Respect—Making Your Mess, Your Message: What I Learned About Courageous Truth-telling from Gender-based Violence

Our fellow fellow Dr. Atim George will present on: Respect—Making Your Mess, Your Message: What I Learned About Courageous Truth-telling from Gender-based Violence. Regsister at: tiny.cc/cbsr513

In November 1967 Dorothy George, a 36-year-old Black woman whose early life had shown great promise, was found injured and near death in a Chicago alley.  Despite these suspicious circumstances, the cause of her death weeks later was ruled 'undetermined' and no criminal investigation was ever undertaken.  This research, initiated more than 50 years after these fateful events had transpired, represents my efforts to reckon with the forces of racism, misogyny and mental health challenges that vitiated Dorothy’s prospects for a self-actualized life of purpose and meaning.  Exploring how the power of “gendered racism” (Essed, 1991, p. 31) permeates the use and misuse of government authority, this interdisciplinary research deconstructs both the text and context of Inquest 261796 thereby examining the forces of racism and gender-based violence through the emic lens of an embedded researcher who is a scholar, daughter, mother, elder and global citizen.  Employing oral history, ethnographic resources and archival sources, in this research I consider the implications of officials’ actions and failure to act in my efforts to illuminate critical elements in a painful episode of gender-based violence. My preliminary findings suggest that our collective work of reimagining our policy-making and practice, must be informed by the marginalized and vulnerable among us because they have insights to share born of their frequently painful lived experience.