A.C.T.O.R (A Continuing Talk on Race 4.7.19 -Sexual Assault Awareness Month ft. Aishah Shahidah Simmons
Date and Time
Apr 7, 2019 5:00 pm
Location
14th & V
2021 14th St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20009
Apr 7, 2019 5:00 pm
14th & V
The A.C.T.O.R. (A Continuing Talk on Race) open discussion series is hosted by Busboys and Poets as a community service. It provides the opportunity for people to come together and speak openly and honestly about issues of race. The intent is that each person walks away from the discussion feeling something: challenged, educated, uncomfortable, enlightened, refreshed, reassured and hopefully inspired and moved to action! Each month there is a new topic for discussion.
This Month's Topic: Survivors Breaking the Silence: Screening of groundbreaking film, NO! The Rape Documentary with a talk featuring filmmaker, Aishah Shahidah Simmons and her mother, Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons! They will discuss the film, and Aishah's forthcoming edited anthology, Love With Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (AK Press, Fall 2019).
Aishah Shahidah Simmons is an award-winning Black feminist lesbian documentary filmmaker, activist, cultural worker, and international lecturer whose work examines the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and sexual violence. She is a four-year Just Beginnings Collaborative Fellow, a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, and an Affiliate Scholar at the Ortner Center on Violence and Abuse in Relationships, also at the University of Pennsylvania. A child sexual abuse and adult rape survivor, she is the producer/director of the groundbreaking, critically acclaimed, 2006-released Ford Foundation-funded film, NO! The Rape Documentary, the creator of the #LoveWITHAccountability Project, and the editor of the forthcoming anthology, Love With Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (AK Press, Fall 2019). Simmons has screened her work, taught university courses, guest lectured, and facilitated workshops across the North American continent, and in numerous countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. You can follow her on Twitter, @AfroLez
Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, Ph.D., is a Senior Lecturer of African American Studies and Religion at the University of Florida. She received her MA & Ph.D. in Religious Studies and a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies from Temple University. Her primary academic focus is on Islam with a specific focus on Islamic Law and its impact on Muslim women. She has a thorough grounding in Sufism having studied seventeen years with the contemporary Sufi Mystic, Shaykh M.R. Bawa Muhaiyadeen. During her early adult years, she was active with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), becoming active during the Sit-Ins as a student at Spelman College in Atlanta, Ga. This involvement led to her leaving college to work full time with SNCC in the summer of 1964 as a volunteer in the historic Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. She spent four years working full-time on voter registration and desegregation activities in Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama in the 1960s. Dr. Simmons is featured in NO! The Rape Documentary by her daughter Aishah Shahidah Simmons, and the PBS documentaries, This Far By Faith by Valerie Linson, and Freedom Summer by Stanley Nelson.
Description of NO! The Rape Documentary
NO! The Rape Documentary is the 2006-released, groundbreaking, internationally acclaimed feature-length film that explores the global atrocity of rape of women by men, and other forms of sexual assault through the first person testimonies, scholarship, spirituality, activism, and cultural work of Black people in the United States. NO! also examines how rape is used as a weapon of homophobia. Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-winning author of The Color Purple says, “If the Black community in the Americas and in the world would save itself it must complete the work this film [NO!] begins.” Since its world premiere at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, NO! has been continuously screened and distributed to racially and ethnically diverse audiences at film festivals, colleges, universities, high schools, correctional facilities, rape crisis centers, battered women’s shelters, conferences throughout the United States and Canada, and in countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands, the Caribbean, and South America.
Free and open to all.
A.C.T.O.R. is held on the first Sunday of every month at Busboys and Poets 14th & V from 5:00 PM-7:00 pm.
