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Day 1 - Reckoning with Systemic Racism (3)

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Doudou: In recent years, racism is growing and emerging.  Racism has always been masked, and lately the masks are being removed and racism is emerging from the darkness.

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Doudou: In recent years, racism is growing and emerging.  Racism has always been masked, and lately the masks are being removed and racism is emerging from the darkness.

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I share the link to visit the virtual exhibition of Casa de la Memoria Guatemala 

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I share the link to visit the virtual exhibition of Casa de la Memoria Guatemala 

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Florencia Ruiz: I live in the US I am Latina, the resistance to talk about racism among non BIPOC people is very notorious. How to fight the resistance in the classroom, especially with Adults, in spaces where people do not participate if they don't want to

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Dany Manyasi: Triangular Trade enslaved Africans both home and away! Thus, whether in slavery abroad or under colonialism at home, we both suffered slavery immensly. East African slaves found themselves in Middle East. As eunichs, few had descendants who were equally enslaved. Modern Day Slavery is on-going with the 'exportation' of cheap labour to the Arab world.

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From Andrea: Memory is important but not enough. Memory is necessary but we need more actions in a globalized world that legitimizes racist practices. Memory is not enough, it is not enough to not be racist, anti-racist actions that guarantee non-repetition must be implemented

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The oppressed and the oppressed have a bond, it is impossible to separate them

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From Ashley:

The Whitney plantation had two systems of work after slavery was abolished. I think it is at this point that the Withney plantation can help us understand many of the current situations in the United States, such as the dispossession of generational wealth in the South of the United States.

Once slavery was abolished, the plantations did not stop working, as is the case in this site

One of the control systems in the plantations of southern Louisiana was the warehouses. After slavery, the masters took all the benefits that these plantations could give the slaves (food, bed for a year), and transformed them into services in charge of the worker. Thus imposing a restriction of rights on basic needs. For example, in the 1950s a worker on the plantation earned 50 cents an hour and the doctor cost $ 3. In many cases, the owners charged the workers for each sick day. This generated unpayable debts among the workers and kept them tied to the plantation, thus controlling the labour force.

The plantation mindset has been implemented in the united states

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from Andrea:
The study of Racism cannot be separated from historical memory and patriarchy.

Casa de la Memoria is a permanent physical exhibition that addresses the various ongoing violences in Guatemala. Racism is understood as a continuum of violence - domination of bodies, dispossession of land and knowledge - that is repeated generation after generation.

Guatemala recently witnessed a genocide perpetrated by the state against the Mayan population. Previously, Guatemala had its first experience of genocide and epistemic dispossession in 1524 with colonization. To combat racism, we must understand the impact of colonization and the imposition of the western idea of ​​the world.

Confronting racism is also recovering ancestral knowledge, and recovering the historical memory of
Guatemala also implies recovering the memory and knowledge of the ancestral peoples.

At Casa de la Memoria we work with alternative ways of knowing history, which do not depart from the whiteness imposed as an official narrative since the creation of the nation-state. We also work from the idea that racism in Guatemala is legitimized from the power structures, becoming part of the legal framework of the constitution and allowing discrimination, violence and genocide.

Casa de la Memoria, as a Site of Conscience, links the past with the present, understanding that the racism of the past and this permanent process of dispossession lead us to the society we have today.

During the internal conflict in Guatemala, the state targeted the Mayan population as  the internal enemy, considering this population group as the only group that always resisted the idea of ​​the single and not diverse state. Thus, 83% of the victims of the conflict belonged to indigenous groups.

Colonization created and justified a system of domination towards the Mayan population, which was considered insubordinate. From this process, genocide was the perfect mechanism for the appropriation of ancestral territories and knowledge. That is why we call genocide the highest expression of racism.

The work of memory is to understand the past in order to live in the present and improve the future.

To speak of a continuum of violence is also to speak of a continuum of resistance. In the face of such violence, there have always been forms of resistance. Women, racialized women, and Mayan women have allowed the tradition of these resistances to be kept alive using oral tradition, spaces of struggle, and academia.

"Nothing will work against life because nothing worked ever against life"

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Lebo: ¿How to have impact as a museum? we are developing new educational programs. If we dont have these inclusive dialogues, these issues will go from one generation to the other

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From Lebo:
Constitution Hill was built in 1892 as a fort and was later used as a prison - Mandela or Gandhi were detained in the building. Today it is a museum.

The system of racial discrimination was imposed from the beginning, using what was called the "pencil method" that differentiated between  black and white from the hair of the inmates. A pencil was put on the head of the inmates, and if it was held, that person was considered black.

Black people were relegated to section 4. At first, this section was built for less than 1000 people. Eventually, more than 2,000 black prisoners ended up living there in conditions of famine and deprivation. Among other dehumanizing activities, they were asked to undress and appear in the courtyard to dance in front of the guards. Isolation was the punishment for those who objected to such a practice. These practices were carried out between 1948 and 1994, the year that marked the end of Apartheid in South Africa.

Although these practices ended, today we see new and renewed forms of racism in South Africa:

Discrimination based on hair continues to exist and has been the protagonist of recent incidents in the country, with the expulsion of people with Afro hair from schools and professional spaces or the prohibition on television of headdresses with scarves. The rules on hair have been racialized. This has generated a new wave of protests: especially among young women who did not suffer apartheid like their parents, thus transferring protest and consciousness from generation to generation.

