<p>Born and raised in the Bronx, Rosa Alicia Clemente is an award-winning organizer, producer and journalist. A leading voice of her generation, Rosa is frequently sought out for her insight on Afro/Black-Latina/Latino/Latinx identity and liberation movements as well as police violence, colonialism in Puerto Rico, hip-hop feminism and more.</p><p> In 2008, Clemente made HERstory when she became the first Afro/Black-Latina to run for Vice-President of the United States on the Green Party ticket. She and her running mate, Cynthia McKinney are, to this date, the only women of color ticket in U.S. Presidential history.</p><p>A media-maker, Clemente was an associate producer on<em> Judas and the Black Messiah</em>, a two-time Oscar-winning biopic about the Black Panther Party. As an independent journalist, Clemente has provided on-the-ground coverage of the U.S. Navy’s withdrawal from Vieques, Puerto Rico; the devastation and government failures in New Orleans and Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina; Black Lives Matters protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, and more. </p><p>She is president of Know Thy Self Productions, co-founder and national coordinator for the National Hip-Hop Political Convention in 2003, which helped bring together more than 3,000 activists to create and implement a political agenda for the hip-hop generation.</p><p>A fearless voice against injustice and violence, Clemente and six other women of color organizers joined Hollywood actresses at the 2018 Golden Globes Red Carpet as part of an initiative by Time’s Up and #MeToo.</p><p>Currently completing her PhD at the W.E.B. DuBois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Clemente’s academic work centers national liberation struggles inside the U.S. with a specific focus on the Young Lords Party, the Black Panther Party, Black and brown liberation movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s as well as the effects of COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) on such movements. </p>
Award-winning Black-Puerto Rican scholar-activist, political and cultural commentator
<p><strong>Advancing Equity and Anti-Racism Strategies on Campus</strong></p><p>What is equity in higher education? What does it mean and what does it look like? In this talk, Rosa Clemente lays bare the inequities that exist on college campuses across race, ethnicity, and gender. She discusses the varied ways inequality shows up, including in institutional structures, policies and procedures, resource allocation, academic equity and access, curriculum and pedagogy, hiring and promotion, and campus climate and culture. She shares a framework to advance anti-racism strategies across college campuses and offers tools to help create more diverse and inclusive educational spaces.</p><p><strong>Can’t Stop Our Blackness: Black Latinx Narratives and Resisting Erasure</strong></p><p>More than 90% of enslaved Africans landed in what is today known as Latin America and the Caribbean via the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade. The presence of our ancestors is still felt and maintained throughout these regions, including in the United States. Black Latinx/African descendants and people(s) are part of the broader Black community’s cultural and historical landscape in the United States. Contemporary migration patterns of Afro-descended people throughout the Americas have created complex and diverse definitions of Blackness. Through the lens of hip-hop, social justice, and Black and Brown freedom struggles, this lecture or workshop discusses these diverse and complex experiences in an effort to illuminate intersections and findings about the experiences of people throughout the African Diaspora. Rosa engages with various topics and geographic locations to center Black Latinx and African descendant voices in service of providing historical context and contemporary realities about race, representation, and power within the U.S. Rosa, a voice of the hip-hop generation, draws from 30 years of movement building, third-party electoral politics, and independent journalism, weaving in her personal narrative with the histories and experiences of ancestors, elders, contemporaries, peers, and future generations.</p><p><strong>From Moments to Movements: The Power of Community Activism And Organizing</strong></p><p>We the people build power through community organizing, and in this workshop, Rosa Clemente shows us how. By examining the history of select social justice movements of the last 50 years and sharing the speaker’s personal narratives as an organizer, scholar-activist, and independent journalist, Rosa shows audiences how building movements provides space for people to work together for a common social, political, and cultural goal. She also outlines how to move from social media moments and viral hashtags to decentralized movements. What is needed for an idea of the few to be transformed to an idea of many? How do we build movements that are non-hierarchical? How do we make sure these organizing efforts are inclusive of the multiple identities that we all carry? The workshop will provide tools that we use to inspire and engage young people to become community activists and organizers.</p>