Former Carlisle residents Fern Johnson and Marlene Fine will discuss their new book, Let’s Talk Race: A Guide for White People (New Society Publishers, 2021), emphasizing how the book can be used as a resource to improve conversations about race. The killing of George Floyd and subsequent trial of Derek Chauvin, the health inequities revealed in the coronavirus pandemic, and the white supremacist insurrection at the US Capitol in January 2021 have led many white Americans to look more closely at racial disparities throughout the culture and at our own complicity in sustaining those disparities. Yet, we are still not engaging deeply enough in genuine conversations about race. White people too often don’t know how or are reluctant to talk about race. But without talking about race with other whites and across race, we cannot create the relationships and trust necessary to achieve racial equity and justice. Let’s Talk Race offers an approach to help meet this challenge. The authors will talk about why they wrote the book and demonstrate how to use the personal and conversation prompts in it to create conversations about race.

About the presenters:

Fern L. Johnson, Ph.D., is Senior Research Scholar and Professor Emerita of English at Clark University, specializing in race, gender, and culture in language. Her publications include Speaking Culturally: Language Diversity in the United States, (Sage), Imaging in Advertising: Verbal and Visual Codes of Commerce (Routledge), and many journal articles. Prior to Clark, she was a faculty member at UMass Amherst.

Marlene G. Fine, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita of Communications at Simmons University, specializing in cultural diversity, leadership, and dialogue. She authored Building Successful Multicultural Organizations: Challenges and Opportunities (Praeger), and her articles appear in a broad range of journals. Her previous appointments were at Emerson College and UMass Boston.

The authors are white and the mothers of two African American sons, who they adopted as infants. The family lived in Carlisle for 20 years. Marlene and Fern co-authored The Interracial Adoption Option: Creating a Family across Race (Jessica Kingsley).