:: speaker and presenter bios

Andrea Ayvazian
Andrea Ayvazian, an ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ, has been an anti-racism educator since 1985. For 14 years, she traveled with Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum leading anti-racism workshops and seminars in 33 states nationwide. Rev. Ayvazian holds a doctorate in Racial and Ethnic Studies and has been a social activist since the 1970s. She is currently the Dean of Religious Life and Protestant Chaplain at Mount Holyoke College.

Beverley Bell
Bev Bell is a white South African who has come to the US with her family to complete her doctorate. A Secondary school teacher for 15 years, Bev is currently working on her research: The role of multiple mentors in helping novice teachers learn to teach. She teaches in the MHC Secondary and Middle School Teacher Preparation program and also teaches: Race, Class and Gender in Education, and Schools, Schooling and Society: The Politics of Literacy. She also teachers some courses at UMass and supervises pre-service student teachers.

Currently Bev is also working with urban novice teachers in the Quality Urban Educators Support for Teachers project. She is also committed to Community Based Learning and does outreach in Holyoke, where she has coordinated a Community Youth Resource Mapping project over the past two summers, with WIA youth and Career Point. She is also the co-founder of the Western Mass Nomads Field Hockey club, which is based in Amherst.

Her next focus is spending this summer in South Africa with her colleague Lenore Carlisle, researching issues of equity and race within education. How far have school teachers come, since South Africa's 10 years of freedom from Apartheid.

Dwayne Brewington
Dwayne Brewington has a 14-year background as an anti-discrimination educator and community organizer and owns his own consulting business, Plain Talk Consultants, with his wife teaching anti-racism. As a Black man from Florida currently living in Massachusetts, he has a unique understanding of the dynamics of cultural competency within both the northern and southern regions of the United States. Dwayne is currently attending University of Massachusetts Social Justice Education program as a Masters student and after completing this program he will go to Law school to acquire his Jurist Doctor. As a professor and lawyer, he will continue to work as a part of the solution working to end racism in the United States and the world.

Isabelle Darling
Isabelle Darling is a final semester student at Hampshire College. She has been highly committed to social justice work and understanding the various ways of being an ally, specifically within refugee communities. As a young woman of color Isabelle is very aware of how titles of oppression can paralyze forward movement towards social justice, yet she remains persistent in using her various privileges as vehicles for change. Isabelle has facilitated various workshops and dialogues on systems of oppression including gender, sexuality, and racism. She has also initiated a student group called Project Alliance and recently organized a weeklong conference which was dedicated to supporting the voices of refugees and immigrants.

Michael Sean Funk
Michael Sean Funk is currently pursuing his Doctoral degree at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst School of Education in the Social Justice Education department. Along with academic pursuits he is serving as an Assistant Resident Director in residence life where he works with the NUANCE program, an intentional multicultural living/learning community at UMASS.

Prior to his journey to Massachusetts, Michael served as Assistant to the Dean for the College of Arts and Sciences at New York University. He served as the Director of the college's Academic Achievement Program, an academic enhancement program targeted towards Black, Latino, and Native American undergraduate students and co-Directed the Martin Luther King Jr. Scholars program, where he planned and implemented service learning projects with his students both domestically and internationally including sites such as Brazil, Ghana, Puerto Rico, Mississippi, and the Gullah Islands in South Carolina. In 2000, he received his Masters degree in Higher Education, Student Personnel and School Administration from NYU.

Some of Mr. Funk's accomplishments and most proud moment include conducting and facilitating Human Relation Teach-Ins in collaboration with Teach for America with under-resourced communities located in Harlem, the South Bronx, and Washington Heights. Creating and training staff members to facilitate the College of Arts and Sciences freshman orientation diversity workshops. In addition, supervising the first same-sex, transracial, adoption home study in the state of Pennsylvania, while working as an adoption caseworker for Three Rivers Adoption agency.

Eric Hamako
Eric Hamako is a doctoral student in the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Social Justice Education Program. Eric is currently interested in studying how political education can support mixed-race people's movements in the US and ways to incorporate stronger anti-racist frameworks into those educational efforts. He has been involved in mixed-race student organizing since 2000, most recently serving as National Programs Director for Hapa Issues Forum (HIF), a nonprofit serving Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders of mixed heritage. Eric is a multiracial Asian American man of Japanese and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, raised upper-middle class in Watsonville, California.

Holly Hanson
I am an Associate Professor of History and African and African American Studies. My most recent book is "Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda", but I've also written about community based social change and overcoming racism.

