The Baton Foundation

The Rage of Innocence
2024-06-23 15:00 - 16:30 (America/New_York)
The Baton Foundation will host a lecture about the day-to-day brutalities endured by Black youth growing up under constant police surveillance and the persistent threat of physical and psychological abuse. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
Drawing upon twenty-five years of experience representing young people in Washington, D.C.’s juvenile courts, Kristin Henning confronts America’s irrational and manufactured fears of Black youth and makes a compelling case that the nation’s obsession with policing and incarcerating Black America begins with Black children.

Unlike White youth, who are afforded the freedom to test boundaries and figure out who they are and who they want to be, Black youth are seen as a threat to White America and denied the privilege of healthy adolescent development. Weaving together powerful narratives and persuasive data, Henning examines the criminalization of Black adolescent play and sexuality, the demonization of Black fashion, hair, and music, and the discriminatory impact of police in schools.

The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2021), lays bare the long-term consequences of racism and trauma that Black children experience at the hands of police and their vigilante surrogates and explains how discriminatory and aggressive policing has socialized a generation of Black teenagers to fear and resent the police.
About the Author
Kristin Henning is the Blume Professor of Law and Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at Georgetown. Professor Henning has been representing children accused of crime for more than 26 years and was the lead attorney for the Juvenile Unit of the D.C. Public Defender Service. She is currently the Director of the Mid-Atlantic Region of the Gault Center.

Professor Henning worked closely with the McArthur Foundation’s Juvenile Indigent Defense Action Network to develop the Juvenile Training Immersion Program (JTIP), a national training curriculum for youth defenders, and is the co-founder of several initiatives to combat racial inequities in the juvenile and criminal legal systems, including the Ambassadors for Racial Justice program and a Racial Justice Toolkit for defenders. Professor Henning trains state actors across the country on the impact of racial bias in the courts and the traumatic effects of policing in communities of color.

