Overcoming Racism:
Recognizing & Challenging the Legacies That Oppress Us
Friday, October 29, 2010: 9 am - 6 pm, registration 8:30
Saturday, October 30, 2010: 9 am - 6 pm, registration 8:30
William Mitchell College of Law
St. Paul, MN
Friday AM Keynote: Dr. Antony Stately, PhD (Ojibwe/Oneida) Director, Mental Health and Chemical Health Programs, Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, Prior Lake, MN
Friday PM Keynote: Rev. John E. Robertson (Dakota) Vicar, Bishop Whipple Mission/Lower Sioux, Morton, MN
Saturday AM Keynote: Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe), White Earth Land Recovery Project
Saturday PM Keynote: Eddie Moore, Director of Diversity, The Bush School; Founder, White Privilege Conference
More on keynote speakers
Friday plenary panel: Tearing Down The Myths
Workshop Schedule & Descriptions
FRIDAY, October 29, 2010
| 8:30 a.m. | Registration opens |
| 9:00 | Opening Ceremony & Conference Orientation |
| 9:30 – 11:00 | Keynote: Dr. Antony Stately, including processing/ Q&A |
| 11:15 – 12:45 p.m. | Workshop Session #1 |
| 12:45 – 1:15 | lunch |
| 1:15 – 2:30 | Plenary Panel: Tearing Down the Myths |
| 2:45 – 4:15 | Workshop Session #2 |
| 4:30 – 6:00 | Keynote: Rev. John Robertson, including processing/ Q&A |
SATURDAY, October 30, 2010
| 8:30 a.m. | Registration opens |
| 9:00 | Opening Framing by Conference Co-Chairs |
| 9:30 – 11:00 | Keynote: Winona LaDuke, including processing/ Q&A |
| 11:00 – 11:30 | Networking: “Affinity groups” for action planning |
| 11:30 – 12:15 p.m. | lunch |
| 12:30 – 3:00 | 2 ½ Hour Workshops |
| 12:30 – 2:00 | Workshop Session #3 (90 minutes) |
| 2:15 – 3:15 | Workshop Session #4 (60 minutes) |
| 3:15 – 3:45 | Refreshments & networking |
| 3:45 – 5:15 | Closing Keynote: Eddie Moore |
| 5:15 – 5:45 | Closing Ceremony |
Conference Mission: Advancing antiracist transformation of ourselves, our institutions and our communities
Conference purposes:
- Address colonization*, historical trauma* and decolonization*—the colonizer and colonized interactions, social arrangements, and mindsets
- Communicate how historical trauma developed (who? why?)
- Understand how oppressive legacies are embedded (policies, institutions, social systems) and perpetuated today (practices, belief systems, behaviors) in the form of institutional and structural or systemic racism* as well as its individual manifestations.
- Understand what oppressive legacies looks like/how they manifest themselves, how they get all of us stuck (oppressor/oppressed), and how we get unstuck; what this understanding implies and demands in action (So what?)
- Provide models, skills and tools for advancing antiracist transformation that participants can apply in their daily lives, their work and their institutional and community contexts.
- Understand the challenges and benefits to having honest conversations about systemic racism, ongoing colonization, white privilege and white supremacy as manifested in and flowing from historical traumas resulting from the violence of colonialism
- Gain practical skills and tools for countering racism, facilitating difficult conversations about race and racism, and for challenging institutional racism in their own life contexts.
- Explore the unique challenges, possibilities and practical application of racial justice skills, tools and facilitation in their particular settings
Each day of the conference will include an opening plenary, AM & PM keynote addresses, networking time, lunch, and workshop sessions. Friday includes a plenary panel with multiple speakers with differing perspectives. Come for both days to experience all the opportunities, but if you can only make one of the days, you will still get a lot out of it!
Download the flyer and spread the word!
Be part of the planning and organizing of our second conference! The steering committee meets regularly the 3rd Friday of the month, 9-11 am at Cherokee Park United Church, 371 Baker St., 55107, on St. Paul's West Side.
