We speak in we. A journey towards racial healing and the relationships that set us free. Addressing the leaders of today and tomorrow, An Other World alternates between heart-wrenching but hopeful letters to Hanif Fazal’s daughter Amina, reflections on Fazal’s formative life experiences and lessons on identity, Black and Brown relationships, and a unique type of freedom that could be available to all of us. In this moving blend of social commentary and memoir with a call to action, Fazal—co-founder of the Center for Equity and Inclusion—documents his journey towards Black and Brown joy, freedom, and belonging. This timely book traces Fazal’s relationships with Black and Brown family members, professional colleagues, and close friends as they attempt to thrive at home, school, and work in the all-consuming whiteness of Portland, Oregon, and the broader United States landscape. Fazal's youth involved a constant experience as the other in an all-white school system, breakdowns in family, and feeling split between his Mexican and Indian heritages. He went on to create programs that offered healing and belonging to BIPOC youth in schools and to BIPOC adults in the workplace. In An Other World, Fazal pinpoints how educational and professional diversity frameworks often perform surface-level inclusion but refuse to invest fully in the complex realities of their BIPOC learners and employees. He also stares down the myth of “making it” and invites BIPOC communities to reflect and redefine success on their own terms.
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Hanif Fazal’s authenticity, passion and commitment to building a world where not only his daughter but all of us can truly belong is compelling. In this book he has managed to use his own story to provide the reader with actionable tools that, if used, clear the pathway to ‘an other’ world.
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Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, CEO of Feeding America