Who Belongs?

In this episode we hear from Gerald Lenoir and Nunu Kidane about their work on bridging African American and African immigrant communities through dialogues. Gerald is OBI’s identity and politics strategy analyst and was the founding executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI). Nunu was a founding member of BAJI and is currently the director of Priority Africa Network. Ger...

In this episode we interview UC Berkeley Professor and OBI Director john a. powell. john a. powell is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of civil rights, civil liberties, structural racism, housing, poverty, democracy, and othering, bridging and belonging frameworks-- which he has been critical in developing and translating between academia and fields of practice. In this interview,...

In this episode of Who Belongs? we look at the impacts of minimum wage increases with Michael Reich, a Professor of Economics and Chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at UC Berkeley. The federal minimum wage has been frozen at $7.25 an hour since 2009. That's an annual income for a full time worker of just $15,000. But a few weeks ago Senator Bernie Sanders and other progressive leg...

In this episode of Who Belongs? we hear from Jacinta González, an organizer with Mijente, a non-profit which leads campaigns to educate and organize around issues concerning immigration, detentions and deportations. Jacinta explains how ICE and other law enforcement agencies are using surveillance technologies to target immigrant communities and other communities of color, and gives us her take on...

In this episode of Who Belongs?, we hear from three thinkers and members of the OBI faculty — john a. powell, Ian Haney López, and Emnet Almedom — on the situation unfolding in the wake of the Washington D.C. riots. This past week, we saw remarkable scenes of violence take place at the country’s Capitol Building. Our guests will help us make sense of what happened, how race and class politics shap...

In this episode of Who Belongs?, we speak with two activists based in France — Yasser Louati and Houria Bouteldja — about the intensification of Islamophobia and state repression unfolding in the country following Samuel Paty's gruesome murder. Our guests help us understand the current situation as it relates to the country's history of racist marginalization and terror attacks, what strategies af...

In this episode of Who Belongs? we speak with Lara Kiswani, Executive Director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center based in San Francisco, and Theresa Montaño, professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University, Northridge, to discuss the efforts to develop an ethnic studies curriculum in California. On September 30, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed Assembly Bill...

In this episode of Who Belongs?, we speak with Carroll Fife, an organizer, mother, and director of the Oakland office of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, also known as ACCE. Earlier this year, she was involved in coordinating the #Moms4Housing campaign in which the five Black women took over a vacant home on Magnolia Street in Oakland. She joins us to speak about the history...

Last week Trump announced he had eliminated an Obama-era fair housing rule put in place in 2015 to reverse patterns of residential segregation that have been in place for many decades. The move was widely seen as both an attack on integration and also a racial fear mongering strategy to appeal to his white base of supporters three months before the election. To talk about the purpose of the 2015 A...

In this episode of Who Belongs? we speak with Gerald Horne, Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, and author of more than 30 books. Professor Horne has written on a spectrum of issues and events including the early settler colonial period of the US, the Haitian and Mexican revolutions, labor politics, civil rights, profiles of WEB Du Bois and revolutionary...

In this episode of Who Belongs? we hear from Erin Kerrison, an Assistant Professor of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley, to discuss her thoughts on transforming social structures and imagining futures beyond police following the murder of George Floyd. Professor Kerrison’s work investigates the impact of structural disadvantage, concentrated poverty, and state supervision on health outcomes of individ...

In this episode of Who Belongs? we hear from Adam Hochschild, a prominent historian, journalist, and a best selling author who wrote King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, among many other books. He's also a lecturer in Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Professor Hochschild gives us his take on the efforts around the world to topple statues and other...

In this episode of Who Belongs? we’re bringing back john a. powell, our director at the O&B Institute, and professor of Law and African American studies at UC Berkeley, to talk about the ongoing events in Minneapolis following the police killing of George Floyd, and why he’s remaining optimistic about some of the glimmers of hope he sees in an otherwise very upsetting and traumatic situation....

In this episode of Who Belongs? we hear from john a. powell, a professor of Law and African American studies at UC Berkeley. He’s also the director of the Othering & Belonging Institute. In the interview professor powell offers historical context for the conflict over this question of when to reopen the economy, and the government’s authority to impose shelter-in-place orders. This issue has b...

In this episode of Who Belongs? we hear from a three-guest panel of Berkeley faculty who provide various perspectives on the different forms of racism we’ve been witnessing since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. We hear about the experiences of Asian Americans who are facing a surge in hate crimes, the disparate impacts on black and brown communities in terms of the rates of death, and about...

In this episode of Who Belongs? we speak with Alex Boskovich, who is the Government Relations Officer at the Alameda County Community Food Bank based in Oakland, which collects and distributes food and other resources to about 300 partner organizations throughout Alameda county, including food pantries, churches, senior centers, schools, and other organizations. Just prior to the outbreak of COVID...

In this episode of Who Belongs? we’re looking at the reality facing undocumented immigrants and migrant farmworkers in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We hear from three researchers who discuss some of their recent and upcoming articles that look at ICE raids targeting immigrant communities despite shelter-in-place orders, as well as the conditions of farmworkers who are putting themselves a...

In this episode of Who Belongs? we speak with Ian Haney Lopez, a professor of law here at UC Berkeley, about his new book: “Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America.” The book puts forward the argument that the left can re-frame racism as a weapon of the rich by crafting messages that fuse race and class and build a cross-racial movement needed to beat powerful fear...

In this episode of Who Belongs? we hear from two guests, Erika Washington and Quintin Savwoir from a civic engagement group in Nevada called Make it Work - Nevada. In the interview they discuss a recent survey they conducted of black women in their state to learn about the issues that are most pressing to them and how they feel about the candidates running in the 2020 presidential election. Erika...

In this episode of Who Belongs? we hear from two guests about a year-long initiative at UC Berkeley marking the 400th anniversary of the start to slavery in North America. The initiative includes weekly events with scholars, activists, and artists from around the country reflecting on the enduring legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, looking at the Civil Rights era, our current era, and also trying t...

In this episode of Who Belongs? we hear from Alicia Garza, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement and the principal of the Black Futures Lab, which is an organization that engages Black voters year round and works to stop corporate influence in progressive politics. Alicia recently authored a paper for the Othering and Belonging Institute, titled, “Identity Politics: Friend or Foe?...

In this episode of Who Belongs? we speak with Michael Gomez Daly, the director of the Inland Empowerment coalition, and Sky Allen, who is the coalition's census coordinator, about their efforts to mobilize people in southern California's Inland Empire ahead of the 2020 Census. This episode is another installment of the Civic Engagement Narrative Change project series, with the interview conducted...

In this episode of Who Belongs?, we hear from journalist and author Lawrence Lanahan about his new book called The Lines Between Us: Two Families and a Quest to Cross Baltimore’s Racial Divide. The book weaves together three storylines about people trying to overcome a host of barriers to opportunity and integration in hyper-segregated Baltimore and its suburbs. The book is the culmination of year...

This episode of Who Belongs? is another installment of our Civic Engagement Narrative Change project series, with project researcher Josh Clark interviewing two guests: The first is Robert Greenwald, an award-winning producer and director who has a new film coming out on September 25 called “Suppressed: The fight to vote”, about voter suppression in the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia, and...

In this episode of Who Belongs? host Sara Grossman interviews Christine Wong Yap, who became the Haas Institute's first Artist in Residence in the fall of 2018, about her "Places of Belonging" project, which was recently featured in a KQED report here: https://www.kqed.org/arts/13850669/christine-wong-yap-asks-where-do-you-feel-a-sense-of-belonging Learn more about the Haas Institute's A...