AAPF Organizes International Conference in Bellagio, Italy: Globalizing Positive Action

Conference planned for Bellagio, Italy
The generosity of the Rockefeller Foundation has enabled AAPF to convene a summit on global inclusion policies at Bellagio from August 1-10  2007. The conference, which gathers 25 of the world’s leading experts on affirmative action in various countries, arises out of a need within academic and advocacy communities to create and maintain an integrated global network of researchers engaged in various efforts to defend and/or expand a wide range of targeted inclusionary policies. This network includes scholars, advocates, public policy analysts, and media experts. Attendees at Bellagio will function as an international working group on affirmative action, with representatives from Brazil, France, South Africa, India, and the United States. In so doing, the network will serve the interests of academics, policy makers, and advocates who need to share the most recent research and other informational resources to combat the global assault against affirmative action. This joint venture will enable our participants to push back against ideological frameworks in their respective countries which seek to deny or obscure the function of race or other forms of identity in creating rigid patterns of social stratification. By adopting an international and interdisciplinary approach to the study of this issue, we will create and sustain a much needed forum to investigate the larger systemic, global, and national issues at stake in the current affirmative action debates.

At Bellagio, we will interrogate various social ideologies against which affirmative action must contend in order to gain significant traction as a defensible social policy. In the US, the framework is "colorblindness" while in Brazil, there are claims of a "racial democracy." In France, the notion of French citizenship informs and shapes the lives of all of its residents, though the recent race riots there reflect the failure to integrate Muslim and African immigrants effectively into the corridors of political, economic, social and cultural power. Even in post-apartheid South Africa there is already an effort to link the goal of "a non-racial South Africa" to policies that "move beyond race" so as to focus on class as the exclusive marker of exclusion in society. Yet South Africa remains deeply segregated for reasons linked to structural inequities associated with its tragic history of racial apartheid. Similarly, the caste system in India and the legacy of untouchability has permeated politics and policy choices, preventing new policies from flourishing or to actually promoting equality, especially in rural areas. In each of these societies, an idea of "formal equality" between the races masks the pervasiveness of on-going problems of historical and institutional discrimination. In our workshop, we will explore these myths individually and comparatively, and set as our objective the development of knowledge that lays bare their role in providing an acceptable narrative for racial stratification.
At the same time that these policies are undergoing large-scale assault, abundant information exists across many research fields that confirm that the best way to ensure the integration of those who have been traditionally excluded in society is to take targeted steps to ensure their inclusion. Unfortunately, much of this information remains isolated and disaggregated within various disciplinary and national borders. The Bellagio project aims to remedy this problem; we anticipate it will be a great success.

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