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November 10, 2022
The Black Cat House is happy to offer an online presentation from one of our favorite activist-academics, Dr. Lory Dance! This month she will be discussing one of her childhood heroes, the legendary martial artist Bruce Lee, and how he embodied modern values of intersectionality.
Please join us on Jitsi Meet Thursday night with this link:
https://tinyurl.com/intersectionaLEEty
Bruce Lee was not just an awe-inspiring athlete; he was also someone who uplifted and empowered himself and others without resorting to bullying and abuse. As an Asian American often treated as an “oriental” stereotype, Bruce Lee once said: “You know what I want to think of myself? As a human being. Because […] under the sky, under the heavens there is but one family. It just so happens that people are different.” Lee had multiple intersecting identity differences from the White American mainstream such as his race, perceived nationality, and religion. Lee used his knowledge of these identities to fight bigotry instead of dehumanizing those with less power. Though Bruce Lee may have never uttered the word “intersectionality,” his anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-nativist approaches to dealing with actual inequities, parallel the problem-solving approaches of intersectionality in practice.
Lory Janelle Dance is one of the only people on the planet to have a PhD from Harvard and a fourth-degree black belt in Taekwondo. She is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, as well as a Visiting Senior Researcher in Sweden at Lund University’s Human Rights Studies Program. Her academic specialization in race and ethnicity as well as her decades of training in martial arts make her uniquely qualified to offer this presentation to us.
This event is free and open to the public. We will be offering it via the video conferencing software Jisti Meet. Unlike Zoom, you can run this in your Internet browser on most computers. You don't need to download the app unless you want to watch this on a mobile device, such as your phone.
We hope you'll join us! We're sorry for the short notice, but if you can't make it we're also recording this for our YouTube channel. If you haven't looked us up there, hop on over and see some of Dr. Dance's previous videos on our channel!