UNITED TO END RACISM

UER also examines the racism in many of our societies' institutions and encourages its members to become actively aware of it and to find new ways of combating it. UER offers both an ongoing system of support that assists people to sustain their efforts to eliminate racism, and effective tools for eliminating racism that can be taught and used on a one-to-one basis.

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Through its work, UER has been part of a movement to develop an understanding of racism and the relationships between racism and other oppressions. This understanding includes how racism and other oppressions are inflicted upon people, how oppressions damage people, how this damage is passed from generation to generation, how people can resist such damage, and how people can recover from it. One key understanding is that racism can be unintentionally internalized by those who have been targeted. That internalized oppression can operate within the targeted group, making that group’s work to end racism more difficult. UER continues to develop an understanding of the effects of racism on members of oppressor groups and how racist attitudes are installed on and persist in them.

 

With this framework for understanding racism, UER has found methods for undoing its damage. The work to recover from the damage of racism is done, in different ways, both by people of the Global Majority and Indigenous people (GMI)* and by people who are members of groups that play oppressive, racist roles.

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UER was organized in 2001 as a non-governmental organization (NGO) in order to participated in the UN World Conference Against Racism (WCAR), in Durban, South Africa, in August 2001. UER sent a delegation of 50 RC leaders who led workshops, panel speakouts, and support groups throughout the conference.

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In preparation for and supportive to UER’s work in Durban, local RC Communities engaged in hundreds of projects in twenty countries to communicate about our work on ending racism. These projects included: workshops, house parties, public forums, film showings followed by discussions about racism, introductions to RC and UER, listening projects, report-backs from the UN World Conference Against Racism, and presentations at workshops and conferences held by other organizations.

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Since 2001, UER has carried out hundreds of local events, done introductory workshops in a number of countries, and participated in several large projects, including World Social Forums, U.S. Social Forums, and the European Social Forum. UER has also been a key participant at several conferences including the White Privilege Conference, the Tule Lake Pilgrimage, the Gandhi-King Conference, and conferences on climate justice, including the United Nations Climate Conferences (COPs).  Since 2015 UER frequently partners with Sustaining All Life in the work to address the climate emergency in the context of ending exploitation and oppression. UER's work continues to play an important role in introducing RC and the role of discharge in ending racism.

 

* Global Majority and Indigenous people (GMI): The peoples of Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Latin and Caribbean America, and those descended from them, and Indigenous people, are over eighty percent of the global population. These people also occupy most of the global land mass.

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Using the term “Global Majority and Indigenous (GMI)” for these people acknowledges their majority status in the world and interrupts how the dominant (U.S. and European) culture assigns them a minority status.

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Many Global Majority and Indigenous people living in dominant-culture countries have been assimilated into the dominant culture—by force, in order to survive, in seeking a better life for themselves and their families, or in pursuing the economic, political, or other inclusion of their communities. Calling these people “Global Majority and Indigenous” contradicts
the assimilation.