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Blog: Five simple, transactional changes for a better society after Covid-19
How do we build resiliency for future crises? The global pandemic of the coronavirus revealed deep flaws in our society and structures. In a new blog post, Assistant Director Stephen Menendian points to the need for enacting common-sense, everyday practices to protect our health. While structural changes are necessary, he writes, "we shouldn’t lose sight of the potential for simpler, transactional changes to improve lives and help build a better society."
Among these changes are an enhanced mail-in voting system, expanded sick leave for all workers, and greater respect for our educators. Read more about these changes and why we need them in the article here.
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Video: A virtual town hall on race and justice
Institute Director john a. powell moderated a virtual town hall event this week hosted by congressperson Barbara Lee to discuss racial justice in the country. The event, "Conversation on Race," also featured congresspeople Mark DeSaulnier, and Jackie Speier, as well as panelists Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter network, Jeff Gee, former Redwood City councilmember, and Theresa Gonzales, Executive Director of Centro Legal de la Raza.
Watch the recording of the livestream here.
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Join us Sept. 23 for #RiseUp4Justice: Voter suppression and the fight to vote
On September 23, we will be partnering with the Black Voters Matter Fund to bring you the third event in the "Rise Up for Justice: Black Lives and Our Collective Future" livestream event series. Fifty-five years after the passage of the Voting Right Act of 1965, the right to vote is being subverted. The fight to vote has taken on legal, advocacy, and grassroots organizing dimensions in many parts of the country. This discussion brings together some of the strategists, organizers, and lawyers that are on the front line of the battle to ensure that everyone’s vote counts and every vote is counted. RSVP here.
Speakers include:
- Desmond Meade, Executive Director of Florida Rights Restoration Coalition
- Brianna Brown, Deputy Director of Texas Organizing Project
- Gerald Lenoir, Strategy Analyst at Othering and Belonging Institute
- LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter Fund
The conversation will be translated into Spanish live. Habrá taducción en español en vivo.
Check out a recap of the last event in the series. For more information on the #RiseUp4Justice series visit the campaign website.
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Race—The Power of an Illusion, Part II (Film Screening + Panel discussion)
Join us Friday, September 25 from 1pm to 3pm Pacific Time for a screening of Part II of Race—The Power of an Illusion followed by a one-hour panel discussion with experts! RSVP Here.
Part two of the docuseries, "The Stories We Tell," looks back in history and reveals that the idea of race came well after the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to the colonies. Following the American Revolution, there was a need to justify the persistence of slavery and the genocide of Indigenous Americans. Racial thinking naturalized the insidious hierarchies created by European colonialism into essentialized biology.
We will screen the documentary in the first hour, followed by an hour of discussion from:
- Lundy Braun, Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Africana Studies at Brown University
- Gerald Horne, Professor of History and African American Studies at University of Houston
- Terence Keel, Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies
- Kim TallBear, Associate Professor of Native Studies at University of Alberta
- Denise Herd (moderator), Division Head of Community Health Sciences at UC Berkeley
If you missed our Part I screening and panel keep scrolling for a recap below.
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Race, Part I recap: What it means to ‘unmake race’:
Last week, we hosted the first installment of the Race—The Power of an Illusion film and discussion event series. We screened part one of the documentary, “The Difference Between Us,” which historicizes the concept of race in order to unravel its mythology as a biological and fundamental fixture of humanity. Following the viewing, a panel of experts on race came together to discuss race and its realities.
Click here for a video recording and Berkeley News article about the event. For more information about Part I and a transcript of the panel, visit the Race website. |
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Research for Radical Imagination workshop series
We are excited to partner with the Highlander Research and Education Center and Southwest Folklife to bring you this three-part series on participatory action research for artists and organizers. This webinar series will focus on how Participatory Action Research can be used by artists and organizers to advance racial justice. Participants will grapple with questions such as "Who tells your story?" and "What knowledge is valid?"
Workshops will take place on September 17, 24, and 29. Each session will be ninety minutes long, and Spanish and ASL interpretation will be provided. Reservations are required twenty-four hours in advance of the workshop. Read more and RSVP here.
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News & Media
Institute researcher Samir Gambhir was interviewed by Berkeley News about Part 5 of our Bay Area segregation report series. "If you look at the racial distribution in the Bay Area ... it seems like a very diverse community. But if you look at our research, you’ll see that there are pockets of segregation across different counties ... White people have the most segregated communities."
Faculty scholar Cristina Mora was interviewed in a New Yorker article, "Who Are You Calling Latinx?," had her research reviewed in a JSTOR Daily article "Where Did the Term 'Hispanic' Come From?," and explained in an interview with History.com that the term "Hispanic" emerged in the 1980s from "the debates of the 1970s [and] the protests of the late 1960s."
Faculty scholar Janelle Scott did a Q&A with California Magazine on whether distance learning will make educational inequality worse.
Faculty scholar Rachel Morello-Frosch co-authored a study finding that historic redlining has led to present-day disparate birth outcomes. “Studies like ours ... that have looked at the health effects of redlining show that even 80 years after these policies were enacted and declared illegal, they’re still having a detrimental effect on current health,” she is quoted in the Daily Cal as saying.
Faculty scholar Henry Brady spoke to KTVU about how Trump and Congress are "calculating the political costs of not providing relief to American voters."
Faculty scholar Enrico Moretti was quoted in the SF Chronicle about ongoing high unemployment due to the pandemic. He said, “This will be a long, probably painful recovery for jobs. With every single passing month, there are businesses going out of business and workers who are losing skills, losing human capital and becoming longer-term unemployed, which is never a good thing.”
Faculty scholar Ian Haney Lopez was interviewed on North Carolina public radio about "Why Dog Whistles Work In Politics."
Senior Fellow Richard Rothstein was quoted in a Washington Monthly article, "Trump Is Wrong: Affordable Housing Can Help the Suburbs," describing how New Deal programs and redlining made affordable housing appear "undesirable" to the American public.
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Opportunities at the institute
We have the following positions open at the institute:
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