UPDATE: Tonight's event will be inside the gallery due to the outdoor air quality issues. Doors at 6:30. Come early to grab a seat.

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Paperback Release Party: Inheritance, by Baynard Woods with special musical guests – outside at Current Space!

Join us for an intimate night of live music, reading, and discussion of whiteness and the way that it has shaped our ideas of music and culture.

Thursday, June 29
7-9pm
(Current Space Garden Bar open from 5-11pm with no cover)

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About "Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness," by Baynard Woods:

Baynard Woods thought he had escaped the backwards ways of the South Carolina he grew up in, a world defined by country music, NASCAR, and the confederacy.

But when a white guy from his hometown of Columbia, S.C.—also the birthplace of secession— massacred nine Black people in Charleston in the name of Southern whiteness, Woods began to delve into his family’s history—and the ways that history has affected his own life.

Upon discovering that his family—both the Baynards and the Woodses—collectively claimed ownership of more than 700 people in 1860 and that his great-grandfather had assassinated a Black politician in 1871, Woods realized his own name was a confederate monument. With assiduous research and brutal self-analysis, Woods uncovers the details of his family’s crimes and all of the mundane ways he inherited them…and their coverup. Along with his name, he had inherited privilege, wealth, and all the lies that his ancestors passed down through the generations.

At a time where Southern states are embracing a return to authoritarian, anti-democratic principles, Woods' analysis of how we inherited our whiteness from the twisted psychology of Southern slavers is both trenchant and urgent—but always cast against the foibles and failures of his own life.

Unflinching and uninhibited, INHERITANCE is a no-holds-barred memoir that exposes the story from Trump country that you haven’t heard while excavating what it means to reckon with whiteness in America today and what it might mean to begin to repair the past.

"Rather than assuming the role of a reporter investigating the embedded racism of his home state, with Inheritance, Woods examines his own experience in the white culture in which he was raised, and its invisibility to him. Woods is an engaging writer and aspects of his story will resonate with anyone who has grown up in the majority-white cities, towns, and suburbs of America.”
—Baltimore Magazine

“A journalist reckons with the free passes and blinkers his White privilege has bestowed on him. . . This book is an effort to uncover what benefits he reaped from this unthinking, and he’s as honest as he can be on the matter without lapsing into self-pity or false proclamations of allyship. . . rooted in fine storytelling. . . Bracing, candid, and rueful.
—Kirkus Reviews

“\\\[Inheritance is\\\] an interesting look at his own family’s history and the relationship to whiteness and policing. Using ancestry and archives he uncovered dark secrets in his blood line, and we chat through the ways in which he rejects his family’s role in the history of slavery without denying it. This is a conversation that non-Black allies I think can use to think about their own role and responsibility in the movement for Black Liberation.”
—DeRay Mckesson on “Pod Save The People”

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Accessibility and Parking Info: https://www.currentspace.com/contact
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Consider becoming a sustaining member of Current Space – membership starts at just $5/month! Supporters ($10/month) get half price advance tickets and Benefactors ($25/month) get free advance tickets.

Current Space is an artist-run gallery, studio, outdoor performance space, and garden bar; nourishing an ongoing dialogue between artists, activists, performers, designers, curators, and thinkers. Operating since November 2004, we are committed to showcasing, developing, and broadening the reach of artists locally and internationally.

Programs at Current Space are made possible in part by supporting members like you; the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization; the generous contributions of The Maryland State Arts Council; The Creative Baltimore Fund, which is a grant program funded by the Mayor’s Office and the City of Baltimore; and the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.