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Are Canadian Universities in any position to lead anti-racism movements?

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Are Canadian Universities in any position to lead anti-racism movements?

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Are Canadian universities in any position to lead anti-racism movements? — University Affairs

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To work in a setting in which all of the power, opportunities, leadership and administration is primarily white is a powerful reality check.

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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

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A New York Times Bestseller
A Washington Post Bestseller
Named a "Best Essay Collection of the Decade" by Literary Hub

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings-asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass-offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

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Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants: Kimmerer, Robin Wall: 9781571313560: Books - Amazon.ca

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Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future 

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Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future 

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PERSPECTIVES ON WRITING Series Editors: SUSAN H. MCLEOD and RICH RICE In ANTIRACIST WRITING ASSESSMENT ECOLOGIES, ASAO B. INOUE theorizes classroom writing assessment as a complex system that is "more than" its interconnected elements. To explain how and why antiracist work in the writing classroom is vital to literacy learning, Inoue incorporates ideas about the white racial habitus that informs dominant discourses in the academy and other contexts. Inoue helps teachers understand the unintended racism that often occurs when teachers do not have explicit antiracist agendas in their assessments. Drawing on his own teaching and classroom inquiry, Inoue offers a heuristic for developing and critiquing writing assessment ecologies that explores seven elements of any writing assessment ecology: power, parts, purposes, people, processes, products, and places. ASAO B. INOUE is Director of University Writing and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Tacoma. He has published on writing assessment, validity, and composition pedagogy in Assessing Writing, The Journal of Writing Assessment, Composition Forum, and Research in the Teaching of English, among other journals and collections. His co-edited collection Race and Writing Assessment (2012) won the CCCC's Outstanding Book Award for an edited collection.

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Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future

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Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future: Inoue, Asao B: 9781602357730: Books - Amazon.ca

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Decolonizing Shakespeare? Toward an Antiracist, Culturally Sustaining Praxis

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Decolonizing Shakespeare? Toward an Antiracist, Culturally Sustaining Praxis

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Activists and students have called on us to decolonize our syllabi and the university more broadly. Students at Yale, for example, insisted that the English department decolonize rather than simply diversify its curriculum, denouncing professors for teaching students "how to analyze canonical literary works" but not "to question why it is canonical, or the implications of canonical works that actively oppress and marginalize non-white, non-male, trans and queer people." Such demands ask us to take seriously legacies of settler colonialism and white supremacy and to interrogate how they infuse our institutions, our practices, and the texts we read, teach, and perform. This reflexivity allows us to use our teaching to remediate these historical injustices for our multiracial, multicultural students.

At Texas A&M University - San Antonio, where we teach, the colonial roots of the academy are readily apparent, as our campus sits on land historically belonging to the Coahuiltecan people and later occupied by the Mission Espada. An Anglocentric curriculum adds another layer to this colonial palimpsest, in a region where Latinxs have faced intertwined racial and linguistic oppression. As English faculty, we are working to craft a curriculum that can better serve our students, 82% of whom identify as Latinx. This imperative, we believe, applies to instructors throughout the United States and in other settler colonial nations, but it is all the more urgent for those of us serving students from colonized, marginalized, and otherwise oppressed groups.

But what should we do with Shakespeare, that centerpiece of the English curriculum (and our bread and butter as early modernists)? Shakespeare occupies a privileged place both in the white male canon and in the history of colonialism. His works were marshalled in the interests of empire, often celebrated as evidence of Anglo cultural supremacy, and used as part of "civilizing" colonial projects. Nonetheless, Shakespeare has repeatedly been mobilized for anti-colonial and anti-racist purposes, as in acclaimed works such as Aimé Césaire's Une Tempête and Toni Morrison's Desdemona, which disrupt the colonial imaginaries that continue to inflict political and epistemological violence on colonized subjects. Is it then possible to decolonize the Shakespeare classroom? What would this look like? And how might we as Shakespeare professors contribute to this decolonial effort? Or, at the very least, not reinscribe colonial violence?

Below, we list pedagogical strategies we've developed for teaching Shakespeare in more inclusive, anti-racist, and decolonial ways. While our experience is rooted in our institutional context, these practices - many of them drawn from women of color feminisms, critical race and decolonial studies, and culturally sustaining pedagogy - may be productively adapted elsewhere. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang remind us, "Decolonization is not a metaphor" and must involve deep structural change. It is in this spirit, and in collaboration with anti-racist activists, students, artists, and scholars, that we share these moves toward decolonizing Shakespeare.

Attend to Particular Contexts

Colonial education presumes that it can be transported, without modification, to any context. By contrast, decolonial pedagogy must attend to specific geographies, cultures, epistemologies, and colonial/racial histories. In our case, we must consider in particular the racial and linguistic politics surrounding Shakespeare in the US/Mexico borderlands, which have contributed to the idea, as Ruben Espinosa writes, that "his works are less accessible to certain users, such as Latinxs."

Address Shakespeare's Colonial Legacies and Canonization

We must interrogate Shakespeare's cultural role so that we do not contribute to the deification of Shakespeare as a representative of white cultural supremacy. In our courses, students discuss the political forces shaping Shakespeare's canonization, and we read essays such as Marcos Gonsalez's " Caliban Never Belonged to Shakespeare " to consider how Shakespeare continues to be used as an oppressive tool. Consequently, our students learn to analyze and dismantle the structures of power that contribute to colonial, white supremacist uses of Shakespeare.

Center Critical and Creative Responses by BIPOC Artists and Critics

To counter the whiteness of Shakespeare studies, we privilege responses to Shakespeare by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) scholars and artists. Counter-renditions such as Hip-Hop artist Akala's performances, Djanet Sear's Harlem Duet,and Caridad Svich's Twelve Ophelias, offer students varied patterns of critical engagement, inviting them to contend with Shakespeare's works in ways that are relevant to their lives. These texts spark conversations about intertextuality and appropriation and are treated as important works in their own right, not merely as Shakespeare derivatives.

Privilege Students' Cultural Knowledge and Provide Opportunities to Connect It to Course Content

Whereas colonialism devalues Black, Indigenous, and Latinx cultures, decolonial pedagogies, such as Django Paris's culturally sustaining pedagogy, recognize them as vital funds of knowledge. Creative assignments such as performances, remixes, and fan fiction allow students to harness their cultural repositories to speak back to Shakespeare and to appropriate his works for their own purposes. For example, Katherine's students created a bilingual appropriation of a scene from The Merchant of Venice that tackles questions of linguistic diversity and prejudice against undocumented Mexican immigrants.

Center Intersectional Understandings of Identity

As Laura Turchi and Ayanna Thompson argue, effective pedagogy must center questions of identity. To do this, we teach Kimberlé Crenshaw's framework of intersectionality; ask students to consider intersectionality in the works we read; and design assignments that encourage students to explore their own identities. We also attend to our identities as a White and a Black woman teaching Shakespeare and to the negotiation of power in our classrooms.

Encourage Linguistic Diversity and Decenter Standard American English (SAE)

We must decouple Shakespeare from the linguistic violence of white supremacy. Decolonial pedagogy invites students to draw on their own linguistic traditions to understand, respond to, and revise Shakespeare. Lisa, for example, asks students to translate a passage from Shakespeare into both SAE and their home language, which encourages them to value their own linguistic resources and to think broadly about questions of language, power, and textual circulation.

Attend to the Racist, Misogynist, and Colonial Violence of Canonical Texts

Decolonial pedagogy must attend to the trauma experienced by students and to the ways in which the gendered, racial, and colonial violence dramatized in canonical texts may be triggering. A trauma-informed approach responsibly addresses the graphic racial and sexual violence in, for example, Titus Andronicus, as well as the more mundane but ubiquitous racism and misogyny throughout the plays. Students might reflect on their own embodied reactions to such moments, and could use these responses as a basis for critique or to evaluate whether and how such works should in fact be taught and performed.

Decenter Western Academic Epistemologies and Practices

The academy traditionally privileges individualistic and detached modes of critique that ask students, particularly BIPOC students, to disavow their embodied identities. A decolonial pedagogy, by contrast, works with students to combine critique with other ways of knowing, including the corporeal, the affective, and the spiritual. In remix projects, for example, our students have created songs, paintings, photo essays, sculptures, dances, and altars relating to themes in the plays. Moreover, performance projects can accomplish this work, given the embodied, collaborative model of the theater, both in the early modern period and today. In addition, we have incorporated a greater emphasis on reflective writing, a student-centered practice that helps students integrate their ideas and embodied responses.

Employ Anti-Racist Assessment

Given the role of grades in evaluating and determing student success, it is crucial to consider their role in perpetuating racist colonial hierarchies. We suggest consulting Asao B. Inoue's work on anti-racist assessment and labor-based grading, as he encourages us to resist the idealization of colonial standards of expression and to seek other ways of measuring students' contributions.

Implementing these principles and practices has energized our classrooms. Students have expressed excitement about the idea of creating knowledge alongside - and sometimes in resistance to - Shakespeare, and have felt empowered to draw on their own cultures, histories, and languages. We believe, moreover, that such efforts will help attract BIPOC students to early modern studies, which, as Kimberly Anne Coles, Kim F. Hall, and Ayanna Thompson argue in their recent call to action, is necessary for our field's continued relevance. More broadly, a culturally sustaining approach resists reinscribing the linguistic and cultural violence that so easily and subtly inheres in many Shakespearean classrooms, and it helps BIPOC students displace internalized forms of oppression that are fostered by traditional pedagogical environments. This work is fraught and necessarily incomplete within the confines of the neoliberal university, but it is essential if we hope to disrupt the colonial and white supremacist forces that have molded Shakespeare reception and the academy more broadly.

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Decolonizing Shakespeare? Toward an Antiracist, Culturally Sustaining Praxis

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Activists and students have called on us to decolonize our syllabi and the university more broadly. Students at Yale, for example, insisted that the English department decolonize rather than simply diversify its curriculum, denouncing professors for teaching students "how to analyze canonical literary works" but not "to question why it is canonical, or the implications of canonical works that actively oppress and marginalize non-white, non-male, trans and queer people."

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The Water Walker is a short documentary, tracing the roots, passion and perseverance of young Autumn. We follow her story as she prepares...

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Embedding Anti-Racist Principles in School Food Programming

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Embedding Anti-Racist Principles in School Food Programming

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Embedding Anti-Racist Principles in School Food Programming

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The Coalition for Healthy School Food organized two panel discussions during Food Secure Canada's Cultivating Change event in November 2020. You can find the link to the first session from November 13th here.

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The Skin We're  In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power

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The Skin We're  In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power

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The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power

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The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power: Cole, Desmond: 9780385686341: Books - Amazon.ca

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"The 'reverse racism' card is often pulled by white people when people of color call out racism and discrimination, or create spaces for themselves ... that white people aren't a part of. The impulse behind the reverse racism argument seems to be a desire to prove that people of color don't have it that bad, they're not the only ones that are put at a disadvantage or targeted because of their race. It's like the Racism Olympics. And it's patently untrue" (Blay, 2015).

Reverse Racism is a Myth

While assumptions and stereotypes about white people do exist, this is considered racial prejudice, not racism. Racial prejudice refers to a set of discriminatory or derogatory attitudes based on assumptions derived from perceptions about race and/or skin colour. Thus, racial prejudice can indeed be directed at white people (e.g., "White people can't dance") but is not considered racism because of the systemic relationship to power. When backed with power, prejudice results in acts of discrimination and oppression against groups or individuals. In Canada, white people hold this cultural power due to Eurocentric modes of thinking, rooted in colonialism, that continue to reproduce and privilege whiteness. It is whiteness that has the power to define the terms of racialized others' existence. Tim Wise explains how, for white individuals,

"When a group of people [such as racialized individuals] has little or no power over you institutionally, they don't get to define the terms of your existence, they can't limit your opportunities, and you needn't worry much about the use of a slur to describe you and yours, since, in all likelihood, the slur is as far as it's going to go. What are they going to do next: deny you a bank loan? Yeah, right. ... White perceptions are what end up counting in a white-dominated society. If whites say [Indigenous people] are savages (be they of the "noble" or vicious type), then by God, they'll be seen as savages. If [Indigenous people] say whites are mayonnaise-eating Amway salespeople, who the hell is going to care? If anything, whites will simply turn it into a marketing opportunity. When you have the power, you can afford to be self-deprecating, after all" (2002).

