Our special guest speaker will be Nancy Haydt, Executive Director of Death Penalty Focus, who will answer the question, “Why do we still have the death penalty?”  The pandemic has given us time to reflect on the society we have and the society we want. The Black Lives Matter movement brings alive our understanding that there is no justice, there is no peace, until all citizens are equal in rights and opportunities.  A significant artifact of our racist history is the death penalty. This talk will discuss the death penalty as a means of repression and subjugation of black citizens. We will discuss the myths that keep the death penalty alive in our society. And we will talk about strategies for outlawing the death penalty once and for all.  We’ll also do an icebreaker, watch videos, and do online urgent actions.  You can RSVP for the meeting by registering here.  If you’ve already registered for this particular meeting you do not need to do so again.  We’ll send registered attendees Zoom info prior to the meeting.

The topic for this meeting is the Border Patrol’s increasing forays into the realm of local law enforcement, particularly its involvement in suppressing Black Lives Matter protests.  Pedro Rios, Director of the American Friends Service Committee’s US/Mexico Border Program, will be our guest speaker and will discuss his thoughts about this disturbing development and the dangers of having an unaccountable paramilitary force that operates with impunity involved in responding to civil actions.  You can RSVP for the meeting by registering here.  If you’ve already registered for this particular meeting you do not need to do so again.  We’ll send registered attendees Zoom info prior to the meeting.

Our July 13th virtual meeting will focus on the broken asylum process for refugees.  Marty Rosenbluth, an immigration attorney who moved to Lumpkin, Georgia to be able to represent his most desperate clients in person, will speak about the crisis in asylum for refugees.  You can register for the meeting here, and we’ll send you the Zoom info prior to the meeting.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have moved our meetings online!  We also now meet once a month on 2nd Mondays.  We will be sending a link to register for the virtual meeting in our email meeting reminders that arrive three days before the meeting.  A day or so before the meeting, we’ll send attendees the Zoom information to join the meeting.  If you are not on our email list, you may subscribe here or email us at group137@amnestysd.org.

Join us for an onlinw discussion of White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo.  This New York Times best-selling book explores the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality.  Details here.

Please join us for a book discussion of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, which is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress.  Details here.