MEET SANKOFA FORUM: ADLA-CHICAGO ELDER LIONS FOR AFRICANA STUDIES EDUCATION

1.  As we have mentioned before the field of multiculturalism and diversity is what progressive sociology calls "contested terrain."

There are multiple competing and colluding top-down and bottom-up approaches within both.

2.  At the risk of oversimplification, the top-down approach works to contain multiculturalism and diversity within the established order.  

More, the top-down approach, then, tends to reduce multiculturalism and diversity to gatherings of food, fun, and fashion on the one hand and on the other the inclusion of multicultural and/or people of color faces in highly visible places without making significant changes in the lop-sided distribution of wealth, power, social status, and other resources.

The bottom-up approach, by contrast, seeks to break out of the containment of the established order toward a new social arrangement characterized by multicultural and people of color forces striving for an equitable distribution of all social premiums. This said our multicultural and diversity approach seeks to emphasize the latter bottom-up approach over the former.

3. Clearly, the African Descent Lutheran Association (ADLA) is a multicultural and/or diversity project within the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). However, even within ADLA the project is contested terrain with competing, contending, and colluding approaches despite the tendency of some to have God, God's Self, endorse their particular approach-often to the exclusion of others.

4.  What is needed within ADLA (locally and nationally) is operational unity in the organizing process i.e. unity without enforced uniformity, unity in diversity-of organizing approaches.  In a word we need multiculturalism and diversity within ADLA.

5.  More still, this blogger's basic approach is to use Black or African culture as a resource and not merely as a reference.  By which we mean consistently dialoging with (studying, learning from etc.) and building on African culture and not simply making a reference to it while quickly following in the ways of the dominant culture or established order. 

6.  We therefore take the concept and tradition of SANKOFA seriously. And because we understand it as an essential ongoing or continuing education project in the field of Africana Studies, we are creating SANKOFA FORUM: ADLA-CHICAGO ELDER LIONS FOR AFRICANA STUDIES EDUCATION.  

7.  The objective of SANKOFA FORUM is to bring Africana Studies to the local and national ADLA community and the local and national ADLA community to Africana Studies.  More, SANKOFA FORUM is our contribution to evaluating the recent February 6, 2016 Sankofa Gathering Special Event at Lutheran School of Theology-Chicago.  We advance it as a much needed bottom-up multiculturalism and diversity approach and thereby social corrective.

Respectively submitted: Rev. Joel Washington (Khunanpu Sangoma), Reformation Church-Chicago ("Young Barack Obama's community organizing sanctuary") and for SANKOFA FORUM, 2-10-16