392. Anna Malaika Tubbs with Florangela Davila: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden from Us
Town Hall Seattle Civics Series
Release Date: 07/19/2025
Town Hall Seattle Civics Series
At a moment when national politics are testing the boundaries of constitutional protections and human dignity, local communities are asking a vital question: What can we do to protect one another? Town Hall Seattle and The Stranger present the March 19 edition of the Speaking of Seattle civic conversation series, an evening focused on immigrant rights, community responsibility, and the everyday actions that help safeguard our neighbors. This timely conversation explores how federal immigration enforcement policies ripple through local communities — and how ordinary people can respond...
info_outlineTown Hall Seattle Civics Series
As we cascade further into the digital age, concerns over privacy and data security continue to rise with increasing urgency. As artificial intelligence expands its reach, vast aggregates of personal data are constantly being mined to refine future models. But, the fight for digital privacy is as old as the digital age itself. In Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, author and Digital Rights Activist, Cindy Cohn, chronicles her career-long battle to preserve our right to privacy online. Part memoir and part legal history for a general...
info_outlineTown Hall Seattle Civics Series
Are you ever overwhelmed with politics and trying to figure out how and where to channel your resources to make a difference? Or, worse, have you thrown up your hands in disgust and opted for the couch? Join an empowering conversation on “How to be a strategic political donor,” where you will learn that you have agency and can make a difference in determining the future of our Democracy. Based on her decades-long journey in this arena, U.S. Ambassador (ret) Suzi LeVine will paint the landscape of the political ecosystem and decode their acronyms; provide a roadmap with key elections and...
info_outlineTown Hall Seattle Civics Series
Whether or not you call yourself religious, there’s no denying that religion has an impact on society across the continents. And there is no faith more dominant than Christianity in the United States today. Washington State University professor and historian Matthew A. Sutton can show you just exactly how evangelical Christianity entwines itself with all aspects of the country. Drawing from his book, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, Sutton chronicles Christians’ five-hundred-year endeavor to turn the U.S. into their version of the kingdom...
info_outlineTown Hall Seattle Civics Series
Have you ever wondered what really goes on in our country’s criminal courts? Many want to believe in the hallowed halls of justice, with ethical and equitable legal processes that pursue truth and enforce the law fairly. But one author argues that this perception hides the reality that the system is broken. Emily Galvin Almanza, also a former public defender, presents her latest work The Price of Mercy: Unfair Trials, a Violent System, and a Public Defender’s Search for Justice in America. The text takes us behind closed doors of America’s criminal courts, arguing...
info_outlineTown Hall Seattle Civics Series
Blue City Blues leads a conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian Anne Applebaum, as she addresses the escalating global threats to democratic institutions and explores pragmatic strategies to counter the rise of authoritarianism. Drawing on her extensive research, Applebaum discusses findings from her critically acclaimed works, including Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism and her latest book, Autocracy, Inc., offering insight into how free societies can prevent the worst-case scenarios now unfolding across the world. Anne...
info_outlineTown Hall Seattle Civics Series
Like many universities nationwide, the University of Washington is facing threats to federal funding, which they rely on for fundamental research and development. The erosion of federal support means universities like UW are facing decisions on how to survive and move forward, especially as today’s social and political climate becomes more divisive. UC Davis law professor Brian Soucek explores this pivotal moment in his book, The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education. One could argue that universities must remain...
info_outlineTown Hall Seattle Civics Series
Seattle loves to think of itself as an informed, engaged, “I-read-the-footnotes” kind of city. But what happens when the institutions we rely on to tell our stories are shrinking, consolidating, or vanishing altogether? Join Marcus Harrison Green with Florangela Davila, Hannah Murphy Winter, and Naomi Ishisaka for a candid, no-spin conversation about the state of local media— and what it means for the future of civic life in Seattle. We’ll dig into questions like: Who gets covered, and who only shows up in the news when something goes wrong? What does it mean when neighborhoods lose...
info_outlineTown Hall Seattle Civics Series
Across the water from Seattle, you can visit the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial. It’s a place to honor and learn from the past. Evelyn Iritani, a longtime Seattle resident and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, wants to remember – and learn from – another, lesser-known story from World War II. In her book, Safe Passage, she reveals the dramatic, behind-the-scenes efforts to bring U.S. and Japanese citizens home from enemy land. In 1943, during some of the Pacific theater’s bloodiest battles, the United States and Japan coordinated the exchange of civilians...
info_outlineTown Hall Seattle Civics Series
Celebrate the 234th anniversary of the Bill of Rights and the historic December 15, 1941, radio broadcast of We Hold These Truths with a live performance and radio event at Town Hall Seattle. Known as the poet laureate of American radio, Norman Corwin wrote We Hold These Truths months before its original airing. But after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, the program—created to honor the Bill of Rights on its 150th anniversary—took on new emotional depth and national significance. This production commemorates both the Bill of Rights and Corwin’s landmark broadcast, featuring a...
info_outline
One guiding principle for resisting the patriarchy in the United States is to demand equal rights for men and women. Yet, author and multidisciplinary expert Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs argues that fighting patriarchal culture is more complicated than that. Tubbs believes that this fabricated hierarchy became so deeply ingrained over time that it now goes unnoticed. She outlines the history of patriarchy in the United States along with everything it intentionally conceals.
Pulling from her latest book, Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden from Us, Tubbs highlights how the United States has its own unique gendered hierarchy. From the founding fathers to the current Supreme Court justices, from enslaved women to maternal health crises, from the exclusion of women in the Constitution to the continued lack of an Equal Rights Amendment, Tubbs brings together academic research, the stories of freedom fighters, and her own experiences to reveal what is erased. She goes further, showing a patriarchal system that has survived by hiding the tools that are necessary to dismantle it.
Resisting a patriarchal system, Tubbs believes, is more complicated than once thought. She argues that humanity in the United States is determined by gender in a limited and flawed binary that is also always tied to whiteness. The first step to dismantling patriarchy is to understand how deeply ingrained it is. The next step, Tubbs says, is telling a different story that highlights everything the patriarchy shrouds, and bringing it back into the narrative.
Anna Malaika Tubbs is a New York Times bestselling author and multidisciplinary expert on current and historical understandings of race, gender, and equity. With a Ph.D. in Sociology and a Masters in Multidisciplinary Gender Studies from the University of Cambridge in addition to a Bachelors in Medical Anthropology from Stanford University, Anna translates her academic knowledge into stories that are clear and engaging. Her articles have been published by TIME Magazine, New York Magazine, CNN, Motherly, the Huffington Post, For Harriet, The Guardian, Darling Magazine, and Blavity. Anna’s storytelling also takes form in her talks, including her TED Talk that has been viewed 2 million times, as well as the scripted and unscripted screen projects she has in development. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their three kids.
Florangela Davila is a newsroom leader and journalist who has been working in Seattle media for more than two decades. She’s earned regional and national awards for her own work as the former race and immigration reporter for The Seattle Times, and has led teams at Crosscut/Cascade PBS and at KNKX Public Radio to accolades, including the 2024 national Edward R. Murrow award for Overall Excellence in the large market radio category. In February, she joined the BIPOC-led and focused online journalism outlet The South Seattle Emerald as executive director. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, the child of immigrants from Colombia and Peru.
