Anti-racist Action Research Articles

Anti-racist actions and accountability: not more empty promises

PurposeThe current piece summarizes five critical points about racism from the point of view of Black scholars and allies: (1) Black people are experiencing exhaustion from and physiological effects of racism, (2) racism extends far beyond police brutality and into most societal structures, (3) despite being the targets of racism, Black people are often blamed for their oppression and retaliated against for their response to it, (4) everyone must improve their awareness and knowledge (through both formal education and individual motivation) to fight racism and (5) anti-racist policies and accountability are key to enact structural reformation.FindingsThe first three of these points detail the depths of the problem from the perspectives of the authors and the final two lay out a call to action.Practical implicationsThis viewpoint is the joint effort of 14 authors who provided a unified perspective.Originality/valueThis was one of the most original experiences the authors have had – working with 13 former/current students on joint perspectives about police brutality and racism more generally. The authors thank for the opportunity.

An Open Letter to Our Community in Response to Police Brutality Against African-Americans and a Call to Antiracist Action

An Open Letter to Our Community in Response to Police Brutality Against African-Americans and a Call to Antiracist Action

Justice for George Floyd and a reckoning for global mental health.

In the wake of George Floyd's killing by police in Minneapolis and the global response inspired by Black Lives Matter, it is time for the field of global mental health to reexamine how we have acknowledged and addressed racism in our institutions, our research, and our mental health services. In solidarity with street level responses, this is an important opportunity to understand and collaboratively respond to public demand for systemic change. To respond effectively, it is vital to (1) be aware of the colonial history that influences today's practices, and move forward with anti-colonial and anti-racist actions; (2) identify where and why diversity and representation are lacking in the global mental health workforce, then follow steps to combat these disparities; and (3) work with communities and institutions to end both police violence and structural violence.

An Open Letter to Our Community in Response to Police Brutality Against African-Americans and a Call to Antiracist Action

An Open Letter to Our Community in Response to Police Brutality Against African-Americans and a Call to Antiracist Action

Diversity Language as System Maintenance: Toward Alternative Frameworks for Addressing Racism at Predominantly White Institutions

This theoretical essay explores the ways predominantly White institutions (PWIs) “speak” about race and diversity as providing frameworks through which the campus racial environment is perceived and enacted. The major premise is that diversity language functions to conceal operations of systemic racism on campuses, producing inaction and/or “cosmetic” action that does not threaten whiteness as a position of privilege and power. White racial comfort goes unchallenged, with White students, faculty, and staff not having to recognize their complicity in campus racism or engage with racism or themselves as raced persons in a critical way. Longstanding policies and practices that secure whiteness at the expense of students of color go unchanged, as diversity language easily fits within existing organizational frameworks. After examining the various psychological and organizational mechanisms by which diversity language works to maintain universities as “White spaces”, we explore alternative languages that can highlight operations of racism that diversity language conceals and thus provide more critical frameworks to guide anti-racist action. We conclude by sharing the implications of alternative languages for practitioners and institutions and suggest future paths for researching the effects of diversity language and ways to produce recognizable change. The analysis and recommendations are applied to PWIs broadly, which includes Christian colleges and universities. However, throughout the paper we integrate unique ways Christian institutions might use White Christian logic and scripture to produce the same effects of concealment and inaction.

White Supremacy and Counseling Psychology: A Critical–Conceptual Framework

The mainstreaming of White nationalism in the United States and worldwide suggests an urgent need for counseling psychologists to take stock of what tools they have (and do not have) to combat White supremacy. We review the rise of social justice issues in the field of counseling psychology and allied helping professions and point to the limits of existing paradigms to address the challenge of White supremacy. We introduce transnationalism as an important theoretical perspective with which to conceptualize global racisms, and identify White racial affect, intersectionality, and allyship as three key domains of antiracist action research. Finally, we suggest three steps for sharpening counseling psychologists’ approaches to social justice: rejecting racial progress narratives, engaging in social justice-oriented practice with White clients, and centering White supremacy as a key problem for the field of counseling psychology and allied helping professions.

