This workshop will encourage participants to think through and with the concept of civil rights. What is the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement in the contemporary moment? In what ways do different communities engage with the achievement of civil rights or lack therefore? The workshop will specifically interrogate, what civil rights are yet to be achieved? The workshop leader will utilize ethnographic research with the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem to think through these questions. The workshop will explore the Hebrew Israelite perspectives on how the issues of sovereignty and self-determination counter the notion of a temporal marker on the Civil Rights Movement. More specifically, the workshop will allow students to ask, in what ways do civil rights claims have racialized norms of achieving justice embedded into its structure? Is there a way to pursue justice for one’s community without adhering to established racial logics and hierarchies?
