The annual Hutchins Forum came back to the Old Whaling Church Thursday evening, bringing with it a tense discussion about affirmative action admissions practices at elite colleges and universities.

“It’s a boiling time in America, and not just because of climate change.”

So Henry Louis Gates, Jr., introduced the 2022 Hutchins Forum, a discussion of race and the American culture wars at the Old Whaling Church on August 18. An extension of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, the forum brought together academics, journalists, and professors to discuss the cultural tensions present in public discourse and the media.

We have made the difficult decision not to host the Hutchins Forum this summer, in line with Harvard University restrictions that have been in place for in-person gatherings.

Experts see change on horizon amid pandemic, reckoning around race, and upcoming election

Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. opened this year’s Hutchins Forum by speaking about the past in order to draw parallels with the present state of life in America.

On Thursday, historian and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. hosted his annual Hutchins Forum at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown. This year’s discussion centered around “A Single Garment of Destiny: MLK’s Dream in the Age of Trump.”

Nodding to Professor Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr. at his Whaling Church panel discussion Achieving Equality in the Age of Obama last night, Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell shook her head and said: ”If you had told me this time last year, when we were all pretty emotionally up and excited, even though George W. Bush was still our President, that we would actually feel worse a year later, when Barack Obama was our President, about questions of race in America, I would have told you you were lying.”

There were plenty of problems on the table and few easy solutions at hand as an influential panel convened Thursday evening to discuss the issue that has gone unnoticed in this issue-laden presidential election year: unemployment and high poverty rates in the African American community.

The deaths of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and many others at the hands of police in recent years have sparked conversations and protests around the country.