Looking as white: anti-racism apps, appearance and racialized embodiment

ABSTRACT Smartphone apps for anti-racism education and intervention are being developed by organisations in various countries. The ubiquity of smartphone use and app methodology, as Grant argues, have the potential to disrupt racial knowledges and facilitate anti-racist action. I use Nicholas Mirzoeff’s ‘zones of appearance and non-appearance’ and Derek Hook’s discussion of ‘racialising embodiment’ to discuss the potential of one such app, Everyday Racism, to challenge and disrupt white supremacy. The Australian-based app uses gamification to encourage users to participate in ‘bystander anti-racism’. However, by failing to question the neutrality of the default white bystander, the app risks reproducing hegemonic constellations of white agency versus racialized inaction. I argue that, in the zone of appearance, it is not enough to make racism apparent. It is necessary to appear. To appear first requires exposing nonappearance including the role even of the well-intentioned in maintaining it.

Racism, Popular Culture, and the Everyday Rosebud Reservation

Racism, Popular Culture, and the Everyday Rosebud Reservation Thomas Biolsi (bio) HOW DO WE MAKE SCHOLARLY (and political) sense of the everyday lives of people living in Native communities? By "everyday" I do not mean the episodic moments (and movements) of critical consciousness or resistance (e.g., protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline) or of heightened awareness of racial or colonial oppression (e.g., the Idle No More Movement).1 Instead, I mean the mundane, habituated, and taken-for-granted daily routines that compose most of Native experience. This is not at all to say that the everyday is not power laden or that the personal is not political for Native people. Far from it; there is no question that this everyday world is "structured" by settler colonialism and capitalism in determinate ways, including what we might aptly call "everyday racism."2 But that does not exhaust the everyday world of Native people. Both individuals and the everyday worlds they actively take part in making have what Chris Andersen insightfully calls density—a complexity (and a politics) not reducible to a single subject position. Even if we recognize that the Native subject is complicated by "intersectionality," this does not approach the full complexity of Native density. Andersen quotes Robin Kelley on the density of Black being, which Kelley insists is "not just political struggle but the struggles of everyday life …: fighting, dancing, begging, cajoling, teaching, thinking, loving." Andersen forces us to recognize the "more serious and infinitely less schematic livedness" of Native life.3 Indeed, Andersen's argument is that theorizing the politics of colonialism and racism—which, given the nature of structural accounts, runs the risk of schematization—will be deepened by careful attention to the everyday. After all, most Native people do not theorize settler colonialism or racism or explicitly engage in anticolonial or antiracist action in their everyday lives. Nevertheless, they live both within and against oppression. How do they do it? By examining the everyday world of Native people—and taking the role of embodiment seriously, as Brendan Hokowhitu urges us to do—we can bring to light Native ways of being that have escaped scholarly attention.4 In pursuit of the everyday on Rosebud Reservation, I begin with two South Dakota scenes. Scene one. From 1910 to 1997 a mural titled The Spirit of the West, created by New York artist Edwin Blashfield, graced the governor's office in the [End Page 77] South Dakota Capitol in Pierre (Figure 1). State historian Doane Robinson described the mural at the time of installation: "South Dakota is represented as a beautiful woman, in the spotlight, with the figure of hope floating over her and pointing forward. Trappers and settlers are beating back and overcoming the Indians who are clinging to her garments, attempting to impede her progress. Outlawry, represented by a dark and hooded figure is scuttling away into the darkness. In the background the prairie schooners of the early settlers are to be seen making their way across the prairie."5 After a long controversy beginning at least as early as the 1970s, in which the mural was severely criticized by Lakota people as racist because of its negative and exclusionary—even genocidal—depiction of Indians, it was walled over by Governor William Janklow (R) in 1997 after he had long resisted making any changes.6 The mural clearly fell into line with a persistent settler-colonial imagination of Indian people as the antithesis of civilization, with no contribution to make to, or modern place in, South Dakota. In the present, white imaginings of incompetent tribal governments that cannot be trusted to dispense justice to non-Indians on the reservation or traveling through it, of lazy people (including "welfare queens") living on "government handouts," and of Indian children who are a menace to white children in public schools are alive and well.7 In 2006 a group of Rosebud Sioux schoolchildren and their parents and guardians sued the off-reservation Winner School District in federal court for creating a "racially hostile educational environment." The plaintiffs claimed that "Caucasian students frequently call Native American students racially derogatory names, such as 'dirty Indian,' 'Black boy,' 'Indian bitch,' or...

