UNITED TO END RACISM

UER offers spaces and support for Healing Racial Trauma to people involved in racial justice work.  This is done in small group settings where individuals can use the tools for healing provided by UER.

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The healing work of UER supports people to become better able to:

• interrupt racism in their daily lives,

• free themselves from all of racism's effects,

• take leadership,

• form deep relationships across racial lines,

• remove racism from our societies' institutions, and

• support the work of other individuals and organizations in ending racism.

 

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 increase understanding of racism and it’s intersectionality with other forms of oppression.  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 is internalized both by people who are targeted by racism as well as by people who are in the role of oppressor (people who are designated by society to enact oppression.) The operation of internalized oppression within a targeted group makes that group’s work to end racism more difficult. Similarly, the operation of internalized oppression within oppressor groups makes it difficult for them to be aware of the racist attitudes that are installed on and persist in them.  This makes it difficult for members of oppressor groups to recognize when they are enacting racism.

 

The healing work of UER aims to help members of both target and oppressor groups to heal from the effects of having the oppression installed on them.  This healing work helps all of us recover our ability to think and act outside racist conditioning.  It helps Global Majority People* as well as people who play oppressor roles to recover from the damage done by racism.

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UER was organized in 2001 as a non-governmental organization (NGO).  UER has engaged in hundreds of projects in twenty-one countries to communicate about our work on healing the trauma of racism and ending racism.  These projects include the UN World Conference Against Racism (WCAR), in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. 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) and Climate Week New York City.  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 the role of healing in ending racism.

 

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

 

Using the term “Global Majority (GM)” 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.

 

Many Global Majority 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” contradicts the assimilation.