As the director of Refugee and Immigrant Community Services (RICS) at Heartland Human Care Services, Léa
Tienou-Gustafson has unique insight into the many ways people in America understand race and experience racism. A child of immigrants, Léa has lived and traveled in many countries over the course of her life, and she said part of her work with RICS to help immigrants and refugees settle and thrive in the U.S. includes helping people adjust to a differently racialized society.
Léa and her team at RICS provide case management, employment, educational, and youth services to more than 1,000 refugees and immigrants annually, and Léa is a member of Heartland Alliance’s Anti-Racism Response Committee.
“This work matters to me because racism and white supremacy are baked into the fabric of our society, and we must fight against them with all we’ve got, all the time and in all that we do,” Léa said.
Describe a truly equitable and free society. How is it different from now? What are we still missing?
The key to a truly free society is not just about physical freedom and access to opportunities, but also the ability to be fully yourself in each and every context. For a lot of people in the world, that isn’t the case right now. In my work at Heartland Alliance with Refugee and Immigrant Community Services, it’s often broken systems that lead to people not being able to be fully free and thrive in communities. In a free and equitable society, people are able to live freely without fear and to reach their full potential in society.
How are you working toward this vision? How does your work at Heartland Alliance support this? How can others work toward this?
At RICS, we help individuals build new lives and thrive in the U.S., but it’s also our job to think about the larger systems, policies, and practices at play and how we can advocate for a more just refugee resettlement system. My work with Heartland’s Anti-Racism Response Council is similar in that way—we look at the policies and systems that affect our work at Heartland and how to ensure equitable practices so that not just participants can bring themselves fully to the work, but so that all staff can too. We want to truly honor each and every person’s dignity in the services we provide.
The heart of this work is reflection. Every individual can try to be cognizant of the ways inequity and systemic racism seep into systems—interrogation is key to fighting racism and building equity. It’s about understanding how culture is impacted by racism and white supremacy, and really interrogating those things.
Sankofa is a word in the Akan Twi and Fante languages of Ghana that translates to “Go back and get it.” Sankofa symbolizes the importance of knowing and learning from our past to guide our future. Where should we look to in our past to help guide us to that vision?
When we learn about the history of this country, we often don’t hear about the horrors that have existed, or the very systemic history of racism. The important takeaway of Sankofa is that we spend time looking at our past, not to be ashamed but to understand how it has shaped current structures and power dynamics.
Sankofa is about looking to the good things, too. For me, that means drawing strength from my parents’ immigration story in my own work with refugees and immigrants. There are a lot of problematic things in our history, but looking at the ways immigrants have built and continue to contribute to this nation is important and impacts where we are today.
Are there individuals or events that could help us achieve our goals of equity and opportunity for all?
As Heartland Alliance and at RICS, our participants are the center of the work, and they’re the people who will help us get to our vision. We all have our own identities, and our participants know many things we do not—the refugee process, resettlement in a new country, being introduced to a differently racialized society—and in order to get to a vision of a truly equitable and free society, we need to really be in true partnership with our participants.