Ricky Sherover-Marcuse asserts that "we should not confuse the occasional mistreatment experienced by whites at the hands of people of color with the systematic and institutionalized mistreatment experienced by people of color at the hands of whites" (p. 2). While expressions of racial prejudice directed at white people may hurt the white person/people individually or personally, and are never to be condoned, they do not have the power or authority to affect the white person's social/economic/political location and privileges.

"Racism has nothing to do with feelings. It is a measurable reality that white people are not subject to, regardless of their income or status" (Harriot, 2018).

Reverse racism is a myth because it attempts to ignore the power/privilege dynamic between the individuals/groups involved; the myth of reverse racism assumes that racism occurs on a so-called level playing field, when in actuality, it does not. One claim of "reverse racism" that is often made is in relation to affirmative actions programs: programs that were created to help ensure that non-white individuals are given equal consideration and opportunities, whether it is in regards to employment, school, or scholarships etc. For white individuals, programs such as this might feel like something is being "taken away." Zeba Blay outlines how white people often "believe deserving white students are discriminated against while academically unqualified students are given highly coveted college or company positions ― just because they happen to tick the 'ethnic minority' box. This argument ignores the fact that affirmative action did not come out of nowhere ― there was a need for a system that would address the decades of underrepresentation of people of color both academically and in the job world." Sherover-Marcuse explains how "[a]ffirmative action programs are attempts to repair the results of institutionalized racism by setting guidelines and establishing procedures for finding qualified applicants from all segments of the population" (p. 2). In other words, these programs do not privilege people of colour but are an attempt to "level" the not-so-level playing field that has historically privileged a certain type of candidate.

↳ See our definition of White Privilege/White-Skin Privilege
References:
Recommended Readings:

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Myth of Reverse Racism - Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre

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"The 'reverse racism' card is often pulled by white people when people of color call out racism and discrimination, or create spaces for themselves ... that white people aren't a part of.

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Canada the Redeemer and Denials of Racism

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Canada the Redeemer and Denials of Racism

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Canada the redeemer and denials of racism

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An Islamic Perspective on Knowledge, Knowing, and Methodology

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An Islamic Perspective on Knowledge, Knowing, and Methodology

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Is There Such a Thing as “Anti-White Racism”?

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Is There Such a Thing as “Anti-White Racism”?

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Is There Such a Thing as “Anti-White Racism”?

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by Daniel Sabbagh Given that the denunciation of “anti-White racism” has become one of the far right’s hobbyhorses in France, the temptation is great to […]

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This easy-to-use guide explains how to recruit, nourish, and fortify writers of color through innovative reading, writing, workshop, critique, and assessment strategies.

A captivating mix of memoir and progressive teaching strategies, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom demonstrates how to be culturally attuned, twenty-first century educators.

The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop is a call to create healthy, sustainable, and empowering classroom communities. Award-winning educator Felicia Rose Chavez exposes the invisible politics of power and privilege that have silenced writers of color for far too long. It's more urgent than ever that we consciously work against traditions of dominance in the classroom, but what specific actions can we take to achieve authentically inclusive communities? Together, we will address how to:

· Deconstruct our biases to achieve a cultural shift in perspective.

· Design a democratic teaching model to create safe spaces for creative concentration.

· Recruit, nourish, and fortify students of color to best empower them to exercise voice.

· Embolden our students to self-advocate as responsible citizens in a globalized community.

Finally, a teaching model that protects and platforms students of color, because every writer deserves access to a public voice. For anyone looking to liberate their thinking from "the way it's always been done," The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop is a clear, compelling guidebook on a necessary step forward.

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The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom

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The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom: Chavez, Felicia Rose: 9781642592672: Books - Amazon.ca

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The dark history of Canada's Food Guide: How experiments on Indigenous children shaped nutrition policy

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The dark history of Canada's Food Guide: How experiments on Indigenous children shaped nutrition policy

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This segment originally aired on April 18, 2021.

When historian Ian Mosby published evidence that the Canadian government had conducted nutritional experiments on Indigenous children in residential schools, his findings made headlines across the country.

In his academic article 'Administering Colonial Science,' published in 2013, Mosby revealed how nutritional studies and experiments were performed in Indigenous communities and residential schools in the 1940s and '50s.

The tests were apparently done, explained Mosby, without the informed consent or knowledge of the Indigenous people involved.

What isn't yet widely known, said Mosby, a professor of history at Ryerson University, is how these experiments are directly connected to Canada's Food Guide.

Government policies were creating conditions of hunger

In the 1940s, federal bureaucrats found that malnutrition was widespread in Indigenous communities and residential schools. But this wasn't new information to many Indigenous people.

"Indigenous people had been arguing for a long time that their kids were hungry in residential schools, that government policies were creating conditions of hunger in their communities," explained Mosby.

The Canadian government began to send researchers to examine these conditions of hunger. In many cases, the researchers found "severe malnutrition," said Mosby.

Some federal bureaucrats and scientists saw the pervasive malnutrition and hunger experienced by Indigenous people as an opportunity to test their scientific theories.

Lionel Pett

The federal Nutrition Services Division was established in 1941 under the leadership of a medical doctor and biochemist named Lionell Pett.

Pett was a "major player" in setting nutritional standards and policy in Canada, said Mobsy. Scientific questions were often on Pett's mind, explained Mosby, questions like what the daily recommended intake for different vitamins and minerals should be. But there was controversy over how to determine dietary standards, said Mosby, and it was challenging to do the kinds of studies that were needed to test Pett's questions.

The long term impact of that kind of hunger during childhood leads to a whole series of problems. - Ian Mosby

"It's really difficult to do those kinds of experiments because you need hungry people," said Mosby.

"When Pett began to uncover these accounts of hunger in Indigenous communities and in residential schools, he saw this as an opportunity to put some of these controversies to the test."

The experiments

Pett oversaw a series of nutritional experiments in Indigenous communities. Among these was a long-term study carried out in residential schools which used Indigenous students as experimental subjects.

In 1947, Pett began testing different nutritional interventions on close to 1,000 children in six residential schools across the country. These experiments used the baseline of malnutrition and hunger experienced by Indigenous children in the schools as a way to test "a whole bunch of both interventions and non-interventions," explained Mosby. These experiments included some children, who were known to be malnourished, receiving no changes to their diets in order to act as controls in the experiments.

You can draw a direct line between the types of experiments that were being done in residential schools and .... the food guide. -Ian Mosby

One intervention included testing an experimental fortified flour mixture on residential school students. There was a federal ban on fortified flour at the time, and there was debate over whether or not to legalize it, explained Mosby. Pett and his colleagues introduced an experimental flour mixture which included substances like bone meal. Pett and the researchers found increased incidences of anemia among the students who were fed the experimental flour.

The federal government's larger social experiment

The nutritional experiments were part of a larger series of "investigations" into the diets of Indigenous people during this period, what Mosby described as the federal government's "social experiment" to transform Indigenous people's diets.

A justification for these experiments, explained Mosby, was a theory going around among scientists and bureaucrats that the so-called "Indian problem" might have been caused by malnutrition and not due to what they saw as "racial traits."

"They took the extremely racist idea that Indigenous peoples were somehow racially inferior, and they suggested that might have had to do with nutrition. And so they took it upon themselves to solve this 'Indian problem' through expert intervention into Indigenous people's diets."

"At the heart of this was this .... willful attempt to ignore the actual cause of the changes in Indigenous people's diets which was colonialism, which was the Indian Act, which was the forced removal of Indigenous people from their lands, the limits placed on Indigenous peoples' livelihoods through regulations on hunting and trapping, through the effects of residential schools - all of these different elements of Canadian colonialism, which led to problems with Indigenous people's diets."

Direct line between nutritional experiments and Canada's Food Guide

"The most important connection between the nutrition experiments and Canada's Food Guide is Lionel Pett," said Mosby. "Pett was the architect of Canada's Food Guide."

Pett was the primary author of Canada's Official Food Rules, which was introduced in 1942 and was the precursor to Canada's Food Guide.

"The nature of the experiments that [Pett] conducted in residential schools was determined based on a whole series of internal debates among nutrition professionals and bureaucrats about Canada's Food Guide and about what a healthy and nutritionally adequate diet looked like."

"Pett used the opportunity of hungry kids in residential schools ... who had no choice in what they were going to eat and whose parents had no choice in what they were going to eat ... to attempt to answer a series of questions that were of interest to him professionally and scientifically."

"You can draw a direct line between the types of experiments that were being done in residential schools and these larger debates about how they should structure the food guide."

The ongoing impact of the nutritional experiments

"What happened to me because of these experiments?" is a question that Mosby has heard from many residential school survivors.

Following the publication of Mosby's 2013 article which revealed that nutritional experiments were conducted in Indigenous communities and on students in residential schools, Mosby co-authored an article that investigated the long-term health impacts of the widespread malnutrition and hunger experienced in residential schools.

''Hunger was never absent': How residential school diets shaped current patterns of diabetes among Indigenous peoples in Canada' was published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 2017 and was co-authored by Mosby and Tracey Galloway, an anthropology professor at the University of Toronto .

"We found that the food served in residential schools, that the level of hunger experienced by kids, had long term health effects not just on survivors themselves, but also on their children."

"The long term impact of that kind of hunger during childhood leads to a whole series of problems, starting with stunting and kids not reaching their growth potential, but leading to a higher incidence of type 2 diabetes, a tendency toward obesity later in life, and a whole range of problems that sort of cascade from there."

These are health problems that impact Indigenous people disproportionately in Canada, explained Mosby. "There's been a tendency over time to argue that there's a genetic basis for this," he said.

"That ignores the fact that .... a lot of these health conditions are produced by Canadian institutions like residential schools."

Mosby hopes his research "puts the lie to" the idea that there's "somehow an Indigenous genetic susceptibility" to health conditions like type 2 diabetes. "In fact, the susceptibility is Canadian colonialism and Canadian colonial policy."
Interview produced by Zoe Tennant.

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The dark history of Canada's Food Guide: How experiments on Indigenous children shaped nutrition policy | CBC Radio

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This segment originally aired on April 18, 2021. When historian Ian Mosby published evidence that the Canadian government had conducted nutritional experiments on Indigenous children in residential schools, his findings made headlines across the country. In his academic article 'Administering Colonial Science,' published in 2013, Mosby revealed how nutritional studies and experiments were performed in Indigenous communities and residential schools in the 1940s and '50s.

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Racial Equity Tools Glossary

Words and their multiple uses reflect the tremendous diversity that characterizes our society. Indeed, universally agreed upon language on issues relating to racism is nonexistent. We discovered that even the most frequently used words in any discussion on race can easily cause confusion, which leads to controversy and hostility. It is essential to achieve some degree of shared understanding, particularly when using the most common terms. In this way, the quality of dialogue and discourse on race can be enhanced.

Language can be used deliberately to engage and support community anti-racism coalitions and initiatives, or to inflame and divide them. Discussing definitions can engage and support coalitions. However, it is important for groups to decide the extent to which they must have consensus and where it is okay for people to disagree. It is also helpful to keep in mind that the words people use to discuss power, privilege, racism and oppression hold different meanings for different people. For instance, people at different stages of developing an analysis tend to attach different meanings to words like discrimination, privilege and institutional racism. Furthermore, when people are talking about privilege or racism, the words they use often come with emotions and assumptions that are not spoken.

Many of the terms in this glossary have evolved over time. For example, given the changing demographic trends in the United States, the word "minority" no longer accurately reflects the four primary racial/ethnic groups. The terms "emerging majority" and "people of color" have become popular substitutes. Also, the terms used to refer to members of each community of color have changed over time. Whether to use the terms African American or Black, Hispanic American, Latinx or Latino, Native American or American Indian, and Pacific Islander or Asian American depends on a variety of conditions, including your intended audiences' geographic location, age, generation, and, sometimes, political orientation.

