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A prowling ‘Panther’ at Pratt

By Mike McLaughlin
The Brooklyn Paper
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The Brooklyn Paper / Noelle D’Arrigo
Pratt student Lindsay Dean puts up a flier to advertise guest speaker Angela Davis.

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How do you get a fugitive from the 1970s, a presidential candidate from the 1980s and a California academic onto one marquee at Pratt?

Book Angela Davis — she’s been all three.

So it’s no wonder that next week’s visit from radical former Black Panther and Communist Party leader is the talk of the campus of the Clinton Hill institute.

On Thursday, Davis will treat the design school to her lecture, “Identifying racism in the era of Neo-Liberalism,” and it’s sure to make headlines — if her similar address at Brown University in February is any indication.

“Racism is no less overt” now than it was in the 1960s, she said on the Providence, R.I. campus. “Perhaps we do not recognize it as being overt because we have learned how to ignore it.”

That kind of chatter, along with allegations of her involvement in the killing of a judge in the early 1970s, a subsequent manhunt and trial, remain fodder for the city’s tabloids, but Pratt faculty members say that Davis is welcome because she asks tough questions about current affairs.

“If you invite a speaker who only says things that are non-controversial, then you invite someone who is only there to reproduce society as it is — and few people would say that the world we have today is perfect,” said Jon Beller, an assistant professor of English and Humanities.

But is Davis correct that racism is just as omnipresent now as decades ago? In interviews across Downtown Brooklyn, we found that the jury is still out.

Angela Davis lecture. Memorial Auditorum (Ryerson Walk between Willoughly and DeKalb avenues in Clinton Hill) at 7 pm, April 22. Free. Call (718) 636-3554 for info.

©2008 The Brooklyn Paper

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