Please see below for the near as finished programme for the Race,
Privilege & Identity gathering taking place in Bristol, UK, April
24-26th.

all details of free accomodation, childcare etc are up on the blog

email: raceprivilegeidentity@...

http://raceprivilegeidentity.wordpress.com

please forward to your networks -

in solidarity,

the RPI crw xxx

Programme

Friday 24th April, 7.30pm – 10.30pm @ 9 Bath Buildings, Montpelier

Film starts at 8pm

Film Screening: Travel Queeries (2009, 96 mins)

Travel Queeries is a documentary that examines the culture, art and
activism of radical queers in contemporary Europe.

Through personal interviews and documentation of performances, festivals,
multi-media visual arts and spaces, Travel Queeries puts an exciting
international lens on queer fringe culture. With the aim of building
bridges and awareness, Travel Queeries considers the word “queer” and
explores the complexities, innovative values and spirit of queer within a
progressive social change movement.

Following the screening there will be a discussion about issues of race,
privilege and identity raised by the film.

Saturday 25th April, 10am – 11pm @ St.Werberghs Community Centre, Bristol,
BS2 9TJ

Workshops will run over two days and there will be an opening plenary, an
icebreaker followed by two simultaneous workshop streams and a closing
plenary on Sunday that will be used to for evaluative purposes and future
action planning.

10 – 11.30 Opening Plenary and icebreaker

Saturday, Stream One

12.00 – 1.30 Anti-Racist Space Audit: Part One
Facilitator: Sam Lamble

Too often racism is seen as primarily a problem of individual attitudes,
prejudice or ignorance. Though certainly important, a focus on individual
behaviour often obscures systemic forms of racism, namely racist norms
that are embedded in institutions, community spaces, and collective
practices. The physical spaces we inhabit, whether public buildings,
resource centres, community workplaces or social squats, are often
neglected as sites that require specific anti-racism work.

This two-part workshop considers the ways in which spaces we inhabit may
reinforce racial, gender, class, and ability-based hierarchies.

1.30 – 2.30 Lunch

2.30 – 4pm Street Activist Coalition Building Across the Margins
Facilitator: Abher Behn

“Now we must recognise differences among (wo)men who are our equals,
neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each others’
difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles.”*
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

Street and community activists use face to face engagement as a tool to
action change, raise awareness about social justice issues and the
atrocities of state and nation.

If, as “progressive” activists, we confront many issues in solidarity with
the marginalised communities they affect, why are the groups fighting for
social justice still so lacking in diversity? Why are we are still
struggling to embrace and include difference within activist groups? Why
are the decisions of autonomous non-hierarchical activist groups still
being dominated by white straight able bodied privileged men, in said and
unsaid ways despite the rhetoric?

The anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist/feminist movements of the last 20
years have worked hard to be truly “inclusive”, to avoid the political
replication of a rightwing exclusionary demographic (from which the
leftist vanguard suffered to its detriment) and essentialisms, but are we
really succeeding in doing this? In the very act of “including” we are
announcing that there is “another” to include, someone we place outside of
the socio-economic history of activist organisation.

If we continue to deny difference we deny access, despite the declarations
of an open door and so our potential for movement and transgression
remains a contradictory theoretical construct.

*******
In this workshop we will discuss and map the language of oppression and
“inclusivity”, how identity and privilege work complicitly with
race/gender/class/ableism in an immediate and destructive way in our lives
as activists and community organisers. How in trying to sustain our
communities and tackle local, global and personal oppressions we need to
find ways to challenge the behaviour, language and actions of the self and
one another beyond tokenistic gestures of tolerance and acceptance.

4.30 – 6 Remember Olive Morris
Facilitators: Remembering Olive Collective

Olive Morris was a key figure in Black British and Black British feminist
history. A member of the Brixton Black Panthers, she also founded the
Brixton Black Women’s Group, was a founding member of Organisation of
Women of Asian and African Descent and was at the forefront of
London-based squatter movements in the 1970s.

The London based Remembering Olive Collective is a grassroots history
project made up of a mixture of women from different backgrounds and ages.
Their presentation will introduce the aims and objectives of the Remember
Olive Morris? Project; including the activities they have already done,
the use of the blog and, of course, collecting information about the life
of Olive Morris.

http://rememberolivemorris.wordpress.com/

Saturday, Stream Two

12.00 – 1.30 Race & feminism: learning from history
Facilitator: Terese J

This workshop will start with a presentation looking at how racism and
white privilege has been challenged, discussed, ignored and/or erased from
history at different moments within feminism’s recent past (looking in
particular at the 80s). It will also challenge the popular misconception
that feminism in the UK has always been led by white women. The
presentation will be followed by a discussion about how contemporary
feminist activistscan engage with and learn from this history, and to
think about ways in which we can avoid reinventing the wheel, and instead
build on the historically-grounded, critically honest and accountable
antiracist movements spearheaded by anti-imperialist feminists in the
1980s.

