ANTI-RACIST TEACHING COLLECTIVE

In Conversation with Grace Evans: Founder of Bound to Be Bookclub

2/16/2021

We connected with Grace Evans to learn about her newly formed bookclub, Bound to Be. Grace is a sophomore majoring in Ethnic Studies and Political Science at Santa Clara University.

What were your intentions for opening up the space of Bound to Be? What are your hopes for the space and community?
I created Bound to Be, a bold book club with a conscious commitment to intersectionality, to share my love of learning with others. Its name, Bound to Be, is a reference to books, yes, but also to that which binds us together as a community of learners. We are bound by our humanity. We are bound by our humility. We are bound to be, bound to be whoever and whatever we want to be. My hope for Bound to Be is that it attracts any and all who wish to learn literature’s lessons.

Why did you select The Vanishing Half as your first book?
I chose Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half as January’s Bound to Be (#B2B) book, our first one, to cement my commitment to centering voices of color. According to Brit Bennett’s website, The Vanishing Half is a “stunning new novel about

twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white” (britbennett.com). Furthermore, The Vanishing Half brilliantly brings together topics like racism and colorism, sisterhood, longing and belonging… Brit Bennett’s writing is sage, savvy, and truly timely. I couldn’t put it down.

How has literature shaped the work that you do as a Political Science + Ethnic Studies double major?
As a Political Science and Ethnic Studies double major, I owe so much of what I’ve learned to literature. From Toni Morrison to Ta-Nehisi Coates, fictional and non-fictional works play an important role in my studies. Without them, without their power (emotional, empirical, etc.), my knowledge of our country and of our world

would be little. Likewise, literature has taught me to ask and answer questions that may not be easily asked or answered - leading me to Political Science and Ethnic Studies, fields of study that both diagnose pessimism and prescribe optimism. After all, as Angela Davis once said: “Walls turned sideways are bridges.” And so I will continue to create and to communicate with gratitude to those who fought for my right to do so.

You can find Bound to Be on Instagram - we’re currently reading Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

In Conversation with Rosa Clemente: Black and Brown Organizing Histories to Inform Revolutionary Resistance

11/13/2020

“Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories...”

-Amilcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts

Seasoned community organizer, activist-scholar, and independent journalist, Rosa Clemente, reflects in conversation with Maria Hinojosa from Latino USA on the urgencies of confronting anti-Blackness in Latinx communities and the importance of forging Black and Latinx alliances that can mobilize to resist and disrupt the assemblages of anti-Blackness, white supremacy and racial violence.

Drawing from her own personal experiences as a Black Puerto Rican woman with decades of experience as a community organizer in New York, Rosa reminds us of the importance of Black and Brown liberation struggles, of the histories of multi-racial solidarity and movement building that can inform our present and future. By describing the coalitions formed between the Brown Berets, the Young Lords and the Black Panthers, we are reminded that in unity there is strength. More than strength there is resistance, revolution and radical hope to carry forward movements for liberation and humanizing possibilities.

Noting the awakening of a racial consciousness among Latinx communities, including members of her familia, in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, Rosa calls upon us to engage in the disruption of anti-Blackness within Latinx communities, discourses and spaces. At the same time she reminds us of the importance of setting boundaries, even within our own families, to ensure that the radical revolutionary work of organizing for systemic change goes beyond the interpersonal. Political discernment of when and where, and how to push and resist, even among those most close to us, is a necessary strategy to sustain racial justice activism and organizing.

As the founder of the Black-Latinx Organizing Project, a non-profit committed to challenging anti-Blackness in Latinx communities, Rosa urges us to dive deep into our own colonial past and mindsets -- to unsettle and uproot the internalized racial logics that produce soul-wounds, both within individuals and communities -- and that keep us from actualizing racial justice and the humanizing affirmation that Black lives matter. In deconstructing the romanization of Latinidad, she urges Latinx to reckon with a history of colonial violence and the erasure of Afro-diasporic identities and experiences in the Americas.

Affirmed by the reflections of white privilege acknowledged by her brother, and in bearing witness to the activism and mobilizing of the younger generation, including her daughter, Rosa’s words -- along with her tears -- underscore that racial violence and anti-Black racism “has to end and our generation has to stop this.” Urging Latinx families to begin the process of deconstructing anti-Blackness within and among themselves, and at the kitchen table, Rosa affirms for us through her own personal experiences that radical revolutionary change and resistance begins through dialogue and connection. And indeed, in conversation.

Check out the work mentioned in the podcast, consider buying from a Black owned bookstore

Writings by Rosa Clemente

"Who is Black?"

"How I Came to Know and Appreciate My Blackness an Afro-Latina"

Read Here

Referenced Works

In Conversation with Imani Perry: Artistic Possibility through the disciplines of hope and writing

10/16/2020

This fascinating conversation between Dr. Marc Lamont Hill and Dr. Imani Perry covers Perry’s recent work, process, overarching questions of the work, aspirations, rituals of writing, daily writing, and the contemporary literary renaissance. Perry speaks to working on multiple projects at once and accepting where we are with the work and the writing. It is clear through the questions he poses that Hill knows Perry’s writing deeply. He is a really wonderful interviewer and a conversationalist. This is what makes a podcast truly good—that one can listen and also fully imagine being in the space through the dynamic between the speakers.

Perry speaks to the process of writing her most recent texts, including (title and links.) On Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, Perry describes it as a “a three-part letter.” Perry explains that the text examines “what it means to come of age in this moment that is so fraught and so difficult.” She continues,

“it is a hard time—it has always been a hard time to come of age as a Black person in this society. It is particularly difficult now and part of what I wanted to communicate—I want people to witness this—it is an internal conversation—but it is also an invitation to a suite of witnesses that notwithstanding the difficulty, there is great beauty in Black life and there are also incredible resources from those who came before—our elders and ancestors.”

Written directly to her sons, the letter meditates on “how one fashions a life under difficult circumstances that can nevertheless be beautiful” and also “how to build a life that is deeply meaningful and in service to the world” as well as what it means for a Black child to have “to watch for how people are watching [them]” and how this speaks to the experience of being, at a young age, “burdened with managing White people’s anxieties.”

Later in the podcast, Perry discusses how reading is a critical process of writing and how beginning with a question allows for an openness in the process. In response to a question Hill poses about how her work that exists across disciplines and genres and traditions, Perry responds by articulating how “every piece of writing is a methodological exercise” and how the work has to be rooted in one’s own passion and connected to what one identifies as meaningful rather than the trajectories that academia can impose as the only routes or ways of doing and being.

In terms of the larger questions that guide her scholarship, Perry responds with two questions which reflect the role of processing pain to access possibility for and within Black community and intellectual space.

For Perry, the first question is:

“why—every time we seem to make progress on questions of justice there is not just retrenchment but the kind of imaginative work of white supremacy takes over such that we wind up like two steps forward, three steps back.”

Knowing the answer to this is necessary for liberation. The second question guiding the work for Perry is

“how in the imagination and particularly in the Black imagination where we puzzle through these barriers, impediments, sources of suffering in a way that leads to incredible artistic possibilities and ways of expressing ourselves in life. I find Black folks breathtakingly beautiful in how in the art that resists that domination. I want to talk and think about it and I want to do it. I want to produce it.”

In the podcast conversation, Perry cites Mariame Kaba’s approach that “hope is a discipline” as well as Hortense Spillers’s foundational essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987).

Check out the books mentioned in the podcast, all images are linked to Black owned bookstores

Work by Imani Perry

Marc Lamont Hill's Latest Book

Books referenced in this podcast

In Conversation