Ambasada USA zaprasza na spotkania z Darylem Davisem, znakomitym amerykańskim jazzmanem, bluesmanem oraz aktywistą społecznym zajmującym się problematyką dialogu międzyrasowego w Stanach Zjednoczonych, który w przyszłym tygodniu odwiedzi Kraków i Warszawę na zaproszenie ambasady USA i konsulatu USA w Krakowie.

Daryl Davis jest od lat zaangażowany w dialog z Ku Klux Klanem. Zaprzyjaźnił się z 20 jego członkami i może pochwalić się tym, że w wyniku jego postawy i perswazji około 200 osób wystąpiło z tej organizacji. O swoich doświadczeniach napisał książkę pt. ”Klan-destine Relationships: A Black Man’s Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan”. Jego pytanie „How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?” stało się kluczem do dialogu z członkami Klanu. Jak tego dokonał? Dowiemy się podczas poniżej zaplanowanych spotkań:

 

24/10 (czwartek) godz. 15:30

Spotkanie organizowane przez Warszawskie Centrum Innowacji Edukacyjno-Społecznych i Szkoleń (WCiES), ul. Stara 4, Warszawa.

Wymagana rejestracja przez link na tej stronie: https://kursy.wcies.edu.pl/pl/a/Dialog-z-Ku-Klux-Klanem-Lekcja-Odrobiona  Na to spotkanie szczególnie zapraszamy nauczycieli.

Wydarzenie na Facebooku: https://www.facebook.com/events/1001849616831619/

 

25/10 (piątek) godz. 17:00

Spotkanie organizowane przez studentów Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, które odbędzie się w Audytorium Maximum w Auli Adama Mickiewicza Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28.

Wydarzenie przewiduje prezentację Daryla, dyskusję z publicznością i krótki akcent muzyczny.

Wstęp wolny. Wydarzenie na Facebooku:  https://www.facebook.com/pg/samorzad.studentow.uw/events/?ref=page_internal

 

Spotkania odbędą się w j. angielskim.

 

Pragniemy aby wystąpienia naszego prelegenta przerodziły się w dyskusję na temat tolerancji, dialogu międzykulturowego oraz sposobów zapobiegania rozprzestrzenianiu się fałszywych informacji i mowie nienawiści.

 

Więcej informacji na temat Daryla Davisa znajdziecie Państwo poniżej oraz na stronie: https://www.daryldavis.com

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Daryl Davis is an expert on race relations, and the author of “Klan-Destine Relationships: A Black Man’s Odyssey through the Ku Klux Klan.”  Davis has spent much of his life trying to understand and stop racism, including engaging with Klan members to help them find common ground across racial lines.  Several Klan members have given up their robes as a result of these ongoing dialogues.  Daryl Davis is a blues musician who has worked with artists including Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley’s Jordanaires, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bo Diddley. However, what Daryl is most known for is his work with members of the Ku Klux Klan. Daryl, an African American, has befriended members of the KKK for the past 30 years… with at least 200 of them renouncing their robes and former beliefs.

As the child of American foreign service officers, Daryl spent some of his childhood living abroad. He attended international schools, where his classes were filled with children from all over the world. Growing up with such diversity, Daryl was unaware of the racial issues that plagued American culture and politics at that time. When his family finally returned to the United States in the middle of the Civil Rights era, Daryl had a rough introduction to race politics. While marching in a parade as a Boy Scout with his troop, stones, bottles, and soda pop cans began striking Daryl. He innocently wondered, “Why don’t these people like the Boy Scouts?” He was unaware that as the only African American in the troop, he was the only one being hit—his parents had to explain this afterward.

Soon after this incident, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. Daryl began to comprehend the realities of racism, but still didn’t understand why it existed at all. This led Daryl to ask a question that he has since spent his life seeking to answer. He asked, “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?”

