Freedom Dreaming SUMMIT RACIAL EQUITY
Building Community Nurturing Radical Inclusion
Imagining Transformation
April 13, 2023
“Without a rigorous and consistent evaluation of what kind of future we wish to create, and a scrupulous examination of the expressions of power we choose to incorporate into all our relationships, including our most private ones, we are not progressing, but merely recasting our own characters in the same old weary drama.”
Audrè Lorde
When did you last feel truly free?
What contributed to that sense of freedom?
Freedom Dreaming is not passive.
It is the active, intentional, thoughtful creation of the world we dream of.
We do this by visualizing the world we want to live in, and the determining the actions we must take to lead us there.
*The term “Freedom Dreaming” was coined by Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
James Baldwin
“The
beauty of anti-racism is that you don’t have to pretend to be free of racism to be an anti-racist. Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself. And it’s the only way forward.”
Ijeoma Oluo
What does it mean to fight racism in yourself?
How are you approaching this fight?
“[It’s our job,] from the littlest person to the oldest person everywhere, to say, ‘We treasure this, this is our home, this is what gives us sustenance, this is what gives us meaning.’”
Yo-Yo Ma
Freedom Dreaming involves continuous engagement with learning.
“The
better we understand how identities and power work together from one context to another, the less likely our movements for change are to facture.”
Kimberlè Williams Crenshaw
Consider the identities you hold.
In what way(s) are those identities related to power, both formal and informal?
Does this change based on the context in which you find yourself? How?
Deepen Your Knowledge to Expand Your Freedom Dreams
Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 by David Wallace Adams
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
One Person, No Vote by Carol Anderson
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings by Reyna Grande and Sonia Guiñansaca, Viet Thanh Nguyen (foreword)
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones (Creator)
Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands by
Kelly Lytle Hernández
A Wider Type of Freedom: How Struggles for Racial Justic Liberate Everyone by Daniel Martinez HoSang
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D.G. Kelley
How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Letter from the Birmingham Jail by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk by Sasha LaPointe
America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States by Erika Lee
Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by
Valeria Luiselli
The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness by Rhonda V. Magee, Jon Kabat-Zinn (Foreward)
The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee
My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color by Cherrie Moraga
So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Breathe: A Letter to My Sons by Imani Perry
Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor by Layla F. Saad
Better, Not Bitter: Living on Purpose in the Pursuit of Racial Justice by Yusef Salaam
Not Quite Not White: Losing and Finding Race in America by Sharmila Sen
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
Investigating Oppressive Systems
Priming, Associations, Assumptions:
• Dominant narratives about race (family, media, society), coupled with racialized structural arrangements and differential outcomes by race all prime us to believe that people of color are inferior to white people, create and maintain harmful assumptions about people of color
History, Policies, Practices:
• Race is created to justify enslaving people from Africa
• Policies and practices that consolidate and protect power bestow unearned economic, social, cultural, and political advantage to people called “white,” and unearned disadvantage to people of color
• National narrative about people of color being “less than” human (and “less than” white) justifies mistreatment and inequality (white supremacy)
Inequitable Outcomes and Racial Disparities:
• Inequitable outcomes and experiences resulting from policy decisions in health, housing, employment, education, and life expectancy - reinforce white supremacist beliefs and ideology; used as justification for white supremacy
Click on the graphic above for a more in-depth analysis.
Source: The National Equity Project.
Imagine a future in which you feel that you’re fully living in freedom.
Can you describe it?
“The most valuable possession you can own is an open heart. The most powerful weapon you can be is an instrument of peace.”
Carlos Santana
“The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination.” bell hooks
A New National Anthem
by Ada Limòn
The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets red glare” and then there are the bombs. (Always, always, there is war and bombs.) Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw even the tenacious high school band off key. But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call to the field, something to get through before the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps, the truth is, every song of this country has an unsung third stanza, something brutal snaking underneath us as we blindly sing the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the flag, how it undulates in the wind
like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled, brought to its knees, clung to by someone who has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon, when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can love it again, until the song in your mouth feels like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung by even the ageless woods, the short-grass plains, the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright, that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on, that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit in an endless cave, the song that says my bones are your bones, and your bones are my bones, and isn’t that enough?
Finish this sentence:
“In a world in which Black and Brown lives really matter, I imagine . . .”
“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
Audrè Lorde
What would you risk for the sake of your own freedom?
What would your risk for the sake of someone else’s freedom?
Dr. Imani Perry
2022 Winner of the National Book Award
Keynote speaker
SU Racial Equity Summit
“I want you to follow the stars, where they take you, to go the way your blood beats, and once you are there, I want you to build a glorious edifice at the pitch of freedom so whole that you forget the skeleton and scaffold were ever necessary.”
Dr. Imani Perry, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons
Freedom School
Freedom Schools were created in the 1960s to equip those impacted by racism and segregation to become political and social actors on their own behalf. Racial
Equity Summit Freedom Schools are based on this model. Click on the picture to find out more!
Freedom School topics include:
• Direct Action Gets the Goods!
• Racial Intersectionality and the Media
• Anger and Racial Justice
• From Equality to Belonging
• Toward Education as a Practice of Freedom: Learning with bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress
• The Risks and Opportunities Emerging Technologies Carry in the Area of Racial Equity
• The Intersection of Spirituality, Anti-Racism, Social Justice, and Practice
• Effective Allyship
• The Intersection of Disability and Race
• Native American Boarding Schools
• Freedom Writers: Writing Freedom
• The Nameless Foreigner: The Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) Community . . . and many more!
“Tomorrow’s ‘whole person’ cannot be whole without an educated awareness of society and culture with which to contribute socially, generously, in the real world. Tomorrow’s whole person must have, in brief, a well-educated solidarity . . . ‘for the real world.’”
Kolvenbach (Santa Clara, 1995)
The Dream Keeper
Bring me all of your dreams, You dreamers, Bring me all of your Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers Of the world.
Langston Hughes