Barrett Holmes Pitner is a philosopher, author, educator, journalist, and founder of The Sustainable Culture Lab. In 2021, he published the celebrated book, The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America, which NPR named one of the top books of the year. In it, he describes how ethnocide — the destruction of a people’s culture while keeping the people — has shaped American life since the transatlantic slave trade. The destruction of African culture while keeping African people was a foundational component of the slave trade and of chattel slavery in the Americas. Through his work, research, and advocacy, Pitner has devoted himself to combating ethnocide by developing and cultivating a sustainable and nurturing culture for society. A current focus is to center the Reconstruction era of US history to better understand American society today and supply a framework for reconstructing it along lines more consistent with the Reconstruction amendments to the US Constitution.

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