Beyond Race: SAIN et SAUF™ as a Framework for Confronting Every Form of Exclusion

Our SAIN et SAUF™ method was created from a specific perspective — the largely erased legacies of Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous women who made a difference even within societies and institutions that were never designed to include them, much less afford them agency.

But what this work really seeks to do is help us recognize that the mechanics of exclusion are not unique to race. The same dynamics that extract labor without credit, that demand assimilation as the price of belonging, that punish, "other," or deny equal protection under the law, and in some cases, dignity or even life itself, operate across every axis of marginalization: gender, disability, class, sexuality, age, documentation status, and more.

Race and ethnicity are the insidious blueprint for this unfortunately universalist architecture: the lessons we explore and integrate in this model extend to all kinds of difference — and they help us interrogate inequity, inequality, power imbalance, and in its worst realizations, animosity, bigotry, and hate.

SAIN et SAUF™ was built from race because race is where the foundation of American exclusion is most legible, most documented, and most violently enforced.

The antidote to this perfidy is defined within the rights movements across so many vectors of society. These hearken back to well before Abolition, but are most readily associated with the decades following the Civil Rights movement up until these recent times of systematized and retrograde backlash. SAIN et SAUF™ is one practice for redressing the backslide — and disseminating the change, progress, and liberation that so many of us still cherish.

It would be foolish and naive to envision SAIN et SAUF™ as the antidote to every horror of this time. What we hope, rather, is that it provides a broader, more inquisitive, and ultimately more inclusive lens for examining the mindsets, knee-jerk reactions, policies, and systems that allow such ills to proliferate with impunity.

From an unchecked microaggression to a “phobic” quip, joke, threat, or assault — right on up to laws, policies, and campaigns that seek to harm and erase life, implicitly or explicitly — harm is a spectrum. To paraphrase MLK and 19th-century abolitionist minister Theodore Parker: the arc is long, but it does bend — and SAIN et SAUF™ is one tool to help us bend it, even at our own individual level, toward progress, unity, and solidarity.

Wherever your personal priorities of identity lie, it is my sincere hope that SAIN et SAUF™ will be a springboard to more awareness, liberation, celebration, joy — honestly, SOLIDARITY and UNITY. 

Thank you!