For those of us going to this year’s General Assembly conference, the UUA has compiled a fabulous list of tools to help us prepare. It includes readings, videos, books and activities.
Below are six videos featured in their list of preparatory tools. I’m using them to jump start my preparation. I invite you to do the same. Videos vary from the full length documentary 13th to a 3 minute clip of comedian Aamer Rahman.
Have a team going to General Assembly? Check in on your preparatory education and reflection plans. Besides making sure everyone knows about these tools to prepare for GA, you might want to plan an opportunity to watch one or more of these videos as a group.
I think I’m going to have a GA prep movie night… What about you? ~ Peter
1. Watch 10 Years after Katrina
Watch 10 Years after Katrina: Resilience, Recovery, and Reality (30 Minutes)
August 29, 2015 marks the tenth year since Hurricane Katrina became a platform for a conservative recovery agenda pushed by then President George W. Bush. This agenda spearheaded the privatization of public places and public services in New Orleans and the storm-damaged communities of the Gulf Coast Region. The inequities and unjust outcomes of this agenda are laid bare in the short film Ten Years after Katrina: “Recovery,” “Resilience” & REALITY produced by the Greater New Orleans Organizers Roundtable.
2. Watch the Rev. Dr. William Barber at GA 2016
Watch GA 2016 Event 214 – Rev. Dr. William Barber on The Third Reconstruction (1 Hour, 9 Minutes)
Rev. William Barber, II, leader of Moral Mondays, Forward Together and NAACP NC, speaks on his new book The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement (Beacon Press). He calls for a nation-wide moral revival and offers a blueprint for state-wide grassroots organizing.
Order The Third Reconstruction from the UUA Bookstore
Get The Third Reconstruction for Amazon Kindle
UUA Common Read Discussion Guide
3. Watch 13th on Netflix
Watch the documentary 13th on Netflix. Free month trial available. Directed by Ava DuVernay. (1 Hour, 40 Minutes)
In this thought-provoking documentary, scholars, activists and politicians analyze the criminalization of African Americans and the U.S. prison boom.
4. Watch Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed at 50th anniversary of the Selma Crossing
Watch the Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed speaking at conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma Crossing. (50 Minutes)
5. Watch TEDx Talk by Jay Smooth
Watch TEDx Talk by Jay Smooth How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Discussing Race. (12 Minutes)
Jay Smooth is host of New York’s longest running hip-hop radio show, the Underground Railroad on WBAI 99.5 FM in NY, and is an acclaimed commentator on politics and culture.
6. Watch Hot Chicken Video with Devita Davison
Watch Hot Chicken Video with Devita Davison at the Social Capital Markets Conference 2016. (9 Minutes)
Nashville’s most famous chicken dish began as an act of vengeance by a spurned girlfriend of entrepreneur Thornton Prince in the 1930s. Instead of feeling burned, Prince was inspired and turned Hot Chicken into a thriving business. Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack is still in business but never grew outside of Nashville–even though his recipe is making money for others all over the world. At SOCAP16, Devita Davison of FoodLab Detroit told the full story of Hot Chicken, to illustrate cultural appropriation in action and the barriers to success that minority entrepreneurs often face.
6. Watch comic Aamer Rahman on Reverse Racism
Learn more about comedian Aamer Rahman (Fear of a Brown Planet) at aamerrahman.tumblr.com and on Twitter at @aamer_rahman. (3 Minutes)
Is this your first General Assembly? If so, this collaborative unofficial UUA General Assembly Survival Guide is for you!
UU PLANET 
Race, Race, Race, ….
I am assuming you know something about Boston and Environs. Please go to the UUA website and lookup UU Churches in or near Boston. You won’t find any in a POC neighborhood (Roxberry, Matapan, East Boston, …). This is in a city where the UUA is headquartered! You can (if you are not dismissing this already) find this pattern also exists in POC Neighborhoods in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Atlanta, …
The UUA ( especially as exemplified by One Beacon) has a continuous systematic record of failure with respect to POC outreach. The solution to this is not programs to discuss “White Power”. it is for POC – especially POC on the UUA staff – to get off their behinds, stop pontificating, and start churches in historically POC areas. UUA people would almost certainly fall all over themselves to support this kind of work.
I believe this has been tried several times and failed. If this effort fails, then the UUA is faced with some stark questions.
Perhaps the issue here is not racism.
Perhaps the issue here is that UUs are not particularly good missionaries
and have no taste for it.
Perhaps POC have already have many church alternatives which they prefer.
The hardest queston is why it is so hard for us to learn to deal with what we are. We will never move forward without understanding (and loving) ourselves. It is clear to me that we want to avoid the effort and jump to the solution. It never works.
The UUA has diversity problems in many areas. One that is never mentioned is that diversity does not exist around politics. The “progressives” in the church are so inbred that they have managed to convince themselves that everyone who is a Unitarian sees the world the same way they do. I’m waiting for these folks to start throwing around the “Unitarian in Name Only” tag for those that disagree. Perhaps we will be saved from this since the UNO tag has already been snapped up by a pizza franchise 🙂
Regards to all,