Professor Henning writes extensively about race, adolescence, and policing, and her book, The Rage of Innocence, was featured on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. She has served on the Board of Directors for the Center for Children’s Law and Policy, was a Reporter for the ABA’s Juvenile Justice Standards Task Force and is an Advisor to ALI’s Restatement on Children and the Law project. In addition, she has received many awards including a 2023 Embracing the Legacy Award from the RFK Community Alliance, a 2022 Women of Distinction Award from the American Association of University Women, the 2021 Juvenile Leadership Prize from the Juvenile Law Center, and the Robert E. Shepherd, Jr. Award for Excellence in Juvenile Defense by the Gault Center. Professor Henning earned her B.A. from Duke University, her J.D. from Yale Law School, and her LLM in Advocacy from Georgetown Law.
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The Nation That Never Was
2024-09-15 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation will host a lecture about the enduring myth of the so-called American story. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
There’s a common story we tell about America: that our fundamental values as a country were stated in the Declaration of Independence, fought for in the Revolution, and made law in the Constitution. In The Nation that Never Was (The University of Chicago Press, 2022), Kermit Roosevelt III, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey School of Law, argues that, with the country increasingly divided, this story isn’t working for us anymore—what’s more, it’s not even true. Roosevelt presents an eye-opening reinterpretation of the American story, in which our fundamental values, particularly equality, are not part of the vision of the Founders and suggests that there is a different and more useful way to understand our history.
About the Author
Kermit Roosevelt is the David Berger Professor for the Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. He is the author of numerous law review articles and several books. Before joining the Penn faculty, he clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter. In 2021, he was selected by President Biden to serve on the Presidential Commission on Supreme Court Reform. He is also the author of two novels, Allegiance and In the Shadow of the Law. Professor Roosevelt is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School.
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What's Your Street Race? Why We Must Add a Street Race Question in Federal Standards and Beyond for Advancing Equity in Black Diasporic Communities
2024-10-13 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation will host a lecture about the perception of race in U.S. society and how we must rethink it. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Program
This presentation will focus on the urgency of employing intersectionality as a transformational and ethical vision for data infrastructure that can illuminate inequities within heterogenous Black diasporic communities. Dr. López will discuss policy-relevant research on outcomes in health, education, employment, housing, poverty, wealth, etc. that shows that race is a social status that has a visual, ocular and corporeal component and ethnicity as a cultural background. An intersectional understanding recognizes that race and ethnicity are simultaneous, yet they are analytically distinct positions in society that require separate questions because they are not concordant. Imagine if intersectionality as praxis and inquiry became a normative ethical principle for revising Office of Management and Budget (OMB) federal guidelines on race and ethnicity and a street race question was added to all institutional data collection? How can we engage in what Crenshaw calls “mapping the margins” and what Collins calls intersectional “flexible solidarity,” when it comes to data collection, that makes the invisible visible within Black Diasporic communities and beyond?
About the Speaker
Dr. Nancy López is professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico. She co-founded and directs the Institute for the Study of “Race” and Social Justice. Her scholarship, teaching and service are guided by the insights of intersectionality–the importance of examining the simultaneity of race, gender, class, ethnicity and other systems of inequalities across a variety of social outcomes, including education, health, employment, and housing for developing contextualized solutions that advance social justice. Dr. López is author of Hopeful Girls, Troubled Boys: Race & Gender Disparity in Urban Education (2003); co-editor of, Creating Alternative Discourses in the Education of Latinas & Latinos (2003), Mapping “Race”: Critical Approaches to Health Disparities Research (2013); and QuantCrit: An Antiracist Approach to Education Equity (2023). Her current research, “Intersectionality as Inquiry and Praxis: Race-Gender-Class-Ethnicity for Student Success in STEM,” is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) program. Professor López is a Black Latina, New York City-born daughter of Dominican immigrants with a second-grade education rich in cultural wealth. She is the first woman of color tenured in Sociology and the first woman of the African Diaspora tenured in the College of Arts and Sciences (2008) and promoted to full professor (2018) at UNM.
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Die Standing: From Black Panther Revolutionary to Global Diversity Consultant
2024-11-24 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation will host Elmer Dixon as he talks about his journey from co-founder of the first Black Panther Party chapter outside California to diversity consultant.
About the Book
This powerful memoir, with a foreword by former Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale, sets the record straight about the altruistic mission of the Black Panther Party. Historically, members of the Panthers have been maligned in media, movies, and minds as angry, gun-toting, misogynistic thugs. During his tenure, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover declared the Black Panther Party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”
To the contrary, the Panthers started a free breakfast program for children, distributed free groceries to families, opened schools, founded health clinics, and provided patrols to protect people from police abuse. Today, their 10-point plan serves as a blueprint for social justice movements in the United States and abroad.
In Die Standing (Two Sisters Writing and Publishing, 2023), Dixon describes how heavily armed Panthers confronted police to protect Black drivers. He also takes the reader into suspenseful scenes inside the Panthers’ homes and offices.
The book shows how, after 16 years in the Party, Dixon began working as an EEO officer and training manager for a large organization for which he developed and implemented trainings. He also monitored accusations of sexual harassment and racial discrimination.
Die Standing offers Elmer Dixon’s inspiring story and action-oriented teachings to help propel social justice movements forward by creating a world in which Black and Brown people are safe to live, learn, and prosper.
About the Speaker
Elmer Dixon is a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) consultant. His expertise in the field is rooted in his identity as a revolutionary committed to working for equality and justice.
Inspired by the Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s, Elmer was 17 years old when he and his older brother, Aaron, co-founded the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968—the first chapter outside of California.
After guiding the chapter to local prominence by providing essential services to Black and Brown people in his multicultural community, Elmer served as director of the Al Davis Girls and Boys Club in Tacoma, Washington’s predominantly Black Hilltop community. He then became Training Manager and EEO officer for the Seattle Parks Department, creating and implementing anti-sexual harassment policies, recruiting women to non-traditional jobs, and investigating sexual harassment complaints. Dixon’s success in that position led then-Mayor Charles Royer to appoint him to his cabinet as director of the city’s Citizens Service Bureau.
Elmer’s EEO work impressed the founders of Executive Diversity Services (EDS), who recruited him to a new career providing high-level DEIB training to national and international businesses. In 2010, Elmer became the organization’s president.
Elmer has been a guest lecturer at JAMK University of Applied Sciences in Finland for the last 13 years, and teacher at Espeme University in Lille and Nice, France. He is the current president of SIETAR USA, and routinely presents at SIETAR Europa. His recent TEDx Talk is “Stories from the Revolution’s Front Lines.”
