Election Fever: “We Can’t Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival”- Soho Events

By Housing Works

Nov 13  |  Culture

With Jabari Asim & Rebecca Carroll – Soho Events

Author, editor, and academic Jabari Asim (The N Word; What Obama Means…For Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Future) discusses his new book We Can’t Breathe: On Black Lives, White Lies, and the Art of Survival with Rebecca Carroll (Sugar in the Raw; Saving the Race).

In We Can’t Breathe, Jabari Asim disrupts what Toni Morrison has exposed as the “Master Narrative” and replaces it with a story of black survival and persistence through art and community in the face of centuries of racism. In eight wide-ranging and penetrating essays, he explores such topics as the twisted legacy of jokes and falsehoods in black life; the importance of black fathers and community; the significance of black writers and stories; and the beauty and pain of the black body. What emerges is a rich portrait of a community and culture that has resisted, survived, and flourished despite centuries of racism, violence, and trauma. These thought-provoking essays present a different side of American history, one that doesn’t depend on a narrative steeped in oppression but rather reveals black voices telling their own stories.

Jabari Asim was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. For eleven years, he was an editor at The Washington Post, where he also wrote a syndicated column on politics, popular culture and social issues, and he served for ten years as the editor in chief of Crisis magazine, the NAACP’s flagship journal of politics, culture and ideas. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Arts and the author of six books for adults, including The N Word, and nine books for children.

Rebecca Carroll is a cultural critic and Editor of Special Projects at WNYC, where she develops, produces and hosts a broad array of multi-platform content, including podcasts, live events and on-air broadcasts. She is the author of five interview-based narrative nonfiction books about race in America, including the award-winning Sugar in the Raw, and critically acclaimed Saving the Race. Her essays, cultural commentary, book reviews and feature profiles have appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine Ebony, Essence, The Daily Beast, Jezebel, Gawker, The New Republic, and The Guardian, among others. She is a critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times, and a regular columnist for Shondaland. Her memoir Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2020.

Election Fever is a series of events drawing attention to timely, controversial, social justice-focused political issues facing Housing Works clients and specific populations of New Yorkers, as well as the nation as a whole. The series’ Publishing Sponsor is Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books. Our beer sponsor is Sixpoint Brewery.

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