Black New England Conference

For Black America, the pursuit of autonomy takes on particular urgency in the face of ongoing efforts at erasure. This erasure manifests in many ways: the distortion or omission of Black history in classrooms, misrepresentation in media, and the silencing or marginalization of Black voices in our nation’s most influential spaces.

Against this backdrop, autonomy becomes both a necessity and a declaration. It encompasses the struggle for self-determination, control over narratives, economic independence, political representation, and the preservation of cultural heritage. The 20th Annual Black New England Conference will bring together scholars, activists, artists, and community leaders to examine how Black communities have historically fought for autonomy—and how they are shaping tomorrow in the face of systemic erasure.

In an era marked by the erasure of Black voices and perspectives, journalist and media entrepreneur Joy Reid joins cultural explorer Anthony Poore for a powerful conversation about resilience, reinvention, and self-determination. Together, they will discuss Joy Reid's remarkable rise to becoming one of the most influential voices in broadcast journalism, her removal from a position of national media power, and her journey to building an independent platform on her own terms.

This discussion examines the shifting landscape of media ownership, the challenges Black leaders face when confronting systems of power, and the importance of creating autonomous spaces where Black stories, ideas, and truths can thrive. Through personal reflection and critical analysis, Reid and Poore will offer insights into what it means to shape tomorrow by reclaiming narrative authority in an age of erasure.

Afrofuturism fundamentally challenges who gets to imagine the future, control time, and define reality. The "comfort zone of whiteness" is, at its core, a temporal and narrative comfort zone—a presumption that history is linear, progressive, and centers a particular experience, and that the future is a neutral, inevitable extension of that.

The current digital renaissance is not merely a technological shift but a critical site for the Black future-in-the-making. Through the lens of Afrofuturism, we can consciously channel this moment toward tangible Black determination by applying ancestral principles of self-definition, community building, and resistance to the virtual and algorithmic realms, thereby resisting digital erasure and shaping a self-determined tomorrow.