Becoming an Anti-Racist Educator
M Gabriela Torres, Professor of Anthropology and Associate Provost for Academic Administration and Faculty Affairs, Past Co-Director, CCTL
Anti-racism is
the “active process of identifying and eliminating racism by changing systems, organizational structures, policies and practices and attitudes, so that power is redistributed and shared equitably.” –from the National Action Committee on the Status of Women International Perspectives: Women and Global Solidarity
Becoming an anti-racist is always a work in progress, seldom yields perfection, and differs depending on who you are.
Anneliese A. Singh in The Racial Healing Handbook suggests that there are different pathways for different people but that we can all be racist and/or anti-racist.
For example, Singh suggest that becoming an anti-racist as a white person means taking responsibility for your power and privilege, acknowledging the feelings you have to increased multiculturalism, cultivating a desire for understanding and growth, etc.
Becoming an anti-racist as a person of color means recognizing that there are important class differences between people of color, understanding that all racial groups are struggling in some way under White supremacy, realizing that people of color groups are not always united in solidarity, and challenging internalized White supremacy, etc.
The Racial Healing Handbook proposes that all anti-racists must commit to taking individual and collective action as well as engaging in relationship-building beyond their own racialized identity.
Becoming an anti-racist means having an anti-racist agenda.
An anti-racist agenda “offers an understanding or explanation of race, racism, and the particular racial formations that develop in and around the classroom or program in question.
It defines and explains the particular realms of experience that both individuals and groups find themselves involved in at that site or classroom.
This means the agenda may discuss how racism tends to be a part of the structures and mechanisms of grading in writing classrooms, in teacher feedback, in the ways that the school admits and places students into classes, in how and what it values in writing and how those values are related to larger dominant discourses. It explains the particular brands of whiteness and whiteliness that occur in the classroom and in assessments. […]
When it comes to race, racism, and antiracist work, it is important that everyone feels safe, but equally important that many also feel uncomfortable. It’s only through discomfort, perhaps pain and suffering, that we grow, develop, and change for the better.” (from Frankie Condon and Vershawn Ashanti Young, Performing an Anti-Racist Pedagogy, 2017)
This resource is a action-oriented guide that does not claim to be exhaustive. It is meant to engage all educators in the college campus in becoming anti-racist.
It will direct you to resources produced by communities of educators across the US.
Practices that help us become anti-racist
Step 1: Begin with personal reflection on your socialization and worldview.
Assess Your Position
This begins with understanding the forms racism takes, understanding white privilege, and for those willing to do a deep dive, engaging with critical race theory!
Racism takes many forms
The National Museum of African American History and Culture reminds us that being an anti-racist begins with understanding that racism takes several forms.
Whiteness and Anti-Racism are tied
Understanding white privilege and how it impacts communities of color is a crucial early step in your path to anti-racism and this CBS interview with Robin DiAngelo, Author of White Fragility, and Ibrahim X. Kendi, author of How to be an Anti-racist, is a great place to start.
Nolan Cabrera talks through “White Immunity” in this TEDx talk.
Your identity shapes your teaching and relationships
How does your own identity shape your teaching and relationships with students. Explore Columbia University’s Guide and look at a couple of primers on white fragility. The first from the National Educational Policy Center and the second from EdWeek.
Think about your students and sterotype threat.
Allyship
Thinking about your position as an ally is difficult work and Courtney Ariel provides advice in For our White Friends Desiring to be Allies.
Critical Race Theory
For a deep engagement with critical race theory, Adrienne Keene’s Critical Race Theory Course at Brown University is a wealth of resources.
Understand the Impact of White Supremacy in your Work
The culture of Higher Education is not exempt from racism. It is important to understand that racism in this context is expressed in individual lives as well as particular institutional challenges.
Impact in your institution
Bedelia Nicola Richards helps us start by asking Is Your University Racist?
Tuitt et al. focus on transforming the classroom at traditionally White institutions to make Black lives matter in To Improve the Academy (2018) 37 (1), 63-76
Impact on your colleagues
Your colleagues of color are impacted by White Supremacy. Teaching Tolerance provides a snippet into the impact of systemic racism on teachers of color.
Kimberly A. Griffin discusses the unique institutional barriers and benefits to increasing the representation of people of color n the Professoriate in a 2020 chapter in the Higher Education Handbook of Theory and Research.