*Definitions:
Historical Trauma: The theory of historical trauma specific to the Indigenous tribes of the United States and Alaska was created by Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart in the late 1980s (Jackson & Jackson, 2006). The theory of historical trauma in this context refers to the individual, community, and intergenerational effects of the cataclysmic events of European colonization, such as genocide, warfare, ethnic cleansing, massacres, forced assimilation, and relocation. Trauma is the experience of intense feelings of fear, mental stress and/or distress, or grief in response to harmful mental, emotional, or physical situations or events. Historical trauma broadens this definition to include the cumulative impact that historically traumatic events have had, and are still having, on the Native American community. Sometimes referred to as a soul wound, historical trauma has had a tremendous impact on the identity and core strength of the Native American population (Duran, Firehammer, & Gonzalez, 2008). Historical trauma has been linked to the mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional health disparities of the Native American people, as well as the dysfunctional coping mechanisms that have formed in response such as alcohol and substance abuse.
Colonization: Colonization occurs when one people is conquered by another people through destroying and/or weakening basic social structures in the conquered culture and replacing them with those of the conquering culture. Colonization robs the colonized of most of their land and resources. Loss of the land base meant loss of the foundation for their traditional social, economic and cultural ways of life. Colonization robs the colonized of their cultural inheritance. Colonizers view and treat the colonized as lesser human beings; this leads to stigmatization, shame, and sense of worthlessness. Decolonization: Decolonization refers to a process where a colonized people reclaim their traditional culture, redefine themselves as a people and reassert their distinct identity.
Institutional Racism: Unequal impacts and outcomes based on race, produced by key societal institutions such as the health care and housing systems, and education and employment systems. These institutions are racist when the impact of their policies, practices and power is to advantage and disadvantage whole groups of people along racial lines. When an individual acts within the context of an institution, and help to perpetuate these racial inequities, these actions are no longer just interpersonal actions, but rather institutional actions. (Thus, when a police officer treats a member of the public with racial bias––such as giving white people the benefit of the doubt while presuming people of color are guilty–– this action is institutional racism since the police officer is acting as a representative of a law enforcement institution.) Unequal impacts based on race are the measure of institutional racism, regardless of whether or not the disproportionate and discriminatory effects are intentional. Institutional racism is not just carried out by white people but also by people of color acting in institutional capacities, "just doing their jobs" and implementing decisions that have a negative effect on people of color. Whomever the actor, the power source is institutional policy.
Structural Racism: The normalization and legitimization of an array of dynamics––historical, cultural, institutional and interpersonal––that, in the USA, routinely advantage “white” people while producing cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes for people of color. Structural racism encompasses the entire system of white domination, diffused and infused in all aspects of society, including its history, culture, politics, economics and entire social fabric. Structural racism is more difficult to locate in a particular institution because it involves the reinforcing effects of multiple institutions and cultural norms, past and present, continually reproducing old, and producing new forms of racism. Structural racism is the most profound and pervasive form of racism—all other forms of racism emerge from structural racism.
Systemic racism: Systemic racism refers to race-based system of hierarchical interaction, principally concerning the creation, development, and maintenance of privilege, economic wealth, and sociopolitical power in defense of the interests of the dominant racial group and its elites. In the Unites States, systemic racism includes proprietary group position (rightness of whiteness/white Recht, white preeminence), a diverse assortment of racist practices; the unjustly gained economic and political power of whites (theft of land from American Indians and enslavement of Africans); the continuing resource inequalities; and the racist ideologies, attitudes, and institutions created to preserve white advantages and power (Feagin 2000: 6).
System, in the context of systemic racism, refers to the arrangements, methods, procedures, and theories of organization whereby an assemblage of institutions function in concert as a unified whole to preserve white dominance (racial supremacy). That which unifies the whole, racism—racist beliefs, values, goals, theories of social organization, and legal and illegal mechanisms of privileging white power and control—allows the system to function more effectively in realizing the goals of each separate institution. In a racist society, racism is the “life blood” that enables and helps sustain the survival of institutions in their individual and collective mission.
(“Institutional” and “Structural” racism definitions adapted from Applied Research Center. “Systemic racism” and “System” definitions derived from Antiracism Study-Dialogue Circles [ASDIC].)
Workshop Descriptions Keynote Speakers Panel Description Registration page