Challenges and Coping Mechanisms of Whites Committed to Antiracism

Scholars have cited an antiracist identity as an ideal development status for Whites seeking to change systemic racism (Helms, 1995). However, little is known regarding the lived complexities of antiracist work itself. This article examines the experiences of one group of Whites (N = 10) committed to antiracist action. Outcomes indicate challenges that include backlash and struggles to identify more effective antiracist tactics. Coping mechanisms are considered in relation to counseling and counselor training practices.

Scholar commentary

ABSTRACTThis commentary reflects upon the articles and purposes of this special issue, in the context of, growing numbers of students of color (SOCs) in K-12 schools who continue to be modally placed in classrooms with White teachers (e.g., Berry and Pour-Khorshid papers of this issue). Few institutional programs of Teacher Education seem able to effectually address this longstanding demographic challenge (e.g., Whitaker, et al. paper). Fewer still, impactfully retain SOCs for careers in K-12 settings (e.g., Morales paper). Nevertheless, second wave teacher identity studies are encouraging nuanced professional learning for White and other, K-12, candidates and teachers that encourages: critical consciousness about race and whiteness, metalogic talk about colorblindness, and closing the gap between rhetoric and genuinely antiracist actions in praxis with SOCs (e.g., Alvarez & Milner; Caldas; McManimon & Casey papers. Demonstrably, second-wave analyses are revealing much about evidentiary approaches for teacher education/learning that emphasize differential capacities for teaching SOCs. Nonetheless, further research is needed on strategies for addressing formidable challenges, such as those of defensiveness and White Fragility (e.g., Blaisedell paper). The papers of this special issue indicate that combining such research with ground-breaking approaches to race-visible education offers a promising path to the knowledge and praxis needed.

Response to commentaries on Disorientation and Moral Life

In Disorientation and Moral Life, I consider disorientations as experiences of not knowing how to go on following serious life events and experiences like those involved in traumas, grief, illness, education, consciousness raising, and migration. I challenge a history of moral philosophy that I claim has been preoccupied by a focus on the best moral agents as those who are most decisive, wholehearted, and clear about how they ought to act. In this piece, I respond to three commentaries on Disorientation and Moral Life. In particular, I offer reflections on how disorientations might be useful in contexts of disability studies, prison abolitionism, professional philosophy, anti-racist action, and political organizing.

Teaching for Social Justice: Resources, Relationships, and Anti-Racist Practice

Fear and bigotry have spread through schools on the heels of a presidential campaign that promoted divisiveness grounded in racism and discrimination. This article describes the need for and a path toward explicit anti-racist teaching and anti-racist action to counteract this surge of hate speech. In addition, to create a more equitable and just education system and society, the article outlines actions needed to change key aspects of institutionalized racism and intolerance that are embedded in our schools: a) Correcting the unequal resources leading to inequitable opportunities, programs, teacher and leader distribution; b) providing equal opportunity for the kind of deeper learning demanded in the 21st century: A curriculum that supports critical thinking, problem solving, communication, collaboration, and applications of knowledge to real-world problems; c) developing social/emotional as well as academic skills; and d) supporting personalization and relationships so that students feel cared about and cared for and experience culturally responsive, engaging, and empowering learning opportunities in contexts that provide supportive relationships and community.

Theorizing Anti-Racism: Linkages in Marxist and Critical Race Theories Toronto by Abigail Bakan and Enakshi Dua eds.

