Creating a Culture of Change: Conversations on Race and Community Building

Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture is pleased to partner with the Arab American National Museum and National Network for Arab American Communities in presenting

In light of recent protests and actions across America in support of the Black Lives Matter Movement, there is a need among Arab American communities to have intentional conversations around issues of race, racism, and social justice. Through a cultural lens, the Arab American National Museum, Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, and Network of Arab American Communities are organizing a series of virtual presentations during the summer that bring together artists in conversation with Arab and African American educators, community leaders, journalists, and scholars. We hope these conversations will provide space for increased understanding and community building towards a more just and equitable America that addresses the structures of systemic racism and inspires our individual and collective efforts for change.

Tuesday June 30:  Youth and Race Education

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Omar Offendum – hip-hop artist

Omar Offendum is a Syrian-American rapper/spoken word artist living in Los Angeles. Known for his unique blend of Hip-Hop & Arabic poetry, he’s been featured on prominent world news outlets. He has presented at a number of prestigious academic institutions and collaborated with major museums & cultural organizations, while helping to raise millions of dollars for various humanitarian relief groups. Offendum was recently named a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow for 2018-2019.

Dr. Krystal Strong – scholar, activist, assistant professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education

Dr. Krystal Strong is a scholar-organizer whose research and teaching focus on activism, the cultural and political power of youth, and the role of educational spaces as sites of political struggle with a geographic focus on Africa and the African Diaspora. A trained anthropologist, Krystal is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education where she teaches courses on global youth cultural formations, ethnography and qualitative research methods, the politics of education in the Global South, and activism and education. Krystal is actively involved in organizing work in the city of Philadelphia, her hometown, and brings this commitment to local communities and the lessons of community activism to bear on her scholarship and pedagogy.

Dr. Debbie Almontaser – educator, founder of Bridging Cultures Group

Dr. Debbie Almontaser is an internationally recognized, award-winning educator, entrepreneur, speaker, authority on cross cultural understanding and author of Leading While Muslim. She is an influential community leader and the Founder and CEO of Bridging Cultures Group Inc. Dr. Almontaser was the founding and former principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy in Brooklyn, NY. A twenty-five-year veteran of the NYC Public School System, she taught special education, inclusion, trained teachers in literacy, and served as a multicultural specialist and diversity advisor. She frequently lectures, serves on panels, facilitates teacher and public workshops on cultural diversity, conflict resolution, Arab Culture, Islam, Muslims in America, interfaith coalition building and youth leadership at schools, universities, libraries, museums, faith-based organizations, churches, synagogues, as well as national and international conferences. Dr. Almontaser is also known for her leadership role in organizing the historic Yemeni Bodega Strike Rally and I Am a Muslim Too Rally.

Tuesday July 14:  The Power of Words

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Vashti Dubois – founder/director of The Colored Girls Museum

Prior to creating The Colored Girls Museum (TCGM), Vashti DuBois held leadership positions at a number of organizations over the span of her 30-year career in non-profit and arts administration. DuBois’ work focused primarily on issues impacting girls and women of color at organizations such as The Free Library of Philadelphia, Tree House Books, the historic Church of the Advocate, the Children’s Art Carnival in New York City, the Haymarket People’s Fund in Boston, Congreso Girls Center and The Leeway Foundation.  In 2015, DuBois opened TCGM to “honor the stories, experiences and history of Colored Girls throughout the African Diaspora.”  It is the first memoir museum of its kind offering visitors a multi-disciplinary experience in a residential space. TCGM initiates the ordinary object, submitted by the colored girl herself, as a representative of an aspect of her story and personal history which she finds meaningful.  TCGM has been engineered to pop up in other cities and neighborhoods around the country, transforming ordinary spaces into Colored Girls Museum outposts that collect, archive and share the stories of indigenous Colored Girls.  DuBois is a graduate of Wesleyan University and a NAMAC Fellow. She is currently working on a book about the making of The Colored Girls Museum.