2.30 – 4 ‘Colonialism’s final frontier’
Facilitator: Bristol LGB Forum

‘Under One Sky’, Bristol LGB Forum’s groundbreaking project documenting
the experiences of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual people of BME heritage / BME
heritage and Faith present a workshop contextualizing their research to
date within the historical and contemporary oppression of LGB people of
colour in Britain.
http://www.bristol-lgb-forum.org.uk/

4.30 – 6 Too many prisons, not enough justice
Facilitator: Bristol ABC

Prisons are tools of social exclusion that remove and silence the
criminalised other, often defined as such by gender, ethnicity, economic
status or political affiliation. We can see this at work in the UK today,
with people of colour being over-represented in the prison system, the
growing number of women and young people being given custodial sentences,
and the disproportionately long sentences meted out to political
activists. This destroys our communities while keeping individuals
isolated and vulnerable; communities and individuals are criminalised,
excluded and disempowered.

Prisons reinforce the state and capitalism’s oppressive agenda:
hierarchical, patriarchal, racist, heterosexist, homophobic, and
imperialist.

In our workshop, we will explore the factors that increasingly contribute
simultaneously to the criminalisation and victimisation of communities. We
will also discuss ways of defending against the criminalisation and
overpolicing of our communities to oppose the growing “prison society”. It
is our hope that this will feed into any plenary session discussion
regarding future action.

Bristol ABC works in solidarity with political and social prisoners to
challenge state oppression by directly
supporting radical, anarchist and class war prisoners. We consider all
prisoners are political prisoners. We look to examples of solidarity and
mutual aid to find solutions in our communities.

Bristol ABC is made up of radical activists who are engaged in the day to
day struggle against the state, capitalism, and all forms of oppression.
We will draw on this knowledge for the workshop.
http://bristolabc.wordpress.com/

6pm – 7.30 Dinner

Saturday Night Film Screening: 7.30 pm onwards

The Journey of Bronze Woman, Monument of Love, the Installation (10 mins,
2009)

The first permanent statue of a Black woman in the UK was unveiled in
Stockwell, London, in October 2008.
The film focuses on this historic event whilst introducing the inspiration
behind the statue, 89 year old poet, composer and writer Cecile Nobrega,
author of the poem ‘Bronze Woman’.

Kuchu Story (20 mins, 2008)

Rachel Wamoto’s short documentary presents candid interviews with British
born lesbians of African and West Indian descent and those who have come
to Britain in order to be out.

The Great Grunwick Strike 1976-1978: a history (64 mins, 2008)

This film tells the tale of the Great Grunwick strike at a film-processing
factory in North London at the end of the 1970s.

The strike, led by Jeyaben Desai, was mainly comprised of Asian women
workers. This documentary tells the story through footage and stills from
the time plus contemporary interviews with forty-odd participants.

It offers an honest and direct account of how a small band of workers in a
small back-street factory managed to bring out thousands and thousands of
workers in solidarity for the simple right to form a trade union.

Sunday, Stream One

11 – 12.30 AIDS, Intellectual Property and Access to Knowledge
Facilitators: Mike & Dettie

Mike & Dettie will screen a short work-in-progress of their documentary
Patent Fever which takes a fresh look at the controversy surrounding
patents and access to medicines in the country hardest hit by HIV: South
Africa. Patent Fever documents both the progress on access to treatment
and the new under-reported explosion of HIV-TB co-infection that threatens
to undermine it. The film draws on previously unseen archive footage and
the personal testimony of key players - including Vuyiseka Dubula, the new
inspirational head of the Treatment Action Campaign - to narrate the
latest twist in the decades long global fight against AIDS.

After showing the film there will be the opportunity to give feedback to
the filmmakers and discuss the issues raised during the film.

Link to the trailer: http://patentfever.blip.tv/#1889425

Sunday, Stream Two

11 – 12.30 Deaf and disability awareness
Facilitators: Marion and Lani

How can we make our events more accessible to deaf and disabled people? It
is easier than you might think! In fact, attitudes and lack of awareness
create the biggest barriers for deaf and disabled people. We will discuss
practical strategies for improving accessibility which don’t require a lot
of money or specialist knowledge.

We will also talk a little about the social model of disability and the
history of deaf and disabled movements. What can we learn from them? We
will be drawing on experiences of living as and working with disabled
people, but we are not experts! Please feel free to discuss your own ideas
and experiences, so that we can learn from each other.

12.30 – 1.30 Lunch

1.30 – 2.30 Anti-Racist Space Audit
Facilitator: Sam Lamble

While Part 1 of the workshop identified problems, Part 2 focuses on
solutions. Participants will be asked to identify the five most pressing
issues/concerns they identified in Part 1 of the workshop, and then
brainstorm possible strategies and solutions. This will lead into a larger
facilitated discussion, where participants can raise issues that come up
in the audit exercise, discuss challenges and collectively share ideas for
creating anti-racist spaces.

Closing Plenary 2.30 – 4