Daryl couldn’t have anticipated that the first answer to this question would come from a member of the KKK! One night, Daryl was playing at the Silver Dollar Lounge, a bar in Frederick, Maryland. A man approached and complimented him, saying, “You know, this is the first time I ever heard a black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis.” They sat down at a table to discuss the origins of blues and boogie-woogie. Eventually the man revealed that he was a member of the KKK. He returned to the bar many times to hear Daryl play; gradually a relationship formed. Daryl recognized this budding friendship as an opportunity to answer the question that had remained with him since boyhood.

After that initial friendship, Daryl met hundreds of other KKK clansmen and women. During these encounters, he always listened to the other person’s perspective first before sharing his own perspective. Keeping the dialogue going is paramount because, “When two enemies are talking, they’re not fighting. It’s when the talking ceases that the ground becomes fertile for violence. If you spend five minutes with your worst enemy—it doesn’t have to be about race, it could be about anything… you will find that you both have something in common. As you build upon those commonalities, you’re forming a relationship and as you build about that relationship, you’re forming a friendship.”1 Daryl’s curiosity about and knowledge of the KKK, politics, history, and racism was so compelling to some clansmen and women that they began to question their own beliefs.

In seeking an answer to his question, “How can you hate me when you don’t even know me?” Daryl found not just answers but friends. Today, Daryl still meets with members of the KKK, with some crediting him for saving their lives. When they needed love and acceptance, Daryl extended his friendship across deep racial and ideological divides. Sitting with a former KKK member who is now one of his close friends, Daryl says, “We’re a family and this family is one that’s going to last.”

American Studies Colloquium Series

March 20: Limits to/of Representation: Intersectional and Gender-Based Violence in Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River

March 12, 2025

We are pleased to invite you to the second lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2025 Spring semester! This time, we are joined by Dr Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová of Charles University, who will offer a nuanced analysis of Taylor Sheridan’s directorial debut Wind River through the categories of representation as inclusion and representation as portrayal.

Year 2024/2025

March 14: SPLOT Artemis Generation Open Event: To Boldly Go Or Not: Human Futures in Space

March 11, 2025

After a decades-long slowdown of extra-terrestrial exploration, humanity seems poised to return to space. Some visions of this return are very ambitious, but much remains unclear about the feasibility, the scope, and the cost of expanding beyond the third planet from the Sun. To think through these (and other) aspects through the lens of science fiction, space psychology, design and architecture, SPLOT Artemis Generation in collaboration with the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw, is hosting a discussion panel featuring Dr. Joanna Jurga, Dr. Agnieszka Skorupa, and Prof. Sherryl Vint and moderated by Prof. Paweł Frelik.

Year 2024/2025

March 13: Anachronistic Retrofuturism and the Cosmic Indifference of the Workplace

March 5, 2025

This talk centers the anachronistic office work setting and technologies of the tv series Severance (2022–) to argue that the series exemplifies the aesthetic techniques of the Weird even as it reorients the site of horror from the indifference of the universe to the sociopathy of neoliberal capitalism. If the original concept of Weird Fiction stressed the impotence of human beings within a universe ruled by forces that greatly exceed our power and that are, at best, indifferent to our fate, Severance confirms that these forces are, worse, malign as it locates them in the corporate priorities of the tech company Lumon Industries and its reduction of humans to human capital.

News

Extending the ELS

March 3, 2025

Extending the ELS (electronic student ID) validity will take place on March 17 – 20, 2025 from 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.

American Studies Colloquium Series

March 6: Bending Reality to Economics

March 1, 2025

We are delighted to invite you to the first lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2025 Spring semester! This talk examines the nested narrative of Hernan Diaz’s novel Trust as a motif by which the novel engages with the form of the financialized economy, in parallel with how its plot reflects on the lives of New York’s financial elite. By reframing the story of the 1929 crash through several mediations from the ‘reality’—a novel-with-the-novel, notes for a biography, reflections on this process by the ghost writer of said biography, and finally a personal journal—Trust draws our attention to the financialized economy as an exercise of substituting models for the thing itself, with inevitable distortions and lost data.