Ladan Osman – poet, writer, filmmaker

Ladan Osman is a Somali-American writer and filmmaker. She’s the author of Exiles of Eden and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony, winner of a Sillerman First Book Prize. She has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, Cave Canem, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Osman is an experienced teaching artist and lectures widely in literature, performance, and media. Her first short film, Sam Underground profiled the 2020 American Idol. Osman’s next film projects are love letters to artists and their cities. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Moustafa Bayoumi – author, journalist

Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the critically acclaimed How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (Penguin), which won an American Book Award and the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. It has also been translated into Arabic by Arab Scientific Publishers. His latest book, This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (NYU Press), was chosen as a Best Book of 2015 by The Progressive magazine and was also awarded the Arab American Book Award for Non-Fiction. An anniversary edition of How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?, which included a new afterword, was published in 2018. An accomplished journalist, Bayoumi is also a columnist for The Guardian, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times (recent article), New York Magazine, The Daily Beast, The Nation, CNN.com, The London Review of Books, The National, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Progressive, and other places. Bayoumi is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and is the recipient of two excellence in teaching awards.  In 2015, he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters by Southern Vermont College. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Wednesday July 29: Building Community through Faith

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Jasiri X – hip-hop artist, activist, co-founder/CEO of 1Hood Media

Jasiri X is the first independent hip-hop artist to be awarded an Honorary Doctorate, which he received from Chicago Theological Seminary in 2016. This recognition grew out of the spiritual/political urgency and artistic vision he shared on songs like “Justice For Trayvon” and “Strange Fruit (Class of 2013),” which documented the unjust police killings of young Blacks in the Millennial Generation. Likewise, he has been deeply involved with the national Movement for Black Lives, working with organizations like The Gathering for Justice, Blackout for Human Rights, Justice or Else, BYP100 and Sankofa. Still, he remains rooted in the Pittsburgh based organizations he co-founded, the anti-violence group One Hood as well as the New Media Academy, which teaches African-American boys how to analyze and create media for themselves. Jasiri emerged on the national scene in 2007 with the powerful hit song “Free The Jena 6” and the groundbreaking Internet video series This Week With Jasiri X, a program that reached millions of Internet views. His critically acclaimed album Black Liberation Theology (2015) has been recognized as a soundtrack for today’s civil rights movement. He has performed his music from the Smithsonian to the Apollo Theater and has discussed his views on hip-hop, race and politics at leading institutions across the nation, including Harvard University, the University of Chicago, NYU, Stanford, among others. Beyond his work nationally, Jasiri’s focus on social change has also touched the global arena. In 2016, he was commissioned by The Open Society Foundation to travel to Columbia to create a film (War on Us with Grammy Award-winning hip-hop artist Rhymefest) that highlights the international effects of US drug policy in South America. One of the most important political voices of his generation, in 2015 he received the USA Cummings Fellowship in Music, a BMe Fellowship and a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artist as Activist Fellowship. Jasiri X lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his wife Celeste and their three children.

Ahmad Jitan – community organizer at Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN)

Ahmad Jitan is a community organizer at IMAN where he leads the Corner Store Campaign, in addition to supporting IMAN’s other organizing and advocacy efforts. Like many other Palestinians and children of refugees, Ahmad has called many places home. An immigrant to the United States from a young age, he was raised predominantly in the U.S. South, whose culture of resistance and resilience he carries with him to this day. Ahmad has worked as an educator and community organizer advocating for young people, racial justice, and immigrant and refugee rights in Durham, NC; Brooklyn, NY; Beirut, Lebanon; and Nablus, Palestine.  He passionately brings his experience in settings as diverse as public schools, grassroots organizations, international non-profits, as well as higher-education to IMAN and Chicago where he hopes to learn from local leadership and build collective power. Through IMAN’s Corner Store Campaign and broader Food Ecosystems work, Ahmad hopes to transform Chicago’s corner stores from sites of mere transaction or exploitation to ones of solidarity and healing and a model for racial and economic justice.

Margari Aziza Hill – co-founder/executive director of Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative (MuslimARC)

Margari Aziza Hill is an adjunct professor, blogger, editor, and freelance writer with articles published in SISTERS, Islamic Monthly, and Spice Digest. She is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of MuslimARC, the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, an organization focusing on Education for Liberation. After converting to Islam in 1993, her life experiences as a Black American woman have informed her research and writing on Islam, education, race, and gender. She has nearly a decade of teaching experiences at all levels from elementary, secondary, college level, to adult education. She earned her bachelor’s degree in History from Santa Clara University in 2003 and master’s in History of the Middle East and Islamic Africa from Stanford University in 2006. Her research includes colonial perceptions mixed-raced identities in Northern Nigeria, anti-colonial resistance among West Africans in Sudan during the early 20th century, transformations in Islamic learning in Northern Nigeria, and International student programs at Al-Azhar and Cairo University. She has given talks and lectures in various universities and community centers throughout the country.