SOURCE: Project Change's "The Power of Words." Originally produced for Project Change Lessons Learned II, also included in A Community Builder's Toolkit - both produced by Project Change and The Center for Assessment and Policy Development with some modification by RacialEquityTools.org.

The main source for each definition is noted with its term below. Some definitions are paraphrased or updated. If you plan to use a couple of the terms in your materials, we encourage you to keep the SOURCE citation(s) that we have listed for them.

You can download a PDF version of this glossary . Please feel free to share the RET Glossary PDF or post a link on your site. We request that you use the following citation: Racial Equity Tools Glossary, MP Associates, Center for Assessment and Policy Development, and World Trust Educational Services, July 2022.

For guidance on evaluation terms in particular, see .

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Words and their multiple uses reflect the tremendous diversity that characterizes our society. Indeed, universally agreed upon language on issues relating to racism is nonexistent. In this way, the quality of dialogue and discourse on race can be enhanced.

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Introduction

The SRO program was created in 1979. Since its creation, we have never seen a public review of the program.

This project was created by Dr. Alexandre Da Costa and Bashir Mohamed out of a need to investigative this secretive program.

We FOIP'd the Edmonton Police Service requesting data relating to the SRO program. Data that should have always been public. We spent our evenings and weekends analyzing the data - this website is the result of our work.

One key aspect that emerges in the data is the validation of the experiences of students that have been overpoliced. We hope you keep this in mind as you review our research. The data we collected does not identify the racial identities of students, but we discuss the potential implications of race in the larger context of policing in schools.

This work is also important because police agencies and school boards have - for too long - avoided acknowledging the documented effects that policing in schools has on children and youth who are Black, Indigenous, students with disabilities, English language learners, immigrants, refugees, and/or LGBTQ2S+.

For Bashir: The documents were eye-opening and emotional, considering my last year of highschool (2011-2012) is captured in the data. In many ways, the information we gathered validated my experience as a young Black student navigating the Edmonton school system. This project also emphasizes the importance of data and how so many Edmonton institutions justify and maintain systemic racism via the denial of data - i.e., we are told that our experiences are not real because it is not captured. This project proves our experiences.

For Alex: Publicly accessible, critical analysis of the Edmonton SRO Program puts into practice politically-engaged work that I strongly believe more sociologists should be doing. Sociology is a field that solidified its place in North American universities by producing reams of research on and about the racialized "other."It is also a discipline that, through the highly popular subfield of criminology, has increased collaborations with police agencies. These relationships provide institutional legitimacy and disproportionate space to voices advocating reform rather than structurally addressing the harms caused by policing. Instead, sociologists should be asking: Who is sociology for? What type of intellectual and political work can we do to create a society free from policing?

This is an ongoing project and further analysis will emerge as we move forward. Our current work barely scratches the surface but there was enough information to begin the public dissemination of our analysis.

The project is hosted on this website for all and without a paywall. We have broken up our analysis into four parts: The Numbers, A Primer On The SRO Program, A Story Of Surveillance, and Alternatives To Police In Schools.

You can find all documents we reference by clicking here.

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The SRO program was created in 1979. Since its creation, we have never seen a public review of the program. This project was created by Dr. Alexandre Da Costa and Bashir Mohamed out of a need to investigative this secretive program. We FOIP'd the Edmonton Police Service requesting data relating to the SRO program.

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We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

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We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

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Winner of the 2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award

Drawing on personal stories, research, and historical events, an esteemed educator offers a vision of educational justice inspired by the rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists.

Drawing on her life's work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex.

To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom-not merely reform-teachers, parents, and community leaders must approach education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist. Following in the tradition of activists like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer, We Want to Do More Than Survive introduces an alternative to traditional modes of educational reform and expands our ideas of civic engagement and intersectional justice.

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We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

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We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom: Love, Bettina: 9780807028346: Books - Amazon.ca

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A Guide to Responding to Microaggressions

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Racist and Sexist Microaggressions on College Campuses

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Racist and Sexist Microaggressions on College Campuses

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An examination of racist and sexist microaggressions on college c

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Intergenerational Trauma and Racism: How to Be an Ally

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Intergenerational Trauma and Racism: How to Be an Ally

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Intergenerational Trauma and Racism: How We All Play a Role – and How to Be an Ally

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Ayana Gilham, Regional Director of In-Home Services in Atlanta, explores intergenerational trauma and racism and how we can increase our consciousness of the role we play.

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Welcome to Anti-Racism Lab, the website for the Canada Research Chair in Feminism and Intersectionality 7-year research project on decolonization and antiracism in universities.

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On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life

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On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life

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What does diversity do? What are we doing when we use the language of diversity? Sara Ahmed offers an account of the diversity world based on interviews with diversity practitioners in higher education, as well as her own experience of doing diversity work. Diversity is an ordinary, even unremarkable, feature of institutional life. Yet diversity practitioners often experience institutions as resistant to their work, as captured through their use of the metaphor of the "brick wall." On Being Included offers an explanation of this apparent paradox. It explores the gap between symbolic commitments to diversity and the experience of those who embody diversity. Commitments to diversity are understood as "non-performatives" that do not bring about what they name. The book provides an account of institutional whiteness and shows how racism can be obscured by the institutionalization of diversity. Diversity is used as evidence that institutions do not have a problem with racism. On Being Included offers a critique of what happens when diversity is offered as a solution. It also shows how diversity workers generate knowledge of institutions in attempting to transform them.

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On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life

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On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life eBook : Ahmed, Sara: Amazon.ca: Kindle Store

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The Shattered Mosaic: How Canadian Social Structures Cause  Homelessness

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The Shattered Mosaic: How Canadian Social Structures Cause  Homelessness

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Tens of thousands of people are living in Canada without safe secure shelter every night and hundreds of thousands more are precipitously close to losing what housing they have. This book looks at the expenses, options and policies impacting people in Canadian cities to create homelessness. The inadequacy of social housing support in this wealthy country, coupled with indifference to the actual costs of meeting basic needs, means the remnants of our social safety net tend to let down the people who are most in need of help. The core of this book explains how members of certain sub-sections of our population are made more vulnerable through social structures, prejudice and neglect so that: Aboriginal people, newcomers, people with radicalized identities, single-income families, people with serious health and ability challenges, isolated seniors and gender-queer youth (among others) are less likely to be able to house and feed themselves. With better understanding of the structural constraints faced by vulnerable people, compassionate social policy upholds human rights and creates the context in which the beautiful diversity of people in Canadian cities can be fully appreciated. Social supports and effective economic regulation can be the metal frame work in which the brilliant colours of different cultures can be held within Canada but the last two decades of federal policy have broken and bent those supports beyond their ability to function.

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The Shattered Mosaic: How Canadian Social Structures Cause Homelessness

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The Shattered Mosaic: How Canadian Social Structures Cause Homelessness: Mary Ellen Donnan: 9781926476094: Books - Amazon.ca

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Abolitionist Teaching and the Future of Our Schools

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Abolitionist Teaching and the Future of Our Schools

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Abolitionist Teaching and the Future of Our Schools

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Navigating Race in Canadian Workplaces Toolkit

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Navigating Race in Canadian Workplaces Toolkit

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The Indigenous diversity gap - Academic Matters

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Where are the Indigenous Peoples in Canadian universities? Canadian postsecondary institutions have pursued equity, diversity, and inclusion policies and programs since the [...]

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Mapping the Leaky Leadership Diversity Pipelines at Five Canadian Universities

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Mapping the Leaky Leadership Diversity Pipelines at Five Canadian Universities

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Schooling Identity: Constructing Knowledge About Islam, Muslims and People of the Middle East in Canadian Schools

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Schooling Identity: Constructing Knowledge About Islam, Muslims and People of the Middle East in Canadian Schools

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What Systemic Racism Looks Like in Canada

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What Systemic Racism Looks Like in Canada

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TORONTO -- George Floyd's killing at the hands of police in Minneapolis and the ensuing wave of global protests have prompted many Canadians to take a deeper look at systemic racism, and national data reveals the stark racial divide in this country.

The most recent census data from 2016 shows that Black Canadians face far steeper economic challenges than white Canadians and other racial groups. For example, Black Canadians make significantly less money than non-racialized Canadians regardless of how long their families have lived in Canada.

First-generation Black Canadians make an average income of nearly $37,000, compared to an average income of $50,000 for new immigrants who are not members of a visible minority.

That wage gap doesn't go away over time. Third-generation Black Canadians make an average income of $32,000, compared with $48,000 for Canadians who aren't a visible minority - a demographic that, due to the way census data is collected, includes Indigenous Canadians, who also experience income disparity.

Those numbers are troubling but not surprising, says Andrea A. Davis, chair of York University's department of humanities and co-ordinator of the university's Black Canadian Studies Certificate.

"Often when people see statistics like this, the assume that well, there's clearly a rational and a good reason for this disparity," Davis told CTVNews.ca in an interview Thursday.

The reality, Davis said, is that Black immigrants are up against a system that makes assumptions about them based on the colour of their skin. She said many Black immigrants face a tougher time getting hired because employers say they want someone with "Canadian experience."

"Many of us have heard the stories of new immigrants who are doctors who can't get jobs, engineers who are driving taxi cabs in Toronto. That sort of reincorporation into the labour force is harder for Black people because they can be weeded out because of the colour of their skin."

Unemployment rates among Black Canadians are higher than other populations, and are more than double the rate of other visible minorities.

"Some racialized groups are seen as more productive, harder working, smarter - a 'good minority' - so they get absorbed far more quickly into the mainstream than Black new immigrants," Davis said.

But the income gap between Black Canadians and non-visible minorities doesn't go away for the children or grandchildren of Black immigrants. Davis said that's because many teachers treat Black children differently than their peers.

"These children go into an educational system that marks them as a deficit, that sees them as problematic, and then they struggle to integrate. And so they under-achieve in many cases and are unable to live up to the desires, the hopes of their parents. And once they enter the labour force, they repeat the struggle of their parents," she said.

"So it's a kind of cycle that doesn't break. And it can be invisible, so many Canadians don't see it because they don't know how to narrate it, or it's not narrated for them."

The data shows that Black youth are keen to achieve a higher education. Nearly 94 per cent of Black young people aged 15 to 25 surveyed in 2015 said they would like to complete a university degree, but only 59.9 per cent thought it was possible.

That gap between hope and expectation doesn't exist for the rest of the population. Eighty-two per cent of other groups surveyed said they wanted to achieve a university education, and 78.8 per cent believed they could.

Davis said this data falls in line with what she sees in her classroom. She teaches a first-year course on race at York University in Toronto, and the majority of her students are Black.

"They work tremendously hard and their aspirations are great. But very few people have told them they can be successful," she said. "I don't think it's about funding. Really, I don't. I think it's about the belief in self ... 'Do I belong here? Can I do this?'"

As part of her research, Davis studied the impact on violence in youth communities in Toronto and Jamaica. The most profound finding, she said, was how strongly Black youth in Toronto pushed back against the idea that the greatest violence they had faced in their communities was physical violence.

"They insisted that the most sustained, daily violence was the violence of the education system. It was teachers who did not believe in them, who stereotyped them, who over-disciplined and over-punished them, who constructed possibilities for them that were different from the possibilities for other children."

When it comes to hate crimes in Canada, Black people are far more likely than any other racial group to be victims of hate crimes, according to statistics from the Canadian Centre for Justice and Community Safety.

Canada is often celebrated as a multicultural nation, but Davis said that doesn't mean racism isn't a present and pervasive force here.

"It's difficult for Canadians to hold in their minds at the same time this idea, this fervent belief, that they live in a democratic and even a multicultural society, and that racism can exist in that same society. When they see acts of racism like George Floyd's death, they're convinced that racism is perpetuated by only a few individuals or bad apples, but it's not widespread," she said.

"We have to acknowledge that racism can look like hate, it can look like what happened to George Floyd, but that's only one way it shows up. It shows up in apathy, in silence, in ignorance, in the refusal to really learn.

"The reality is that racism is expressed not just as conscious acts of hate or violence, but it's far more complex than that. It evolves out of a set of deeply rooted systems in our country. So deeply rooted that it might be easy to miss."

