Community-building, forums, and research: Will it work?
One concrete consequence of the mass campus protests over the murder of George Floyd was the establishment of centers to promote antiracism.
According to a recent story by The Chronicle‘s Calli McMurray, college administrators green-lit and philanthropists bankrolled several antiracism centers to serve as incubators of new ways to tackle racism.
From her story:
As their newly tapped directors were still getting their bearings, the centers’ founding principles quickly came under attack.
College leaders announced these centers as part of their institutional response to the outrage that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Their missions and methods varied, but generally they aimed to confront racism and repair the harm it causes. Typically they were branded as “antiracism centers,” following the model of the bestselling book How to Be an Antiracist by the historian Ibram X. Kendi.
At the same time, right-wing leaders in states such as Ohio, Florida, and Texas began working to strike down mandatory diversity training and restrict instruction about critical race theory and African American history. Some conservative legislators claimed that teaching about how race connects to privilege and oppression was a form of indoctrination that pitted people of color against white people.
Lost in the heated debate is a concrete understanding of what antiracism centers actually do. Calli reports that most day-to-day affairs are, on the whole, not likely to grab headlines. That includes holding forums between activists and scholars, funding research to explore lesser-known causes of race disparities, that sort of thing. Some of this work is at risk from efforts by conservative legislators to ban a variety of work that flies under the banner of DEI. The lawmakers describe these efforts as divisive and ineffective.
More from Calli’s story:
As they look toward the future, the directors described what they see as a key misconception that can hinder their progress: the idea that racism can be stamped out in only a few months or years. “I think it’s hard for us to shift our mind-set from, ‘This is a problem or an obstacle to be overcome, a history to transcend,’ to ‘This is a part of human dynamics and life,’” said William P. Umphres, director of the University of Cincinnati center.
It took hundreds of years to build the country’s systems and institutions, and it will take a long time to address the racism that was baked into them, the directors said. Racial inequities in education, wealth, and home ownership have snowballed over the course of many generations, influencing the success of students today. And since individual people also carry racial biases, it’s possible for racism to affect the new systems and programs they build, too.
What I’m reading:
- Adam Hochschild, in The New York Review of Books, profiles Mildred Rutherford, a “Lost Cause” educator of the early 1900s who overhauled the ways schools in the South teach the Civil War. The University of Georgia has a building named for her.
- Congressional leaders have recently attacked colleges’ diversity, equity, and inclusion officers for ignoring antisemitism. The idea predates the Israel-Hamas war, according to 2021 report by Jay Greene and James Paul, published on the website of the Heritage Foundation.
- Corporate-diversity efforts are on the wane and fewer Black people now are being promoted into executive roles, according to The Wall Street Journal.
- Matthew Yglesias examines the unique ways the civil-rights leader Bayard Rustin wanted to fight racism and what it means today.