Race in America: April Ryan, Keith Boykin, and Mary Frances Berry
Three leading voices in journalism, politics, and history discuss race, democracy, and white nationalism in contemporary America at Politics and Prose.
Why we picked this
Three people who have been watching this particular set of problems from different vantage points — a White House press room, a television studio, and a historian's office — on the same stage at once.
April Ryan has covered the White House as a correspondent for nearly three decades, watching race and power from a press briefing room where the stakes of the conversation were immediate and daily. Keith Boykin has been a CNN contributor, author, and political commentator whose work tracks the intersection of race, sexuality, and American democracy. Mary Frances Berry served as chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under multiple administrations and is a University of Pennsylvania historian whose scholarship spans the full arc of American civil rights from Reconstruction forward.
The conversation they’re gathering to have — about race, democracy, and the resurgence of white nationalist politics — is one that each of them has been having in their own forums for years. What changes when they’re in the same room is the friction and synthesis: three different disciplines, three different ways of translating the same underlying reality for different audiences.
Politics and Prose is a genuinely appropriate home for this event. Free, in Washington, and very likely to fill up.