Sonali Kolhatkar on BREAKING ICE
Join Sonali Kolhatkar for a conversation about her new book Breaking ICE: Community Defense against State Terror and MAGA Fascism at Moon Palace Books on Monday, October 26th at 7:00pm. Sonali will be joined in conversation by Yohuru Williams, Peter Rachleff and Shannon Gibney.
A gripping, on-the-ground account of the growing movement against state violence, featuring interviews with those on the frontlines of the fight for immigrant justice.
In Breaking ICE, award-winning journalist Sonali Kolhatkar presents her conversations with over a dozen movement organizers, lawyers, artists, labor leaders, and scholars on the frontlines of the fight. Through their courageous stories, Kolhatkar documents the impact of ICE violence, workplace raids, mass surveillance, and intimidation tactics, and how communities from Maine to California are organizing for a better world. Our present actions will not only determine the nature of American demographics from here on out, but also whether the future of the United States will look like an open multiracial democracy or a fascist police state.
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Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the racial justice editor at YES! Magazine and the host of YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali, a weekly television and radio program that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica Radio stations and affiliates around the United States. Sonali is a senior correspondent of the Economy For All Project at the Independent Media Institute and the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice. She has won numerous awards, including Best TV Anchor and Best National Political Commentary from the LA Press Club, and has been nominated for Best Radio Anchor four years in a row.
Sonali earned her MS in Astronomy from the University of Hawaii, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. She resides with her husband and two sons in Pasadena, California.
Dr. Yohuru Williams is Distinguished University Chair, Professor of History, and Founding Director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas. A nationally recognized historian, author, and public scholar, his work explores the intersections of history, democracy, civil rights, and public memory while helping communities use history as a tool for civic engagement and social change.
He is the author, co-author, and editor of eleven books, including Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Black Panthers in New Haven; The Black Panthers: Portraits from an Unfinished Revolution; Teaching Beyond the Textbook; Call Him Jack: The Story of Jackie Robinson, Black Freedom Fighter; More Than a Dream: The Radical March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature; Afterlife: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America; and Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement.
Peter Rachleff has spent the last forty-five years exploring the intersections of race and class in the development of the United States and trying to have an impact on how they function in our lives. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh in1981, and he published his dissertation as BLACK LABOR IN RICHMOND, 1865-1890 (University of Illinois Press, 1989). From 1982 to 2012 he taught labor, immigration, and African American history at Macalester College, and occasional classes at the University of Minnesota, Metropolitan State University, and New Brookswood Labor College. Beyond academia, he served on the executive board of the Labor and Working Class History Association from 2005-2009 and as President of the International Labor and Working Class Studies Association in 2006-2007. He also served on the Editorial Board of SOCIAL SCIENCE HISTORY, LABOR HISTORY, LABOR: STUDIES IN WORKING CLASS HISTORY OF THE AMERICAS, and SAFUNDI: SOUTH AFRICAN & AMERICAN COMPARATIVE STUDIES. During the Hormel strike of 1985-86, he served as co-chair of the Twin Cities Local P-9 Solidarity Committee, and he played a similar role during the Northwest Airlines Mechanics’ strike of 2005-2006. In 2014, Peter and his partner Beth Cleary co-founded the East Side Freedom Library, with the mission to “inspire solidarity, work for justice, and advocate for equity for all.” In 2022, they stepped down as the co-executive directors of the Library, although they are still involved with its work. Recently, he has discovered St. Paul Public Schools Adult & Community Ed and the University of Minnesota’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute as places to satisfy his desire to continue to create and share knowledge.
Shannon Gibney is a writer, educator, and activist. She is author of several books, including The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption, which received a Michael L. Printz Honor and a Minnesota Book Award; See No Color and Dream Country, both winners of Minnesota Book Awards; Where We Come From (co-authored), winner of the 2023 Carter G. Woodson Award; and Sam and the Incredible African and American Food Fight, a children’s picture book about a cross-cultural family, and We Miss You, George Floyd. A Bush Artist and McKnight Writing Fellow, Gibney teaches at Minneapolis College, where she was named Educator of the Year in 2023. She lives with her two children in Minneapolis, is a parent leader at Minneapolis Families for Public Schools (MFPS), and a candidate for the Minneapolis Public Schools Board.