In the wake of the 2016 Presidential election, for many one of the biggest questions persists: Why were so many “Americans” drawn to someone as openly racist and xenophobic as Donald Trump? Others might also ask: How many degrees of separation is there between the thinking the rest of White America from this mentality?

You’re invited to talks and book signing for Deep Denial: The Persistence of White Supremacy in United States History and Life, which explores the normalizing of racial superiority in a society that permits white people to be individuals while people of color are collectively held as outsiders. Each chapter begins with an intimate and unsparingly personal account from the author’s own life. He then lays out the historical facts, while preserving the master storyteller’s connection with the reader.

“No one speaks to racism and its cure better than David Billings, a white Southerner who has seen it all. His is a voice that needs to be heard. It is a voice with a perfect pitch….”—Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Emmy & Peabody Award winning journalist and civil rights pioneer

In conversation with IPS Fellow Karen Dolan, who will be MC for the afternoon event at William Penn House, author David Billings, historian and Core Trainer with the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, will read from, discuss and sign his cutting edge work.

12:30-2:00 pm
William Penn House
515 E Capitol St SE, Washington, DC 20003
Light Lunch and Refreshments will be served

RSVP: 503-778-0036 or nathannola@gmail.com

7:00-8:30 pm
Potter’s House
1658 Columbia Rd NW, Washington, DC 20009

A leader of anti-racist workshops, an historian, organizer, and ordained United Methodist minister, David Billings has worked for half a century in the struggle for racial justice. Born in McComb, Miss., Billings knew his father and uncles rubbed shoulders with the Ku Klux Klan but somehow did not succumb to the race hatred the group espoused. It would take years for the young Billings to fully understand his family’s complex example of human decency. And by the time he did, he had long since packed his “suitcase of contradictions” and joined the nationwide fight against racism. He candidly acknowledges that even decades later not all these contradictions are merely part of his past.