From Tulsa, Texas, to Turkey: The Price of Denial

Assistant Director Stephen Menendian published a powerful new essay this week to mark the 100-year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, about the contemporary social cost of denying your history. He writes:

"If the opposite of denial is truth, then truth is the predicate for a society of inclusion and belonging. A society inflected with denial is warped and distorted, unable to see itself in the mirror as it truly is. And any society that cannot grapple with reality is one that will have many disturbing pathologies. Indeed, this should now be obvious. There is a price to be paid to live in denial."

Click to read this piece.

Join us for the reveal of our national housing segregation project

In less than three weeks we'll be releasing our "Roots of Structural Racism: Twenty-First Century Racial Residential Segregation in the United States" project, a huge initiative that has been in the works for several years to map the most segregated and integrated regions, cities, and tracts across the country.

Join us on Tuesday, June 22, 9am-12pm PT / 12pm-3pm ET, for a half-day seminar with leading scholars and fair housing advocates for the unveiling of the project. Speakers include Richard Rothstein, author of the best-seller The Color of Law; Lisa Rice, president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance; Demetria McCain, fair housing advocate and president of the Inclusive Communities Project; Margery Turner, fellow at the Urban Institute; O&B Institute director john a. powell, and assistant director Stephen Menendian.

Pain of police killings ripples outward to traumatize Black people

Read a new piece by Associate Director Denise Herd marking the 1-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, published in The Conversation, about the trauma and health consequences experienced in Black communities following police killings or confrontations with law enforcement. She writes:

"Aggressive policing can cause fear and excessive watchfulness among Black Americans that, at elevated levels, are associated with high blood pressure. A New York City-based research team found in 2016 that in neighborhoods where police engaged in the invasive practice of “stop and frisk,” residents were more likely to have not only high blood pressure but to also suffer from diabetes, get asthma attacks and be overweight."

Click to read this piece.

Creative Fellow Alex Nezam on exploring belonging through film

Read a new Q&A with Alexander Nezam, who is the Institute's new creative fellow for our Europe-based Toward Belonging program. An experimental filmmaker who aims to use the power of filmmaking and participatory design to build belonging, Nezam will facilitate a long-form “participatory filmic poem” created by immigrant communities in Verona, Italy. The interview discusses what he’ll be working on during his creative fellowship and how he is approaching that work. Read the interview here.

Correction: The previous newsletter published on May 12 introducing Alex Nezam displayed a still from one of his films showing a young man, suggesting he was Alex Nezam, when in fact he was not. That was an error on our part. We apologize for this error.

ICYMI: Black and Asian communities build power through unity

Last month we hosted our latest livestream as part of our #RiseUp4Justice event series, this time featuring Black and Asian activists talking about coalition building needed to combat white supremacist structures. Watch a replay and read a write-up of this event here.

Other OBI updates

Upcoming events:

• June 4: Targeted Universalism: Practice and Policy to Advance Equitable Systems Change
• June 10: Teaching for Racial Equity and Housing Justice in the Bay Area
• June 22: The Roots of Structural Racism: Residential Segregation in the US
• Oct. 18-20: Othering & Belonging Conference 2021: Programming will include virtual access on our conference online platform for all days of the conference, plus we are developing plans for an in-person hub in the Bay Area, California on Oct. 18. Stay tuned for details in future newsletters.
  

Job opportunities:

• Data Scientist
• GIS and Visualization Analyst (Contract position)
• CRM Database and Web Student Assistant (For undergraduate or graduate students)

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Othering & Belonging Institute
University of California, Berkeley
460 Stephens Hall
Tel: 510-642-3326
Berkeley, CA 94720
United States

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