Does your family, relationship, or identity cross borders of race, ethnicity, or culture?
We’re learning more about Brooklyn’s overlapping, interweaving communities.
Join the conversation at these upcoming events, on Twitter using #cbbg, and at brooklynhistory.org/cbbg.
What Are You? a discussion about mixed heritage
Monday, September 26, 2011 7 p.m.
Othmer Library, Brooklyn Historical Society
128 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn Heights
Free
Participate in this discussion about mixed heritage co-sponsored by Loving Day, a global network fighting racial prejudice through education and building multicultural community. This conversation will be facilitated by Jen Chau of Swirl, a multi-ethnic anti-racist organization that promotes cross-cultural dialogue; with Suleiman Osman, author of The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification, Race, and the Search for Authenticity in Post-War New York; performance artist Judith Sloan, co-author and co-creator with Warren Lehrer of Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America; and writer and actress Katrina Grigg-Saito, whose documentary and installation FishBird is titled for the saying “a fish can love a bird but where would they live?” Panelists will start the conversation and we hope you’ll join in. Brooklyn Brewery beer and light refreshments will be served.
20 Years Since the Crown Heights Riot
of August 1991
Sunday, October 23, 2011 2 p.m.
Medgar Evers College
1650 Bedford Avenue, Crown Heights
Free
Listen as historians and community members respond to oral history interviews with Crown Heights residents recorded in the 1990s and 2010. What’s changed? What’s stayed the same? The panel will include the following guests: co-curators of the Crown Heights History Project, 1993-1994 Craig Wilder, professor of American History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn, and Jill Vexler, anthropologist and curator of exhibitions about cultural identity and social history; Dexter Wimberly, curator of the Crown Heights Gold exhibition at the Skylight Gallery; Rabbi Eli Cohen, Executive Director of the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council; and Alex Kelly, organizer of Crown Heights Oral History – Listen To This and Monica Parfait, a student interviewer from Paul Robeson High School, currently in her first year at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Women’s Development and the President’s Office at Medgar Evers College.
UPDATE: Also speaking: museum educator and public historian Cynthia Copeland and Pamela Green, Executive Director of Weeksville Heritage Center.
Jungle Fever 20 Years Later:
A screening of Spike Lee’s iconic 1991 movie followed by discussion
Tuesday, November 15, 2011 7 p.m.
BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Avenue, Fort Greene
$12 / $7 for BAM and BHS Members
Watch Spike Lee’s iconic 1991 movie about mixed-heritage relationships, Jungle Fever, and hear how three panelists respond to the movie 20 years later. With historian Renee Romano, author of Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America and co-editor of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory; Michele Wallace, film critic, daughter of artist Faith Ringgold, and author of Black Macho and The Myth of The Superwoman and Dark Designs and Visual Culture; and Imani Perry, author of Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop and More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States. This event is co-presented by BAMcinématek.
The Hapa Project:
A multiracial identity art project
created by artist Kip Fulbeck
Thursday, December 8, 2011 6:30 p.m.
Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA)
215 Centre Street, Manhattan
Free
Join a discussion about what it means to be Hapa. Once a derogatory label derived from the Hawaiian word for “half,” Hapa has since been embraced as a term of pride by many whose mixed racial heritage includes Asian or Pacific Island descent. Kip Fulbeck photographed more than 1,200 people from all walks of life who identify as Hapa – from babies to adults, construction workers to rock stars, engineers to comic book artists. The project is featured as a part of MOCA’s core exhibition, With A Single Step: Stories in the Making of America. Join Fulbeck in conversation with Ken Tanabe, founder of Loving Day, a global movement for a new holiday to celebrate the anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court decision that legalized interracial marriage in the United States. Loving Day fights racial prejudice through education and builds multicultural community. This event is co-sponsored by MOCA and is part of Target Free Thursday at MOCA.
Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations is made possible by:
Institute of Museum and Library Services
The National Endowment for the Humanities
New York Council for the Humanities
Sweet’N Low Division of Cumberland Packing
Inventing Brooklyn: People, Places, Progress, now open at Brooklyn Historical Society, traces the evolution of Brooklyn into the place we know today. From Native American roots and lasting Dutch colonial influences to icons such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Dodgers, Inventing Brooklyn looks at how various peoples, places, and historical events have shaped the development of the borough. 
