Tarso Ramos

Tarso Ramos is Executive Director of Political Research Associates. Under his leadership, PRA has expanded existing lines of research documenting right wing attacks on reproductive, gender and racial justice by launching several new initiatives on subjects that include the export of U.S.-style homophobic campaigns abroad, the spread of Islamophobia, and the Right’s investment in redefining religious liberty toward discriminatory ends. Before joining PRA, Ramos served as founding director of Western States Center’s Racial Justice Program, which works to oppose racist public policy initiatives and support progressive people of color-led organizations. As director of the Wise Use Public Exposure Project in the mid-’90s, he tracked the Right’s anti-union and anti-environmental campaigns.

As an Activist-in-Residence, Ramos has been working on addressing authoritarianism and misogyny as well as examining gender and White Supremacy. Among the warning signs of authoritarianism is the mobilization of xenophobia, racism, misogyny, and religious bigotry and the emergence of violent, organized street forces. Growing misogyny, the Incel movement just one example, appears to have been recently accelerated by open hostility to women from Trump and overly normative gender roles promoted by the Christian Right. Ramos is thus working to understand better the relationship between authoritarianism and misogyny, the ways in which misogyny is currently being mobilized by the Far Right/Alt Right and being used and supported by the Trump Administration, as well as learning from the ways in which it has been resisted historically and globally by feminist movements. In collaboration with Loretta Ross, Ramos is planning to convene a group of strategists and scholars to situate misogyny and current authoritarian practices within the long history of US White supremacy, generate new ideas for further research and collaboration, and develop frameworks to combat and transform these trends. On November 13, Ramos is participating in a panel discussion at Barnard, Building from the Left: Strategies to Disrupt the Right, open to the community to probe how the left can develop more robust strategies to undermine and disrupt the powerful ascendance of the U.S. Right, and build a transformative intersectional social justice agenda that encompasses reproductive justice, LGBTQ rights, racial and immigrant justice, civil liberties, and economic justice. This event is free and open to all.