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Black Canadians make significantly less annual average income that non-racialized Canadians, according to Statistics Canada data. (Area of square represents values.)

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Five charts that show what systemic racism looks like in Canada

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George Floyd's killing at the hands of police in Minneapolis and the ensuing wave of global protests have prompted many Canadians to take a deeper look at systemic racism. National data detailed on CTVNews.ca reveals the stark racial divide in this country.

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Willful Subjects eBook : Ahmed, Sara: Amazon.ca: Kindle Store

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Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

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Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

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Delving behind Canada's veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, Policing Black Lives traces the violent realities of anti-blackness from the slave ships to prisons, classrooms and beyond. Robyn Maynard provides readers with the first comprehensive account of nearly four hundred years of state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization and punishment of Black lives in Canada. While highlighting the ubiquity of Black resistance, Policing Black Lives traces the still-living legacy of slavery across multiple institutions, shedding light on the state's role in perpetuating contemporary Black poverty and unemployment, racial profiling, law enforcement violence, incarceration, immigration detention, deportation, exploitative migrant labour practices, disproportionate child removal and low graduation rates. Emerging from a critical race feminist framework that insists that all Black lives matter, Maynard's intersectional approach to anti-Black racism addresses the unique and understudied impacts of state violence as it is experienced by Black women, Black people with disabilities, as well as queer, trans, and undocumented Black communities. A call-to-action, Policing Black Lives urges readers to work toward dismantling structures of racial domination and re-imagining a more just society.

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Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present

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Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present: Maynard, Robyn, Maynard, Robyn: 9781552669792: Books - Amazon.ca

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Our Mission Critical Resistance seeks to build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe. We believe that basic necessities such as food, shelter, and freedom are what really make our communities secure.

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What We Do

Grants

APS Teacher Campaign

APS Teacher Campaign

ATN awards grants to educators and community members who strive to disrupt inequalities and injustice within their schools, communities, or both. We will be launching our 3rd annual grant cycle in late October 2023.

APS Teacher Campaign

APS Teacher Campaign

APS Teacher Campaign

Explore resources to learn about the Atlanta Public Schools "Cheating Scandal" and support the educators facing prison

Programming

Programming

Programming

Year round, we host political education, healing justice, and affinity group events for educators, organizers, students, and parents/caregivers. Follow us on socials to stay up to date.

Resources

Programming

Programming

From our founding guide for racial justice and abolitionist social and emotional learning to a database for queer, trans, and non-binary educators + students, we pride ourselves on being a resource hub for education communities.

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Abolitionist Teaching Network's mission is simple: develop and support educators to fight injustice within their schools and communities. Utilizing the intellectual work and direct action of community organizers, Abolitionist Teachers will organize and take action for educational freedom.

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Secularism and securitisation: the imaginary threat of religious minorities in Canadian public spaces

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Secularism and securitisation: the imaginary threat of religious minorities in Canadian public spaces

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ABSTRACT
From the assumed physical threat of a ceremonial Kirpan in an elementary school carried by a Sikh child, to the fictional possibility of rich, Arab, Muslim University students utilising their implicitly understood patriarchal power to subjugate all women from access to common swimming pools, Canada has become increasingly replete with examples of using religious minorities as a danger to secure public spaces for societies most privileged. Since 9/11, this has become a far too common public discourse on maintaining close surveillance, scrutiny and regulations for those religious and racialised Canadian minorities associated with the 'war on terror'. Promoting public spaces, especially public-school spaces, as 'secular' has become the argument of supposed non-bias in ensuring safety and equality for the wider population, all the while leaving many of those used as an example of threat to wonder if the ultimate intent is to preserve white, Christian (and Christian cultural) privilege. This article proposes to examine cases since 9/11 that have problematised racialised groups associated with the terrorism in public schooling to the benefit of maintaining 'Old Stock' status quo.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for a grant allowing the study of the nature of secularism in Canadian public schools.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [435-2014-2026].

Notes on contributors

C. Darius Stonebanks
C. Darius Stonebanks is a multiple teaching award winning Professor at Bishop's and Adjunct at McGill University. Among his publications are Teaching Against Islamophobia and Muslim Voices in Schools, which won the NAME's Philip C. Chinn book award. He is the co-founder of Transformative Praxis: Malawi, an Action Research project that connects social justice theory to practice and is the Primary Investigator on the SSHRC funded research project examining the secular nature of Canadian public schools.

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Secularism and securitisation: the imaginary threat of religious minorities in Canadian public spaces

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ABSTRACT From the assumed physical threat of a ceremonial Kirpan in an elementary school carried by a Sikh child, to the fictional possibility of rich, Arab, Muslim University students utilising their implicitly understood patriarchal power to subjugate all women from access to common swimming pools, Canada has become increasingly replete with examples of using religious minorities as a danger to secure public spaces for societies most privileged.

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Themes in the Research on Preservice Teachers’ Views of Cultural Diversity: Implications for Researching Millennial Preservice Teachers

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Themes in the Research on Preservice Teachers’ Views of Cultural Diversity: Implications for Researching Millennial Preservice Teachers

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Themes in the research on preservice teachers views of cultural diversity_implications for researching

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What Does Abolitionist Teaching Have to Do With Me?

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What Does Abolitionist Teaching Have to Do With Me?

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January 18th is Martin Luther King (MLK) Day, a federal holiday celebrating the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. Only since 2000 have all 50 states honored the date. Schools often have speakers to remind students what MLK stood for. When we heard about the opportunity to have Dr. Bettina Love, the author of We Want to do More than Survive, give a virtual lecture at Luther on MLK Day, we were very excited. We have heard her speak on panels and TED talks, and have taught her texts. Dr. King would agree with her premise to pursue educational freedom through abolitionist teaching. But what is abolitionist teaching? And what does it have to do with three white identified instructors? How is abolitionist teaching applicable to a primarily white institution of higher education? What does it have to do with you? And me?

Abolitionist teaching is teaching for freedom. Before we go any farther, it's important to know that it is freedom for all, not just freedom for Black folk; but that is where it starts. Abolitionist teaching shows that we need to reframe education for all, so that Black and Brown kids feel welcome, are able to learn and grow and discover, and can be seen in their full humanity.

To us, this reframing of education means changing the way we teach. Beyond teaching, it means creating a new way of life. We have been in too many workshops and seminars and listened to speakers where the message is understood as "add an inclusive teaching statement on your syllabus," or "add an author of color." And some faculty believe that such workshops or messages are not for me, not my expertise or area. Abolitionist teaching is not about a tweak or adjustment to your teaching, nor is it just for peoples of color or for professors of color, and/or white liberals. Abolitionist teaching is about all of us, about the whole system of education, and all educators. It's about all the students in our classrooms. It's about the whole institution. It's about you, and it's about me.

Dr. Love will challenge us all to be co-conspirators in struggle and activists for change, for that is the only way that meaningful change will actually happen. Transformation of the system is going to take all of us being willing to stop oppressing others, to stop participating in systemic racism, to stop participating in white supremacy in all its forms, and to take a stand that Black lives matter.

Abolitionist teaching, then, operates at a number of levels:

1. It requires us to think about what we can do now within an educational system of which Luther College is a part that was and is created, reproduced, and sustained by racist policies and white supremacy ideology (a system, by the way, that we work in, get paid by, receive accolades from).

2. As mentioned above, it insists that we (white people) confront our own racism and privilege; it insists that we decenter whiteness even, and perhaps most explicitly, in classrooms that are made up of all white students taught by those who identify as white.

3. Though it may take years (as Love says), it obliges us to tear down the system as a whole--to abolish it--and to reconceive education/learning differently, replacing it with another model (perhaps one based on what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls "pop up" universities).

4. It compels us to create learning environments wherein students are not only heard, but also learn how to resist, protest, and struggle against injustice, against white supremacy; that is, it compels us to offer a real civics education, one that does not only teach "here are the three branches of government."

5. It engenders joy--joy in the struggle; joy in and with communities that struggle.

Practically, for the three of us, abolitionist teaching means seeing every student in the room, to know them as best we can. It causes us to value where every student in each classroom is coming from, to see the assets that each of them brings, to nurture and expand their knowledge. It means accepting that I do not know everything, that I will make mistakes, that one size does not fit all. It means being open and curious about everything and everyone. It means being willing to challenge my role as a white identified person and a white teacher in a radically unjust educational system. It means loving my students, all of my students, not just loving my job to teach them. And it means challenging that system that denies some of our students, and some of our colleagues, their full humanity and in doing so diminishes the humanity of all of us.

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What Does Abolitionist Teaching Have to Do With Me?

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January 18th is Martin Luther King (MLK) Day, a federal holiday celebrating the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. Only since 2000 have all 50 states honored the date. Schools often have speakers to remind students what MLK stood for.

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Kimberlé Crenshaw; Neil Gotanda; Garry Peller; Kendall Thomas (Editor)

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Research Guides: Learn & Unlearn: Anti-racism Resource Guide: Intersectionality

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Research Guides: Learn & Unlearn: Anti-racism Resource Guide: Intersectionality

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Ten Tips for Putting Intersectionality Into Practice

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Ten Tips for Putting Intersectionality Into Practice

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Ten Tips for Putting Intersectionality into Practice

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We've compiled ten tips for putting intersectionality into practice to promote opportunity for individuals and communities who face multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination.

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Intersectionality & Anti Racism Lib Guide

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Intersectionality & Anti Racism Lib Guide

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This guide aims to provide information to support your reflective and teaching practices about the Black Lives Matter movement and other anti-racism and anti-oppression resources.

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Sara Ahmed - Complaint as Diversity Work

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Why black people discriminate among ourselves: the toxic legacy of colorism

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Why black people discriminate among ourselves: the toxic legacy of colorism

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Why black people discriminate among ourselves: the toxic legacy of colorism

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You cannot separate the often painful stereotypes of colorism from misogyny and the sexual exploitation inherent in American slavery. To combat it we need to speak about it

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The Insanity of Exclusion in STEM | Natalie Robinson Bruner | TEDxABQED

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Black on Black Racism: The Hazards of Implicit Bias

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Black on Black Racism: The Hazards of Implicit Bias

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In his year-end press conference, President Obama was asked about the state of black America. He responded by saying blacks are "better off than they were," but juxtaposed that with the lingering issues evinced in the recent tragic police encounters with unarmed black men. Interestingly, he took particular care in calling out the "hidden biases that we all carry around," a sentiment he echoed in another recent interview.

My own hidden biases punched me in the gut last week, as I stared in disbelief at a test result on my computer screen. Before I started the racial-bias assessment, a disclaimer explicitly warned me that those who are not prepared to receive uncomfortable news should not proceed. I was too intrigued to turn back, but it turns out I was unprepared for the outcome.

According to the Implicit Association Test, I have a "strong automatic preference for European Americans compared to African Americans." That's a sterile way of saying that I'm biased against black people. For most people, such a designation would probably be unsettling. After all, the United States is a nation that ostensibly aspires not to judge others "by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." But for me, it caused a mini-existential crisis.

Why? Because I'm black.

As I read the results, I thought about what it means to be black and biased against other black people. Does it mean harboring a subconscious contempt for my race? Or considering myself to be part of the blessed segment of an otherwise unfortunate lot? Is it even possible for a black person to be racist against black people? In a moment of self-dramatization, I felt as if Kanye had just announced on national television that I didn't care about black people.

Then, the tropes saturated my thoughts. I wondered if my bias was the undergirding of the sort of intra-race prejudice colloquially expressed in phrases like "Uncle Tom," "crab in a barrel," and "acting white." Since my results were the same as the 88 percent of white Americans who show a bias in favor of white people, it seems to me that this demonstrated "strong preference" is the very definition of acting white-a well-worn pejorative that pained me as an awkward adolescent and suddenly felt fresh again.

