Day 1: Practicing Solidarity Against Anti-Blackness In An Age of Reproduced Illusions

Wednesday, August 10, 2022 | 10am - 12pm PST

The first day is organized around solidarity not only as a practice of resistance to racial capitalism and white supremacy but also as a matter of political education. Led by Yusef Omowale, head archivist at the Southern California Library, a community library and archive located in south-central Los Angeles, this opening session will explore community-based responses to harm and the ways that dominant ideologies and counter-hegemonic memory work can impact these efforts. Participants will engage with case studies of real-world events to analyze practices of solidarity against anti-Blackness, as well as other forms of collective resistance to state violence. Some of the questions that will be discussed include the following:

• What does solidarity against anti-Blackness look like?

• How have state-sanctioned versions of history shaped our understandings of harm and justice?

• In what ways can critical study disrupt the violences we suffer and offer alternatives for living? 

Yusef Omowale is a staff member at the Southern California Library (SCL). SCL is a library and archive located in South Los Angeles that documents and makes accessible histories of struggles that challenge racism and other systems of oppression. Founded over 50 years ago, the Library holds extensive collections of histories of community resistance in Los Angeles and beyond.

Over the past 10 years, Yusef has participated within long-standing traditions of collective memory work to document the impacts of policing, incarceration, displacement, and poverty. This archival labor has included political education workshops, campaign support, and offering spaces of healing and material support to ease some of the day-to-day sufferings of late capitalism.