Facing Race: A National Conference in St. Louis, MO — November 20-22, 2024

Ram Vishwanathan

Campaign Coordinator, SAVERA | SAVERA
Pronouns: they/them
Ram is the Senior Campaigns Coordinator for ICWI, and an organizer and researcher working on countering the transnational far-right. Ram has organized in student spaces, where they co-founded a nationwide network of progressive South Asian students in the US, as well as in India, where they traveled across the country to build and coordinate a pro-democracy network among a wide array of social movements.

Presentations from Facing Race 2024

United Against Supremacy: Resisting Hindu and White Supremacist Politics and Their Harm to Our Communities

This session will be a dialogue between Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, Co-Executive Director of Highlander Research & Education Center, and Prachi Patankar, Writer and Organizer with Savera.

Savera's campaign is founded on a simple belief: that building a true multiracial democracy requires multiracial, interfaith coalitions that stand united against supremacist politics of all kinds. Within Indian-American communities, for example, the Hindu supremacist movement has grown in size over the past couple of decades and has since increasingly converged on an alliance with the white nationalist far-right, developing a politics that advances and supports the rise of fascism in India but also harms all of us here in the U.S. Hindu supremacist groups not only oppose the struggle for protections against caste discrimination and Islamophobia, but they have also offered non-white support to campaigns against affirmative action, spread anti-Muslim rhetoric and a pervasive anti-Blackness, and fractured coalitions among communities of color.

This is a moderated conversation between Ash-Lee and Prachi about the steps needed to build a true multiracial democracy in the U.S. Placing these issues within the global rise of authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, and racial and ethnic nationalism, this session offers possibilities for interconnected strategies that place our struggles in transnational and local contexts. They will share their analysis from their work in building intra- and inter-community unity against supremacist movements and how to evolve new strategies to take on the far-right in a multiracial society.

Speakers: Prachi Patankar, Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, Ram Vishwanathan