Kamala Kiem
Kamala Kiem was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. She graduated from Florida International University with a Bachelor in Business Administration. She received her Masters of Arts in Student Affairs Administration at Michigan State University. Kamala has spent over six years in the field of Student Affairs developing social consciousness among undergraduate students. Currently she is a second year Masters student in the Social Justice Education program at University of Massachusetts.

Julia Koch
I grew up in a primarily white suburban city, in a white family, around mostly white friends. I also grew up, until high school, never thinking, or having to think, about this reality. It was not until these issues were brought into the classroom that many of the implicit lessons that I was being taught at home about how to interact positively with my world were reinforced. At this time I also began to consider the role that race played in my own life, and that I began to understand that my white skin privileged me in this country. Since the end of middle school I have participated in several classes, workshops, conferences, and dialogues that have informed my thinking and feeling about racism and white skin privilege, and now see my understanding of and commitment to these issues as a life-long process.

Phyllis Labanowski
Phyllis Labanowski, MA is a white woman of European descent. She encountered her own internalized white supremacy as a result of being raised in a working class, Polish patriarchy. She has worked as a white ally for almost 25 years in elementary and secondary classrooms, in graduate education programs and in school districts all over New England. She is also committed to working towards justice in our local community and has volunteered on innumerable community-based, anti-racism committees and initiatives. Currently, she is co-facilitating a Study Circle for students on race in Amherst High School and serving on the board of directors for Spirit in Action, a national movement-building organization. She is interested in weaving together the political, the spiritual and the artistic into social justice work. Her own clarity and courage comes from personal and professional relationships with people of color and other white allies.

Sandra Lawrence
Sandra Lawrence teaches courses in antiracist multicultural education, whiteness and the construction of identity, methods of curriculum design and instruction, and qualitative research methods in psychology. Her research interests include: white racial identity development, antiracist professional development of teachers, and social justice education.

Lawrence's writing about whiteness have been published in Teaching and Teacher Education, the Journal of Teacher Education, Teaching of Psychology, and the Teacher Educator. She has also coauthored an article with former dean of the College at Mount Holyoke and now president of Spelman College Beverly Daniel Tatum for Teachers College Record and chapters in two anthologies, Beyond Heroes and Holidays (NECA, 1998) and Off/White: Readings on Race, Power, and Society (Routledge, 1996).

La Wanza Lett-Brewington
La Wanza Lett-Brewington has been an activist and organizer throughout New England for over 14 years and is the Director of Community Education at Everywoman's Center located on the campus of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. As such, she directs the Educator/Advocate Program which provides workshops and trainings for groups who want to better understand and prevent violence against women. She is known throughout Massachusetts for the work that she has done in facilitating workshops and forums on the interconnections of racism, sexism, and classism in relation to sexual assault. In her activist and organizing work she has concentrated on issues of discrimination, oppression and social change through both grassroots initiatives through the Discrimination Prevention Project and as co-owner of Plain Talk Consultants. She has facilitated forums on racism, led speak outs against homophobia, organized tenant meetings, mediated dialogues between parents and school officials, and assisted organizations in strategic planning and organizational development.

Paul Marcus
Paul has been involved in anti-racism work for well over 20 years, first as a teacher in independent schools and with CCI since 1992. He co-instructs a course, "The History and Development of Racism" with Horace Seldon at Boston College. Paul has been the lead organizer in calling together the Angry Heart Taskforce, a coalition of individuals and organizations devoted to increasing awareness of health care disparities.

Paul is a white anti-racist activist, educator, trainer, organizer, writer and consultant and is a Co-Director of Community Change in Boston. The particular focus of CCI is on the dynamics of systemic racism and what it will take to disentangle its destructive web.

Peter Meyer
I grew up in the suburban world of the 1950's, in which the only contact I had with people of color was the black housekeeper who came daily to clean, cook and do the laundry. While in college in the 1960's, and after a battle with my parents, I went through a transformative experience, spending a summer in West Africa. I returned to teach there for 3 1/2 years and then moved to New York City, where for the next 22 years I worked for a youth services agency, a progressive labor union of hospital workers, and a film workers union. In 1991, I moved to the Boston area where I am a high school teacher at a large, all black, inner city high school.

Jeb Middlebrook
Jeb Middlebrook, a.k.a. Privilege of EBTBcrew.com, is one half of the rap group, diversity workshop, activist organization, and production team E.B.T.B. (Everything But the Burden). E.B.T.B. is currently on a national tour to conferences, college campuses, and performance venues spreading a message of racial justice, community building, and social responsibility through art and Hiphop performance. E.B.T.B. believes that the deconstruction of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism is key to progressive social change in the United States; and that in order to contribute to this movement, white people have a dual responsibility to actively support racial justice work led by people of color; and to encourage other white people to do the same. E.B.T.B. promotes this message in their music, products, workshops, and activism. For more information, or to book an E.B.T.B. appearance, contact: ebtbcrew@hotmail.com or (510) 290-5428.

