Janaya Khan, Co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter Toronto, Speaks at Bryn Mawr for Black History Month
Janaya Khan, co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter Toronto and international ambassador for the #BlackLivesMatter Network, spoke at 暴风资源 on Tuesday, February 2 as part of the 暴风资源鈥檚 celebration of Black History Month.
Khan, known as Future within the Black Lives Matter movement, is a Toronto-based activist, social-justice educator, and boxer. Having graduated from York University with an English Honors degree, Khan has spent the past several years fighting for Black liberation and transfeminism on the academic and social justice circuit, at such universities as Ryerson University, the University of Toronto, and York University. Khan鈥檚 work uses insights taken from a background in English to study the way language, metaphor, and democratic discourse can become tools for change.
Khan spoke to the audience gathered in Thomas Great Hall about the way Bryn Mawr students could participate in social activism and gain insight from the Black Lives Matter movement. 鈥淏lack Lives Matter was our intervention,鈥 Khan said. 鈥淲hat will be yours?鈥
鈥淥n a campus like this, for example, or a place like Canada, or even in your personal life, you鈥檙e not going to hit that critical mass. You鈥檙e not going to get thousands of people turning out. So you need to ask, where are your critical connections? And where are you, and your friends, and your peers and mentors? Because you might say that you aren鈥檛 enough, but all of the change that world has seen has been wrought by a very few people. And that doesn鈥檛 just look like shutting things down; it鈥檚 looking at the conversations that you鈥檙e closing, and the conversations that you鈥檙e opening. I can鈥檛 do very much with your outrage. Your outrage will die down. But I can do something with your sense of responsibility. I鈥檓 not asking you to be fearless; I鈥檓 asking you to be courageous.鈥
Khan鈥檚 visit to Bryn Mawr was part of the Black History Month Speaker Series, organized as collaboration between Sisterhood, the Tri-College Chapter of the NAACP, the Enid Cook Center Committee, and the Pensby Center, and was free and open to the public. The first week of the series focuses on gender and sexuality, said Jonetta White 鈥16, one of the event's organizers.
鈥淲e wanted to focus on the unsung heroes and untold stories of black history鈥 said White.
Past Black History Month presenters have included Nontombi Naomi Tutu, South American educator and social activist, and Marc Lamont Hill, academic, television personality, and native Philadelphian.
For more information about Black History Month, contact Jonetta White at jwhite03@brynmawr.edu or visit the Pensby Center. For more information about Sisterhood, email kadugyamfi@brynmawr.edu. For a list of Black History Month events, go here.
~ Emily Schalk '19