Our Histories Are Tied Together: Liberation in a Global Context

 

The following is a transcript of the video above, from our webinar on “Remaking the Economy: Redefining Leadership.” View the full webinar here.

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Seema Agnani: I think if we want to work towards shared understanding of one another’s history, you have to think about it within the global context. It’s understanding race, and in some places, like in India, for example, it’s also there are issues of persecuted communities because of their faith. Gender comes into play quite a bit. And so, understanding the caste system in India, things like that, which really—of course, there are things that tie us all together.

If we’re really going to make progress within the US and beyond, there is a real need for us to understand each other’s histories and where these sorts of inequities really emerge from. So, the slave trade: those same ships that were used for the slave trade were later used to move indentured servants across the globe, and so our histories are tied together by a shared colonial history. It’s important for all of us to have that understanding in this work.