Ep 140 | The Afara Collective: CoFounder Liz Williams Builds A Bridge for Systemic Racism Education

Talking Taiwan

A note from Talking Taiwan host Felicia Lin:

Liz Williams is one of the co-founders of The Afara Collective and Jennifer Ho, heads Afara’s film club team. Seeing how the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and others last year sparked Black Lives Matter protests globally, and led to greater dialogue about systemic oppression and anti-racism, Liz and her co-founder Jules Sanders were inspired to create Afara.

Afara invites everyone, regardless of ethnic background to work on their personal biases

Liz and Jen talked about why the work of Afara matters to them, the types of training and programs that Afara will offer, and how Afara is about creating safe, brave spaces to have difficult conversations about systemic oppression, racism and bias.

Liz has been a guest on Talking Taiwan. In episode 88 she and Elissa Russell talked about Being Black in Taiwan and Racism in the United States.

Here’s a little preview of what we talked about in this podcast episode:

• What inspired Liz and her co-founder Jules Sanders to create The Afara Collective?
• What is the mission of The Afara Collective?
• How Afara is about including everyone (regardless of ethnicity, not just Blacks and Whites) in the work of being an anti-racism
• What does the word afara mean?
• What is anti-racism?
• How Afara is about creating safe spaces to discuss racism and bias
• What have been the challenges in running The Afara Collective?
• Their approach to working with and managing their team of volunteers
• Afrara’s film club and book club
• Afara’s See and Unseen Film Club
• How Afara creates safe brave spaces for people to discover personal biases
• The types of training, courses and programming that Afara offers
• Afara’s Go Fund Me crowdfunding campaign
• Afara’s vision of empathy in action

Related Links:

The Afara Collective’s Go Fund Me campaign: https://www.gofundme.com/f/The-Afara-Collective-antiracism?qid=68c382c4dac86653f790901ee54ada06&fbclid=IwAR1DTLBW2pLMC5Brdt2KwsNwdqgpYm34KqIL9r4ZLh9epnXzI-RoIFH-A-U

The Afara Collective: http://www.weareafara.org/

The Afara Collective on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weareafara/

The Afara Collective on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/weareafara

George Floyd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd

Breonna Taylor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Breonna_Taylor

https://www.nytimes.com/article/breonna-taylor-police.html

BBC News article, “Ahmaud Arbery: What do we know about the case?” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52623151

March 16, 2021 Atlanta Spa Shootings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Atlanta_spa_shootings

Liz Williams and Elissa Russell’s Talking Taiwan interview about Being Black in Taiwan and Racism in the United States: https://talkingtaiwan.com/being-black-in-taiwan-and-racism-in-the-united-states-ep-88/