Innovation is Crucial to Success: Antiracism is Crucial to Innovation

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.

It is our duty to win.

We must love each other and support each other.

We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

Assata Shakur

American Hero and Revolutionary

Innovation is so much more than technology!  True innovation will only come when we break the incestuous cycle of white supremacist knowledge production.  We need new voices and those voices are standing right here.  Real innovation will come when people who created Hip-Hop, Jazz, Rock and Roll--when the people who created flavor in American cuisine and who pretty much generate American culture throughout the continent are involved in information production and knowledge creation.  Indigenous, Black, Brown, and other people of color will create a groundswell like never before once they are allowed to fully function within the academy.  We will change education's structures, its techniques, its goals, its meaning.  We are the harbingers of change and we are here now.  

Education is Stale

Education is stale, the ideas are backward and the time for change is now.  New blood, new ideas and finally--some progress in society--not just progress in making tools.  Western people are the best tool makers, but have little to no idea about how to live with one another and how to create good human relations--which lead to real security.  Not the false security that guns everywhere provide, but the real security of knowing that your neighbor’s fate and experience directly relate to your own. 

The truth is that Education needs us!  We bring flavor, new insights, conceptual relationships that white people don’t even know exist--we bring progress.  The academy needs to aggressively recruit people who have backgrounds from ‘marginalized’ communities and then allow these scholars to create radical change within our academic institutions.  This change is not something we are asking for--this change is something we bring and are announcing.  The backlash is on and we stand ready and strong--stronger than we have ever been.  We are at war--it is a cultural war.  We are bound to win, we must win--”we have a duty to win.”  

Ideas to speed up change:

• Create an action research center at your school that focuses on anti-oppression integration in education.  

• Block hire a BIPOC cohort into your school or organization.  

• Create support systems for BIPOC and other oppressed groups.

• Create support systems for antiracist activators and activists at your school--protect them and promote them!

• Create an EDI/Antiracist Handbook for your department--you have the expertise.  Research, learn, share and promote antiracist and anti oppression curriculum, pedagogies and systems.

• Use antiracism as a model for building other anti-oppression tactics for the liberation of all oppressed groups.

• Create and sustain affinity spaces for oppressed groups at your organization.

• Create partnerships with schools and other vocational training organizations to form a pipeline of BIPOC employment recruits.

• Empower BIPOC leaders to lead.

Until we have a system that has been created with BIPOC and other oppressed groups involved, we will never have equity, inclusion, diversity nor anti-oppression as part of our organizations.  We need NEW systems that have been co-created by BIPOC and that are inclusive and are not oppressive.  What are you doing today to create this needed change? This will necessitate the destruction of old structures.  There are many racists who are deeply invested in these shitstems--they must be defeated and these racist structures destroyed.  We will replace them with inclusive systems and structures that will create real progress for society.  

MLK Day, 2017 #InnovationNOTRepetition

One of the greatest tragedies of the civil rights era was the inability, or unwillingness, of people who achieved positions via affirmative action to create real change for other POC.
  #BougieFucks #TapedMouths #RunAwayFromUS #Vendidos #JoinedTheOtherSide Then those same assholes have the audacity to tell me to act White. They use code-words like Professional and Educated--but what they really mean is try to be White. The best they could do was try to give us tips on how to act White and get money for ourselves. #MLKDay2017 #IDontWantTOBeLIkeYou

 We need change, we don't need to be told how to watch ourselves, how to 'behave' and how to survive in a world dominated by White people.  We need to learn how to change the world into a world that is friendly toward Black and Brown faces...

This is a criticism of the recipients of Affirmative Action. People who are given power,  but are too scared to use it. They have their hands tied because they don't want to lose what they have been allowed to gain. I understand self-preservation, but I don't understand turning one's back on their own people. The New Jim Crow was allowed to happen as a result of their inaction, capitulation and buying into the American Myth that if only you" work so hard--you can do anything--even if you are Black or Brown." Even our Black president turned his back on us. He believed in trickle down benefits to POC...That is a joke! Once people get so entrenched in the Colonial system, they begin to believe in it--in the lies, and are  complicit in the deceit of their own people. We need to create new systems, not teach people how to be successful in a system that won't really ever accept them--apart from tokenization and fetishizing the 'exotic.'

Let us honor the memory of Dr. King and create a new world--a world where "acting White"  and telling lies to our kids and family are unnecessary.  Where working together instead of against one another are the standards by which we live.   

 

Ethnic Leaders Must Create Change

The reason there has been no real advancement in Education for ethnically diverse people is because leaders do NOT create change within a system that is White-Supremacist, oppressive and hostile to non-European Americans.

What our leadership programs do, is to show students how to 'succeed' in the present White-Supremacist educational system.  By success, they really mean that students can take a place within this oppressive system and provide continuity in a system of violence, intimidation and murder.  

So, the cream of the crop, our best of the best are MOST OFTEN turned into overseers, who continue on and legitimize the present system.  These students legitimize it by taking their place in the system and telling other students that they too can 'succeed,' but they must act 'professional,' not be radical and keep telling others that, "change takes time!"  

How much time is it going to take?:

For them to stop killing our kids, no matter what type of degree we or they have?

For them to treat us like human beings and allow us to grow?

For us to realize that the present system is based on UNREPENTANT Genocide, Land-theft and Slavery AND that this system is NOT sustainable.

We need change and we need it now--not in some distant time.

If we continue on merely taking our place within a system that creates oppression, depression, that allows for the murder of our children, that allows for our children to be locked up in prison and disenfranchised,  that MAINTAINS the current system, then our grandchildren will be asking the same questions that are asked today.

How could this happen?

Why haven't things changed?

What are we going to do?

There is something we can do right now--we can NOT become like the oppressor, not take our place (as instructed to do so)in the grand killing machine that is the US, and to train students to create change themselves.

Change won't happen by conducting research that will please the dominant culture, but by creating real change via direct action and REAL discussion.  How much research do you need to know you live in a system that is horribly sick with issues it has not confronted and solved?

We don't need weak leaders. 

There are so very few of us in higher education, we can't let our 'successes' continue on in this manner.

We need real change and we need it now!