Date: Tuesday, June 2 (Tomorrow)
Time: 6-8pm
Location: HH 242
Disproportionate incarceration rates, higher unemployment and poverty figures, targeted police brutality and profiling, super-exploitation and unsafe working conditions, mass detentions and deportations, heightened xenophobia and jingoism, imperialist wars for profit and empire, an enduring legacy of colonialism and slavery that condemns two-thirds of the world to ever-growing impoverishment and oppression. Racism is alive and well in the twenty-first century, and continues to impact in devastating ways the lives of millions of workers, students, and families across the globe.
Racist police violence against Black and Latino men is a common occurrence in cities across the U.S., while immigrant Mexican and Central American workers become the victims of increasing xenophobic attack in a time of economic crisis. On college campuses, Black students are targets of racist insults and vicious acts of violence while administrators refuse to act. College attendance rates for students of color and working-class students dwindle in the face of rising tuition and a racist culture of intimidation on campuses. Anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism is promoted by politicians, the media, and in schools to justify domestic repression in the U.S. and genocidal wars for empire in Iraq and Afghanistan (and, in the near future, possibly Iran). Across the world, governments spend billions upon billions of dollars to “save” predatory banks and global capitalism while New Orleans remains largely in the same condition five years after Katrina, world poverty and misery increase from Southeast Asia to Africa to Latin America, and Haiti lies in ruins.
Racism stands at the center of our global economic, social, and political system, and for this reason, the continuing international fight against injustice, oppression, and exploitation must be decidedly antiracist and multiracial. Join our panel of student-activists and worker-activists for a discussion of the negative impact racism continues to have today and the possible ways to build anti-racist unity and struggle.
RYAN DAVIS will discuss the persistence of structural antiblackness in American society and the recent incidents of antiblack racism on college campuses.
OSAMA SHABAIK will discuss the fostering of “Islamophobia” and anti-Muslim racism in the U.S. and across the globe under the guise of a “War on Terror.”
CELENE PEREZ will discuss the subcontracting of Latina/o workers at UCI and other UC campuses, and the struggles to end the super-exploitation of subcontracted workers within the UC system.