The Project Implicit test has been around for a few years, but a recent Mother Jones article titled, " The Science of Why Cops Shoot Young Black Men " gave it wider currency and helped explain the role of implicit bias in the recent events in Ferguson, Cleveland, and Staten Island, where the aggressive policing of black people turned deadly. The IAT measures the ability to quickly and correctly sort selected words as positive and negative and to distinguish faces as belonging to a white or black person. Through a series of paired word and face sequences, the test detects in milliseconds the time it takes the respondent to associate black faces with positive and negative words relative to the time it takes to match white faces. When a respondent pairs black faces and negative words more quickly than other pairings, it reveals implicit bias.

As difficult as it was to learn about my black-on-black bias, such results are fairly common. This is sadly comforting. The data reveal that black respondents' implicit biases are split just about evenly between pro-white and pro-black. Other research has also shown that black participants tend to have a strong pro-black explicit bias. A conflict emerges: When blacks are asked about their predilections, they express a solid preference for their group over whites, but, in general, performance on the IAT suggests they subconsciously hold a slight preference for whites over blacks.

This dynamic is obviously a direct result of racism. Too often, racism is seen as a social phenomenon that happens to black people. But it happens through black people as well. That is, the negative associations thrust upon black people and black culture can color how we black people view each other. Blacks and whites receive the same narratives and images that perpetuate stereotypes of black criminality and flippancy while synonymizing white culture with American values. It is to be expected that there will be an observable impact on black intragroup perceptions.

The construct of racism is efficiently designed to politically and socially subjugate a segment of the population. For the oppressed, a natural response is to advocate for conformity with the dominant culture as an appeal for equal treatment. If black people were only more respectable, one line of argument runs, they would be less subject to the ills of racism.
to black people. But it happens through black people as well.
The contrast between black respondents' explicit and implicit biases is a fingerprint of the politics of respectability, a term coined by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham in her book In Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920. In her conception, the politics of respectability involves the "reform of individual behavior as a goal in itself and as a strategy for reform." Higginbotham argued that black Baptist women "rejected white America's depiction of black women as immoral, childlike, and unworthy of respect of protection" by teaching blacks to mind their manners, dress and speak appropriately, and remain free from sexual and other vices. Thus, the politics of respectability say that if black people behaved more like the proffered white ideal, the result would be equal treatment and the demise of racial discrimination. This tactic was a form of political protest based on an appeal to white humanity, but it has had troublesome side effects.

This thread has persisted in black scholarship and society for decades. From W.E.B. DuBois' Talented Tenth in 1903 to Bill Cosby's infamous Pound-Cake Speech a hundred years later, the politics of respectability has often taken on the quality of black theology. Members of the black community are told that wearing the mask, playing the game, and being twice as good are the keys to making it in America. It's as if to say, "If we only knew how to act, racism would just fall away." This is, of course, absurd. Good behavior and attire deemed proper do not abrogate racism. Discrimination does not come with a dress code.

The politics of respectability is really a coping mechanism. It affirms the inferiority and unattractiveness of black culture. And it contributes to the formation of implicit biases that lead black people to prefer white people over their own.

But it's not the only option. Unable to live with my "strong automatic preference," I took the test a few more times. Through repeated attempts, I trained myself to react evenly to the black, white, positive, and negative pairings. In a sense, through acknowledgement of the bias and a concerted effort to modify my behavior, I suppressed the implicit bias. By my fourth and final attempt, I exhibited no preference at all. If each of us is willing to recognize our implicit biases and police our actions accordingly, there may be hope for the racial aspect of the American experiment after all.

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Black-on-Black Racism: The Hazards of Implicit Bias

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In his year-end press conference, President Obama was asked about the state of black America. He responded by saying blacks are "better off than they were," but juxtaposed that with the lingering issues evinced in the recent tragic police encounters with unarmed black men.

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Celebrating Black Joy Through Storytelling

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Celebrating Black Joy Through Storytelling

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Celebrating Black Joy Through Storytelling

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We talk a lot about trauma when we reflect on Black history - but what about joy?

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Black Joy Isn't Frivolous, It's Necessary

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Black Joy Isn't Frivolous, It's Necessary

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When I first started writing this, I was excited to wax poetic about black joy and Instagram battles. I started drafting this story a week before Mother's Day, buzzing from how the internet coalesced around Teddy Riley and Babyface and excited to watch Erykah Badu and Jill Scott battle it out. Amid the coronavirus outbreak, these Verzuz battles were reminding me of how vital it is for black people to experience joy. It's a secret ingredient to black resilience, in my opinion.

At the time, my primary motivation for writing this was compensatory. It's well documented that black and brown people are at greater risk of death from COVID-19. I wanted to talk about how joy has to be part of black health too, and how finding these moments of lightness can help us persevere. Inevitably, when the conversation turns toward black folks enjoying themselves, someone suggests that it's a distraction from larger issues. But happiness and levity have quantifiable health benefits, and I was ready to discuss them.

Then I heard about Ahmaud Arbery, the 25-year-old man gunned down while jogging near his Georgia home in February. And news tumbled in of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT in Kentucky who died in March after being shot by police while she slept in bed. Processing racism alongside a pandemic left me far more exhausted than joyful.

I still believe that joy is an integral part of black well-being, and I'm not the first person to say this. Audre Lorde wrote eloquently about how caring for oneself is an act of resistance. There's also the Black Joy movement, sprouted alongside Black Lives Matter, which celebrates the happiness, playfulness, and freedom that undergird social justice. Adrienne Maree Brown's 2019 anthology, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, gives a nudge toward understanding the power inherent in being delighted. While I'm not the first to say that joy, creativity, and even eroticism are necessary components of black health, I lend my voice to the chorus because we're facing overwhelming challenges, and the things that sustain us-no matter how small or playful-should never be discounted.

This notion that joy fortifies isn't just philosophical. A 2019 meta-analysis published in the Annual Review of Public Health found associations between affective well-being (defined as joy and seeking pleasure) and lowered stress hormones like cortisol. (Overproduction of cortisol from chronic stress can contribute to a host of ailments from heart disease to depression, the Mayo Clinic says.) There's evidence that laughter, thanks to its stress-relieving effects, can help support your immune system, among other benefits. And, since this piece was inspired by Instagram battles, it's worth noting that a consistent habit of dancing (hopefully swaying in your seat is included) does count as exercise and, as such, can nurture the parts of the brain that have to do with memory, planning, and organizing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. There's also some evidence that listening to music might help reduce chronic pain thanks to the power of distraction, the National Institutes of Health explains. And a 2017 meta-analysis published in Perspectives of Public Health found an encouraging link between listening to music (as well as singing it) and improved mood in adults of all ages. My point? Joy isn't a distraction-it's nourishment. It's part of where some of us find the energy to continue thriving.

The essay I wanted to write is no longer as relevant-the Jill Scott and Erykah Badu battle was restorative (the Nelly and Ludacris battle, a little weird)-but that essay was probably incomplete. Finding joy is useful, but I can't talk about the necessity of it right now without making space for the inherent risks-a man was shot while jogging down the street, a woman shot while sleeping in her bed. I can't talk fully about black joy in public without talking about these killings. And I refuse to make a recommendation for black joy without acknowledging that joy alone won't change the ways we're under threat. But I still believe it's something that pours out of us organically, and it should never be undervalued.

My hope, as we weather the pandemic and the latest round of senseless killings, is that you're able to find respite in moments of joy and laughter. And if you can, throw yourself unapologetically into those feelings. Those are legitimately good for you.
Related:

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Black Joy Should Be a Public Health Recommendation

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When I first started writing this, I was excited to wax poetic about black joy and Instagram battles. I started drafting this story a week before Mother's Day, buzzing from how the internet coalesced around Teddy Riley and Babyface and excited to watch Erykah Badu and Jill Scott battle it out.

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Black Joy as an Act of Resistance | Dr. Frederick Engram Jr. | TEDxDallasCollege

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Speaking of Whiteness: Disrupting White Innocence

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Speaking of Whiteness: Disrupting White Innocence

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Speaking of Whiteness Disrupting White Innocence

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Whites Will be Whites: The Failure to Interrogate Racial Privilege

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Whites Will be Whites: The Failure to Interrogate Racial Privilege

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Founded in 2019, The Unplug Collective is a platform to share stories about mental health and body discrimination. As a team of 5 Black women ages 18-23, we are dedicated to building community through representation. We prioritize working closely with you to tell your stories in the form of written personal narratives, photo/video campaigns, and more because we believe that each of us holds tremendous power to educate and inspire. Along with generating content from our community, we also create our own educational research and visual content, which can be found on our Instagram page.

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Founded in 2019, The Unplug Collective is a platform to share stories about mental health and body discrimination. As a team of 5 Black women ages 18-23, we are dedicated to building community through representation.

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The Difference Between Allyship and Co-opting Movements

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The Difference Between Allyship and Co-opting Movements

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After Tuesday night's election results were released, there was an outpouring of love and support from people all across communities coming together for collective change on the dangers that a Trump presidency will cause. Whether individuals were directly affected by the threat of Donald Trump's proposed policies, they came together in solidarity to reject his rise to power and the very systems in power that allowed an election like this to occur. It was an incredibly moving and beautiful moment to see in the midst of a divided America, that potential to come together in unity and strength still existed.

However, when allying with a specific cause or movement, it can be easy to attempt to co-opt the movement and forget the people who have been on the ground doing the manual work to social change before it became trending or with its own hashtag. Co-opting movements is incredibly problematic because it forgets the work that has been going on far before the movement gained popularity, and becomes accredited to a false perception of a savior-like ally swooping in to save the day.

You can still be an ally while avoiding the erasure of the knowledge of the people and organizations behind the movement for social change. Check out the dos and don'ts of allyship, and be prepared to help ignite change within your respective communities!

Allies know how to make space. One of the best ways to demonstrate solidarity is by knowing when it's time to sit down and pass the microphone to the communities actually affected by the change. As a white queer non-binary individual, I cannot speak on behalf of the way undocumented people or people of color are processing the election results because I do not belong in the community affected by the change. Allies are not spokespeople for the movement, nor are they the Press Secretary controlling their narrative for public perception. Instead of writing a Facebook post about how other people are taking the election, challenge yourself to share what a person of color or undocumented student are already sharing. Pass the microphone, but be the sound speaker. Uplift their narratives in your own communities as a challenge to what's become normalized: anti-blackness, xenophobia, homophobia or any other wedge designed to divide our civilization. Your voice matters, but your ability to uplift voices is a potent act of political resistance rarely tapped into or given attention towards.

Allies give credit where credit is due. You and I both know that you did not come up with ending a protest with "we have nothing to lose but our chains." That was Assata Shakur, a badass black feminist and activist and a former member of the Black Panther Party. You did not come up with the theory of intersectionality - that was achieved by Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, a black civil rights leader and critical race scholar.

It is incredibly important that we recognize the voices that have been resounding far longer than our involvement with the movement, and that we honor the people and their contributions that they make. By not quoting important sayings or chants or contributions, you are contributing the erasure of the movement's history and replacing your name with it. That's not okay. Activism is not about you or your legacy, especially when the perceived legacy was not your original ideas or thoughts. Give credit where credit is due. Honor the movement and its history.

Allies do not create social change solo. This is something that still challenges me, as I tend to get so excited about becoming involved with a new project that I unintentionally forget about the people who set the table for the discussions far before I even knew about the existence of the problem. Nothing an ally does on behalf of an identity that they don't hold should be completely solo. If you are not black, you do not have the end-all, be-all solution to ending police brutality for young black males. If you do not identify as Latinx, you do not have the championship of how to expand opportunities for undocumented people. If you are straight, you do not get the ally card by just attending our pride festivals.

Nobody knows what is better for a community than the actual members of the community who experience life day-to-day in their various identities. If you have ideas on what you think should be done, members of the community affected should always be consulted. Often, the ideas that you have on what is the best solution is what the community group has already been working on for a number of years. Save the time in investing resources trying to be the champion of a movement that isn't personal to you, and instead reinvest your time and energy into supporting the folks fighting for their own individual liberation. Support one another.

Don't be so desperate to be perceived as a trailblazer that you take the rights of others to succeed in their movements. We have enough people starting movements and creating noise, and we need more individuals that are willing to support the movement's goals and do the on-the-ground volunteering, fundraising and outreach.