Reviewed by: K. E. Barber, York University, Toronto, CanadaHow should we theorize anti-racism? Theorizing Anti-Racism: Linkages in Marxism and Critical Race Theories provides response to this question by engaging with the historic (5) between Marxist and postcolonial/critical race studies, each of which has played prominent role in the theorization of racism. The editors of this volume, Bakan and Dua, conceptualize the divide as problematic gulf between two polarities: Marxists reduce race to epi-phenomenon of the economic, ignoring the influence of culture; critical race scholars reduce race to purely cultural phenomena, ignoring materiality and the influence of capitalism. In order to address racism, we must be able to understand the processes that generate race and (6) - complex processes that cannot be addressed if we allow the theoretical divide to persist.Bakan and Dua argue that the divide leads to mis-match between theory and the social and political praxis that informs anti-racist action. As result, their goal is to present integrated analyses of Marxist and postcolonial/critical race theories that unite culture, modernity, and whiteness (6) with a dynamic capitalist mode of production and global processes of imperialist war and conquest (6). Given the broad scope of this endeavour, the editors focus their inquiry by structuring the collection around four central questions that form the four sections and 13 chapters of the book: (1) Are postcolonial/critical race scholars opposed to Marxism?; (2) Can Marxist theoretical framework account for race?; (3) How do black and Third World scholars address the race/class divide?; and (4) What models can we look to that successfully integrate race and class? (9-10).The first two sections, titled Rethinking Foucault and Revisiting Marx , discuss points of convergence between Marxist and Foucauldian scholars. Although these sections identify Foucault and Marx as their central figures, the contributions also remind us that neither Marx nor Foucault engaged with the idea of race in meaningful way. Yet the editors suggest that the division of race scholars into Marxist and Foucauldian camps is pervasive problem, and that uniting these camps is necessary and possible. Rethinking Foucault begins with chapter by Enakshi Dua who provides historical context for the divide. Dua argues that division resulted from shift amongst anti-racist scholars who found that Foucauldian concepts allowed them to problematize liberal notions of equality evident in Eurocentric Marxist anti-racist approaches (20). Subsequent chapters by Enakshi Dua and Robert C. Young attempt to dismantle caricatures of so-called Foucauldian approaches to race by locating Marxist ideas and critiques of race within the work of prominent scholars such as Edward Said, Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, each of which were also influenced by postcolonial and cultural studies. The second section, Revisiting Marx , attempts to demonstrate how Marxist theory can account for race. Abigail Bakan interprets race as type of social difference rooted in and oppression, understanding racism as an ideological codification and practical expression of extreme alienation (105). …

Locations of racism in education: a speech act analysis of a policy chain

This article explores how racism is located in an educational policy chain and identifies how its interpretation changes throughout the chain. A basic assumption is that the policy formation process can be seen as a chain in which international, national and local policies are ‘links’ – separate entities yet joined. With Sweden as the national example, the article analyses how racism in education is framed at different policy levels and which anti-racist actions are proposed. The article thereby clarifies who or what is, at different policy levels, perceived to be the location of racism. A first finding concerns terminology: throughout the policy chain the problem of racism is discussed in terms of ‘discrimination’. At European, national and local level, discrimination is mostly associated with ‘ethnicity’, thereby removing from policy a possibly stronger language for combating racism. A second finding is that the location of racism in education moves gradually through the chain from an institutional to an individual location of racism, with an increasing focus on the significance of the student rather than the importance of societal structures. The importance of circumstances for policy formation is a third main finding in the article.

Visual methodologies and participatory action research: Performing women’s community-based health promotion in post-Katrina New Orleans

ABSTRACTRecovery from disaster and displacement involves multiple challenges including accompanying survivors, documenting effects, and rethreading community. This paper demonstrates how African-American and Latina community health promoters and white university-based researchers engaged visual methodologies and participatory action research (photoPAR) as resources in cross-community praxis in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans. Visual techniques, including but not limited to photonarratives, facilitated the health promoters’: (1) care for themselves and each other as survivors of and responders to the post-disaster context; (2) critical interrogation of New Orleans’ entrenched pre- and post-Katrina structural racism as contributing to the racialised effects of and responses to Katrina; and (3) meaning-making and performances of women’s community-based, cross-community health promotion within this post-disaster context. This feminist antiracist participatory action research project demonstrates how visual methodologies contributed to the co-researchers’ cross-community self- and other caring, critical bifocality, and collaborative construction of a contextually and culturally responsive model for women’s community-based health promotion post ‘unnatural disaster’. Selected limitations as well as the potential for future cross-community antiracist feminist photoPAR in post-disaster contexts are discussed.

