USC’s Hajar Yazdiha joined The Emancipator’s Amber Payne at Frugal Bookstore on Friday, September 15, at 5:30 pm, for a timely conversation on how politics transforms the memory of the civil rights movement.
In the post-civil rights era, wide-ranging groups have made civil rights claims that echo those made by Black civil rights activists of the 1960s, from people with disabilities to women’s rights activists and LGBTQ coalitions. Increasingly since the 1980s, white, right-wing social movements, from family values coalitions to the alt-right, now claim the collective memory of civil rights to portray themselves as the newly oppressed minorities. The Struggle for the People’s King reveals how, as these powerful groups remake collective memory toward competing political ends, they generate offshoots of remembrance that distort history and threaten the very foundations of multicultural democracy.
In the revisionist memories of white conservatives, gun rights activists are the new Rosa Parks, antiabortion activists are freedom riders, and antigay groups are the defenders of Martin Luther King’s Christian vision. Drawing on a wealth of evidence ranging from newspaper articles and organizational documents to television transcripts, press releases, and focus groups, Hajar Yazdiha documents the consequential reimagining of the civil rights movement in American political culture from 1980 to today. She shows how the public memory of King and civil rights has transformed into a vacated, sanitized collective memory that evades social reality and perpetuates racial inequality.
Powerful and persuasive, The Struggle for the People’s King demonstrates that these oppositional uses of memory fracture our collective understanding of who we are, how we got here, and where we go next.
Hajar Yazdiha was born in Berlin, Germany, the daughter of Iranian political refugees. Her life has been spent – and indelibly shaped by – living in the United States as a child of immigrants. She grew up in Northern Virginia, spent ten wonderful years living in New York City (with some back-and-forth to graduate school at UNC Chapel Hill where she received her Ph.D. in Sociology), and is now based in Los Angeles now. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology faculty affiliate of the Equity Research Institute at USC, and a 2023-2025 CIFAR Global Azrieli Scholar. She is indebted to her free-thinking parents for her sociological imagination and to her children for her commitment to a more just world.
Amber Payne is an award-winning journalist, executive producer, editor and storyteller with a track record for creating bold content that drives conversation. Before assuming the role of Publisher/GM, Amber was the founding co-editor in chief of The Emancipator, a multimedia digital publication reimagining the first abolitionist newspapers for a new day. The Emancipator explains and amplifies solutions to structural racism, featuring critical voices, ideas, debates and evidence-based commentary. She and her husband also run Tilt Shift Media, a small production company focused on documentaries and narrative-driven branded content.
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