Allies acknowledge when they are wrong or when they are ignorant of something. As an ally, you don't have to know every single thing about the complexities of living with an identity you cannot claim as personal to you. However, as an ambassador of the movement, it is your duty to acknowledge when you do not know something. Don't make the movement look weak or inadequate because you were unable to articulate the goals or why it is a systematic issue that we are trying to dismantle. Ask questions. Be humble. Be open to accepting different worldviews and perspectives of the history we have been taught for years.

Allies do their own research. It is not the burden of the oppressed to explain why they are oppressed. For people constantly marginalized or isolated as a result of societal factors, it can be exhausting to have to constantly articulate to people the root causes and justification as to why they are fighting for the causes that they believe in. If you have a question about something, be humble enough to accept that you don't know why an issue persists or where it came from. Yet, also use your resources. Google it. Read a book. Keep up with the news. Do not expect the oppressed to inform you of their continued oppression because that poses an unfair burden to an already marginalized group. Roll up your sleeves, pull up Google and get ready to both learn and unlearn about everything you thought you knew about race, class, power and privilege.

Allies hold their own community accountable. Protests and rallies are a great way to collectively come together to voice frustrations, but if you are silent during Thanksgiving dinner when your aunt assumes that all terrorists are Muslims, you have only done the work in vain. The movement does not need people only in it for lip service or name recognition.

Don't just protest Trump - protest, challenge and dismantle the very systems of oppression that you unconsciously benefit from. All change is uncomfortable. It can be awkward to talk to your childhood best friend about systematic racism or the school-to-prison pipeline, but it needs to be done. It might not seem like a fun party icebreaker to mention police brutality or the need for gun violence prevention, but it needs to be addressed directly from the communities we come from. People are more likely to listen to someone they know talk about difficult and controversial subjects than they are to approach a complete stranger for assistance. Challenge unchecked hatred, bigotry and intolerance within your own communities. Get out of your bubble of social justice spheres, because the true battleground is in the tapestry of our everyday lives. Be an ally even when nobody sees it. Be an ally even when the TV stations don't publicize it. Be an ally even when it won't get a headline in the newspaper.

Allies recognize that their participation as an ally is a privilege. Your ability to walk and stand in protests is a privilege that many of our differently-abled folks do not get to experience. Your ability to have the time to dedicate to these causes as a volunteer or a coordinator is privilege to the people affected by these causes but chained to working several shifts to make ends meet. Organizing spaces owe you nothing. You do not get a gold sticker for being a decent human being and standing up against injustice. It is an absolute honor and privilege to participate in social movements, to stand on the right side of history and to show your support towards these causes. Do not take for granted how blessed you are to be a participant, because there are thousands of disenfranchised individuals who would love for the same opportunity.

This article is not intended to be a policing of the activist movements, but it is essential to know the difference between standing for a movement in a positive way, and participating in a movement in a problematic way. Get prepared for making the change you want to see in the world - together, unified, and unstoppable.

Student at the University of California, Riverside

college

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The Difference Between Allyship and Co-Opting Movements

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After Tuesday night's election results were released, there was an outpouring of love and support from people all across communities coming together for collective change on the dangers that a Trump presidency will cause.

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A note on the scope of this guide:
This guide is intended to provide general information about anti-oppression, diversity, and inclusion as well as information and resources for the social justice issues key to current dialogues within the Simmons Community. This guide is by no means an exhaustive list of anti-oppressive initiatives nor does it capture all of the many facets of the larger conversations about the issues listed here. This guide serves as an introduction to these issues and as a starting place for finding information from a variety of sources.

Books & Subject Headings

Relevant Subject Headings:

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Confronting racism is not about the needs and feelings of white people

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Confronting racism is not about the needs and feelings of white people

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Confronting racism is not about the needs and feelings of white people | Ijeoma Oluo

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Too often whites at discussions on race decide for themselves what will be discussed, what they will hear, what they will learn. And it is their space. All spaces are

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Impossible Burdens: White Institutions, Emotional Labor, and Micro-Resistance

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Impossible Burdens: White Institutions, Emotional Labor, and Micro-Resistance

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Impossible Burdens: White Institutions, Emotional Labor, and Micro-Resistance

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Abstract. This article explores the connections between white institutional spaces, emotional labor, and resistance by illuminating the shared experiences of pe

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Beyond the Hashtag: How to Take Anti-Racist Action in Your Life

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Beyond the Hashtag: How to Take Anti-Racist Action in Your Life

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Anti-racist work isn't easy, and amid the COVID-19 crisis, things look a bit different than they used to. But there are still powerful ways to show up.

Educate yourself!

Reading the work of Black scholars who break down issues of the justice system, policing, and prison abolition are great places to start. Some of my personal recommendations include works by Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Michelle Alexander, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Ida B. Wells, and The 1619 Project, edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones.

Resources like the Abolitionist Futures conference, the Prison Culture blog, and the African American Intellectual History Society have compiled extensive reading lists on policing, incarceration, and the racism baked into both systems. Other groups, including Critical Resistance, have published documents like an " Abolition Organizing Toolkit." And in Minneapolis, MPD150 is a group of local grassroots organizers pushing for the abolition of the city's police department, and it also has a handy zine for frequently asked questions about abolition.

Invest time and resources in on-the-ground community abolitionist efforts.

In the current situation in Minneapolis, these efforts can include Freedom Funds like the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which directly supports activists and organizers who are doing work on the ground. The Minnesota Freedom Fund is "supporting a movement constellation of formations," according to its Twitter, where they also advise donating to the Black Visions Collective, Reclaim the Block, and Unicorn Riot. Respect the leaders on the ground who have been doing the work and leading the way. As documented by the National Bail Fund Network, freedom and bond funds exist all over the country, and they need support even when police brutality isn't in the headlines.

Get involved locally.

This is an important national conversation that gets renewed every time another city is seized by racist horror, but good politics start locally. Sign yourself up for a local listserv or organization that is working to create a lasting organizing infrastructure in your community. If you need help getting started, look for local news reports of anti-racist protest actions, find out who is organizing them, and if you can support their ongoing work.

Uplift and center the voices of the most marginalized people.

In all conversations, it is crucial that we uplift and center the voices and experiences of the people who are most impacted by these issues. Lift up and listen to people like Tami Sawyer, Da'Shaun Harrison, Delaney Vandergrift, Clarissa Brooks, Bree Newsome Bass, and many others. Say the names of Black women who often go unheard of and unseen on major news and media platforms, and make room for Black women to speak for themselves.

Take action in your own life.

Name and call out racism, misogynoir, transphobia, homophobia, queerphobia, fatphobia, and white supremacy in all its forms. It may be uncomfortable to confront your parents, your boss, your teacher, or your peers, but that's no excuse not to do it. Fighting oppression is uncomfortable work by its nature, and working to make change in the systems you're already a part of is as important as plugging into conversations about systems you don't interact with regularly.

Why does it matter?

It is important to be part of building the organizing infrastructure in our communities so that the next time there's another hashtag mourning another death, we already have the playbook to act. We have the leaders and gatekeepers (who do the work) positioned to continue to lead in a sustained way, but they need the support of everyone who wants to see an end to these racist systems.

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Activist and organizer Zyahna Bryant offers advice on anti-racist activism in the wake of George Floyd's death.

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75 Things White People can do for Racial Justice

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75 Things White People can do for Racial Justice

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106 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice

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Note 1: This article was last updated on February 5, 2022.
Note 2: Our work is to fix what we broke and left broken. The work isn’t done…

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Ways to Be an Ally from Two Lifetimes of Learning

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Ways to Be an Ally from Two Lifetimes of Learning

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The explosion of unrest in the U.S. in the wake of George Floyd's death has led many Canadians to reflect on racism and white supremacy at home. Racism is alive and well in Canada. Don't fool yourself into thinking it's not. Of those who know the reality, some may be wondering how to be a better ally.

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We are two health-care academics working in Calgary, one Chinese-Canadian and one Métis. We reflect continuously on our own journeys with experiencing racism, while owning our complicity in upholding racist structures in Canada.

We both actively work to be allies in the fight against racism. Merely extolling that Canada is "welcoming, open-minded and generous" with some diversity and inclusion policies does not automatically result in any real sense of belonging for Black, Indigenous and People of Colour. We share our stories in the hopes of showing what our lived experience has taught us in our lifelong work of allyship.

One key point is that if you or your loved ones have never experienced racism because you are white, then you have a privilege that BIPOCs have never had in Canada. If you are white, you cannot make any judgment about whether racism exists or not. This is the truth.

Amy Tan: As a Chinese-Canadian daughter of immigrant parents from Hong Kong, I had my share of cultural clashes at my home, school and community growing up in Richmond, B.C. By high school, I had internalized the message that I had a choice to make about my identity. I subconsciously denied my Chinese heritage as a teenager to try to fit in with Caucasian peers, while still being reminded daily that I wasn't white. We didn't eat steak and potatoes at home; I was called "ch**k" and "slant eyes"; I was regularly confused for other Asian students. I grew up knowing that belonging was conditional. If I behaved as I should - a helpful, agreeable, conscientious Chinese girl - I wouldn't be hassled as much. I know now that this "model minority" construct is a myth that affirms white dominance, created to pit various ethnicities against each other.

Unfortunately, COVID-19 has created an increase in anti-East Asian sentiment. Violent attacks have occurred because people erroneously accuse us of either bringing coronavirus to Canada or being loyal to the Chinese government. My elderly Chinese parents are now too scared to leave their house in Vancouver for the first time in the 50 years since they immigrated here.

The Canadian government has passed racist laws against people of Chinese descent since 1871, with its exploitation of Chinese immigrants to do the dangerous work in building the Canadian Pacific Railway. Afterwards, there was a near total ban on immigration for Chinese people to Canada from 1923 to 1949 (this followed the prohibitive Chinese head tax enacted from 1885 to 1923). At the same time, Chinese residents in Canada were incorrectly blamed for the spread of diseases like leprosy and smallpox, leading to the xenophobic terminology "Yellow Peril," which is unfortunately being resurrected today for COVID-19. Other oppressive practices occurred in the past to other East Asians, notably the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.

But all this pales in comparison to what Canadians of African and Indigenous descent have endured due to ongoing structural racism in this country.

Pamela Roach: Experiences of racism, discrimination and violence against Indigenous people stem from the colonial systems put in place before Confederation, on which Canada is founded.

Growing up in rural Alberta, with the privilege of being able to pass as a "white" Canadian, I regularly had to decide, as a child, who was safe to disclose my Indigeneity to, who would tolerate it and who wouldn't. Colonization created an oppressive structure, leading to a lot of racist legislation that remains in place today, while leaders across the country claim there is no systemic racism in Canada. In Vancouver, 15 per cent of police stops in 2007-2018 involved First Nations people despite representing two per cent of the population. Indigenous people in federal prisons have increased to 30 per cent of total incarcerated while representing five per cent of Canada's total population. The apprehension of Indigenous children at birth still happens today, and the forced sterilization of Indigenous women has been reported widely as recently as 2018.

Controlling family planning and removing Indigenous children to be cared for by white families, as we know was commonplace during the Sixties Scoop were ways for our systems to legally enforce assimilation, disrupt cultural continuity, and adversely impact the health of Indigenous People. We also know that many Indigenous children were sent to Indian Residential or Day Schools and subjected to physical, emotional and sexual abuse while being forcibly assimilated. Not only have residential schools caused ongoing trauma through this abuse and separation of families, they have left lasting health and social impacts on generations of families.

Similarly, Black Canadians are victims of over-policing and police brutality, and are over-represented in federal prisons and in the child welfare system. In Toronto, seven out of 10 of fatal shootings by police between 2013-2017 were of Black people, despite only making up 8.8 per cent of Toronto's population at the time. In Vancouver, five per cent of police stops involved people who were Black, despite only comprising one per cent of the population from 2007-2018. The origins of anti-Black systemic racism have been traced back to the existence of slavery in Canada and causes persistent disadvantages in education, employment, and the criminal justice system.

Amy Tan: Playing by the rules to be part of the "model minority" allowed me to be " white-adjacent ": I wasn't white, but I was seen by some white people as less "offensive" than other ethnicities. I had the great privilege to not have to grow up being scared of authorities such as police officers, unlike people who are Black or Indigenous.