Fred Moseley
Fred Moseley is a Professor of Economics at Mount Holyoke College.

Catherine Orland
Catherine Orland graduated from Mount Holyoke in 2001 where she started an activism/dialogue group that now continues under the name White Privilege Awareness Project. She resides in Northampton and works at Hampshire College as a Career Counselor and the Student Activities Coordinator. Catherine also plays guitar and sings. She hopes through her music and other activities to challenge people to move beyond their comfort zones by examining the roles they play within oppressive systems. This fall she will begin attending the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont to study for an MA in Social Justice in Intercultural Relations.

Enoch H. Page, PhD.
Enoch Page is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the first anthropologist to develop whiteness theory and to advocate the adoption of whiteness studies in his field. He created the concept of white public space that several other anthropologists have 'borrowed' and that Jane Hill cites with permission. His research on whiteness and race has been ground-breaking and he uses his theoretical perspective in his consulting with groups and organization who desire to improve their understanding of how well they operate or fail to operate. He will soon publish his first edited volume called, The Magical Mask of Whiteness, and the work to appear in that volume will be presented by his students in November 2004 at the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco.

Susan Pliner
Dr. Susan M. Pliner is the Associate Director of the Weissman Center for Leadership in charge of the Speaking, Arguing, and Writing Program and a Visiting Lecturer in the Psychology and Education Department at Mount Holyoke College. In addition, she is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Graduate School of Education, where she teaches courses on social justice education and disabilities. For the past thirteen years she has been actively working for educational equity through her teaching, administrative, and consulting experience in a variety of school settings. Susan also serves on the board of directors, as a Regional Director, for the National Association for Multicultural Education.

Carol Rinehart
Carol has conducted diversity training and consultations since 1984 in a wide variety of settings. She joined CCI in 1998 to develop a stronger analysis and more useful methods for addressing the issue of racism, particularly as it relates to broader approaches to diversity. An example of her work on health care disparities is her role in conducting physician focus groups in a project to improve communication between providers and young mothers of color.

Carol is a white anti-racist activist, educator, trainer, organizer, writer and consultant and is a Co-Director of Community Change in Boston. The particular focus of CCI is on the dynamics of systemic racism and what it will take to disentangle its destructive web.

Aimée Sands
Aimée Sands is an independent documentary producer and writer, currently at work on a new film entitled "What Makes Me White?" She has received a total of 20 awards for her work, including an Emmy, a Peabody Award, and a San Francisco Film Festival Golden Gate Award. Her op-ed essay on segregation in the North recently appeared in the Boston Sunday Globe.

Her television credits include Africans in America, the landmark PBS series on America’s journey through slavery; We Are Family, a WGBH and PBS documentary on life in lesbian and gay families; and Two Intimate Journeys, a WGBH documentary contrasting a feminist and a New Right woman. She has produced in-depth news and documentaries for both WGBH-TV and Radio, as well as for NPR’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition. Topics have included race relations in Boston, welfare, abortion, prisons, and many other social issues.

In 1988 Ms. Sands was awarded a National Press Foundation Spanish Language Fellowship, which allowed her to study Spanish in Mexico. Now fluent in Spanish, she has served as Consulting Producer to La Plaza, PBS’ only program by and for Latino communities.

Ms. Sands is the co-director of the Brookline Poetry Series, and is a Masters of Fine Arts candidate in poetry at Bennington College.

Steven Saranga
Steven Saranga serves on the Multi-Cultural Organizational Development Committee at The Home for Little Wanderers, where he works with children and families as a Licensed Mental Health Counselor. He is one of a group of facilitators for the course “White People Challenging Racism: Moving from Talk to Action”, offered at a number of adult and community education centers in the Boston area. Steven believes that white people must take action to dismantle the system that perpetuates discrimination based on the social construct of race.

Tom Schiff
Tom Schiff is a Health Educator at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. In addition, Tom has over twenty years of experience as an educator, counselor, trainer, and consultant. He also serves as an Adjunct to the Social Justice Education program in the UMass School of Education. Tom has a particular expertise in working with men on issues of abuse, violence, sexual harassment, sexism, and homophobia. His most recent publication is a chapter in Understanding and Dealing With Violence: A Multicultural Approach (2003) edited by Robert Carter and Barbara Wallace (Sage Publications), Developing Men's Leadership to Challenge Sexism and Violence: Working in University Settings to Develop 'Pro-Feminist, Gay-Affirmative, and Male-Positive' Men. He received his Ed.D. in 1992 in Organization Development from the University of Massachusetts.