Black-faced, red faces: the potentials of humour for anti-racist action

ABSTRACTAmong incidences of everyday racism, offensive jokes are writ large as a way of establishing and maintaining social norms and policing the boundaries of the social body. Yet humour's possible deployment toward anti-racist ends constitutes an under-researched problem. This paper examines an incident of supposedly humorous blackface performance on an Australian family variety television show. The incident was notable as an occasion where humour was used with racist effects but also to anti-racist ends. Literature on anti-racist action commonly assumes that responses to racism should have the gravity commensurate to the problem. We argue that humour enables actors to take a ‘decommitted’ relationship to their actions, creating the perception of distance between themselves and the action. While this capacity to decommit enables racist actions to masquerade as ‘just a joke’, it may also form the basis of a less confrontational, but potentially powerful, form of anti-racist action.

Expanding White Racial Identity Theory: A Qualitative Investigation of Whites Engaged in Antiracist Action

This article presents outcomes of a qualitative exploration of White racial identity. Ten participants whose characteristics were reflective of Helms's () autonomy status defined their racial identities and related lifestyle choices. Findings are conceptualized within the framework of Helms's (, ) theory of White racial identity development. Suggestions are intended to enhance White racial identity theory and provide empirical support for characteristics of Whites who are engaged in antiracist activities.

The “Not-So-Final Remark”

This project examines white student learning in the Intergroup People of Color-White People Dialogues (POC-WHITE) and Intragroup White Racial Identity Dialogues (IWRID) at a small liberal arts college in the Northeast. Specifically, in this article, we explore the following research question: At the conclusion of the dialogues, how do white students conceptualize their white racial identity in relation to ally development and motivation to engage in antiracist action? Through content analyses of student papers, this study advances our understanding of how white students make sense of alliance building in an effort to create social change; it also extends national efforts to conduct research on inter/intragroup dialogues and their impact on white students.

“We Put It in Terms of Not-Nice”: White Antiracists and Parenting

This qualitative study explored how White parents who identify as antiracist apply antiracism principles to parenting their White children. Participants discussed how they attempt to incorporate antiracism values into their parenting, their children’s racial awareness, and the impact of race and racism on their children. Our findings indicate significant inconsistencies between antiracist values and parenting practices. The main difference between antiracist White parents and nonantiracist-identified White parents was awareness. Although antiracist White parents overall conveyed an awareness of racism as a system of unearned privileges, there was minimal modeling of antiracist action.

“QUE CRIANÇA FEIA! POR QUE A MÃE DELA ESTÁ FELIZ? ELA NUNCA VAI FICAR BRANCA”: REFLEXÕES TEÓRICAS SOBRE CRIANÇAS E RELAÇÕES RACIAIS

We propose in this paper a theoretical and pedagogical reflection on the implementation experience of Law 10,639 / 03 in the formation of children and young people, therefore, we illustrate our formulation with some experience in application of the College of UERJ. Are teaching practices and visions of knowledge which represent a field of analysis that has been mobilizing and making us theoretically reflect on what is representing anti-racist actions in Brazilian education. Thus, throughout the text, we will make a theoretical reflection on the possibilities and potentialities of law in Brazilian education, highlighting the possible epistemological impact on teacher training and the racialist conceptions still present in Brazilian society and in schools. In addition, the light of our theoretical reflections, analyze the limits and potential of anti-racist educational work with children still being formed, and that are in dispute between an anti-racist education and racialist visions still hegemonic.