In reality, the "model minority" concept is really about having implicit rules of engagement to make Asians stay silent about the white power structure that's more overtly racist of other racialized and minority groups. My entire extended family, partly based on their own previous experiences of overt racism, all bought into the "model minority" requirement that allowed us to be "accepted," albeit on the white power structure's terms. Thus, my family and I have been complicit in anti-Black racism as Chinese-Canadians.

I've been complicit in perpetuating anti-Black racism by not calling out obviously racist comments that I heard in my Chinese community, and by striving to maintain the benefits I received by being a "model minority." This is personally painful.

I now own my part in holding up racist structures while also acknowledging my privilege as a physician. It took me many years to embrace that I have a duty to use my areas of privilege for good to speak out against racism and injustice.

Pamela Roach: Likewise, as I navigated my own safety with disclosing my Indigenous identity, as someone who could be "white coded" I recognize the privilege I had to slide invisibly through potentially dangerous situations, a privilege not all Indigenous people have and that I still reflect on with shame, especially now as an adult when I feel more confident to confront oppression and racism head on.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report and Calls to Action were released five years ago. Can we look at those calls and say that we have really actioned them and made progress in shifting the structural barriers and systemic racism that disadvantages Black, Indigenous and Persons of Colour? I know I can't.

I do work to develop and implement anti-racism strategies, but we are steeped in the tea of our society and working against a system that you also have to live within can feel like "swimming in treacle," a phrase I have inherited from my English partner.

Both: What we need is allyship to improve equity for all.
Everyone benefits when we work to improve equity for all, including non-BIPOC people. Equity involves acknowledging and dismantling the structures that reinforce disadvantage for various people. Equality, the idea of treating everyone the same, is not the same as equity and doesn't support people who have had generations of disadvantage. And in this moment, we know that anti-Black racism urgently needs to be combatted. It needs to be fought so urgently that people are risking their lives in the middle of a global pandemic to gather, protest and make their voices heard. Each and every one of us has the job of listening.

COVID-19 has laid bare how poorly Canadians are protecting and caring for marginalized populations, including Black, Indigenous and racialized immigrant communities. COVID-19 has disproportionately affected essential workers mainly comprised of racialized immigrants, refugees and migrant workers, continuing the long history of exploiting newcomers to do laborious work under harrowing conditions. In the U.S., Black Americans are dying from COVID-19 at 2.4 times the rate of Caucasians due to the underlying neglect of their social determinants of health, all stemming from systemic racism. How unjust is this systemic racism that even in a pandemic, Black Americans have not been spared from further disproportionate deaths by police violence?

We may not have white privilege, but we'll use the privilege we do have to speak up for the human rights of those people who can't. This is what we can do as anti-racist allies. We will not opt out. As Ibram Kendi states in his book How to be an Anti-Racist, anti-racism involves actively fighting racist policies and ideas that lead to racial inequity. There is no "neutral" in this space, so it's not possible to be "not racist."

In our allyship to the trauma that Black Canadians are suffering, we've tried as an Indigenous scholar and an Asian physician-scientist to inform Canadians by sharing our own journeys with race, ethnicity and racism. We hope there is better understanding of why saying #AllLivesMatter or "not seeing colour and treating everyone the same" actually strengthens systemic anti-Black racism by negating and denying Black people's lived experiences that show disparities do exist.
All lives can't matter until Black lives matter in Canada.
We have each endured the visceral reactions to racial slurs, to not belonging enough to speak freely, and to being othered, yet we don't claim to comprehend living as a Black person in Canada. But we use our own lived experiences as BIPOCs and that empathy to help as allies at this time in history to fight for justice to be served. But we can't do it alone.

True (non-performative) allyship means:

1. Doing the continuous work of self-reflection and seeking to understand the systems that lead to racial discrimination and your implicit biases. Acknowledge your privilege and work to get past any shame and defensiveness to arrive at action. Having privilege does not reflect on your character as "good or bad." Every one of us has been complicit in racism, and most of us have some form of privilege. Acknowledging privilege in one arena can help you use the power you have to help others who may be disadvantaged in that space. Read about Stephanie Nixon's Coin Model of Privilege and Critical Allyship. Learn about the concept of intersectionality with racism by reading the work of legal scholar and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw. Listen to the lived experiences of your BIPOC friends and colleagues without judgment or defensiveness.

2. Learning about anti-racism. There are many books, and we personally recommend: How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi, So You Want to Talk about Race by Ijeoma Oluo, Tears We Cannot Stop by Michael Eric Dyson, How to Be Less Stupid About Race by Crystal M. Fleming, White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, and Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzl. We've had to think about race and racial relations our entire lives, yet our reflection on our own complicity and anti-racist work continues to this day. It takes energy, work, discomfort, but it is required. It is an imperfect process that never ends.

3. Speaking up when you witness a racist incident. However uncomfortable it may be to speak up, remember that being silent means you allow the racist status quo to continue. We recognize that other power structures may co-exist (for example, if you're a student, a trainee, an employee), and so calling out racism by superiors may not feel safe. Or there may have been a missed opportunity. That's okay. Reflect, discuss and commit to doing differently the next time you witness a micro or macro-aggression. More importantly, you can model to others what being anti-racist looks like in the way you move through the world and the language you use. Not every act of resistance is confrontational.

For overt racial violence, try to record the interaction if safe to do so, and provide support to the victim. Let the victim know that you're there in support and ask if they need help seeking medical attention.

4. Having uncomfortable conversations with your family, friends and workplaces to educate. Explain why being "colour-blind" or saying, "I treat everyone the same" and #AllLivesMatter isn't helpful and is actually racist. Don't have BIPOCs do all the emotional labour of educating others. Call out racism as what it is. Don't use euphemisms. This is part of the practice of critical allyship.

Remember that if you're Caucasian, white privilege doesn't mean that life hasn't been/isn't hard for you; it just means that your skin colour is not a reason why it is hard. White privilege is not the same as class privilege. Acknowledge and accept that in Canada most societal structures are built around a Caucasian Christian heteronormative able-bodied male construct.

5. Reading literature written by non-white authors to broaden your understanding of the lived experience of different ethnic and cultural groups. Read books about African history and experiences by Angie Thomas, Yaa Gyasi, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates and Tressie McMillan Cottom. Read the works of Indigenous authors including Richard Wagamese, Alicia Elliot, Jesse Thistle and Katherena Vermette. Racialized authors who write about their own culture and ethnicity including Wayson Choy, Paul Yee, Nadia Hashimi, Amy Tan (not the same as the author of this piece) and Shilpi Somaya Gowda can broaden perspectives too. If you are a parent, a caregiver, or an educator, this applies to children's literature, too.

6. Amplifying Black and Indigenous voices. Mentoring and supporting them for leadership positions and being accountable. If you are in education, media or business, have BIPOCs help shape organizational values, policies and procedures. Include them in your content in a positive way so that young BIPOCs can see themselves in social media, mainstream advertising and media growing up. Include anti-racist teaching in pre-primary to secondary education so that children grow up understanding the difference between racism and anti-racism and how their behaviour may either reinforce or fight against racist policies and ideas.

7. Donating to organizations such as Black Lives Matter, NAACP and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association to support the work of achieving justice and defending human rights. Sign petitions and write letters in support of Black and Indigenous communities, and against over-policing and police brutality of these populations.

In this painful moment in time, we hope that you'll take on the work to become a critical ally with us and help the Black people of Turtle Island fight effectively for justice to be served now and in the future.

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coin model of privilege and critical allyship paper

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critical race theorist kimberlé crenshaw

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Ways to Be an Ally, from Two Lifetimes of Learning | The Tyee

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The explosion of unrest in the U.S. in the wake of George Floyd's death has led many Canadians to reflect on racism and white supremacy at home. Racism is alive and well in Canada. Don't fool yourself into thinking it's not. Of those who know the reality, some may be wondering how to be a better ally.

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Asian Americans and the Legacy of Antiblackness

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Asian Americans and the Legacy of Antiblackness

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Can racial minorities be racist against other racial minorities? While this question has largely been debated in semantic terms, resting on the fact that racism, which defines race as a power structure, means that racial minorities can be prejudiced against each other but not racist. However there is without a doubt that certain racial minorities have perpetuated and benefited off of the racist power structures that oppress other racial minorities. The racialization of minorities in America is often seen as binary. However there are ways in which race, privilege, and hierarchy are not consistent across the experiences of different racial and ethnic groups. There is no more poignant example of this complexity than in the case against Affirmative Action in Harvard undergraduate admissions undertaken by the Students for Fair Admissions.

One useful theoretical frame in better understanding the racialized historical context of this case is group interest theory, "based upon the premise that different racialized groups have incompatible goals, especially if they are competing for limited resources." While this theory certainly governs the asymmetrical relationship between racial minorities in the U.S. and white Americans, who monopolize and exclude racial minorities from resources, it also suggests that racial minorities compete over the same pool of resources amongst themselves. This theory immobilizes solidarity and collaborative resistance among racial minorities, but yet it is a perception that pervades interactions between racialized groups. This is particularly relevant to the interactive racialization of Asian and Black communities in America. Within the asymmetrical system devised by white America, excludes all people of color as a whole, those subject to the system are constrained into adopting a realist perception of opportunity, one that is governed by a zero-sum game mentality. Within this system, marginalized groups vy for what limited opportunities they are allowed, perceiving opportunities achieved by other groups as opportunities no longer available to themselves. This effective method of social control obscures the malfeasance of the larger system, which none of the racialized groups are ultimately responsible for.

The Students for Fair Admissions' case against Affirmative Action in Harvard undergraduate admissions is an extension of a deeply rooted legacy of white America's social control over people of color, in which white America facilitates antiblackness within Asian communities. While this efforts have been successful because many Asian American communities buy into the potential benefits to the Asian-American community at the expense of the Black community, those efforts ultimately reify structures of white supremacy that disenfranchise Black people and Asian-Americans.

While there is no doubt that a nuanced understanding of the Model Minority mythology oppresses and undermines our agency of self-formation as Asian Americans, there are ways in which Asian Americans have benefitted from the pseudoscientific notion that particularly East Asian Americans are pathologically superior to Black Americans. In the post Civil War era, Asian immigrant laborers benefited off of racialized notions that they were more obedient and hard-working laborers than Black slaves. Plantation owners argued that the Chinese laborers were "docile, submissive and hard-working, unlike African Americans." This mechanism of social control created competition, leveraging racialized minorities against each other. White plantation owners and white politicians surmised that a sustainable way of maintaining their hierarchy was to foster other racial hierarchies that conformed to and were microcosmic of white supremacy. Thus, competition between Black and Asian communities, which gave way to interracial prejudice, became a cog in the greater machine of American white supremacy. However, it must also be acknowledged that the model minority mythology has not been applied symmetrically across all Asian Americans; South Asians and Southeast Asians historically and empirically do not benefit from this mythology as much as East Asians if you compare admissions statistics and gross income.

Asian Americans continue this legacy by contributing to anti-blackness by means of colorism, the appropriation of black culture, and the policing of black bodies and black neighborhoods. The American system was built upon antiblack racism via slavery; any benefits that Asian Americans receive from that system means that Asian Americans benefit from antiblackness. Antiblack racism continues to be reproduced through institutions like the housing, education, the criminal justice system, and the electoral college. The confluence of this network of institutions collectively targets, disenfranchises, and excludes Black communities from participating in civic society. The emergence of the ABG or "Asian Baby Girl" archetype is a newer addition to appropriation of Black culture by Asian Americans. Gold chains, hoop earrings, bantu knots, and exclusively dating Black men are the typical characteristics of this new phenomena, which chooses and imitates aspects of Black culture that are deemed trendy. The taking of Black culture without any appreciation or acknowledgement of the oppressive structures that shape and limit Black expression is cultural exploitation, enforcing the legacy of white America and other minorities profiting off of Black culture.

