooks, no matter where you live? This is just one example of how people are resisting new restrictions on information and education across the country. In his new book, Teach Truth, Seattle educator and author Jesse Hagopian discusses these restrictions and offers advice on how to defend antiracist education.

Hagopian outlines how numerous states and school districts in recent years have enacted policies or laws mandating how to teach about systemic racism and oppression—policies that impact nearly half of all students in the U.S. Thousands of books have been banned from schools. Teachers face termination, attacks, and disciplinary action. You can be punished, including jail time, for providing access to a banned book. These new changes have old roots in McCarthyism’s Red Scare and Lavender Scare. They have strongholds in U.S. history.

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But there is also strong pushback. Hagopian shows how the fight against them also has a rich legacy, from the resistance to anti-literacy laws for enslaved people to the Black Lives Matter at School movement today. Hagopian calls to defend antiracist education, showing how to reclaim suppressed history by creating beloved classroom communities and healthy social movements.

Jesse Hagopian has taught in public schools for over 20 years, serves on the Black Lives Matter at School steering committee, organizes for the Zinn Education Project, and founded the Ethnic Studies course at Seattle’s Garfield High School. He is an editor for Rethinking Schools magazine, the co-editor of Black Lives Matter at School and Teaching for Black Lives, and the editor of More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High Stakes Testing.


Presented by Town Hall Seattle.

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