The MultiCultural Center appointed UC Santa Barbara alumnus Mickey Brown as its new program coordinator beginning Winter Quarter 2024.
The program coordinator position involves planning and overseeing nearly 100 events yearly on the MultiCultural Center (MCC) main calendar, including ongoing series and MCC collaborations with identity-based student groups. Events range from lectures, panels and workshops to performances, exhibits and screenings, intended to focus on education and community-building.
“We are not free until each and every one of us is free. Until the most marginalized and oppressed amongst us is free. As long as we live in a society that can pick an identity and oppress you and kill you and erase your history … none of us are free,” Brown said, referring to their guiding ethic of social justice.
Brown formerly served as the interim program coordinator starting in March 2023 after their graduation from UCSB, where they earned a bachelor’s degree in Asian American studies. During their time as a student, Brown was an MCC program assistant for two years, marking two and a half years working for the MCC in total. When he graduated, the center had a vacancy for a full-time position but wanted Brown to get more experience before hiring them outright.
One of Brown’s goals is to push programming to “one more level of radical.” The MCC had done programming in the past on topics like radical love and radical joy which, while Brown thinks are valuable, didn’t go beyond identity politics.
“I think some of these other events have addressed the surface-level emotions and surface-level identities. But I’m looking for something more intersectional and something a little, frankly, more interesting,” Brown said.
In their interim period, Brown coordinated a panel titled, “Harm Reduction Workshop: Building Skills and Knowledge for a World Without Police,” intending to speak explicitly on topics of police abolition, reducing harm for houseless people and safe treatment for individuals struggling with addiction, as well as humanizing addicts and houseless people.
“That kind of education is not really within the conventional standards of what this university, what white supremacy and what the institution wants us to learn,” Brown said. “By talking about these topics and just bringing it up, I think that takes us closer to a world where we can treat each other as human beings, which is really what social justice requires.”
One of his plans to step up the programming is coordinating a Palestine-related event each quarter. Last quarter, Students for Justice in Palestine and the MCC hosted a screening of “Tomorrow’s Power” — a 2017 documentary featuring Gaza’s social and economic crises — and post-film discussion as part of this effort.
“It got a little heated, as these conversations tend to get, but there was no violence. People get upset but feelings are not violent. When you discuss the history and the facts, and the documentary that we watched, I think the answer is clear,” Brown said. “Palestinians deserve human rights. Every human being deserves human rights.”
Brown said their undergraduate experience underscored the importance of education, now a guiding principle in their current work. Brown recounted how much he had not known about Japanese internment camps before his first Asian American studies course.
“There are so many gaps in the K-through-12 education system and in our college education system,” Brown said. “Even if you fulfill your ethnic studies requirements, I feel like there’s still so much more to learn.”
As a Filipino, Yokut and transgender individual, Brown feels a personal drive to advocate for those holding marginalized identities and make sure those identities are represented on the MCC calendar. As a student, he planned a campus performance by Sihasin, a Navajo sibling duo that blends rock, punk and Native music with anti-colonial and environmental messages. The duo’s brother, fellow musician (Blackfire) and activist Klee Benally, passed last week at 48 years old
“I feel like we hear about so many amazing activists. They just die too young, which makes this work always urgent. Our [Indigenous] people die at younger rates than any other group,” Brown said.
Brown felt drawn to working at the MCC as its programming “fills the gaps” in what is offered at UCSB by bringing outside professors, speakers and performers the community would otherwise not have wanted to hear.
“The MultiCultural Center is important because it asks you to care about this. Like if you’re coming to a lecture at 6 p.m. on a Thursday after you just went to classes all day, I think that’s really powerful,” Brown said. “I believe people want to learn, but they just don’t know what they need to learn about.”
