How do we attack racialised inequality?
by Sebabatso Manoeli
with Stephen Menendian
In this episode, I reflect on this summer’s uprising against systemic racism in the US with Stephen Menendian, Assistant Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute (OBI) at the University of California, Berkeley. One of the key outcomes of the groundswell of civic action sparked by the senseless killing of George Floyd has been a public conversation on race that no longer frames racism as
just a by-product of deranged or extremely prejudiced individuals, but rather there’s a sense that racism is in kind of the fabric of our societies.
In our conversation, Stephen details the evolution of how racism has been understood in the United States and describes how it operates today at multiple levels in society, including the interpersonal, institutional, systemic, and structural.
In light of the intransigence of systemic and structural racism, Stephen and I explore what it will take to bringing about meaningful and sustained social change. He argues that,
We have to be relentlessly and aggressively outcome oriented.
Noting that being well-intentioned is not enough, Stephen adds that,
No single bill, no single law, no single policy, is going to achieve the goals that we want. We have to work hard, and we have to continue to pair them together to achieve the desired results.
In this episode, Menendian disrupts the simple dichotomies about how social change comes about.
It’s so much more complicated than just this bifurcated notion of, ‘OK, we have policymakers on the one hand and protesters on the other’. It’s such a dynamic, messy, synergistic feedback loop process.
For more, listen here.
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Stephen Menendian is the Assistant Director and Director of Research at the Othering and Belonging Institute, where he oversees many of the institute’s research initiatives and ongoing projects. Stephen leads the Inclusiveness Index Initiative – an assessment of global inclusivity, fair housing policy and opportunity-mapping projects with the State of California. Stephen’s primary areas of expertise are structural racism, affirmative action, and education equity, as well as civil rights law.