CALA faculty member Leonard Cortana and NYU SPS’s successful Racial Literacy and Anti-Racism Practices series has received an Innovation and Anti-Racism Micro Grant from the NYU Office of Global Inclusion (OGI).
During Spring 2021, Cortana developed a series of four workshops: Understanding Race in a Global Context; Microaggressions and Racial Stress: Reducing Harmful Interactions; An Introduction to Intersectionality: Positioning and Situating Identities; and The Fight Against Black Voter Suppression. The grant from OGI will support Cortana in expanding this series and offering a number of brand new workshops in Spring 2022.
In the well-attended workshops this past spring, he engaged with working professionals as well as administrators, faculty, and students at NYU and other universities around concerns about racial harm in the workplace and the concerns of international students. The series also featured faculty guests Dr. Durell Cooper, a notable cultural strategist specializing in systems change, and Dr. Mutale Nkonde, a distinguished scholar and CEO of AI for the People (AFP), a non-profit communications agency. Given NYU’s international presence, the emphasis on understanding race through a transnational perspective was particularly praised and opened debates about the lack of research and understanding of racial discourses outside the U.S.
Cortana’s Racial Literacy and Anti-Racism Practices Series will be offered again in Fall 2021, and three new workshops with a focus on technology and the internet will be offered in Spring 2022. The first of these new workshops will address digital identities, digital racism and fighting hate speech online as well as current scholarship on the racial harm of algorithmic practices. The second workshop will look at the spread of misinformation and how to tackle it with historically marginalized/racialized communities. Finally, the last workshop will address questions of representation/decolonization in the arts and best practices for expanding more inclusive racial imagery to launch successful activist campaigns online.
The Fall 2021 Racial Literacy and Anti-Racism Practices Series is now open for registration as part of NYU SPS’ continuing education program. Students may enroll in one or more of the four individual workshops. To learn more and sign up, click here.
In a recent interview, Cortana told us more about his inspiration for the series, what makes it unique, and what he’s working on next.
What inspired you to create the series?
Speaking about racial equality has always been a complex issue. The current pandemic, the aftermaths of George Floyd’s assassination and the global wave of protests which followed, had a significant impact. I have seen for the first time people who have always refused to tackle issues around race, asking questions and sharing texts about Black activism on their social networks. This crave for reading texts and gaining concepts is paramount for critical race scholars like me who are willing to educate and engage in these conversations.
In my research, I investigate the legacy of assassinated anti-racist activists with a transnational perspective, focusing on the US, Brazil, France, and South Africa. I look at the ways racial discourses have always circulated through continents adapting to political and cultural contexts. Studying in the US feels like, sometimes, living on an island-continent where challenges around racial equality experienced elsewhere are very little known. In this series, I want to offer my expertise to make students reflect on race from a global perspective in order to challenge our own biases. This is very valuable in an environment like NYU which has antennas all over the world and hosts a large international student community.
What skills and tools can students expect to walk away with?
We will look into several concepts and texts so that students can leave the courses with specific tools that they will be able to deepen on their own. In our everyday life, concepts like microaggressions, intersectionality, and passing have often become buzzwords but they deserve a more precise examination through case studies and real-life situations (workplace, school, personal encounters) to be discussed in small groups. As I work with films and media, I also use visuals to help students decolonize their own visual imagery and help them think which medium/language will be more useful to work with in their local communities.
During Spring 2021, I really appreciated the participants’ willingness to share in our main discussions but also in breakout groups. I think it is important to dive into our own experiences to precisely situate our identities in order to understand how they fluctuate in different situations. Racial identities like gender and body-abilities can only be thought of in relation to each other and in movement. They are never fixed, which is why we look at different situations, switch roles, and develop empathy toward stories that are less familiar to us. In this way, we address how to develop storytelling skills while tackling racial discourses.
Finally, I also spend time applying mindfulness to racial stress. The best way to learn is to assume that we all make mistakes and we will all experience racial stress. The environment of this class is filled with joy and also humor since it is the only way to embrace this work.
What else are you working on right now?
In addition to completing my dissertation at the NYU Cinema Studies Department, I am also an affiliate researcher at the Berkman Klein Center – Internet and Society at Harvard Law. I am examining digital identities applied to activism; the development of online film festivals and their consequences on digital exclusion; and online misinformation and the development of deepfakes (a type of artificial intelligence used to create convincing images, audio and video hoaxes). I tackled a bit of this work in the Racial Literacy and Anti-Racism Practices series and participants expressed a strong interest in learning more about how new technologies and the internet have impacted our information ecosystem. I am really excited to receive the Office of Global Inclusion Innovation and Anti-Racism Micro Grant to develop a series on the impact of internet environments on racial equality for Spring 2022. This is urgent to constantly link offline and online environments even more during the pandemic.
My short documentary Marielle’s Legacy Will Not Die on the activist movement spreading the legacy of Marielle Franco, an Afro-Brazilian Councilwoman assassinated in 2018, keeps on circulating and will be screened in the Fall in the US, Belgium, England, Italy, Congo-Brazzaville, and Romania. When the film is selected, I do my best to find local activists who can translate Franco’s legacy in their own context and participate with me on Q&As.
Finally, I am supporting the social campaign to re-open the cold case of South African anti-apartheid activist Dulcie September, murdered in 1988 in Paris. Enver Samuel made the film Murder in Paris and along with her relatives launched an online petition. I am organizing events at several universities including one at NYU this Fall where we will screen the film and create conversations about this period of history in order to celebrate the world’s unsung heroes, particularly women fighters.