Warren Wilson College Professor of Religious Studies Rima Vesely-Flad will present a teach-in at Malaprop’s Bookstore on Thursday, Oct. 12 at 6 p.m. The event will be based on her new book, Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives, and the Struggle for Justice, published this summer by Fortress Press.
A Facebook Event page for the program contains additional information:
According to Ethan Vesely-Flad:
In this book, Rima … describes and examines the symbolic construction of the morally polluted Black body that sustains over-policing of Black and Brown communities and the mass incarceration industry tied to it.
Dr. Willie Jennings, the renowned professor of theology and Africana studies (now at Yale Divinity School, formerly at Duke for many years), states, “In time, this will be the book that many an undergraduate will say changed the way they see the world.”
Framing her argument in religious and philosophical notions of race and morality through the Enlightenment and the dawn of the United States democratic experiment, Dr. Vesely-Flad addresses current-day racial justice struggles, including the anti-Stop-and-Frisk movement and the Black Lives Matter movement.
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