13. When You Start Talking About Race White People Go Crazy

In this episode we welcome activist, organizer, researcher and Ph.D. candidate Karine Coen-Sanchez to blow our minds with her anti-racist truth bombs. Think we missed Black History Month? As Karine says, “I don’t stop being Black in March.” Topics: White supremacy in education, Black scholarship and innovation, polite racism in Canada (and beyond), and de-personalizing the conversation so we can work together for justice. Concepts we explore include racialization, academic freedom of BIPOC people, white people’s discomfort, accountability for impact, and disrupting the mode of production through anti-racist outcry. It’s a serious conversation, with our proprietary blend of swear-words. A new “Letters from Listeners” sparks a conversation about post-colonialism and the way our culture reinforces life-threatening eating disorders. Rosalie is on tenterhooks as Phyllis is all, #FreeBrittney. We end with four recommendations: 1) do meditation and 2-4) rate/review/share our podcast!

• UOttawa Gazette, Talking about Systemic Racism: Grad students lead conversations about change needed in academia
• Karine Coen-Sanchez: I can’t breathe: feeling suffocated by the polite racism in Canada’s graduate schools
• Karine Coen-Sanchez: Repeating the cycle of racism through education 
• Cedric J Robinson, Black Marxism 
• Showing Up for Racial Justice: Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture
• Ighodaro & Wiggan – Curriculum Violence: America’s New Civil Rights Issue 
• bell hooks – Teaching to Transgress
• Political Philosophy of C.L.R. James 
• Historian Afua Cooper 
• Smedley and Smedley on the construction of race – Race in North America
• Fatima Mernissi Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems
• ACLU: How Conservatorship Threatens Britney Spears’ Civil Rights
• Human Rights Watch: #FreeBritney Shines a Light on Problematic Guardianship Systems
• Eyes Wide Open: Healing Through Letting Go Meditation