No! The Rape Documentary 25th Anniversary Screening & Panel

Brought to you in partnership with the Firecracker Foundation and MSU Womxn of Color Initiative.

MODERATOR:

Jasmin C. Howard is a Doctoral student in the History department of Michigan State University. Her dissertation is tentatively titled “North Carolina, Raise Up: Examining the Experiences, Historical Narratives and Commemoration of Student Activism at North Carolina Historically Black Colleges and Universities, 1950-1980”. She is particularly interested in the activism of Black students in North Carolina and how race, gender, class and respectability influenced their activism and the subsequent commemoration of their activism. She also examines and utilizes oral history, digital humanities and other methods to address erasures and silences in the traditional archives concerning Black women and Black people as a whole. She received her BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her MA from the Ohio State University.

PANELISTS:

NiCole T. Buchanan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University. Her research examines how race, gender, and victimization relate to well-being and how organizations can utilize workplace best practices to reduce bias and harassment and create healthy work environments where all employees thrive. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, four separate divisions of the American Psychological Association (APA), and has been the recipient of several awards for her contributions to the field. She offers trainings on implicit bias, microaggressions, and improving dialogue and diversity-related climate for medical personnel, academic units, business leaders, and police departments.

Dr. Buchanan is also the Clinical Director and Founder of Alliance Psychological Associates, PLLC in East Lansing, MI. Her clinical work focuses on healing from gender- and race-based trauma and victimization, thriving in difficult work environments, assertiveness training, and personal empowerment.

RECENT TALKS:
Excising a virus of the mind: Individual and institutional responsibility for reducing implicit bias (LINK)
Bias and its Role in Social Inequity (LINK)
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Nkenge Burkhead
Organizing Director, Mothering Justice

As organizing director I coordinate community conversations with mothers of color to understand what the community needs are, using their life experience to determine what we ask of legislators. Nkenge has an extensive background in community organizing.

She served as fundraising chair for Black Live Matter Detroit. She co-organizes a national community baby shower that specifically serves black mothers. Before coming to Mothering Justice, Nkenge was employed as a prevention specialist for Intimate Partner Violence and advocated for trafficking survivors who experienced homelessness in Detroit.

Nkenge believes that being a black woman is a political experience within itself and organizing mothers of color will create the equitable society activist dream of.
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Mother, Daughter, Sister, Detroit Native, and Social Justice Activist Nicole Denson is a national expert in providing advocacy services to marginalized communities with a focus on crisis intervention, counseling and advocacy for survivors of human trafficking and other trauma. Her extensive expertise in changing the systems related to the handling of sexual assault and intimate partner violence within our criminal – justice system has helped to shape survivor-centered practices and protocols. In 2017, she organized and led the #MuteRKelly campaign in Detroit. This led to a collaborative Anti-Rape Collective and a signed resolution from Detroit’s City Council to no longer support R. Kelly coming to Detroit. Nicole defines herself as an unapologetically Black, Queer Womyn who has been appointed as Vice President of the Women’s March – Michigan. Nicole believes that all survivors of trauma deserve equal rights, respect, dignity, and safety. Her Involvement has reached the masses via platforms such as HBO, Lifetime and the Washington Post. To learn more about Nicole’s work, you can connect with her on Facebook.com/ActivismNicoleDenson, on Instagram.com/kqueenkb, and her Podcast “The Cat’s Meow” is on google play/iTunes/sticher.

No! The Rape Documentary

NO! The Rape Documentary is the 2006-released, Ford Foundation-funded, groundbreaking feature length film that explores the international atrocity of rape cisgender women by cisgender men, and other forms of sexual assault through the first person testimonies, scholarship, spirituality, activism, and cultural work of Black people in the United States. Produced, written, and directed over a period of 12-years, by child sexual abuse and adult rape survivor Aishah Shahidah Simmons, NO! also explores how rape is used as a weapon of homophobia.