Liberatory Lineages: Unpacking & Resisting Anti-Blackness

Mehak is a writer and artist based on Tongva land (Los Angeles) with roots in South Asia and the Pacific Northwest. They lead Vigilant Love’s communications and development work. In their free time, they enjoy reading, spending time outside with their dog, and practicing tarot.

traci ishigo is a queer, nonbinary, Japanese American Buddhist, community organizer, therapist, and somatics practitioner. They are a co-founder and co-director of Vigilant Love, where they steward and implement the organization’s solidarity-based, healing justice programs, and support VL’s campaigns against Islamophobic government programs and the War on Terror. In their private practice called Webs of Well-being, traci provides individuals and couples psychotherapy, as well as politicized, healing-centered consulting. traci brings ten years of grassroots organizing experience and their clinical experience as a trauma-informed social worker to movement spaces, including this workshop series.

traci kato-kiriyama (they+she) --based on unceded Tongva land in the South Bay of Los Angeles-- is a multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary artist, actor, educator, accomplice, community organizer who loves to experiment in hybridity, co-creation and long-haul collaboration.
---I create as part of a continuum of survival, gathering, (be)longing, of excavation, joy, queerness, of breaking lines, walls, silence. My most fruitful work comes through the process of collaboration and long-term relationship building, where everything sprouts from a shared, multi-layered source, where everything is co-founded, co-created, co-envisioned. I have learned and continue to learn how I love myself through the ways I love “other” and all of our shared, parallel, disparate, different yet interconnected paths, through struggle & resistance and toward collective self-determination, care, joyous liberation and peace - these principles and guiding values are what i aspire to show through my process, practice and creative communication & connection with each individual, tribe, and the world at large.---
tkk is the author of the upcoming Navigating With(out) Instruments - a book of poetry, micro essays and Notes To Self (The Accomplices/Writ Large Press).

Born and raised in multicultural Boyle Heights, the Vietnam War and Asian American Studies at UC Berkeley in the late 60’s were important influences on her values. Since the 1070s, she has worked on youth, workers, housing issues in Little Tokyo and JA redress. Currently Cochair of the Nikkei for Civil Rights & Redress, she served on the Editorial Team for the book, “NCRR: The Grassroots Struggle for Japanese American Redress and Reparations”, helped to educate about the camps through the film/curriculum, “Stand Up for Justice” and worked on the NCRR 9/11 Committee to help build relationships with the American Muslim community through programs like Break the Fast and Bridging Communities. Married to Mark Masaoka, she has a daughter, Mayumi and a son, Dan and grandsons, Yuma and Leo.

She represented NCRR to support the rights of Korean and other minorities in Japan and is involved with Nikkei Progressives, Vigilant Love, the Sustainable Little Tokyo project, working on issues such as reparations for Comfort Women and Black folks, the rights of immigrants and Little Tokyo’s future.

Marium is a community organizer, campaigns strategist, and public policy student at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. She has experience designing distributed organizing programs, running rapid response campaigns, and facilitating trainings focused on civic engagement and campaign design. She specializes in labor organizing and has worked on issues connected to immigrants’ rights, economic justice, and voting rights reform. More recently, she is focusing on finding ways to connect Islamic Liberation Theology principles and ideas to local organizing efforts.

Sahar Pirzada is a Pakistani-American Muslim woman from the Bay Area. She is the Advocacy and West Coast Programs Manager for HEART and Co-Director of Vigilant Love. She has a masters of social work from USC. Sahar's work has been featured in Now This, Los Angeles Times, Teen Vogue, NPR, KPCC and #GoodMuslimBadMuslim.

Celine Qussiny is a Palestinian and Muslim community organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement based in Southern California. The PYM is a transnational grassroots movement of Palestinian and Arab youth who are organizing towards the liberation of our homeland, the right of return for refugees and dismantling of zionism. PYM is also looking at the intersections of Zionism, militarism, and the War on Terror.
PYM chapters organize anti-CVE campaigns in various locales, political prisoners campaigns, work with immigrant and refugee communities, organize community and youth programs, delegations, political education, joint struggle efforts, and more. Celine also works at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

Sequoia supports the Vice President of Professional Learning & Family Philanthropy, by managing the development and implementation of programs and events in coordination with outside partners and other SoCalGrantmakers staff. She oversees programmatic, logistical, and administrative aspects of programs to support the Programs and Conferences team.
Sequoia is a Senior Trainer for the Los Angeles County Lesbian Bisexual and Queer Women’s Health Collaborative. She has experience facilitating interactive dialogue about intersectionality, racial healing, gender identity, and has spoken on international panels including the 2017 Opportunities for a more Inclusive Higher Education with the former Dutch Minister of Education, Jet Bussemaker at Universiteit Van Amsterdam. Sequoia incorporates storytelling to humanize the difficult discussions that individuals and society at large are not having. This pairing of storytelling and administrative decolonizing creates a powerfully impactful ambiance for transformational and sustainable change.
Sequoia is passionate about dedicating to being a part of healing the hearts of those affected by systemic anti-Black racism, challenge the institutions who overtly and/or covertly perpetuate it, and continue to challenge ourselves so we don’t perpetuate this systemic plague that separates us.

eli tizcareño is a queer trans mexican american, born and raised in the san fernando valley, the unceded ancestral lands of the Fernandeño-Tataviam Band of Mission Indians. They serve as CA Campaigns Director with the National Young Farmers Coalition to organize for radical change in agriculture through education, grassroots organizing, and coalition building. eli has passion and training in education for social change, healing-centered facilitation, conflict mediation skill-building, & developing urban land projects for racial justice. They co-founded the R’Garden & helped develop and grow the South LA Community Farm and Mar Vista Gardens’ Community Garden with loved ones. In their free time, eli is a grad student at Antioch University, & enjoys being silly, outdoors, and with chosen family.

Jas (they/them) is a Black trans non-binary creative born and raised in south central los angeles, ca - unceded tongva land. Their journey into plant medicine and growing/farming emerged as both a call toward deeper persxnal healing, and a movement commitment to support their communities' adaptability and agency. Jas offers community-based workshops on building relationships with plants and medicine making, and they have helped organize healing justice events including free community wellness clinics in their communities and outside of LA county jails. This year, they are initiating Seeds & Song - a collective of Black queer, trans non-binary practitioners and medicine makers dedicated to nourishing pathways towards autonomy in our individual and communal healing.