Rethink Progress | Timothy McCarthy | TEDxTrinityCollege

Описание: Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover was an African-American LGBT youth from Massachusetts, who in 2009 endured bullying by his peers. At the age of eleven, Walker-Hoover made the decision to hang himself. This incident is not isolated, and is common amongst LGBT youth worldwide. When people consider the LGBT rights movement, the first issue that comes to mind is marriage equality. While this issue is pressing, and important to address, it could just be the symbolic tip of the iceberg. Seven years ago, this country elected its first African-American president in its history, and since that point, more than half of the states in the country have passed legislation to allow gay people to be legally married. Those two facts will go down in history as points in which the country progressed ideologically, and yet neither of those changes affected the course of Carl Walker-Hoover's destiny. These series of events beg the question: who does what we consider ‘progress’ benefit?

Timothy Patrick McCarthy is an award-winning scholar, teacher, and activist. He holds a joint faculty appointment in Harvard’s undergraduate honors program in History and Literature and at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he is the founding director of the Sexuality, Gender, and Human Rights Program at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. He is also the Stanley Paterson Professor of American History in the Boston Clemente Course in the Humanities in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Dr. McCarthy received his B.A. with honors from Harvard University and his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in History from Columbia University.

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