Date: Tuesday, September 29
Time: Noon - 1 PM
Where: Zoom webinar
As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the occasion invites both celebration and reckoning. What have we inherited from the American experiment—and what responsibilities come with that inheritance?
In this Fall MasterClass, historian Yohuru Williams examines America 250 through the intertwined lenses of history, memory, and reparative justice. Moving beyond the question of whether Americans should celebrate or condemn the past, Williams asks us to consider how the legacies of slavery, racial exclusion, and other historical injustices continue to shape institutions, communities, and opportunity in the present. If we inherit the achievements of the American democratic experiment, he argues, we must also reckon with its unfinished work.
Drawing on the stories of descendants and the growing national conversation around historical repair, the MasterClass explores what it means to move from acknowledgment to accountability, and from memory to repair. It also provides a framework for engaging with the What We Inherit exhibition and its exploration of descendants of slavery, while placing those stories within a much larger national question.
At 250, the challenge is not simply to decide what parts of our history we will remember. It is to ask what we have inherited, what remains unrepaired, and what we are prepared to do about it.
