That's Mighty White of You: The Story of White Supremacy in Roughly 8 Acts... with Delma Jackson III
By the time the United States was founded, ideas of racial hierarchy were already well-over a century old. As various institutions came online in the US including science, medicine, academia, law, finance, and eventually pop-culture, these institutions would co-create a story about race that continues to thrive around and within us despite our best intentions, social movements, and efforts to legislate equity.
This session intends to unpack the mythology of white supremacy as articulated by a variety of institutions which co-created and maintain racial hierarchy. By framing the conversation through the lens of story, one can understand its power to both seed disconnect AND offer hope for a more perfect union.
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Delma Jackson III (he/his/him) is an activist, facilitator, writer, counselor, and lecturer.
His research covers a variety of issues including: American pop-culture and media literacy, Islamophobia in America and abroad, Hip-Hop in the context of a Black musical legacy, sexism and media, linguistic authenticity in cross-cultural dialogues, white identity, America’s love affair with violence, the legacy of Black comedy in America, African Americans and history of health care, and African Americans in the context of US housing policy.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in African-American Studies and Psychology from Eastern Michigan University (EMU) and his Masters degree in Liberal Arts with a focus on American/African American Studies from the University of Michigan.
Native Nations, Land Relations, and Higher Education with Megan Red Shirt-Shaw -MOVED TO VIRTUAL-
Land acknowledgements have become a powerful introduction to convocations, graduations, meetings, and conferences in higher education. But institutions must challenge themselves to move away from encouraging acts that are just performative, into commitments of transformative change. In this presentation, Megan discusses her research into how institutions of higher education received their land and the steps institutions can take for land-based reparations including returning institutional land back to Native nations or if this is not possible, providing free higher education to Native students whose traditional homelands the institution sits upon.
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Megan Red Shirt-Shaw (Oglala Lakota) is an inspiring educator, writer, and researcher in higher education. Passionate about Indigenous rights issues, college admissions, and greater Native presence in media and higher education, Megan believes in empowering young people to use their voices for the issues they care about in their communities. A powerful speaker, she has presented at colleges and universities as well as conferences nationwide.
Megan is currently the Director of Native Student Services at the University of South Dakota. She has held positions in undergraduate admissions, college counseling, and student advising at the University of Pennsylvania, Questbridge, Santa Clara University, Albuquerque Academy, and the 7th Gen Summer Program. She also was elected, in 2021, to serve a 7 year term on Harvard University's Board of Overseers, one of two governing bodies that plays an integral role in the governance of Harvard.
Megan is the author of the powerful policy paper, Beyond the Land Acknowledgement: College “LAND BACK” or Free Tuition for Native Students's. Her writings have also been featured on Huffington Post, ThinkProgress, Racialicious, Model View Culture, and Last Real Indians. She is the founder of Natives In America, an online literary publication for Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian youth.
Megan earned her Bachelor’s from the University of Pennsylvania in English and her Master's from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Higher Education where she was co-chair of FIERCE — Future Indigenous Educators Resisting Colonial Education. Megan is currently pursuing her PhD in Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development with a focus on Higher Education and a minor in American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota.
Her favorite phrase her mother ever taught her in Lakota is “Weksuye, Ciksuye, Miksuye” meaning “I remember, I remember you, Remember me.”
Operationalizing Love: Centering Love In Our Intersectional Justice Work with Dr. Durryle Brooks
Love within the US context is often defined in overly individualistic, anemic, and depoliticized ways. Why? What of love and its role in social transformation? This talk will engage the ways in which the everyday notion of love operates as a tool of oppression. It will call for intentional efforts to reconceptualize love in ways that help us resist erasure and dehumanization, but more importantly to reconceptualize it in ways to help us all heal from the effects of system oppression.
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Durryle Brooks, Ph.D is an interdisciplinary researcher and a scholar-practitioner from Baltimore, MD. He is the Founder and CEO of Love and Justice Consulting LLC, an organization that provides leaders with diversity and social justice learning opportunities to increase their capacity to effectively and authentically engage difference. Through dialogue, critical self-reflective practice, and compassionate communication, Durryle 'holds space' for others to do meaningful work that liberates and transforms the personal and collective for our common good.
The Immense Power of Telling Your Authentic Story with Jasiri X
This workshop is a means of educating the participant on the effects of media societal perception and, more specifically, how it shapes how we view “reality.” We explore the constant bombardment of media images and how these images shape the perception of self, community, and, ultimately, the world, as well as how to counteract the effects. The participants will be taken through the process of how positive voices are cultivated via various forms of media and the positive results thereby produced.
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Jasiri X is the first independent Hip-Hop artist to be awarded an Honorary Doctorate, which he received from Chicago Theological Seminary in 2016. Still, he remains rooted in the Pittsburgh-based organization he founded, 1Hood Media, whose mission is to build liberated communities through art, education, and social justice. In 2017, he received the Nathan Cummings Foundation Fellowship to start the 1Hood Artivist Academy. Jasiri is also a recipient of the USA Cummings Fellowship in Music, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artist as Activist Fellowship, and the President's Volunteer Service Award (President Obama).