This edition of “Keeping Up with Atiba” highlights my participation in West Virginia University Diversity Week Events. The entire schedule is available online, and my speaking roles are listed below.
Concerned Latinx Students: Suggesting Solutions
Monday, October 10 at 5:30 pm
Rhododendron Room, Mountainlair
Recently, an open letter to President Gee from a Latinx student went viral. The letter detailed the harassment and issues a Latinx freshman faced in their first weeks at WVU. Culturas WVU is taking this letter as a call to action, to find what institutional changes need to take place at WVU to better support underrepresented students. Join us and discuss what issues you see, and what solutions you might suggest.
In particular, I hope to stress my ideas for institutional change in light of my experiences as a faculty member (and the reflections of students and colleagues I know). More importantly, I hope to be an ally to the Latinx community and learn from their views about the environment at WVU.
Voices Behind the Bars
Monday, October 10 at 7 pm
Room 154
This event, hosted by the West Virginia College of Law, is a dramatic reading of four stories from Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption followed by discussion. The program is part of WVU’s 2016-17 Campus Read of Just Mercy, in whichStevenson explores the moral implications of the American justice system.
The readers for “Voices Behind the Bars” will be graduate fellows Imani Berry, Oluremi Famodu, Quinn Jones and Phillip Zapkin with honors student Emma Harrison and first-year law student Stephen Scott.
Following each reading, there will be a discussion of race and wrongful incarceration, mental illness, gender and incarcerated minors. The conversation will be led by WVU law professors Valena Beety, Atiba Ellis and Kirsha Trychta, and attorney Aaron Moss, a 2015 WVU Law graduate who is working on prison reform.
In particular, I will be discussing how race frames and connects numerous issues in relation to the criminal justice system. I will emphasize on how recent shootings of persons of color, legal limitations regarding criminal procedure, and the collateral consequences of convictions are part of the larger problems of structural racism.
White Privilege
Wednesday, October 12 at 7:00 pm
Ballrooms, Mountainlair
This talk will be led by Brandon Webb and Speak Out, Reach Out leadership members, discussing what White privilege is in general and how it plays out on campus. Professor Atiba Ellis of the WVU College of Law will discuss voting rights suppression and how White privilege is perpetuating this.
In particular, I hope to discuss the problem of white privilege from two perspectives sparked by this political season. First, I will discuss the political rhetoric of this campaign season and how it reveals the enduring and evolving ideology of white supremacy in the twenty-first century despite claims of a post-racial turn American political discourse. Second, I will discuss how this same ideology influences the structure of the law of the political process as revealed by the recent race-based controversies in voting rights.
Atiba Ellis 