Facing Race Panel

Just the other day, I included a snippet from the great Van Jones from this video. It's long, but wonderful. Van is joined by white Anti-Racist activist Tim Wise, Voto Latino's Maria-Teresa Kumar, and the Applied Research Center's Rinku Sen were on a panel and talked about many issues affecting people of color in the States presently. Among the topics that they hit on in a compellingly creative and comprehensively are:

• Immigration (Tim notes that during the 1920's, roughly a million people of Mexican descent were deported to Mexico, even though about 600,000 of those were American citizens);
• Race-baiting and Reverse Discrimination attacks by Right/Nativist/White Supremacist pundits (and the Left's silence allowing the Right to define the discourse);
• Color-blindness (and how that affects other issues, such as predatory lending, health, etc);
• Gender and sex in the racial dynamics;
• Racial equity;
• Ecological equity;
• Political activism/movements (I think it was Maria-Teresa who mentioned that progressives should use volunteers for transactions in the same way that the industries use lobbyists and their gifts as transactions with politicians. Brilliant);
• Power acclimation (Specifically, progressives' Punk-Rawk-like fear of success).

This 1 1/2 hour vid is like a tasty grad-level course on race in the US and is definitely worth the listen.