Impact in your discipline
If you work in STEM, Kimberly A. Griffin addresses how culture shapes these discipline’s diversity in Addressing STEM Culture and Climate to Increase Diversity in STEM Disciplines.
Impact on youth of color
Alice Goffman shares in this TEDx talk “How We’re Priming Some Kids for College and others for prison.”
Impact on the health of people of color
David R. William shares in this TEDx talk “How Racism Makes Us Sick.”
Learn About How Racism Shapes Lives
Even if you already understand that your life experience cannot be assumed as universal, learning about how racism shapes all our lives allows for more informed anti-racist work.
The current moment
To start at the current historical moment, David Harris, president of Union College, shares the impact of the events of recent weeks in Minnesota, Central Park and elsewhere in Do You Know What it is Like?
The roots of the problem
Megan Ming Frances explains the root of racial injustice in this TEDx talk.
What is it like to be “the only one?”
In higher education, being “the only one” impacts students and colleagues in important ways. Amy Harmon looks at being the only one for a Black mathematician.
How is racism baked into culture and institutions?
More generally, Carol Anderson’s White Rage is a great place to get an understand structural racism in the US. If you would rather begin watching, her lecture at Emory University is revelatory.
Racism and Women
Women are particularly impacted by racism and the #SAYHERNAME campaign is one way to bring attention to the issue of police brutality against women. The African American Policy Forum provides a concise summary of #SAYHERNAME.
Racism and LGBTQ+ People
Human Rights Campaign has compiled a robust set of resources on Being African American and LGBTQ
Acknowledge Racial Trauma
Communities of color have seen multiple police killings of African American boys and men and girls and women either directly or vicariously through media accounts. They have been impacted directly or vicariously through media accounts by the criminalization of immigration, and increases in deportations and detention.
Racial Trauma
Boston College’s Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture has put together a toolkit for understanding the symptoms of racial trauma.
For an easy to use info graphic see: Jernigan, M. M., Green, C. E., Perez-Gualdron, Liu, M. M, Henze, K. T., Chen, C….Helms, J. E. (2015) #racialtraumaisreal (pdf).<
Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture, Chestnut Hill, MA. Retrieved from: www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/schools/Lynch School_sites/isprc/pdf/racialtraumaisrealManuscript.pdf
Resmaa Menaken in My Grandmother’s Hands provides a self-discovery guide to examine white body supremacy.
Consider adopting trauma-informed methods for teaching.
CCTL has curated a thread on #traumainformed pedagogy.
See also a very thorough resource on trauma-informed pedagogy from Columbia University’s School of Social Work.
Step 2: Take action in your role as an educator.
Assess Your Expectations of the “Ideal” Student
Racism is often embedded when we make assumptions about what students should be like, what they should know before your class begins, what comportment they should enact in their meeting with you, and notions about their capacities to self-discipline.
Move beyond seeing your students as “single stories”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie asks us to begin by understanding the dangers of the single story in this TEDx talk.
Understand the impact of your biases
Our experiences shape our expectations of students Bree Picover looks at the impact of this in The unexamined Whiteness of teaching: how White teachers maintain and enact dominant racial ideologies, Race Ethnicity and Education, (2009) 12:2, 197-215, DOI: 10.1080/13613320902995475
Work to process your biases
Verna Myers asks us to Walk Boldly Towards our Biases in this TEDx talk.
Working to process our biases crucially changes our ability be effective teachers Gina C. Torino discusses this work in Examining Biases and White Privilege: Classroom Teaching Strategies That Promote Cultural Competence. Women & Therapy, (2015) 38 (3-4) pp. 295–307
Assess the Content in Your Course, Advising, or Training Programs
What we believe to be the core of our discipline, our best practices as advisers, and the sense of our organizational schema — all have to be interrogated as they likely carry legacies of racism and colonialism.
Rely on a Toolkit
We recommend the inclusive pedagogy toolkit developed at CNDLS at George Washington University given its specificity as to what actions you can take in course design and implementation
On campus wide strategies
Using real campus examples, Tia Brown McNair, Estela Mara Bensimon and Lindsey Malcom-Piqueux in From Equity Talk to Equity Walk show how to understand equity-minded data analysis and develop campus strategies for making excellence inclusive.
