2020 Program:
Race Identities and Innovations

Have you ever wondered how mainstream society reduced the full diversity of humanity to "two genders"? In order to answer this question, we'll explore the story of race and gender in building the mainstream. This workshop focuses on how the gender binary operates through white supremacy, and how it is constructed to support a hierarchy of humans run by mostly white men. We'll also build tools and shared language to discuss gender identity and expression through a black feminist lens.

Participants will explore sex and gender through the lens of imperialism in U.S. history, analyzing how racial hierarchies have evolved over time through gender norms. We will then consider how it shows up in current LGBTQ organizing models, and what we can do to reduce the harm that toxic gender norms cause us and our communities.

Hindu fascism did not begin with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This philosophy has been incubating in India and United States for decades. In this breakout, we will outline the history of Hindu fascism in both countries. This workshop will focus on the link between anti-Blackness and Hindu fascism and its role in advancing a white supremacy agenda in America. We’ll discuss not only the dangers of this ideology, but how we can fight its spread.

Participants will have the opportunity to share their knowledge of Hindu supremacy and evaluate its rise in America. We will explore what we can do to ensure that our organizing work is decoupled from Hindu supremacy, and how to pull Americans of Indian descent into the conversation. We'll build shared language and tools through an anti-caste, anti-supremacy lens.

Why is the United States talked about as if it’s unique despite being similar to so many other nations? How is this the “land of the free” if there are slaveowners on our money? Why is the idea that America was never great offensive to so many people? This interactive workshop builds understanding of what some call American exceptionalism: the idea that the U.S. is the best or most free nation to ever exist. This idea filters out the experiences and stories of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color that contradict that narrative.

In our session, we will explore the racial ideas underpinning the “greatest nation on Earth” motto by tying white innocence and national pride to the real practices of erasing or even celebrating stolen land and lives. Can decolonization, reparations, and national pride coexist? Participants will build some shared language about the United States’ myths that exempt it/us from accountability for its/our human rights violations. We will practice a root-cause analysis and then apply it to countering these myths, and finally share some of the tools and frameworks that are keeping racial justice global.

What are the profoundly resilient, magical even, practices of your Asian American lineage? This session explores the resilience practices cultivated across Asian America -- from the homeland herbs that heal us, to the money sharing circles which help pay our bills -- and how the wisdom of these practices can inform the next decade of Asian American organizing. With guided exercises, we will generate a collective pot of distinctly Asian American resiliency practices which encompass our specific and nuanced hxstories and transform them into an organizing strategy. Participants will leave having designed a resilience-based strategy or tactic which increases self-governance and transformative justice in our communities.

This is the presentation and discussion of a case study of the partnership between the Othering and Belonging Institute (OBI) and Inland Empowerment, a civic engagement table in California’s Inland Empire region. The partners sought to understand the regional drivers of inequality and construct a strategic narrative to counter the dominant narrative. The session’s focus is on: 1) the collaboration to understand the implications of an OBI California-wide survey; 2) the partnership in the design and conduct of research in the region; 3) the current plan to create an infrastructure across communities and issues that share the strategic narrative.

The session is the presentation and discussion of a case study of the partnership between the Othering and Belonging Institute, a research institute and Inland Empowerment, a civic engagement table of a dozen organizations in the Inland Empire region of California engaged in base building and civic engagement. The partners sought to understand the drivers of inequality in the region and to construct a strategic narrative to counter the dominant narrative in the region. The focus of the session is on: 1) the collaboration to understand the implications of an OBI California-wide survey; 2) the partnership in the design of a qualitative and quantitative research agenda, the conduct of the qualitative research, and the meaning-making of the research results; 3) the current plan to create an infrastructure across racial and ethnic communities and across issues that share the common strategic narrative that seeks to influence identities and worldviews. This is in the form of an Inland Empowerment Narrative Hub to implement the findings of the research, including narrative tools and messaging.
 
The session is based upon the work of the Blueprint for Belonging (B4B) Project, a California-wide project which was initiated by the Othering and Belonging Institute, UC Berkeley with partner organizations, including CHIRLA, California Calls, PICO California, ACCE and over 25 other organizations, that has engaged in a five-year process to develop and deploy a progressive strategic narrative capable of contending with the dominant narrative and its underlying worldview.

Our proposed session aims to dismantle anti-blackness and white supremacy among Latinx communities and those that work with Latinx communities. We create a space where we display, present, and analyze how white supremacy and antiblackness have insidiously moved through history, time, space, and society, thereby normalizing it and pointing out traditions, practices, and myths among U.S. Latinxs that are seldom interrogated as anti-black. For example: "there is no racism in Latin America," "class matters more than race," "we are all mixed so how can we be racist?" "we don't identify along racial lines, it is more about our nationalities," "we are all equal in Latin America," "there are no whites in Latin America," "there are no Blacks in X country," "Latinxs do not identify racially, this is a new thing and U.S.-centric," all statements untrue. We offer ways to pushback and re-imagine other ways of being. It is also useful for non-Latinx individuals to receive this information as U.S. politics is tied to Latin American politics. Many of these biases are steeped in "tradition" or "that's just the way it is" with very little interrogation, these ideas and attitudes are often unknowingly replicated and continuously duplicated though generations. Many may never have even had to confront how their positionality and behaviors exhibit loyalty and investment to white hegemony. We invite folks to examine these phenomenas, keeping in mind many behaviors were and are survival tactics to re-imagine other possibilities that recognize our full humanity for future generations.

How come antisemitism never seems to stick to the Right? Republicans draw on antisemitism to animate their violent white nationalist base, then use false or exaggerated charges of antisemitism as a tactic to smear progressives --especially Muslims and women of color -- while deflecting their own responsibility.

How can we understand and address antisemitism, hold the Right accountable, and keep Republicans from using antisemitism as a weapon to divide progressives? How can we situate a response to antisemitism within our vision for liberation for all of us?

In this session, we’ll deepen our understanding of the dynamics of antisemitism, including how it has been used by the Right, yesterday and today, as a tactic to undermine social movements and divide natural allies.

In a session led by movement leaders on the front lines of this evolving work across the country, participants will come away with concrete strategies to:
--Address antisemitism in our movements;
--Spot antisemitic tropes and find new ways to express our ideas without falling into traps;
--Prevent mistakes and missteps that fuel antisemitism and division;
--Identify and respond to the weaponization of antisemitism by the Right; and
--Apply an antisemitism analysis to our narrative work around race and class.