Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (The City Lights Open Media) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sonali Kolhatkar is the host and producer of Rising Up with Sonali, a weekly television and radio program that airs on Free Speech TV and on Pacifica Radio station affiliates around the United States. Winner of numerous awards, including Best TV Anchor and Best National Political Commentary from the LA Press Club, she is currently the Racial Justice editor at Yes! Magazine and a Writing Fellow with the Independent Media Institute. Co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence with Jim Ingalls, Kolhatkar is Co-Director of the Afghan Women's Mission. She resides with her husband and two sons in Pasadena, California. 

Rinku Sen is the Executive Director of the Narrative Initiative, where she helps social justice movements develop the power to move ideas. Formerly the Executive Director of Race Forward and publisher of its award-winning news site Colorlines, Sen is the author of Stir it Up and The Accidental. She is Co-President of the Women’s March and serves on the boards of the Ms. Foundation for Women and the Foundation for National Progress. She resides in New York City.

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PREFACE 

As a journalist, my values—cliché as this may sound—are “to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” By definition, journalists are truthtellers called upon to report the truth in the service of the public interest and justice. What ethic could serve the public more than the pursuit of justice for all human beings regardless of race, gender, or class? 

I’ve been engaged in narrative work via journalism for more than twenty years. Abandoning a job in 2002 working on a satellite telescope at the prestigious California Institute of Technology (Caltech), I set my sights on a path of independent journalism grounded in the pursuit of justice—a path that felt much more meaningful to me than a career in astrophysics. 

Much as I enjoyed the beauty and challenges of answering grand cosmological questions, journalism is in my blood. My grandfather, the late Shripad Yashwant Kolhatkar—an Indian rebel, freedom fighter, trade unionist, and co-founder of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)—also served as president of the All-India Newspaper Employees Federation. I feel the strength of his legacy even though he passed away before I found my true calling. 

Here’s how it happened. As an immigrant pre-teen growing up in Dubai, I wrote for a local children’s magazine called Young Times. I interviewed fellow students, wrote stories, and created drawings, but had not yet considered journalism as a potential career. I went on to study physics and astronomy, emigrating to the United States on a foreign student visa at the age of sixteen convinced that I would end up with a long career in science. After graduating, I started working at Caltech, fixated on the grand questions of physical existence on astronomical scales. But around the same time, I grew increasingly cognizant of the injustices in the world around me and of how little progress we had made to solve the grand problems of humanity right here on Earth. I became deeply involved in solidarity work with Afghan feminists and gave public lectures about the U.S. war in Afghanistan. 

When an opportunity arose to be a regular news broadcaster at the independent community station, KPFK, Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles, I jumped at the chance. Since then, I have spent more than two decades reporting the indignities faced by marginalized communities, covering the contours of their resistances through my television and radio program, Rising Up With Sonali. 

Today, as the racial justice editor at Yes! Magazine, I also have the privilege of uplifting Black and Brown voices via print and online media. The mission of my labor is to help tell their stories, amplifying the words of work of people of color who are working to create a world based on justice, freedom, equity, love, and community. 

The late congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis once said, “The movement without storytelling, is like birds without wings.” As a cultural worker grounded in social justice advocacy, I have always seen my journalism as a vehicle for transformative storytelling about people and power. The mere fact that I, an immigrant woman of color, am in the position of being a public story teller, is radical in a world where women of color are constantly excluded from positions of editorial leadership. My liberation is bound up with the liberation of the people whose stories I share. By becoming fluent in each other’s stories, we rise up against racism. Through solidarity, we rise up together.