Facing Race 2012

This month a few of us on the CBBG team headed down to Baltimore for Facing Race, a national conference organized by the Applied Research Center (ARC). ARC is a 30 year old national racial justice organization that "builds awareness, solutions, and leadership for racial justice by generating transformative ideas, information and experiences," and they publish Colorlines.

Over 1400 people attended the conference - and it was fun! Comedian W. Kamau Bell (his new show on FX Totally Biased is awesome) and media technologist Deanna Zandt hosted. Each of the big plenaries began with breath and movement exercises led by InterPlay leader Soyinka Rahim - picture a huge room with 1400 people chanting "Shake your body!" and then shaking it.

Here are some more highlights:

From the Trenches: Stories on Race, Dating, and Love 

The room was packed! (And W. Kamau Bell was in the audience.) The panel was organized by Samhita Mukhopadhyay, founder of Feministing and author of Outdated: Why Dating is Ruining Your Love Life. It was incredible to hear social justice activists talking about how they handle sexism, racism, and heteronormativity in their personal lives. @Racialicious live Tweeted the session and those Tweets are archived here. Jamia Wilson, from Women's Media Center, talked about interracial dating. She read from an essay from the as yet unpublished anthology, Guess Who's Staying for Breakfast?, which tells the story of an experience she had on the subway in New York where a Black man called her a "traitor" because she was sitting with her white boyfriend - and the complicated conversations she had with her boyfriend and father following that experience. Malkia Cyril, founder of the Center for Media Justice, brought powerful feeling to the room with her spoken word and how important it is personally and politically to honor love between two people of color. Junot Díaz also talked about the transformative power of loving in his keynote later that night... 

Keynote: Author & MacArthur Genius Junot Díaz

Here's what stood out to me most about Junot Díaz's talk:

"Did I grow up super misogynistic? That's a f**n' yes! Did I grow up in a culture that rewarded us for all sorts of anti-woman, homophobic, viewing poor people (which was ourselves) as some sort of malignancy? Hell ya!" 

And then he talked about looking into those wounds, owning up to our own privilege (including cuteness!) and victimization of others, and moving forward.

He recommended everyone read feminist, women of color writers who came to the fore in the 1980s and '90s, many of whom are also queer, such as Chandra Mohanty, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, and Octavia Butler because they have been forging a path towards loving themselves and their sisters -- what Díaz describes as "decolonial love - challenging the economy of attraction based on white supremacy."  

Race and Gender in the 21st Century

This plenary was moderated by Maya Wiley, president of Center for Social Inclusion, and she started off the conversation with a story about her interracial, interfaith family:

Wiley identifies as "an angry Black woman" and her husband is Jewish; Wiley and her partner have two kids; and Wiley's mom also lives with them and is a white woman with Alzheimer's. Here's how they responded to the 2010 Census: "I pick up the Census form and I start lecturing my family on the critical importance of political Blackness... and then I say, 'Political Blackness, who's with me?!' and my white, Alzheimer's-having mother shoots up her hand and goes, 'Me!' ... And my 8-year-old daughter, who is very fair skinned says, 'Well, I don't know about the rest of you but I'm white.' So on our Census form it says we are a family of 3 Black adults, 1 Black child, and 1 white child. Wiley is a great storyteller so I recommend watching a video of the full plenary here!

The audience was very interested in how we classify and catergorize race/ethnicity and gender binaries: "Latino" may be moved from an ethnic category to a racial category in the 2020 US Census, this may make it easier for Latino people with indigenous backgrounds to be represented, and many are wondering when "Middle Eastern / Arab" will be added as a category.  Sociologist Michael Omi, talked about what is the future of racial hierarchy - continuing the model of a black/white divide or multi?  He recommended two books Who Is White? by George Yancey (2003) and Racing to Jusice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society by John A. Powell (2012).

The plenary closed with this very powerful dance performance We're Muslim, Don't Panic choreographed by Amirah Sackett and danced by Amirah Sackett, Khadijah Sifterllah-Griffin, and Iman Sifterllah-Griffin: 

Like Racism, But Funnier: Social Change Through Internet Jokes

As you might expect, this was a funny panel - and so smart. The panel of comedians talked about comedy as an art that reveals so much about ourselves as audience - the work of a day-long anti-oppression workshop condensed into a two minute gag. Feminists do have a sense of humor and Iranian-American comedian Negin Farsad is amazing, check out The Muslims Are Coming! 

And check out this great clip from W. Kamau Bell's show Totally Biased:

Storytelling for Racial Justice

As a fan of oral history archives, I was particularly interested in this session led by Rinku Sen, president of ARC, and John A. Powell, author and professor of law and African American studies at Berkeley. They talked about the power of stories as tools for social change. Personal stories humanize events that can otherwise easily be considered abstract. When we talk about immigration policy in terms of the number of people crossing a border, we may not think about the effects that policy has on a family where undocumented parents are detained/deported and their American kids are put into foster care... is that kind of family insecurity what we want Homeland Security to be enforcing? We talked about the elements of a good story: setting, action, moral, and characters and John A. Powell made an interesting point that we may be used to stories with Villians but our brains can handle stories with a moral message that don't have a Villian.

You can watch that and a lot more from this conference on Colorlines.com. Also check out The Racialicious Roundtable for Facing Race 2012. I got to drive home with Nadia Williams and muralist Tanya Linn Albrigtsen-Frable and hear their thoughts on the conference -we all wished we could have attended all the sessions!-  my re-cap here is just the tip of the iceberg of a very inspiring event. I'm looking forward to Facing Race 2014.

P.S.  The conference provided childcare (organized by Kids Creative NYC) and the conference concluded with a magical musical written and performed by conference kids!

Photo by Brian Palmer: Amirah Sackett, Khadijah Sifterlah-Griffin and her sister Iman perform We’re Muslim, Don’t Panic (November 17, 2012)