Peniel E. Joseph

Peniel E. Joseph is a world-renowned scholar and activist on race and democracy. He was also our first ever Featured Giant and the speaker at Waking Giants' launch event! Give our full interview with him a read, and check out the resources he provides to help us make our spaces stronger and more inclusive today.

Jenny Kearney: How did you get into activism?

Peniel E. Joseph: I discovered my vocation as an activist, educator, teacher, and scholar via my mother, Germaine Joseph, a Haitian immigrant who came to the country in the 1960s. I was born and raised in NYC and my mother was a hospital worker who belonged to SEIU 1199, spoke four languages, and taught me and my older brother to march on picket lines, speak out against any foe of justice, and to read voraciously from history books to comic books. So that provided ballast for me as a junior high and high school student to enter the fray of New York City politics at the local level by attending demonstrations, organizing for the study of Black History at my high school, and becoming as politically active and aware as possible.

JK: What has been your most important accomplishment as a community leader?

PEJ: I would say that my most important accomplishments have been multilayered. Institutionally, I founded the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy (CSRD) at Tufts University and the University of Texas at Austin as a research, public history, and policy programming space that focuses on issues of inequality. In this sense, the CSRD has provided a space for knowledge production and for communities and students of color to access this knowledge.

I have been very active in public engaging wider audiences beyond the university through public speaking, writing, and organizing events on the importance of racial justice to the entire American democratic project.

I have also given hundreds of talks to communities from New York City to Dorchester and Austin. By sharing the story of the Black freedom struggle and its contemporary relevance, I have tried to galvanize communities that are thirsty for this knowledge but still lack access to it.

JK: What have you been working on recently?

PEJ: The CSRD has several obliging research projects related to civil rights, voting rights, ending mass incarceration in the justice system, and making anti-racism a central part of political and pedagogical discussions and debates happening in the city of Austin, the state of Texas, and the wider nation as well as internationally. On this score, we are launching a William C. Powers Social Justice Speakers series, generously funded by Mickie and Jeannie Klein, and designed to bring some of the nation’s leading thought leaders and activists to the Austin community. I am currently fundraising to get the CSRD fully endowed so we have the staff and scale to fulfill our enormous ambitions.

JK: What is something everyone can do today to make their spaces more inclusive?

PEJ: What everyone can do is three things: educate, organize, and agitate.

This first involves better educating ourselves about issues of racial justice. You can start by going to the CSRD website and downloading some of the published research briefs written by our fellows. My editorials for CNN and other outlets are also available. The 1619 Project by the New York Times makes for essential reading. White Austinites interested in these topics should explore the many spaces and places, including the CSRD but by no means exclusive to it, where people are doing the rootwork connected to racial justice and its intersectional reverberations — not just in terms of individual identity but also its impact on social networks and political institutions.

Secondly, organize both within your networks but also vertically and horizontally. Make personal and social alliances that challenge you and make you have to find peace outside of your comfort zone. This is part of the root work of racial equality and social justice.

Finally: agitate! Social justice is a hard fought lifetime struggle that will take generations to fully achieve. We need to speak boldly and clearly but always with love and compassion for those who disagree with us or do not share our value. The common denominator is recognizing the humanity in opponents, which moves us away from enemy politics and towards the possibility of finding redemption. The long road to healing racism requires us all to be engaged with each other on terms that may make us uncomfortable. Ultimately this will lead to not only difficult conversations but dramatic transformations in public policy, the neighborhoods we live in, the schools our children attend, the resources we have access to, and how we define ourselves as Americans, global citizens, and human beings.