Tuesday August 11: Documenting Community through Film & Journalism

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Louis Massiah – filmmaker, director of Scribe Video Center

Louis Massiah is a documentary filmmaker and the founder of the Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, a media arts center that provides production workshops to community groups and emerging independent media makers. A MacArthur Foundation “genius award” fellow, Massiah has developed media production methodologies that assist first time makers author their own stories, including the Precious Places Community History project, a collection of 107 collaboratively produced documentaries; the Muslim Voices of Philadelphia community history project, the Great Migration – A City Transformed and a current project The Tenants of Lenapehocking in the Age of Magnets. As a director, Massiah’s award-winning documentaries, include The Bombing of Osage Avenue, W.E.B. Du Bois – A Biography in Four Voices, two films for the Eyes on the Prize II series, and A is for Anarchist, B is for Brown, broadcast on PBS and screened at festivals in the US, Europe and Africa. His commissions include the President’s House site, a five channel permanent video installation for the U.S. National Park Service’ and a video installation for the Musée des Civilisations Noires in Dakar in 2019.

Assia Boundaoui – filmmaker, journalist

Assia Boundaoui is an Algerian-American journalist and filmmaker based in Chicago. Her work has been featured on BBC, NPR, PRI, Al Jazeera, VICE, CNN and HBO. Her feature-length debut film, The Feeling of Being Watched, a documentary investigating a decade of FBI surveillance in Boundaoui’s Muslim-American community, had its world premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. Her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the International Documentary Association, San Francisco Film Society, and the Co-Creation Studio at the MIT Open Documentary Lab. Boundaoui has a master of arts in journalism from New York University.

Yawu Miller – journalist, senior editor at Bay State Banner

Yawu Miller is senior editor of the Bay State Banner, a weekly newspaper in Boston that has been in print since 1965. The longest-running black-owned newspaper in New England, the Banner covers news in communities of color in the Greater Boston area. Miller writes about politics, education and criminal justice issues. He has worked in the nonprofit sector and in Massachusetts state government. Miller is a 1990 graduate of Dartmouth College.

Wednesday August 26:  Queer Experiences in Arab and Black Communities

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Hannah L. Drake – blogger, poet, activist

Hannah L. Drake is a blogger, activist, public speaker, poet, and the author of 10 books. She writes commentary on politics, feminism, and race and her work has been featured in Cosmopolitan Magazine. In 2019 during Super Bowl Sunday, Hannah’s poem, “All You Had To Do Was Play The Game, Boy,”which addresses the protest by Colin Kaepernick, was shared by film writer, producer and director Ava DuVernay, and then shared by Kaepernick. The poem has been viewed more than two million times. Hannah’s commentary on life and challenging others to dream bigger have been recognized by First Lady Michelle Obama. Hannah Drake was featured on the Tom Joyner Morning Show with Jacque Reid to discuss her international movement, Do Not Move Off the Sidewalk, which addresses the power of holdingyour space. In February 2019,Hannah was selected by the Muhammad Ali Center to be a Daughter of Greatness whichfeatures prominent women engaged in social philanthropy, activism, and pursuits of justice Recently Hannah wasselected as one of the Best of the Best in Louisville, Kentucky for her poem Spaces. Hannah’smessage is thought-provoking and at times challenging, but Hannah believes that it is in the uncomfortable spaces that change can take place. “My sole purpose in writing and speaking is not that I entertain you. I am trying to shake a nation.”

Hamed Sinno – musician, poet, activist

Hamed Sinno is a New York based musician, poet, vocal instructor, and social justice advocate. He has been the writer and front-person for Mashrouʼ Leila since 2008. He writes and lectures about the convergence of music and social justice, and teaches singing from his studio in New York. He has a BFA from the American University of Beirut, and will matriculate in the Digital Music graduate program at Dartmouth College in September 2020. Sinno’s rcent reflection on suicide of Egyptian queer activist Sarah Hegazi

Moderator Dr. Eve Troutt Powell – author, professor of history at University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Troutt Powell, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, teaches the history of the modern Middle East. As a cultural historian, she emphasizes the exploration of literature and film in her courses. She is the author of Tell This in my Memory: Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan and the Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2012), A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain and the Mastery of the Sudan (University of California, 2003) and the co-author, with John Hunwick, of The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam, (Princeton Series on the Middle East, Markus Wiener Press, 2002). Troutt Powell received her B.A, M.A and PhD from Harvard University. Prior to coming to Penn she taught for ten years at The University of Georgia. She has received fellowships from the American Research Center in Egypt and the Social Science Research Council, and has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In 2003 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

Fall (TBD): Palestinian-Black Solidarity

All graphics for the series by Ashley Choukeir