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.

Sunday Readings: Where is the world that hears the hurt?

Van (Target) Jones (12:00 in) on the silence of racism:

I think what bothers me the most is when I think about the ordinary folks who are hurt but now they can't holler. It's one thing to be hurt by racism but to be able to stand up and feel that the world is with you when you denounce it. It's something else now to be hurt by racism, to be in a community that's disproportionately impacted by all these things, to feel that you got a sock in your mouth.

And I wonder what that's going to do inside our communities. If you can't actually name your pain, if we can't holler when we're hurt, where does that hurt go?