New York Times journalist Charles M. Blow to discuss the #BlackLivesMatter movement

Charles Blow

Charles M. Blow, the visual op-ed columnist for The New York Times and a CNN contributor, will be at Miami to give a presentation on the #BlackLivesMatter movement at 6 p.m. Monday, April 11, in the Benton Hall Auditorium.

Blow joined The New York Times in 1994 as the paper’s graphics editor. In his op-ed column, which appears every Monday and Thursday, he tackles hot-button issues such as teen pregnancy, the national debt, the presidential race, gender roles and the gay rights movement.

His visual op-ed work at the newspaper has helped it win awards for its information graphics coverage of 9/11, the Iraq war and other topics.

As part of an August 2015 column referring to race in America in the context of a debate response from former presidential candidate Ben Carson, Blow wrote,

“I wish it were that people could all simply ‘move beyond that’ [racism] at will, that they were able to simply choose to slough off the cumulative accrual of centuries of systematic anti-black negativity. But, that is not a power people possess. That is why when people respond to ‘Black Lives Matter’ with ‘All Lives Matter,’ it grates. All Lives Matter may be one’s personal position, but until this country values all lives equally, it is both reasonable and indeed necessary to specify the lives it seems to value less.”

"Charles M. Blow is a passionate intellectual, a leading journalist with acute insights and trenchant analysis, as well as courage and conviction in his fearless writings about blackness, identity politics, and race in the United States,” said Jana Braziel, chair of the department of global and intercultural studies. “We are honored to have him presenting on #BlackLivesMatter at Miami University."

Blow has appeared on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” and “Hardball with Chris Matthews”; CNN’s “American Morning,” “Headline News” and “The Joy Behar Show”; Fox News’ “Fox and Friends”; the BBC; and Al Jazeera, as well as numerous radio programs. His memoir, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, was released in September 2014.

The event is sponsored by the departments of global and intercultural studies; media, journalism & film; and political science and the Humanities Center.

For more information about Blow’s presentation, contact Jana Braziel at brazieje@miamioh.edu.