Another Blogger Against Racism

So I found out, thanks to this post on the Angry Black Woman blog, about the fourth annual International Blog Against Racism Week (or IBARW, because really any title that has more than two words needs to have an acronym!). And since I see myself as constantly working against racism, internalized, individual as well as external/institutional, I have to post something this week to commemorate this worthy effort.

Since I've been fortunate to work in nonprofits that consider themselves racial justice organizations--although I struggle to discretely define what that term means exactly--I will use my airtime to point you towards a few of my favorite racial justice groups:

The Applied Research Center, which was founded by racial justice extraordinaire Gary Delgado, and is now led by the equally amazing Rinku Sen. ARC is a think tank, communications hub, resource for educational materials on race, and also the publisher of Colorlines magazine, as well as the excellent blog, Racewire.

ARC was instrumental in launching the organization that I spent my formative political years with, Californians for Justice, another brilliant racial justice group that has been organizing in communities of color for the past fourteen years on issues such as affirmative action, bilingual education, lack of resources in California public schools, and youth empowerment.

On the literary side of things, the Carl Brandon Society promotes and supports speculative fiction/science fiction (SF) writers of color. Recently, they put out a thoughtful and practical (aka 'Hey White people, here is how you engage in reasonable discourse on race without totally offending and turning off People of Color') open letter, prompted by the recent online racial brouhaha between/surrounding K. Tempest Bradford and Harlan Ellison.

Also, my favorite writerly organization, the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, or VONA as its better known, which offers an annual two-week workshop series for writers of color at the University of San Francisco campus. I was there this past year and got to study with one of my favorite writers of all time, Pulitzer-prize winning author, down-to-earth and super-hilarious Jersey homeboy Junot Diaz.

So now it's your turn to get with the program and do your part---write a blog post against racism, launch a new blog, whatever, just do it!