Herman E. Shelton
Herman E. Shelton III is a 1st year graduate student in the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Social Justice Education Program. Herman has been studying aspects of mixed race identity development since 1999. He is now very interested in looking at issues surrounding the access to white privilege mixed race children with at least on white parent have. Herman identifies as a bi-racial male with African American and Caucasian heritage, raised in many different class experiences in Benton Harbor, Michigan.

Becky Thompson
Becky Thompson is the author of A Promise and a Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism (University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Mothering without a Compass: White Mother's Love, Black Son's Courage (University of Minnesota Press, 2000); and A Hunger So Wide and So Deep: A Multiracial View of Women's Eating Problems (University of Minnesota Press, 1994, fourth printing). She co-edited, with Sangeeta Tyagi, Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity (Routledge, 1996) and Beyond a Dream Deferred: Multicultural Education and the Politics of Excellence (University of Minnesota Press, 1993)which won the Gustavus Myers Award for Outstanding Book on Human Rights in North America.

Becky and is an associate professor of Sociology at Simmons College in Boston and was a visiting associate professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University for the 2002-2003 academic year. She has been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the National Endowment for the Humanities and Political Research Associates. Her activism has included work against the escalation of the punishment industry, against apartheid and U.S. wars in Central America, and in support of a multiracial feminism, multicultural education, and human rights.

Clifford Wallace Thornton, Jr.
Clifford Thornton is the primary speaker for Efficacy - a non-profit organization that has been concentrating efforts on drug policy reform for five years. Mr. Thornton has completed over 400 radio shows on the topic of drug policy reform.

Mr. Thornton taught a graduate level course entitled "Illegal Drugs and Public Policy" at prestigious Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut in the spring semester on 2002.

Mr. Thornton is partially responsible for the removal of DARE from the Ocean City, New Jersey school system this year. Efficacy gave a presentation to the board of education a year and half ago which received great reviews and helped facilitate its demise.

Most recent activities include an eleven week speaking tour of New Zealand, November, 2003 through February, 2004. The first two weeks of September Efficacy was in Montana and Wisconsin for a speaking tour of fourteen dates at various universities, luncheons, and civic organizations. Efficacy journeyed to Seattle, WA in December 2002 to participate in a forum on Race/class and the drug war sponsored by King County Bar Association.

Tim Wise
Tim Wise is one of the most prominent white anti-racist voices in the United States. A social justice activist for the past two decades, Wise has spoken to over 75,000 people in 46 states, on over 275 college campuses, and to hundreds of community groups. He has trained labor, government, corporate, and law enforcement officials on methods for dismantling racism in their institutions, and has served as a consultant for plaintiff’s attorneys in federal discrimination cases in New York and Washington State. Wise has also trained journalists in how to eliminate racial bias in reporting as a visiting faculty member at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Wise serves as Senior Advisor to the Fisk University Race Relations Institute, in Nashville, and in the early ‘90’s, was Associate Director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, the group credited by many with the political defeat of neo-Nazi, David Duke. He is the recipient of the National Youth Advocacy Coalition’s Social Justice Impact Award, in recognition of his contribution to the struggle for equality.

Wise received the 2001 British Diversity Award for best feature essay on race and diversity issues. His columns are regularly distributed by AlterNet, and the ZNet commentary program—web-based services that disseminate essays by prominent progressive thinkers.

Wise has a B.A. in Political Science from Tulane University, where his involvement in the anti-apartheid movement received international attention and the personal thanks of Nelson Mandela and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

UROC
UROC (Undoing Racism Organizing Collective) of Western Mass is a multi-racial, grassroots network of anti-racist organizers committed to organizing, educating, communicating and providing resources to undo racism in our families, communities and institutions. We seek to do this with humanity, integrity, and accountability. Every October UROC hosts an Undoing Racism (tm) Workshop led by organizers from the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond.

Jennifer Yanco
Jennifer Yanco is the creator of a community-based, anti-racism education model called “White People Challenging Racism: Moving from Talk to Action”, which focuses on white people and the role we have to play in dismantling racism—in ourselves and in the institutions around us. Her work is grounded in the conviction that overturning white supremacy will require a cultural transformation among white people. This requires that we learn the facts about our history, that we reflect on the meaning of these facts, and that we become proficient in an anti-racist culture. We have few models for this kind of proficiency, so we must be models for one another, providing the kind of reinforcement we cannot expect from the larger society.