Friday Announcements: Thea on Solidarity Across Communities of Colour; Rethinking Racial Capitalism Symposium; & Black Maternal Health Conference

Come Together? Right Now?
Forming Healthy Alliances Across Communities of Colour
Public Lecture by Thea Lim

Racialicians! (We gotta think of a name for ourselves) I will be speaking in Ohio on Monday. Please come out; it would be great to meet you.

Wilder Hall (Student Union), Wilder Hall,
Room 101 @ 135 West Lorain St.,
Oberlin, OH 44074-1097

Monday 26 April
12 pm
lunch provided

While racism comes in many forms, it is always at base the same thing. No matter who racism targets, it is in our best interest to ally with other groups of colour; to be as invested in their struggles as we are in our own. More than this, pan-ethnic/cultural communities of colour create a home for 1.5 & 2nd genners, mixed race/cultural people, and disaporic people who feel most at ease in rojak.

Yet allyship and coalition-building is not as simple as just embracing the rainbow. While we have much in common, there are many things that separate us. How do those of us whose families recently immigrated here synch up with those of us who descend from the legacy of slavery, or the colonisation of the Americas? How do we sidestep Oppression Olympics, while recognising that things like light-skinned privilege, linguistic privilege or class privilege are genuine leg-ups that some of us have, while others do not? How can we be sensitive and empathetic allies when our struggles are parallel, but not the same? How can we understand, when we lack the lived experience to understand?

Drawing on her own experiences as a self-proclaimed 1.75 genner, a Canadian of colour living in America and the deputy editor of Racialicious (pan-ethnic anti-racist site extraordinaire), Thea Lim will offer stories cheering successes and total failures on the road to coming together, in the hopes of finding an anti-racist space for all people of colour.

Click here for more info.

RETHINKING RACIAL CAPITALISM – TWO DAY SYMPOSIUM
(Does anyone want to cover this for Racialicious? Get in touch: team@racialicious.com)

Program in American Studies, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
New York University, 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

This symposium is an effort to think through both the past and contemporary history of capitalist development in the United States and beyond. It follows from the recognition, as Cedric Robinson writes, that “the development, organization and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, and so too did social ideology. As a material force then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.” (Black Marxism, 2) The term “racial capitalism” refuses the idea of a pure capitalism external to, or extrinsic from the racial formation of collectivities and populations. While ‘race’ may be a key lens through which to consider the relationship between the value-form and the aggregation of socially significant identities in modernity, the term racial capitalism also suggests that capitalism is always more than an economic project. Actually existing capitalism leverages cultural forms, norms and identities: it is lived through the uneven social formations of race, gender, nationality, sexuality and ability, among others. Our goal in this symposium then is to begin to think through relationships between capitalist economy and culture in the United States and beyond, particularly as they develop from histories of racial slavery, colonial expansion, ghettoization, mass incarceration, and overseas warfare, but also as these histories are broadly constituted in the entanglements and intersections of cultural difference.

For more information and event schedule, click here.

Black Maternal Health Conference

You have read the headlines. Now hear the leading expert on the groundbreaking research into the causes of the high maternal and infant mortality rates in the U.S.  Women’s eNews Black Maternal Health Project is now inviting select members of the media to a briefing on the crucial steps needed to be taken to save the lives of our mother and infants.

Wednesday April 28th
12.30p.m. – 2.30p.m.

Speakers
Keynote: Dr Michael C. Lu, UCLA Assoc. Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Public Health “Rethinking Maternal Health & Health Care: A Life-Course Perspective”

Kimberly Seals Allers, Editorial Director, Black Maternal Health
“What’s Race Got to Do With It?”

Tonya Lewis Lee, National Spokesperson A Healthy Baby Begins With You Campaign “Saving Our Babies, Saving Ourselves: The Black Woman’s Imperative”

Register by April 23rd by sending an e-mail rosemary@womensenews.org with the phrase Maternal Health in the subject line. Please include your name, address, phone number, cell number and professional affiliation.

Please arrive at least 15 minutes before the presentation begins.

Women’s eNews office, 6 Barclay Street, Sixth floor, New York City
Map: http://tinyurl.com/map-womensenews