Test Resources
racism
Film: The Last Chance for Eden
Last Chance for Eden is a documentary about eight men and women discussing the issues of racism and sexism in the workplace. They examine the impact of society's stereotypes on their lives in the workplace, in their personal relationships and within their families and in their communities. In the course of their dialogue, they also explore the differences and similarities between racism and sexism - an area that has seldom been researched, but has heatedly become a very important issue needing to be understood and dealt with.
View the trailer: http://www.stirfryseminars.com/video/lce1.mov
http://www.stirfryseminars.com/pages/wo_men.htm
Film: Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible
Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible is a documentary that seeks to expose and understand the perspectives that perpetuate white privilege and racism in modern society. The film features the experiences of white women and men who have worked to gain insight into what it means to challenge notions of racism and white supremacy in the United States. Runtime: 50 minutes.
View a vieo clip, learn more about the film, download the companion study/conversation guide, and order the DVD on the World-Trust website.
http://www.world-trust.org/videos/visible.html
Film: The Long Walk Home
The Long Walk Home is a recreation of a troubled era in American history. The time is 1955; the place, Montgomery, Alabama. When Rosa Parks, an African American woman, is arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, it is the first volley in the great Bus Boycott, organized by Dr. Martin Luther King in order to desegregate the Birmingham transportation system. The boycott is a decided inconvenience for Miriam Thompson (Sissy Spacek), a well-to-do white woman. Now, Miriam must drive to the black section of town to pick up her maid Odessa Cotter (Whoopi Goldberg) and bring her to work. Outside of her own social circle, Miriam realizes for the first time just how privileged, sheltered and self-centered her life has been. What brings this fact home is the realization that Odessa has literally been raising two families: the Thompsons' and her own. Odessa has also sacrificed her own health and wellbeing to serve her employers without question or complaint. Awakened to the true inequities of "Separate But Equal", and impressed by Dr. King's edict of nonviolent resistance, Miriam joins the boycott. This stirs up the racist feelings harbored by Miriam's husband Norman (Dwight Schultz), who at the behest of his goonish brother Tunker (Dylan Baker) joins the Klanlike White Citizen's Council. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
View the trailer - http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/trailer.html?v_id=29947
Get the DVD - http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/dvd.html?v_id=29947
http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=29947
Film: Race: The Power of An Illusion
"Colorblindness will not end racism. Pretending race does not exist is not the same as creating equality. Race is more than stereotypes and individual prejudice. To combat racism, we need to identify and remedy social policies that advantage some groups at the expense of others." - from PBS.org
The division of the world's peoples into distinct groups - "red," "black," "white" or "yellow" peoples - has became so deeply imbedded in our psyches, so widely accepted, many would promptly dismiss as crazy any suggestion of its falsity. Yet, that's exactly what this provocative, new three-hour series by California Newsreel claims. Race - The Power of an Illusion questions the very idea of race as biology, suggesting that a belief in race is no more sound than believing that the sun revolves around the earth.
Yet race still matters. Just because race doesn't exist in biology doesn't mean it isn't very real, helping shape life chances and opportunities.
Episode 1- The Difference Between Us examines the contemporary science - including genetics - that challenges our common sense assumptions that human beings can be bundled into three or four fundamentally different groups according to their physical traits.
Episode 2- The Story We Tell uncovers the roots of the race concept in North America, the 19th century science that legitimated it, and how it came to be held so fiercely in the western imagination. The episode is an eye-opening tale of how race served to rationalize, even justify, American social inequalities as "natural."
Episode 3- The House We Live In asks, If race is not biology, what is it? This episode uncovers how race resides not in nature but in politics, economics and culture. It reveals how our social institutions "make" race by disproportionately channeling resources, power, status and wealth to white people.
By asking, What is this thing called 'race'?, a question so basic it is rarely asked, Race - The Power of an Illusion helps set the terms that any further discussion of race must first take into account. Ideal for human biology, anthropology, sociology, American history, American studies, and cultural studies.
Episodes are also available individually on VHS cassette by clicking below!
http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0149
Film: The Color of Fear
The Color of Fear is an insightful, groundbreaking film about the state of race relations in America as seen through the eyes of eight North American men of Asian, European, Latino and African descent. In a series of intelligent, emotional and dramatic confrontations the men reveal the pain and scars that racism has caused them. What emerges is a deeper sense of understanding and trust. This is the dialogue most of us fear, but hope will happen sometime in our lifetime. (running time: 90 minutes)
Watch the trailer: http://www.stirfryseminars.com/video/cof.mov
http://www.stirfryseminars.com/pages/coloroffear.htm
Building Alliances (RAN)
in
A powerful 6-page guide for organizers to build alliances and overcome divisions caused by institutional oppression and fear. Includes great working definitions for terms related to oppression.
Alliances are crucial to creating any kind of sustainable change. History has shown that different groups have been played against each other by those in power to keep us separated and unable to threaten the status quo.
A little story about our divisions
When the United States was beginning to form, there was a hierarchy of oppression that kept everyone subservient to someone above them. The King of England demanded goods from the Jamestown white elite who exploited and controlled the white frontiersman who, in order to appease the elite with money and land, slaughtered Indigenous people and brutalized African slaves. Many whites joined Indigenous and African rebellions. The white elite worked to stop this because they knew such an alliance would become too powerful and would succeed at overthrowing the control that the elite and the King had. So in order to separate the whites from everyone else, they started giving more privileges (land and better treatment) to the white servants. This worked. The working class whites effectively abandoned the movements for change and to this day these groups have problems working together. (Zinn, 1980).
Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice
in
This book by Paul Kivel focuses on understanding whiteness, racism, privilege, and how white people can work for racial justice. It provides several thought exercises that help the reader put racism in context and offers several tools and tips for countering and uprooting prejudice and oppression.
http://www.paulkivel.com/wst_page5.html
Anti-Oppression Training Organizations (SOA Watch)
Understanding injustice and oppression and creating a healthy and positive environment for organizing is essential to working for sustainability and climate justice. This page provides a list of organizations that do trainings on anti-oppression. There are amazing trainers in every single state. They work at community-based organizations or nonprofits and engage in anti-racist organizing/anti-oppression training. Just call your favorite activist groups and ask who would be the best person to do a training. Skilled trainers will be able to make recommendations based on the needs and goals of your group.
http://www.soaw.org/article.php?id=612#hic
SEAC Anti-Oppression Resources
A comprehensive list of recommended reading, websites, trainers, and other interesting projects all related to differing forms of oppression-both within our society at large and within progressive circles.
http://www.seac.org/resources/antioppression
