Critical race, gender & sexuality studies professor: ‘We don’t talk about race in our everyday lives’
This month at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt features the 28th “Annual Campus & Community Dialogue on Race,” the theme for which is “We Are Here! Fighting Fascism & Erasure.”
The event website notes Professor Jason Stanley’s “ten pillars of fascism that serve an ‘us and them’ framework to seize power and dismantle democracy.”
These include “mythic past, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, unreality, hierarchy, victimhood, ‘law and order,’ sexual anxiety, favoring ‘the heartland,’ and the dismantling of public goods.”
According to HumboldtNow, the event’s programs will “bring students, faculty, staff, and community members together to examine racial injustice, authoritarianism, and the possibilities of collective resistance”:
Through workshops, presentations, performances, and facilitated conversations, the weeklong event creates opportunities to consider how racism intersects with other forms of oppression. CDOR welcomes people of all backgrounds into a shared process of reflection, learning, and action.
The 2026 theme focuses on the relationship between fascism, racism, and ultranationalism. It asks participants to examine how political narratives can be used to enforce social hierarchies, designate groups as outsiders, and weaken democratic institutions.
The organizing committee, made up of students, faculty, and staff, aims to explore what it means to fight fascism from a “poly-TEK” vantage point, one that names and engages with Indigenous perspectives like Traditional Ecological Knowledge in a “polytechnic” university. Speakers will talk about the relationships between AI, colonialism, and eugenics.
The October 19 “keynote event” discussion will be led by “feminist and decolonial scholar of science and technology studies” Anita Say Chan (pictured) of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Chan’s book “Predatory Data” purports to “show how technological systems can reproduce inequalities affecting immigrants and other marginalized communities.”
The 21st and 22nd respectively feature Roberto González, whose research “focuses on technofascism and the effects of algorithmic policing and surveillance on communities of color,” and Abby Abinanti, California’s first Native American to pass the state bar exam and serve as state judge.
Abinanti “incorporates traditional cultural values and rehabilitative practices into judicial proceedings, offering alternatives to conventional criminal justice models,” the press release notes.
According to Cal Poly Humboldt Critical Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies Professor Mike Atienza, “we don’t talk about race in our everyday lives,” and thus these conversations can be held in a “really supportive and principled space.”
Atienza’s faculty page notes he collaborates with “performance artist” Maria Arte Susya Purisima Tolentino to “use the form of drag to analyze transnational media representations and discourse about the lives of Filipina/o/x people.”
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