Confronting the Legacy of Racism in America

WAMU 88.5

Published May 25, 2017 at 11:06 AM EDT

Richard Collins III's graduation gown is draped over an empty front row chair at Bowie State University's graduation ceremony.

“Lynching is back in America’s headlines.” That’s how a recent op-ed in The Guardian put it, alluding to the killing of Richard Collins III, a black college student and newly commissioned Army lieutenant who was stabbed to death last week on the campus of the University of Maryland.

Officials are investigating the fatal stabbing as a possible hate crime. Sean Urbanski, the University of Maryland student charged with killing Collins, was a member of the white supremacist Facebook group, “Alt-Reich: Nation.”

The killing has echoes of past racial crimes, and it has many Americans asking: How does this still happen in 2017?

Ibram X. Kendi looks to the nation’s violent past for answers. He’s the author of “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016.

GUESTS

Brakkton Booker, Reporter, WAMU

Ibram X. Kendi, Professor of African American History, the University of Florida; author of “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America”. In August, he’ll join American University as a professor and as the Founding Director of the new Anti-Racist Research and Policy Center at the university

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