PORT TOWNSEND — Young Hanif Fazal, born in Chicago to a full Mexican mother and a full Indian father, struggled to find a place where his soul felt at home. His family life was rough: After Fazal’s father left, his mother supported her children while working at a convenience store for minimum wage, then $3.35 per hour.
Fazal, now CEO of the Center for Equity and Inclusion in Portland, Ore., is the first speaker in Studium Generale Port Townsend, Peninsula College’s new public lecture series.
He’ll give a free presentation at 4 p.m. Thursday at the college’s Fort Worden State Park location, 202 Eisenhower Ave.
“There are two words that capture how I grew up, in so many ways: mixed up,” Fazal said in an interview with Authority Magazine.
“By the time I was 16, for a variety of reasons my family system fell apart, and I was on my own just trying to survive. While growing up was challenging both from a class and family systems standpoint, my racial identity had the most profound impact in my life,” he added.
Today, Fazal is an author and a consultant who helps organizations around the country learn the essentials of diversity, equity and inclusion.
He and his team teach about the BIPOC experience — Black, Indigenous and people of color — with the aim of shifting culture and building equity for the long term.
The Center for Equity and Inclusion, which Fazal cofounded in 2015, works with people in school systems, healthcare organizations, foundations and pro sports teams.
From 2015 to 2016, Kelly Doran, organizer of Peninsula College’s Port Townsend speaker series, took a year-long course Fazal taught.
This course “focused on teaching with a lens of equity and inclusion. It was the best class I have ever had,” Doran said, “and had such an impact on my teaching.”
Discussing work
On Thursday, Fazal will discuss his new book, “An Other World,” about his own experience of being a brown person in a culture of white supremacy, Doran noted. The book is written as a memoir and as letters to his daughter Amina.
There is a motto by which Fazal lives. In the interview with Authority Magazine, he recalled how, when he was in his 20s, he worked with a mentor who gave him plenty of feedback. Fazal didn’t respond well to it.
“At that time, I was having trouble being accountable, taking responsibility and stepping powerfully into a sense of purpose,” Fazal said.
“I was reactive, mad at the world … At the same time, I was a gifted facilitator and youth professional. I had an extraordinary work ethic and the drive to make a difference in the world. In other words, I held a lot of potential.”
One day his mentor told him: “I’m going to hold the possibility of you, but deal with the reality of you.”
Those words and that moment have stayed inside him since. It gives him a balanced outlook, in his personal relationships and in his professional work. There’s what’s happening now — and there’s potential for something better.
Racism was constructed to be permanent, Fazal continued in the Authority Magazine interview. That is why change is so hard. Yet “when I think about anti-racism work or what it means to dismantle white supremacy, I want to hold the possibility that transformation could actually happen,” Fazal said.
“This creates a sense of hope that is necessary in anti-racism work.”
Future speakers
The Studium Generale Port Townsend lecture series starts Thursday with author and consultant Hanif Fazal’s talk at the Peninsula College building at 202 Eisenhower Ave. at Fort Worden State Park.
Free public presentations will continue every first Thursday of the month at 4 p.m., while more information can be found at https://pencol.edu/events.
Here’s the schedule of speakers:
Feb. 1: Author and Fulbright scholar Genevieve Hudson of Portland, Ore.
March 7: Port Townsend author and translator Bill Porter, who uses the pen name Red Pine
April 4: Port Townsend dancer, choreographer and educator Bill Evans
May 2: Port Townsend chef and educator Arran Stark
June 6: Port Townsend Film Festival Executive Director Danielle McClelland
