To mark the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (March 21), the African Futures Action Lab is hosting a conversation between three advocates for racial justice in South Africa, France and the United States respectively. Drawing on their multifaceted experiences as researchers, activists, and policymakers, David Ragland, Fania Noël, and Jay Naidoo will reflect on the racial dynamics in the three countries, the advances and setbacks of recent years, as well as their visions for the future.

• Join us on Wednesday March 23, 2022  11:00-12.30 EDT ( Boston)/ 16:00-17.30 CET (Brussels)
• Register for zoom link: africanfutures@mit.edu

Dr David Ragland is a writer, scholar, and activist with a focus on racial justice, reparations and abolition. He is a co-founder and co-executive director for Culture, Organizing and Reparations at the Truth Telling Project and is currently the director of the Grassroots Reparations Campaign. David Ragland is also a special advisor to Congresswoman Cori Bush and a number of progressive political candidates throughout the U.S.

Fania Noël is an Afro-feminist organizer, thinker, and writer. She is currently a PhD candidate in sociology at The New School for Social Research in New York. Her research fields are Africana Studies, Black and Materialist Feminisms, and Capitalism Studies. She is the co-creator of the Decolonial Summer Camps. She is the co-founder and editorial director of the political journal on intersectionality Revue AssiégéEs (Besieged). In 2021, after 5 years as a member of the MWASI – Collectif Afroféministe in charge of the political ideology and training, she left to join Black Feminist Future’s Board of Directors. In parallel she is the publication director of Alaso, a Haitian Feminist anthology published by the Haitian feminist organization Nègès Mawon.

Jay Naidoo is an Elder, grandfather and social activist. He has played many roles from a student, community, political and union activist. He has been the founding General Secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions and a Minister of Reconstruction and Development and then Communications in President Mandela’s Cabinet. He sits on the Board of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation which focuses on building good governance and ethical leadership in Africa. Today he is a volunteer who dedicates his life to the building of an authentic intergenerational conversation in Africa and globally. He supports an authentic intergenerational dialogue with youth and women causes that co-creates new activism based on movement-building that puts ecology and indigenous wisdom at its center. And that breaks the bondage of a toxic patriarchy that has poisoned our relationships with each other, the millions of other species we share our planet with and our very Mother Earth.