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A New Year, A New Beginning
2025-01-12 15:00 - 16:30
The Baton Foundation will host a virtual expressive arts workshop to help individuals ground themselves as we begin a new year — and a new chapter in American history.
About the Workshop
With the holiday season behind us and a new year upon us, this virtual expressive arts workshop will help participants explore ways to best maintain their physical, emotional, and spiritual equilibrium as we prepare to usher in a new historical and social era.
Despite the challenges we might face and regardless of the turmoil around us, it is important to draw upon ancestral legacies and focus on our innate strengths — and to ground oneself in the knowledge that all is well. Dr. Wendy Phillips (pictured above) will employ guided expressive arts techniques that will aid each participant in her or his journey to self-expression.
Please wear comfortable clothes and have at your disposal plain/colored paper, chalk, crayons, colored pencils, play dough or paints — whatever materials you would like to work with. You will be able to participate with your camera off or on and there is never any pressure on anyone to actively engage with the group. At the end of the session, the group will reflect on what has been expressed, discovered, and experienced.
Should you have questions about the workshop, you may call Dr. Phillips at 404-798-1061 (after 1p.m. ET).
About Expressive Arts
The Expressive Arts combine a variety of practices including writing, music, visual arts, drama, and dance to support self-expression, personal growth and healing. In each session, and as one participates, s/he explores a variety of materials and activities. The expressive arts have been defined as supporting a process of self-discovery and self-expression, as a way to connect with one’s creative self, and also as a way to find tranquility and or achieve emotional release.
About the Instructor
Wendy Phillips, Ph.D., LMFT, REAT, REACE is a Registered Expressive Arts Therapist, A Registered Expressive arts Consultant Educator, and a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who is based in Seattle, Washington. She also teaches in the Psychology and Creativity Studies Programs at Saybrook University.
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Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality
2025-02-09 15:00 - 16:30
About the Book
Racial Innocence will challenge what you thought about racism and bias and demonstrate that it is possible for a historically marginalized group to experience discrimination and also be discriminatory. Racism is deeply complex, and law professor and comparative race relations expert Tanya Katerí Hernández exposes “the Latino racial innocence cloak” that often veils Latino complicity in racism. As Latinos are the second-largest ethnic group in the US, this revelation is critical to dismantling systemic racism. Basing her work on interviews, discrimination case files, and civil rights law, Hernández reveals Latino anti-Black bias in the workplace, the housing market, schools, places of recreation, the criminal justice system, and Latino families. By focusing on racism perpetrated by communities outside those of White non-Latino people, Racial Innocence brings to light the many Afro-Latino and African American victims of anti-Blackness at the hands of other people of color. Through exploring the interwoven fabric of discrimination and examining the cause of these issues, we can begin to move toward a more egalitarian society.
About the Speaker
Tanya Katerí Hernández is the Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law, where she teaches Anti-Discrimination Law, Comparative Employment Discrimination, Critical Race Theory, Writing/Righting Race in the Public Sphere, The Science of Implicit Bias and the Law: New Pathways to Social Justice, and Trusts & Wills. She received her A.B. from Brown University, and her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she served as Note Topics Editor of The Yale Law Journal.
Professor Hernández is an internationally recognized comparative race law expert and Fulbright Scholar who has visited at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, in Paris and the University of the West Indies Law School, in Trinidad. She has previously served as a Law and Public Policy Affairs Fellow at Princeton University, a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University; a Faculty Fellow at the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, and as a Scholar in Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Professor Hernández is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, the American Law Institute, and the Academia Puertorriqueña de Jurisprudencia y Legislación. Hispanic Business Magazine selected her as one of its annual 100 Most Influential Hispanics and NYC Comptroller Brad Lander awarded her a Commendation for “extraordinary contributions to anti-racism.” Professor Hernández serves on the editorial boards of the Revista Brasileira de Direito e Justiça/Brazilian Journal of Law and Justice, and the Latino Studies Journal published by Palgrave-Macmillian Press.
Professor Hernández’s scholarly interest is in the study of comparative race relations and anti-discrimination law, and her work in that area has been published in numerous university law reviews like Cornell, Harvard, N.Y.U., U.C. Berkeley, Yale and in news outlets like The New York Times, among other publications–including her books Racial Subordination in Latin America: The Role of the State, Customary Law and the New Civil Rights Response (including Spanish and Portuguese translation editions), Brill Research Perspectives in Comparative Law: Racial Discrimination, and Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination. Her most recent book from Beacon Press is Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and The Struggle for Equality, and its Spanish translation edition, Inocencia Racial: Desenmascarando la antinegritud de los latinos y la lucha por la igualdad. Currently under contract with Beacon Press, is her next book (Under) Counting Blackness Across the Globe: The Civil Rights Crisis of Census Racial Erasure.
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Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad
2025-03-09 15:00 - 16:30
About the Book
Riding Jane Crow tells the overlooked story of Black women on American trains, from before the Civil War to more contemporary times. How did Black intellectual women such as Ida B. Wells fight racial segregation through lawsuits, before the (in)famous Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision of 1896? Who were the Black women who worked as Pullman maids, along with the more well-known Pullman porters? How does the experience of Black women on the American railroad provide a more accurate measure of American ingenuity and progress? These questions and others will be answered during this virtual talk.
About the Author
Miriam Thaggert is a professor of English at the University at Buffalo. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on African American literature, history, and culture. Her previous book was on the Harlem Renaissance, Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance. She has also written on films such as Imitation of Life, Twelve Years a Slave, and Mahogany. She is currently working on the Buffalo-area African American poet Lucille Clifton and Percival Everett’s novel, The Trees. She grew up in southwest Louisiana and obtained her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley.
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An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South
2025-04-13 15:00 - 16:30
About the Book
Between Fort Sumter and Appomattox, Confederates bought and sold thousands of Black men, women, and children through a persisting trade in enslaved people. They did so for numerous reasons, including to adapt to the conflict, to invest in their desired slaveholding future, and to fend off the onset of emancipation. These transactions had profound impacts on the enslaved–their lives and families, and the ways in which they pursued freedom during the war. The surviving traffic in humanity thus shaped the experience of the Civil War and its aftermath for all inhabitants of the wartime South.
About the Speaker
Robert Colby is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. His first book, An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South, was published in 2024 by Oxford University Press. His research has won awards from the Society of American Historians and the Society of Civil War Historians and has been published in the Journal of the Civil War Era, Journal of the Early Republic, and Slavery & Abolition.
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