Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Jared Clemons is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Temple University. His research broadly focuses on political economy, race and racism, political behavior, the politics of education, and American political development. His work has been published in academic journals such as the American Political Science Review (forthcoming), Perspectives on Politics, PS: Political Science & Politics, and Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and he has also been featured in public outlets such as The New York Times, the American Politics and Policy Blog (published by the London School of Economics and Political Science) and The Nation. He is currently working on a book project that traces the political origins of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to understand why it failed to remedy structural racial inequality.

John Wood, Jr., is a former nominee for Congress, an opinion columnist for USA Today, the host of "The Reconstruction Project" on KBLA 1580 in Los Angeles, and is national ambassador for Braver Angels, America's largest grassroots, crosspartisan organization dedicated to political depolarization. A nationally recognized speaker on the subjects of political and racial reconciliation, Wood has addressed audiences ranging from CPAC to the Nantucket Project, with written work appearing in publications including the Wall Street Journal, Quillette Magazine, and Reflections (a journal of the Yale Divinity School). He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three children.

Briana Toole is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published articles on a wide range of subjects, with her research focusing on social identity and knowledge, political resistance and disagreement, and power and ideology. Her work has appeared in Hypatia, Episteme, Analysis, Philosophy Compass, and the Journal of the American Philosophical Association.

Michael Fortner, who will moderate the conversation, is the Pamela B. Gann Associate Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College. He is Director of the Dreier Roundtable at CMC, and also a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. in Government and Social Policy from Harvard University. He is the author of Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment (Harvard University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Urban Citizenship and American Democracy (SUNY Press, 2016).

This panel is co-sponsored by the Dreier Roundtable at CMC, whose mission it is to inspire public service, and by the Presidential Initiative on Anti-Racism and the Black Experience in America.