It has taken me far too long to post this, but I feel strongly that smartMeme community will enjoy this important conversation.

On Febuary 25th, the Boston Chapter of the Progressive Communicators Network convened a panel discussion called “Talking About Racial & Economic Justice in Obama’s America.” After some fairly crude sound editing, I managed to upload the recordings of the panelists for your listening enjoyment!

Amaad Rivera [LISTEN] is the director of the racial wealth divide program at United for a Fair Economy, and lead author on their 2009 State of the Dream Report: The Silent Depression. He discusses Racism without Racists, patterns of school segregation in Boston, and building racial justice frameworks.

Tarso Luís Ramos [LISTEN] is the director of research at the right-wing watchdog group Political Research Associates. He discusses the work of Ian F. Haney Lopez’s on  “colorblind white dominance,” Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s work on White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era, and the “Color Blind Ideology.”

Color-Blindness:

“views racism at the individual level (e.g. Lines of reasoning such as “I don’t own slaves” or “I have very close black friends” to defend oneself) without looking at the larger social mechanisms in which racism operates.”

Ramos presents a facsinating discussion of Bonilla-Silva’s frames of color blind ideology, and how these play out in affirmative action fights: Minimization (“Yes, there is some racism but its no big deal”); Cultural Failings (“Mexicans have too many babies; Blacks don’t value education,” etc.); Naturalization (“Its natural for people to flock together. Its not segregation.”); and Meritocracy (“Its unfair for government to advance one race over another; treaty rights/civil rights are special rights.”)

Ramos says that these four frames reinforce each other and hold racism in place, and he points to the work of the Center for Social Inclusion to suggest that audiences need an alternative frame of “Structural Racism” to buck the colorblind mythology.

Doyle Canning [LISTEN] (that’s me), discusses some of the stories in the popular culture on racism and “post racism,” and how story-based strategies can work to challenge some of the underlying assumptions of white supremacy in the dominant culture.

The most potent meme of the moment was the “Nation of Cowards” from Eric Holder’s speech on systemic racism.

I strongly recommend watching this amazing roundtable on the topic on Laura Flander’s GRITtv:

Manning Marable’s comments (10 minutes into the video) are particularly powerful in terms of thinking about the power of narrative and history. He speaks about the stories we carry in our head as we’re walking through the world depending on our history: Marable sees lower Manhattan as a slave trading port, while others (whites) see Wall Street’s glittering façade.

This gets to the heart of the internalization of racism. The Peoples’ Institute for Survival and Beyond discusses the interconnected principles of learning from history and addressing the inter-generational processes of internalized racial superiority and inferiority.

I believe that story-based strategies can help us build movements for racial justice, but it really is about movement building. If only it were as easy as coming up with a pat sound-byte to address these deep seeded cultural currents! It still takes struggle, as it always has.

One piece of work I want to point to specifically is work on unmasking and undoing White Privilege, such as the first annual White Privilege Awareness Week!

Also, in terms of racial justice communications specifically, check out the guide “Talking The Walk,” edited by Hunter Cutting and Makani Themba-Nixon (download the toolkit!); and the Center for Media Justice toolkit, Communicate Justice 101. See also: A Three-Ring Circus On Race This Week by Paul Rosenburg.

And one more thing…

Maureen Dowd wrote in her NY Times OP-Ed on Holder’s speech,

“In the middle of all the Heimlich maneuvers required now — for the economy, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, health care, the environment and education — we don’t need a Jackson/Sharpton-style lecture on race. Barack Obama’s election was supposed to get us past that.”

My observation is that this is the line of reasoning often used in white-led liberal organizations (“We’ve got a crisis and so much work to do…we can’t deal with this now…and besides, we have some people of color involved.”) about why we can’t talk honestly about racism and work to address racism within our movements…Just a thought.

Tags: antiracism, communications, framing, PCN, racial justice, strategy

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 12:18 pm and is filed under articles & publications, meme watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.