Our 21-Week Anti-Racism Challenge

Week 1: October 19, 2020

The Injustice of This Moment Is not an ‘Aberration’ Michelle Alexander contextualizes the US’s 2020 state of racism/white supremacy as an inevitable outcome of a collective narrative steeped in denial.

Week 3: November 2, 2020

We Can't Recover From This History Until We Deal With It (6 min) How do we begin to break through the ills of racism? In the video with Bryan Stevenson, lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson speaks to our country's need to talk about racism. 

Week 4: November 9, 2020

Don’t Talk about Implicit Bias Without Talking about Structural Racism (PDF) (June 13, 2019) The National Equity Project, an organization focused on education reform, teaches us that we cannot begin to dismantle the structural inequities in education without checking both our biases and the systemic barriers sustained by these biases. 

Week 5: November 16, 2020

Here & Now - Without Slavery, Would The U.S. Be The Leading Economic Power? Host Jeremy Hobson explores with author Edward Baptist how slavery established the United States as a world economic power. (15 min)

Baptist argues in his new book, "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism," that the forced migration and subsequent harsh treatment of slaves in the cotton fields were integral to establishing the United States as a world economic power.

Week 7: November 30, 2020

Baldwin – Buckley Debate Still Resonates (PBS NewsHour | 9 min) It has been 55 years since civil-rights activist, James Baldwin, and founder of the conservative National Review, William F. Buckley, Jr., met for a debate on race in America. That discussion and the lives of the two cultural giants are subjects of "The Fire is Upon Us." Zachary Green spoke with author and political scientist Nicholas Buccola about how the debate's still resonating.

Week 8: January 18, 2021

COVID-19 has inflamed racism against Asian Americans. Here’s how to fight back.

California’s vaccine plan will prioritize Blacks and Latinos, among others. Here’s why. (November 19, 2020 | 8 min) As California plans to distribute an eventual vaccine to its nearly 40 million residents, the state intends to prioritize early rounds of the shots in the name of fairness for these communities disproportionately affected by the disease.

COVID-19 and advancing Asian American recovery. (August, 2020 | 10 min) Asian American communities have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Stakeholders in the public, private, and social sectors can help spur their recovery and promote greater equity.

Week 9: January 25, 2021

A Forgotten History of How the U.S. Government Segregated America (May 3, 2020 | 35 min) Federal housing policies created after the Depression ensured that African-Americans and other people of color were left out of the new suburban communities — and pushed instead into urban housing projects. Fresh Air’s Terry Gross interviews Richard Rothstein, research associate at the Economic Policy Institute.

Week 11: February 8, 2021

The Urgency of Intersectionality (2016 | 19 min) The Urgency of Intersectionality (Transcript)

Kimberlé Crenshaw, professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University, introduces us to the term "intersectionality" and how applying this lens makes the invisible, visible.

Week 13: February 22, 2021

How Racism Makes Us Sick (May 2, 2017 | 18 min) During this TedMED talk, David R. Williams recounts his dismay with the mortality rate of Black people in America, and has made it his life's work "to understand why race matters profoundly for health."

On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic (Vanity Fair, September 2020) The acclaimed novelist lost her beloved husband—the father of her children—as COVID-19 swept across the country. She writes through their story, and her grief.

Week 15: April 12, 2021

The George Floyd Protests: A Guide to Practicing Anti-Racism as an Asian Ally (June 3, 2020 | 20 min) Our Asian and Asian American communities are experiencing their own unique plight with "otherness", xenophobia, and anti-Asian racism in America. With the release of the George Floyd, Jr. video, many from the Asian community have come to express great disappointment and anger with the Asian American officer who stood by, failing to intervene. In this article, we learn how Asians and Asian Americans can effectively support the Black community with their allyship.

Why Don’t we Treat Asian American History the Way we Treat Black History? (Washington Post, March 26, 2021) The American racial conversation, in which African Americans are the default minority group, has impoverished our understanding of—and provided a poor platform for—the stories of others. That is why, in a year with thousands of anti-Asian assaults, civil rights violations and instances of verbal harassment reported even before the Atlanta area shootings this month—in which six of the eight slain were women of Asian descent—most Americans are just beginning to engage with the Asian American struggle.

Week 16: April 19, 2021

The Case for Reparations (The Atlantic, June 2014) Ta-Nehisi Coates’ seminal essay disseminating the theft of resources from Black people and the argument for reparations.

Week 18: May 3, 2021

Addressing Anti-Blackness on Campus: Implications for Educators and Institutions (June 25, 2020 | 1 hr 45 min)  In June 2020, the Center for Organizational Responsibility and Advancement (CORA) hosted a special webinar presentation in response to the public statements released by academic institutions regarding the killings of George Floyd, Jr., Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade. A panel of experts came together to discuss viable solutions for confronting anti-Blackness in education.

Week 20: May 17, 2021

What is/isn’t Transformative Justice? (July 9, 2015 | 14 min) 

What is/isn’t Transformative Justice? (PDF) Author and Black feminist Adrienne Maree Brown urges us to be careful with how we direct our energy. We must seek transformative justice, which has long-term impact instead of the short-term gain that comes from “cancelling” individuals, who are often just a symptom of a much deeper, systemic issue.

Culmination, Week 21: May 24, 2021

This week, we invite you to our culmination event on Zoom from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. 

• 5:00 – 5:10: Welcome/Acknowledgement of Land Grant
• 5:10 – 5:20: Remarks from Dean H. Rao Unnava 
• 5:20 – 6:00: Invited Speaker James Burch, Policy Director of the Justice Teams Network
• 6:00 – 6:15: Q&A for Mr. Burch
• 6:15 – 6:30: Alexandra Huynh, Sacramento Youth Poet Laureate, SAYS Member

Register in advance for this webinar and find more information here. 

Prior to our meeting, we hope you engage with Black artistry through the following perspectives in poetry and musical selections that demonstrate the breadth of the Black experience with joy and pain. 

Poetry Selections:

• Between the World and Me - Richard Wright  (Listen)
• Harlem - Langston Hughes  (Listen)
• 1977: Poem for Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer - June Jordan
• Who Said it was Simple - Audre Lord  (Listen)
• The World Rising - Alice Walker

Musical Selections:

• Lift Every Voice and Sing - James Weldon Johnson (lyrics) & J. Rosamond Johnson (music) 
• To Be Young, Gifted and Black - Nina Simone 
• Lovely Day - Bill Withers 
• A Change is Gonna Come - Sam Cooke 
• Living for the City - Stevie Wonder
• Glory - Common and John Legend
• Freedom - Beyoncé (featuring Kendrick Lamar) 

Please note: Dates and meeting times may change.