The last method of participating in antiblackness that I will be examining is support for colorblind policies and contiguously against Affirmative Action. There is a prevailing idea among Asian American communities that race conscious policies are harmful to them, that it in fact "penalizes" white and Asian students. This notion was capitalized on after a sociological study at Princeton by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandra Radford, whose findings implied that black students who scored 1000 on their SATs would have the same chance in admissions as a white student who scores 1310 or an Asian-American student who scores 1450 . What the anti-affirmative action movement unknowingly or knowingly ignores is the legacy of antiblackness in all American institutions, which has massively disadvantaged Black communities in all areas of mobility, including education, income, and mortality. Affirmative action, in principle, seeks to rectify these systemic disparities, that for generation Asian and white communities have directly benefited from. In opposing legislation that seeks to rectify this disparity at the benefit of the Asian American community and the expense of the Black community, many Asian Americans propagate anti-blackness. However, the ultimate beneficiary of the anti-affirmative action movement is not even Asian Americans, but white Americans. This case, which presents as being an initiative of the Asian American community alone is being bankrolled by Edward Blum, a conservative white anti-affirmative action activist, whose ultimate goal is to eliminate the factor of race in admissions period. In actuality, this case is really about advancing white supremacy, which uses Asian Americans as a pawn, as has been a practice since Asian immigrants came to America and were coerced into competition with Black slaves.

What Asian Americans in support of the plaintiffs of the Harvard case against Affirmative Action miss out on is the idea that all forms of racial oppression are interconnected. Racism against any racial minority reifies white supremacy and the marginalization of all other racial minorities. The East Coast Asian American Student Union and many other like organizations have named the plaintiffs of the Students for Fair Admissions as contributing to anti-blackness specifically for pursuing an end to Affirmative Action.
"We need to contribute in the labors to educate non-black Asian folks on why their actions perpetuate antiblackness. The education needs to come from the place of compassion and empowering the voices for black folks instead of speaking up on their behalves. Moreover, this is often overlooked but if you are able, contribute resources and money to support those organizations that help with future reparations for black folks, fight for anti-blackness, and support policy changes that could help combat structural racism... We must support policy changes that combat structural racism, like the prison industrial complex, the criminalization of marijuana, the arming of police with military-grade arms, and redlining. Written by Olivia Mayeda We must resist movements that are inherently anti-black, such as... arguments against affirmative action

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Asian Americans and the Legacy of Antiblackness

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Can racial minorities be racist against other racial minorities? While this question has largely been debated in semantic terms, resting on the fact that racism, which defines race as a power structure, means that racial minorities can be prejudiced against each other but not racist.

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On May 25, George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer who kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes as Floyd gasped, "I can't breathe." On March 13, Breonna Taylor was shot dead by police who stormed her home as she slept. On February 25, Ahmaud Arbery was killed in the middle of the day by two white men, a retired policeman and his son. They got in their car, tailed him, and shot him twice.

I could go on.

These tragedies, just the most recent examples in a long history of violence against black people, have led to an explosion of attention on social media. In the days after Arbery's death, I scrolled through Instagram, reading post after post from white friends and influencers professing their outrage and disbelief. Urging us to #sayhisname. The posts were flooded with comments from more (mostly) white people, thanking them for their "bravery" and praising them for "speaking truth to power." Three months after the shooting, Gregory McMichael and Travis McMichael were arrested and charged with murder in what has been heralded as a victory for the powers of social media, a place where normal citizens can "use their voice" to demand justice.

Still, as a black woman, instead of feeling inspired by this act of solidarity, I found myself feeling angry and afraid. Looking through my feed, I wanted to say to my white friends, "You're here now, but where are you the other 364 days a year when anti-racism isn't trending? When racism isn't tucked safely behind the screen in your hand, but right there in front of your face?"

I am not overlooking the fact that public allyship can help spur positive change. Voices can be heard, and some small version of justice may even be served as a result. But we must also not be lulled into believing that this kind of allyship is enough to dismantle the conditions that made it possible for an innocent black man to be lynched in broad daylight. And we must not let the kind of performative allyship that begins and ends with hashtags take center stage in the quest for equality.

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Performative Allyship Is Deadly (Here's What to Do Instead)

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Ways to be a real ally in the wake of George Floyd's death.

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Continuing our series on racial bias, a black and white conversation between friends.
In this episode, Yasmin and I talk to her friend and former colleague Melissa Kaplan, the Deputy Superintendent of Education at Bright Star Schools. Melissa tells the story of how she was inspired to take her life experiences of growing up poor with an addict for a father and struggling with a learning disorder to the classroom where she believed she could help her students overcome their challenges the way she had been able to: through hard work and education. But she experienced an unexpected awakening to the realities of race in our country that, as a white woman, she had been unprepared to encounter.
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‎Smartest Person in the Room: Ep 30 BIAS: Well-meaning white people on Apple Podcasts

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‎Continuing our series on racial bias, a black and white conversation between friends. In this episode, Yasmin and I talk to her friend and former colleague Melissa Kaplan, the Deputy Superintendent of Education at Bright Star Schools. Melissa tells the story of how she was inspired to take her lif...

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Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom

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Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom

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In Teaching Critical Thinking, renowned cultural critic and progressive educator bell hooks addresses some of the most compelling issues facing teachers in and out of the classroom today.

In a series of short, accessible, and enlightening essays, hooks explores the confounding and sometimes controversial topics that teachers and students have urged her to address since the publication of the previous best-selling volumes in her Teaching series, Teaching to Transgress and Teaching Community. The issues are varied and broad, from whether meaningful teaching can take place in a large classroom setting to confronting issues of self-esteem. One professor, for example, asked how black female professors can maintain positive authority in a classroom without being seen through the lens of negative racist, sexist stereotypes. One teacher asked how to handle tears in the classroom, while another wanted to know how to use humor as a tool for learning.

Addressing questions of race, gender, and class in this work, hooks discusses the complex balance that allows us to teach, value, and learn from works written by racist and sexist authors. Highlighting the importance of reading, she insists on the primacy of free speech, a democratic education of literacy. Throughout these essays, she celebrates the transformative power of critical thinking. This is provocative, powerful, and joyful intellectual work. It is a must read for anyone who is at all interested in education today.

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Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom

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Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom: hooks, bell: 9780415968201: Books - Amazon.ca

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Teaching To Transgress: Hooks, Bell: 9780415908078: Books - Amazon.ca

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When White Women Cry: How White Women's Tears Oppress Women of Color

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When White Women Cry: How White Women's Tears Oppress Women of Color

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The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities 

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The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities 

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The university is often regarded as a bastion of liberal democracy where equity and diversity are vigorously promoted. In reality, the university still excludes many people and is a site of racialization that is subtle, complex, and sophisticated. This book, the first comprehensive, data-based study of racialized and Indigenous faculty members' experiences in Canadian universities, challenges the myth of equity in higher education. Drawing on a rich body of survey data, interviews, and analysis of universities' stated policies, leading scholars scrutinize what universities have done and question the effectiveness of their employment equity programs. They also make important recommendations as to how universities can address racialization and fulfill the promise of equity in the academy.

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The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities

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The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities: Henry, Frances, Dua, Enakshi, James, Carl E., Kobayashi, Audrey, Li, Peter, Ramos, Howard, Smith, Malinda S.: 9780774834896: Books - Amazon.ca

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Kimberlé Crenshaw: The urgency of intersectionality

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Now more than ever, it's important to look boldly at the reality of race and gender bias -- and understand how the two can combine to create even more harm. Kimberlé Crenshaw uses the term "intersectionality" to describe this phenomenon; as she says, if you're standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, you're likely to get hit by both.

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On this page you will find resources on Anti-Semitism. If you have additional resources that you would like to submit for consideration for this page please email diverse@gwu.edu.

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Resources to Address and Challenge Antisemitism

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The topic of antisemitism is complex and deeply historical. Use these resources in the classroom and at home to help young people understand and challenge antisemitism.

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Revisiting the Great White North: Reframing Whiteness, Privilege, and Identity in Education

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Revisiting the Great White North: Reframing Whiteness, Privilege, and Identity in Education

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This landmark book represents the first text to pay critical and sustained attention to Whiteness in Canada from an impressive line-up of leading scholars and activists. The burgeoning scholarship on Whiteness will benefit richly from this book's timely inclusion of the insights of Canadian scholars, educators, activists and others working for social justice within and through the educational system, with implications far beyond national borders.

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Revisiting the Great White North?: Reframing Whiteness, Privilege, and Identity in Education (Second Edition)

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Revisiting the Great White North?: Reframing Whiteness, Privilege, and Identity in Education (Second Edition): Lund, Darren E, Carr, Paul R: 9789462098671: Books - Amazon.ca

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Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

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Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America: McWhorter, John: 9780593423066: Books - Amazon.ca

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Birding While Black Science Has a Racism Problem Scientists Speak out Against Racial Injustice and Discrimination Amid Protests

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An exhaustive volume of leading scholarship in the field of Black Canadian history, Unsettling the Great White North highlights the diverse experiences of persons of African descent within the chronicles of Canada's past. The book considers histories and theoretical framings within the disciplines of history, sociology, law, and cultural and gender studies to chart the mechanisms of exclusion and marginalization in "multicultural" Canada and to situate Black Canadians as speakers and agents of their own lives. Working to interrupt the myth of benign whiteness that has been deeply implanted into the country's imagination, Unsettling the Great White North uncovers new narratives of Black life in Canada.

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Unsettling the Great White North: Black Canadian History

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Unsettling the Great White North: Black Canadian History: Johnson, Michele A., Aladejebi, Funké: 9781487529178: Books - Amazon.ca

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Introducing Decolonizing Practices: Actions we can take; Words we can say and Ideas we can unlearn to undo colonial impacts. This interactive introduction is based on our award-winning workshop, Sínulhkay and Ladders, a giant board game designed by Ta7talíya Michelle Nahanee, Squamish. It also covers key concepts from her popular workbooks.

How it Works
Sign up and watch your email for log in credentials, make sure to check your spam folder. Once you launch the course, you'll have three days to complete.

What's included:

Personal Login Credentials, sent via email after purchase

72 Hours access (once you begin) to each course you purchase (each workshop can be completed in an hour or less)

Each course features short videos, downloadable reflection worksheets and resources, all accessible through the course dashboard

Technical Support

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Introducing Decolonizing Practices: Actions we can take; Words we can say and Ideas we can unlearn to undo colonial impacts. This interactive introduction is based on our award-winning workshop, Sínulhkay and Ladders, a giant board game designed by Ta7talíya Michelle Nahanee, Squamish. It also covers key concepts from

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A powerful and practical guide to help you navigate racism, challenge privilege, manage stress and trauma, and begin to heal.

Healing from racism is a journey that often involves reliving trauma and experiencing feelings of shame, guilt, and anxiety. This journey can be a bumpy ride, and before we begin healing, we need to gain an understanding of the role history plays in racial/ethnic myths and stereotypes. In so many ways, to heal from racism, you must re-educate yourself and unlearn the processes of racism. This book can help guide you.

The Racial Healing Handbook offers practical tools to help you navigate daily and past experiences of racism, challenge internalized negative messages and privileges, and handle feelings of stress and shame. You'll also learn to develop a profound racial consciousness and conscientiousness, and heal from grief and trauma. Most importantly, you'll discover the building blocks to creating a community of healing in a world still filled with racial microaggressions and discrimination.

This book is not just about ending racial harm-it is about racial liberation. This journey is one that we must take together. It promises the possibility of moving through this pain and grief to experience the hope, resilience, and freedom that helps you not only self-actualize, but also makes the world a better place.

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The Racial Healing Handbook: Practical Activities to Help You Challenge Privilege, Confront Systemic Racism, and Engage in Collective Healing

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The Racial Healing Handbook: Practical Activities to Help You Challenge Privilege, Confront Systemic Racism, and Engage in Collective Healing: Singh PhD LPC, Anneliese A., Wise, Tim, Wing Sue Ph.D., Derald: 9781684032709: Books - Amazon.ca

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Racial Healing Handbook Reading Group Guide

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Racial Healing Handbook Reading Group Guide

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Talking about Humour, Racism, and Anti-racism in Class

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Talking about Humour, Racism, and Anti-racism in Class