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On September 27th, 2022, Humanity in Action, the Bertelsmann Foundation and the Democracy and Culture Foundation organized the screening of “I, Too,” a documentary film from the mind of Carol Anderson, at the Athens Democracy Forum. After the premiere, New York Times foreign correspondent Roger Cohen and Carol Anderson engaged in a conversation with the audience about the current state of democracy.
About the Film
On January 6, 2021, armed insurrectionists besieged the United States Capitol in the name of patriotism. To some, it was an unexpected and shocking attack on democracy. To others, it was a noble attempt to rescue a nation on the brink of collapse. For Carol Anderson, the insurrection was a predictable coda to more than two centuries of American mythology. What happens, she asks, when we discover that the history we teach our children is comprised of fables not facts; when the gulf between soaring rhetoric and cynical policy is too wide to ignore; when white supremacy is allowed to thrive? In I, Too, we embark on a journey to uncover stories that reveal how we reached this inflection point in American history, as we strive to narrow the gap between who we say we are as a nation…and who we actually are.
I, Too, is a co-production of the Bertelsmann Foundation and Humanity in Action, with generous support from the Donner Foundation. The film was shot on location in Wilmington, North Carolina; Washington, DC; Ocoee, Florida; North Augusta, South Carolina; and Atlanta, Georgia.
About Carol Anderson
Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University and author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, a New York Times Bestseller, Washington Post Notable Book of 2016, and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. She is also the author of Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955; Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960, and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy, which was long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Award in non-fiction.
About Roger Cohen
Roger Cohen joined The New York Times in 1990. He was a foreign correspondent for more than a decade before becoming acting foreign editor on Sept. 11, 2001, and foreign editor six months later.
In 2004, he began writing a column for The International New York Times, formerly known as The International Herald Tribune. Between 2009 and 2020, he was a New York Times columnist, writing mainly on international affairs and American politics. In 2020, he became Paris bureau chief.
Mr. Cohen has written “Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo”, an account of the wars of Yugoslavia’s destruction, and “Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis’ Final Gamble”. He has also co-written a biography of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, “In the Eye of the Storm”. His family memoir, “The Girl From Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family”, was published in January 2015. Raised in South Africa and Britain, he is a naturalized American.