Untying Knots

It’s 2025, and the fight to protect civil rights in the United States is as urgent as ever. In this final episode, Untying Knots speaks with Deborah Archer, President of the ACLU and Associate Dean and Professor at NYU School of Law, about the current landscape of attacks on civil liberties in the U.S. and the tireless efforts of the ACLU to uphold protections for Americans. President Archer also...

Academy-award nominated Sugarcane is a moving and personal documentary about the investigation into the 150 years-long Canadian Indian Residential School system. The film, directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, chronicles the pursuit of First Nation, Métis and Inuit leaders, survivors and descendants as they find and honor the truth. Sugarcane has resonated deeply with audiences since...

Since 1973, Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) has brought together Asian immigrants and refugees in Oakland and Richmond, California to advance solutions on the issues that matter most to them. For APEN, community organizing is grounded in the leadership of community members, building power at multiple levels for a healthy local economy and climate justice. Christine Cordero, Co-Executive...

In advance of her JFK Jr. Forum talk , Untying Knots sat down with Ava DuVernay, Academy Award nominee and Emmy award winner, to talk about her pioneering work as a filmmaker and cultural arts leader. Her films, including the latest Origin , 13th , and When They See Us , disrupt false narratives of American history and cultivate a detailed view of the individual people impacted by large oppressive...

White Americans are directly implicated in the perpetuation of structural racism, and also have much to gain in actively working to dismantle it. Untying Knots sat down with Erin Heaney, Executive Director of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), to discuss the core principles of SURJ’s organizing approach and to learn about how the national organization is working in predominantly white communiti...

COVID-19 and the 2020 wave of racial justice demonstrations moved many healthcare organizations to enact antiracist change programs. Many of these commitments, however, lacked effective strategy and accountability.  Untying Knots talks to IARA Research Fellow Ángel Rodriguez and Dr. Meenakshi Verma-Agrawal, Board Member of the Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center, about IARA’s one-year study of an...

“Antiracism tells us relationship is always going to come before the methodology . In fact, it's required for it.” On this episode of Untying Knots Theo Miller and Erika Bernabi share the foundations of their organization, Equity and Results, and reflections from their related workshop at IARA’s 2022 Truth and Transformation convening. Equity and Results is grounded in the model of Antiracist Resu...

Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Dr. Bruce Western sat down with Untying Knots to discuss the pioneering new report “ Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice .” The report, co-chaired by Muhammad and Western for the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, tackles the historical roots and present-day realities of racial inequality throughout America’s courts, prisons, jails,...

Land Acknowledgements have become increasingly popular in many organizations and non-Indigenous communities over the last few years, but what is their actual impact? We sat down with Michaela Madrid and Jessica Gliden, Program Managers in Tribal Governance and Leadership Development at the Native Governance Center, to explore this question and their work with Tribal leaders and the 23 Native natio...

On this episode of Untying Knots, we explore the relationship between communities of color and political power by turning to a case study of electoral organizing in the US Pacific Northwest. George Cheung, Director of More Equitable Democracy (MED), joins us to discuss how the American winner-take-all electoral system is not only failing to generate real democratic governance but also creating dis...

Preserving Seats at the Table: White-Dominated Boards In this special episode of Untying Knots, hosts Erica Licht and Nikhil Raghuveera share a discussion from the 2021 Truth and Transformation Conference, hosted by the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project on October 14-15th 2021. The conference brought together a range of scholars, organizers, students, and organizational leaders t...

Equity Takes Time, Commitment, & Disruption In this special episode of Untying Knots, hosts Erica Licht and Nikhil Raghuveera share a discussion from the 2021 Truth and Transformation Conference, hosted by the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project on October 14-15th 2021. The conference brought together a range of scholars, organizers, students, and organizational leaders to address...

Money Left on the Table: Unpacking The Economic Argument for Diversity In this special episode of Untying Knots, hosts Erica Licht and Nikhil Raghuveera share a discussion from the 2021 Truth and Transformation Conference, hosted by the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project on October 14-15th 2021. The conference brought together a range of scholars, organizers, students, and organiz...

In this special episode of Untying Knots, hosts Erica Licht and Nikhil Raghuveera share a discussion from the 2021 Truth and Transformation Conference, hosted by the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project on October 14-15th 2021. The conference brought together a range of scholars, organizers, students, and organizational leaders to address whether organizations have lived up to the s...

Technology companies today serve as gatekeepers to everyday life, overseeing and influencing everything from communication to payments, in addition to access to information. This outsized role among some of the largest firms in the world, however, poses an exacerbated threat to Black, Indigenous, and people of color already harmed by inequitable systems. The current landscape of racial equity effo...

In 2020, during the height of COVID-19, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe was at the US Supreme Court fighting not just to survive a pandemic, but to hold onto their tribal land rights. This case, in addition to the landmark ruling of Sharp v. Murphy in July 2020, emphasizes the ongoing fight of Tribal nations for claims to parts — not even all — of their original and granted land. Yet, US political opp...

Following the end of the Civil War, Southern states immediately sought to limit the freedoms of Black Americans through laws known as black codes , and to prevent exercise of their right to vote through felon disenfranchisement laws, poll taxes, and literacy tests. These same racist institutional barriers still exist today—some in exact name—and also suppress Indigenous and other People of Color v...

Hundreds of years of racist institutional policies have denied wealth to Black, Indigenous, and communities of color. In this current period of uprising, resistance, and crisis on racial injustice, organizational leaders are asking: what does it look like to make structural change for racial justice? Two organizations in Boston, the Haymarket People’s Fund and the Boston Ujima Project, provide a c...

Following the 2019 Truth and Transformation conference, the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability (IARA) Project's Erica Licht sat down with core trainers Addys Castillo and Justin Freitas from the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB) for a closer look at their work. The conversation includes an overview of their approach to antiracist change grounded in community organizing, a...