Join professors Dr. Eraka Bath and Darnell Hunt and alumna and award-winning director Ava Duvernay for the second conversation in the series “Racism is a Public Health Issue” on Tuesday, July 21, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. The panelists will discuss the ways in which racism and discrimination create chronic physical and emotional health conditions.
Bath is an associate professor of psychiatry and the vice chair for equity, diversity and inclusion at the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. She specializes in diagnostic assessment and forensic consultation with adolescents, with an emphasis on high-risk youth, including those with histories of trauma, juvenile delinquency and foster care placement.
Hunt is the dean of social sciences in the UCLA College and a professor of sociology and African American studies. He is a renowned scholar of race, media and culture and he has written extensively on the role of race in Los Angeles and Hollywood.
Ava DuVernay is a writer, director, producer and film distributor. She is the winner of the Emmy, BAFTA and Peabody Awards, as well as an Academy Award nominee. Her directorial work includes the historical drama “Selma,” the criminal justice documentary 13th and Disney’s “A Wrinkle in Time,” which made her the highest-grossing black woman director in American box office history.
The panel is hosted by For Freedoms, GYOPO, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and StopDiscriminAsian, and will also feature artist Rashid Johnson. The conversation will center on the way violent images of Black suffering have been mediated, circulated, and weaponized; the reinvention of one's relationship to those images; the utilization of those images without re-traumatization; and the power of art to address anxiety and other harms of racism.
The event is free, but registration in advance is required. To register, visit the event’s zoom page.