Anti-Latinx Racism (Mark D. Ramirez and Lourdes M. Rosado)
Latinx people are the second-largest racial or ethnic group in the U.S. During the last decade, the Latinx community accounted for about 50 percent of the nation’s population growth according to the United States Census Bureau.
In 1976, the U.S. Congress passed Public Law 94-311, recognizing Americans of Spanish origin or descent as anyone tracing their ancestry “from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central and South America, and other Spanish-speaking countries.” Today’s Latinx population in the U.S. roughly encompasses these same populations, although “Latinx” commonly refers to a subjective pan-ethnic identity that coexists alongside identification with national origins as well as potentially other racial and nationalist group identities.
Anti-Pacific Islander Bigotry (Ian Falefuafua Tapu and Terina Kamailelauli‘i Fa‘agau)
This discussion begins by acknowledging its limits. First, the term “Pacific Islander” commonly functions as a catch-all, referring to any Indigenous Peoples of Oceania, including inhabitants and diaspora. By grouping together politically and culturally distinct Peoples into a single ethnic/racial category, the term is overbroad and often problematic. We adopt this terminology in this report, but we also dissect the “Pacific Islander” category to highlight the diverse experiences of Pacific Islander communities. Second, this report is written in a language that has historically been deployed, with other settler-colonial tools, against Indigenous Peoples to dispossess them of their ancestors’ tongue and their connection to family, culture, and lands. Although relayed in English, this report nonetheless centers our Pacific Islander communities and values.
Antisemitism (Megan Black and Eric Ward)
Even as racism and other forms of bigotry are at the center of our national debate, there is so little understanding of one widespread form of bias that The Atlantic recently published an article titled “Why So Many People Still Don’t Understand Anti-Semitism.” We don’t even have consensus on how to spell what we need to talk about; whether or not to hyphenate or capitalize. Anti-Semitism or antisemitism? As we explain below, many aspects of antisemitism are misunderstood. Our purpose here is to help expand the focus of antibigotry activists to understand the relationship of antisemitism to other forms of bigotry.
Classism (Saqib Bhatti and Keri Leigh Merritt)
“You are kept apart so that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings,” the famous Georgia populist leader Tom Watson told a crowd of Black and white laborers in 1892. Elite whites established and perpetuated segregation between the poor of all races, he argued, to their own economic benefit. “You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both,” Watson rightfully crowed.
An Abundant Queer and Trans Future: Free From Heterosexism and Transphobia (Heron Greenesmith, Kwyn Townsend Riley and Michaé De La Cuadra)
It is a painful exercise to answer the questions “how do heterosexism and transphobia manifest,” and “which laws and systems perpetuate bigotry against queer and trans people.” It is painful because we, the authors of this section of the report, are queer and trans people who, like queer and trans people across the country and the world, are continually forced to justify not only our existence, but also to prove that we face structural and interpersonal bigotry. The discrimination of queer and trans people is a recent, post-colonial phenomenon. In many indigenous societies in the past, trans people were seen as pillars to society and as spiritual beings, but due to the rigid nature of the gender binary and how this has been forced on the world in a non consensual manner, this has subsequently demonized and criminalized queer and trans people.
Islamaphobia (Sahar Aziz, Khaled A. Beydoun, Dalia Mogahed and Lakshmi Sridaran)
The attacks of 9/11, and the U.S. government’s response known as the “Global War on Terror” that followed, positioned Muslim identity as the focal target of the national security state. The consequences have been characterized, understood, experienced, and named by grassroots communities and leaders to include not just the unjust foreign wars and interventions that the U.S. has waged under the Global War on Terror, but also the racial profiling, surveillance, spying, detention, and deportation our government has inflicted on Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities in the U.S. In swift fashion, the Bush Administration restructured the national security, immigration and tracking apparatuses of the state, consolidated into the newly minted Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Linguicism (Cynthia Willis Esqueda and Tyler Press Sutherland)
Linguistically, the United States has a peculiar past and a changing future. Despite the official establishment of a United States government in 1787, England was still the “mother” country and English language was part of that legacy. The United States constitution has no language requirement, since the early framers of the government were aware of past monarchial language restrictions, and they were aware that language promoted freedom of thought. The United States, then, was formed from many national sources and languages. Hence, the “English” spoken in the United States today is a hybrid, with terms and phrases from around the world. However, only 8.3% speak English less than well in the United States.
Religious Intolerance and Structural Bigotry in the U.S. (John Corrigan and Amanda Tyler)
Monotheistic religion is the oldest and most encompassing framework for bigotry in the West. Its Manichean binaries of good and evil, pure and impure, superior and inferior, us and them have been leveraged over centuries to justify bigotry. That ideology of stark division and uncompromising difference has survived in spite of the powerful prophetic traditions of those same Abrahamic religions urging social justice, compassion, and peace. Bigotry has been installed in religious institutions in the West for millennia, but at the same time, those institutions have authorized power to undermine bigotry. They have contributed crucially to the fashioning of counter-ideologies aimed at liberation from narrow views of human subjectivity and social life that engendered suffering. The problem of religious bigotry then, is a complex one, tied to spatial and temporal contexts, and frequently admitting a measure of ambiguity.
Sexism (Jioni A. Lewis and Ria Tabacco Mar)
The COVID-19 pandemic has put women at the center of the most unequal recession in modern American history. In addition, women of color are more likely to work in frontline service jobs that lack the ability to work from home, which has put them at increased risk of COVID-19, and in turn are more likely to lack paid sick leave when they do contract the virus. Yet the unique experiences of women with intersecting forms of marginalization have often been invisible throughout this pandemic.
May 2022
In celebration of Juneteenth, The Emancipator is bringing together local artists and educators to present a FREE, multimedia community event centered around themes of freedom, emancipation, and resistance.
The event will take place at the iconic Slade’s Bar and Grill in Roxbury Crossing on Saturday, June 18 from 5-7pm. The program will feature local artists’ personal interpretations, performances, and expressions of freedom and emancipation, as well as a pop-up workshop and discussion exploring 6 Ways of Resistance with Mia Henry, CEO of Freedom Lifted.