Hello everyone! My name is Daisy Han and I am the Founder/CEO of Embracing Equity. I’m a Korean-American, born and raised on the Ohlone Indigenous land, also known as the Bay Area, and I am mom to an 11-month-old baby! My husband and I are currently in the process of selecting a school for her and want to find an environment that will affirm her Korean-Filipino identity, and provide her with her native language immersion -- that has been no small task! But that is a task that we at Embracing Equity are trying to make easier for all families by raising the bar on the equity, inclusion, and belongingness every child feels at school.
Embracing Equity is a dream of a world where every child will be able to see themselves in their full, beautiful, complicated humanity. I founded this nonprofit organization in 2017 after about a decade in the classroom and working in administration, realizing that there is malpractice happening in the field of education. As educators, we are not equipped, trained, or prepared to confront the legacy of systemic racism in our schools - if anything we are equipped, trained, and prepared to uphold the legacy of systemic racism.
And yet we have the power to transform lives and our society. You don’t have to imagine if you would have been an abolitionist in the 1600s. You can be an abolitionist today and you have so much to contribute to our learning community and to the anti-racism movement.
In our minds, we interpret the world, experiences, and one another through language - language is the bedrock of humanity. And we carry it through generations upon generations. However, the cycle of identification and interpretation can get distorted by the force of colonialism, as the Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s [Goo-gee wah Tee-ong-oh] writes, colonialism’s most powerful weapon against peoples’ collective defiance is, what he calls, the “cultural bomb.”
“The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names,
in their languages,
in their environment,
in their heritage of struggle,
in their unity,
in their capacities,
and ultimately in themselves.”
Ngũgĩ attributes two functions to language: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture. We use it to define ourselves and others. What he’s saying here is that if you want to colonize people, you must do so through language. Language is an incredible force in shaping our thinking, our cultures, and our beliefs.
And this same argument can also be applied to the language and culture of the movement of racial and social justice. When we are not taught the language to describe oppressive experiences or conditions, we also don't have the language for collective defiance.
It is critical to have our own shared language to dissect, analyze, identify, dismantle, and transform these inequitable systems! So something that we’re going to do together during this keynote session is to build a shared culture and vocabulary for the collective movement of anti-racism. And critical to that process is the ability to shift from intellectualizing other people’s definitions of key words like race, racism, and equity - to making meaning and internalizing these concepts for ourselves!