Hair can be political and politicized: Chimamanda Ngozi once said, if Michelle Obama had not had straight hair, Barak Obama would not have won.

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from Eloi:

Racism doesn't just manifest in words, it manifests itself in actions.

There are many forms of racism and we must address them all.

Education plays a very important role in solving the urgent issue of discrimination.

The murder of Georg Floyd is a good example of the struggle and perseverance against systemic racism.

We have to work together to achieve our goals. Our ancestors were considered slaves, and this has influenced local cultures, identity is a process and we have to focus on this process and on cultural transformation.

This is a shared vision regarding preserving memory, the memory of freedom, the memory of equality. It is a collective mission.

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From Vanessa: Systemic racism in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is running high in the centennial year of the massacre of 1921. The community is very active in debating what and who should be remembered.

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Vanessa Adams-Harris, Outreach Coordinator, John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation – USA
anessa Adams-Harris is Muscogee American Indian with African-American/European ancestry.  She is an artist, producer, director, documentary filmmaker, theatre arts adjudicator, workshop facilitator, presenter, playwright, docent, human rights community activist/peace-builder and spirit walker.  She currently serves as Outreach & Alliances and Volunteer Coordinator for The John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation and serves as a  Greater Tulsa Area Indian Affairs Commissioner,  President-North Tulsa Historical Society, Vice-President of TKWolf, Inc, an American Indian non-profit organization, and a Member of the Greater Tulsa Indian Arts Festival.

She has presented both nationally and internationally and was a featured presenter for the 2020 Women, Sex and Violence in Georgia: Symposium on Contemporary Issues in the Age of “Me Too” @Clark Atlanta University and at the 2020 John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation Virtual 11th Annual National Symposium for Reconciliation in America.   In 2019,  she was the Winter Chautauqua Artist-in-Residence for Enid Public Schools, where she presented Big Mama Speaks-A 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Survivor, by Hannibal B. Johnson to over 2,000 public school children,  2nd – 12th grade.  Co-presenter with Dr. Ann Dapice for the 2018 Women Are Sacred Conference “Resilience: Walking in Ancestral Footprints, Carrying Our Medicine,” Albuquerque, NM, and has trained among an international coalition for Women as Peacebuilders through the Just Governance Human Security-X Initiatives of Change-Caux, Switzerland on the Six Pillars of Human Security. She trained with Father Michael Lapsley, Institute of Healing for Memories-NA Workshop  in Ossining, NY.

Her area of study and interest continues to search for meaning with our sense of place giving emphasis on the usage of reconciliation as a path to process what is discovered.   She draws on the need to present the historical accuracy of  African-American and Indigenous peoples voices and lived experiences.  She edited and directed the documentary by TKWolf, Inc. “Unheard Voices-Stalking in Indian Country” and “Unheard, Unseen” an Interview with Dr. Reid Melloy a leading stalking forensic psychologist.

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Ashley Rogers, Executive Director, Whitney Heritage Plantation – USA
Ashley Rogers is the Executive Director at the Whitney Plantation, a memorial site in South Louisiana that is exclusively dedicated to interpreting slavery. She has led the museum since its opening in December 2014. She has spearheaded a project at the museum to explore the legacies of enslavement by documenting the lives of Whitney Plantation’s cane workers in the twentieth century. Ashley is currently pursuing a PhD in history at Louisiana State University. Her dissertation will focus on plantation labor in South Louisiana after slavery. As a museum practitioner, Ashley is concerned with equitable interpretation and institutional practices. She is a co-author and editor of the MASS Action Toolkit, The Inclusive Historian’s Handbook, and James Madison’s Montpelier’s Engaging Descendant Communities Rubric. Prior to working for the Whitney Plantation, Ashley was the Assistant Director of Denver Regional Museums at History Colorado.

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Lebo Marishane, Acting CEO, Constitution Hill – South Africa
Lebogang Marishane is the Strategic Support Manager at Constitution Hill in South Africa and is involved in shaping supportive environments that enable the development of African communities and increase civic engagement.  She also firmly believes in the strategic use of Information Communications Technologies to center and amplify voices of those that live in the margins.

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Eloi Coly, Chief Conservator, Maison des Esclaves – Senegal
M. COLY  is the  current Chief Curator of the House of slaves and  Site Manager of Goree Island, a world Heritage Site, a Space  of memory and Reconciliation among people.

M. COLY is a lecturer and a  founding member  of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience.

M. COLY is also Consultant for Senegal  of the Project of Revitalization of the House of slaves,  funded by the U.S. Ford Foundation and the Senegalese State, in conjunction with  the International  Coalition of Sites of Conscience.

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Andrea Plician Méndez, Facilitator, Casa de la Memoria Kaji Tulam – Guatemala

Guatemalan, feminist, human rights activist with the Center for legal action on Human Rights (CALDH) and defender of the right to memory.

For 4 years she has been in charge of CASA de la MEMORIA Kaji TULAM, which is an interactive space on the historical memory of Guatemala, from the perspective of women, Indigenous peoples and youth.From this space, she accompanies the process of exchanges of

knowledge, recovery of memory and resignification of history with youth, teachers, students and educational centers. CALDH also promotes artistic and cultural processes that link memory from the past-present. She has recently co-built a virtual exhibition process on historical memory in Guatemala, from the decentralization of memory and in contexts of Pandemic and virtuality.