Christians Seeking Justice (CSJ) is excited to sponsor a special four part series entitled Understanding and Remediating Structural Racism. The series will be led by Ayo Magwood (Uprooting Inequity), a highly-regarded public speaker specializing in evidence-based, politically-neutral, and solution-oriented education on historical and structural racism. Learn how racism evolved in the U.S.; how structural racism persists even after the Civil Rights movement; and how we can work to end it and help build a more racially just society.

The series will be held from 8-9:30pm EDT (5-6:30pm PDT) on four consecutive Thursdays: June 15, 22, 29, and July 6. Register for the entire series here.
 Please keep in mind that the series builds cumulative knowledge. In particular, session 2 is a prerequisite for session 3. If you are unavailable for session 2, please watch the recording before session 3.

Session 1 (June 15) The Origins of Race and Racism
Why did we invent races and institutionalized racism? Why do societies invent races? We will go back in history and learn about race relations and slavery during the early colonial American period, before we invented race and racism. Through primary historical sources, we will trace the social construction of the Black and White “races” and our transition from a class- to a race-based society. In the second half, we will analyze why societies in general invent races. We will learn that races are socially-constructed categories of people with hierarchically ranked status and differential access to power, resources, and opportunity, that are invented to legitimize slavery, colonization, or genocide.