If you work in Student Services
To provide Equity-Minded Student Services in the Online Environment, The Center for Organizational Responsibility and Advancement in collaboration with ACPA – Educators International and the Chief Student Services Officers Association published a webinar featuring Dr. Luke Wood and Dr. Frank Harris.
Consider who you include in your syllabi.
One way to do this is to follow the guidelines of the Cite Black Women Collective that ask us to read Black women’s work, integrate Black women into the CORE of your syllabus (in life & in the classroom), acknowledge Black women’s intellectual production, make space for Black women to speak, and give Black women the space and time to breathe.
Consider Student Bandwidth
Cia Verschelden’ s Bandwidth Recovery: Helping Students Reclaim Cognitive Resources Lost to Poverty, Racism, and Social Marginalization.
The cognitive resources for learning of many of our students have been and are being diminished by the negative effects of persistent economic insecurity and discrimination and hostility against non-majority groups based on race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation or gender identity, and other aspects of difference.
Recognizing that these students are no different than their peers in terms of cognitive capacity, we can implement strategies and interventions – in and outside the classroom – that show promise in helping students regain the cognitive resources to be successful in college.
The interventions include values affirmation, connecting the known to the unknown, growth mindset and neurobics, disidentification with the academic self, and high-hope syllabi. A quick summary of the approach is in this EdWeek Interview.
Employ Evidence-Based Anti-Racist Pedagogy
There are many robust pedagogical approaches for organizing your teaching and ensuring that you are ready to engage in difficult discussions.
Be prepared to engage in difficult discussions.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture offers guidance on how to talk about race.
In this hour-long 2019 interview between Beverly Daniel Tatum and Robin DiAngelo on race and racism in Higher Education at the ACE Annual Meeting, the authors discuss the importance of developing intergroup and intragroup dialogues.
Purposeful dialogues in the classroom are an other approach to engaging in inclusive pedagogy. This approach can take many forms but starts from the idea that we need to talk about both our difference and what connects us as persons. Two examples used in higher ed are: Intergroup Dialogue, and Racial Healing Circles.
Difficult dialogues, if well done, are central for increasing diversity and inclusion. There are great resources on this including Vanderbilt University’s managing difficult dialogues and the University of Michigan’s discussing difficult or high-stakes topics (this resource addresses dialogues that are unplanned and instructor identity).
Build a compassionate environment that allows for mistakes.
Cyndi Kernahan’s Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Classroom provides a detailed guide.
Build an anti-racist writing practice.
Asao B. Inoue’s Anti-racist Writing Assessment Ecologies provides a guide to thinking about how to support student assignments that develop anti-racism.
Learn about the breadth of options in anti-racist pedagogy.
Andrea Aebersold at UC Irvine.has put together a reading list of scholarship on anti-racist pedagogy to draw from.
Budget time to feel and be present
According to Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning, contemplative pedagogy is an approach to teaching and learning with the goal of encouraging deep learning through focused attention, reflection, and heightened awareness. Explore Columbia University’s Contemplative Teaching Resources.
Provide better feedback on student work
Cohen et. al ask us to consider different approaches to providing feedback in “Breaking the Cycle of Mistrust: Wise Interventions to Provide Critical Feedback Across the Racial Divide.”
Consider also Juwah, C., et al. (in Enhancing Student Learning Through Effective Formative Feedback (2004)), who point to seven principles of effective feedback practice.
Does grading help or hinder equity and learning?
Read Grades can Hinder Learning.
There are many alternate grading strategies and resources on ungrading to help you design a strategy that will work for you and your students.
Make a Concrete and Actionable Plan to Change
Four key strategies to go from learning to action now!
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- Schedule learning and action into every week. Justice in June gives you a model to do just that!
- Identify relationships that you want to build and strengthen. These relationships may be individual ones with colleagues or students, or they may be collective relationships that can be built by participating in a campus reading groups, learning communities, or workshops. Many programs are offered on our campus!
- Think about your role on campus: are there changes that should be made by you in your practice, in your department or across campus? If there are, consider working with others — or even stepping up to lead.
- Do you know what your professional association is doing? Many scientific societies and professional associations have put together a wealth of resources that are specific to your work. Look them up!