Endemic Racism Research Articles

The (im)possibility of complaint: on efforts of inverting and (en)countering the university

ABSTRACT Over the past decades, research has documented how endemic racism, sexism, and ableism are in academia. Universities have complaint procedures to address these issues. Much research focuses on individual experiences of making a complaint and the institutional uptake of complaints and demonstrates how such ‘isms’ are located in the individual rather than in the institution. This paper instead scrutinizes how complaint procedures mask and reproduce the structures with which complaints are concerned resulting in the complaints’ limited transformative abilities. I demonstrate how complaint procedures only allow for treating complaints as isolated, singular and unusual events that require temporary solutions, which ensures that complaints and complaint work are peripheralized while the white patriarchal ableist core of universities remains intact. Complaints as efforts of inverting the white patriarchal university are too limited as they are quickly reverted. Hence, what is needed is more than a mere procedure but a total inversion of the institution to make difference fit which requires work that goes in and beyond one’s institution.

Discrimination and Exclusion in Higher Education Is Reflected in Multiple Autoethnographies

A synthesis review of 17 autoethnographic (AE) studies revealed experiences of 33 academic staff and graduate students in higher education, the majority of whom are women. These papers, from more than six countries, were found through a Google Scholar search. Most authors identified as marginalised and outsiders in their higher education contexts, whether because of gender, ethnicity, race, or intersectionality. Analysis of tacit and explicit themes in the papers resulted in creation of eight final superordinate themes. The themes represent experiences of fear and insecurity whereby personal vulnerability was exacerbated by lack of cultural and gender awareness in higher education, including obvious examples of White ignorance. Institutional diversity was claimed, but this contrasted with authors’ experiences of exclusionary behaviour. Authors reported endemic racism and sexism, but that it was helpful when institutions provided support for these challenges. AE gives power, volume, and space to rarely heard minority voices. AE synthesis offers an overview of collective experience of similar phenomena or contexts. Such meta-studies are not common in the research literature, and this article provides both evidence of lived experiences of academic staff in 21st century higher education, and a purposeful guide to synthesizing AE research.

“Coalition of the Willing”: Promoting Antiracism Through Empowering Community College Campus Members

Objective/Research Question: Critical race theory (CRT) was used with a basic qualitative study to interrogate how racism unfolds at community colleges and how Black community college presidents enact antiracism. The purpose of this study is to enhance understandings about how community college presidents of African descent construct antiracism, how those definitions are communicated, and the rationale for creating opportunities to disrupt racism within predominantly White campus environments. Methods: Six presidents participated in three semi-structured interviews lasting approximately 75-minutes each. The sample included three men and three women. Interviews focused on institutional communications about racial tensions concerning how presidents’ identities (e.g., race and gender) influenced decision making with campus stakeholders and presidential roles in defining and enacting antiracism. Results: Three themes emerged including how Accountability matters, the need for Space creators, and importance of developing Student “critical” mass. Participants discussed how they created spaces and utilized cultural capital networks to advance campus diversity agendas to benefit their institutions. Presidents posited that although community college leaders were likely motivated to participate in anti-racist practices due to the bettering of institutional image, decisive work needed to be done despite knowing endemic racism occurs in perpetuity. Conclusions/Contributions: This study highlights the need for enhanced training of presidents about how to conceptualize and engage campus racism. Additionally, presidents posited that the majority of students on their campuses were ready to engage in antiracism leadership activism, but they needed training to be empowered to develop anti-racist programs and practices. Finally, institutions need to develop stronger and more systematic ways to call out racism and promote anti-racist programing and practices.

Examining the perspectives of adult working learners and key stakeholders using critical race theory

PurposeThis article reports on a critical race theory (CRT) analysis of the perspectives of providers of employer-supported educational opportunities and adult learners, who identified as Black, indigenous or as a person of color, and were employed in service industries.Design/methodology/approachA review of the literature was used to shape an initial interview protocol. Data were collected from working learners in retail, hospitality, restaurants and healthcare industries. An “a priori” coding scheme that drew from CRT was applied to transcripts during analysis.FindingsAnalysis revealed that working learners' skills, experiential knowledge, learning mindset, language flexibility and knowledge gained from previous learning experiences were not consistently acknowledged by employers. CRT analysis illustrated that endemic racism exists within educational opportunities and in workplace learning.Originality/valueCRT has not been widely used to examine adult education practice, especially for workforce development and employer-based education programs. This research expands the use of CRT in adult education and encourages critical conversations around equity in learning opportunities offered by employers. CRT informed data analysis uncovered barriers to equitable learning opportunities and workplace learning. A discussion of inequities in work-based learning illustrates there is insufficient awareness of implicit bias, which points to the need for initiatives focused on social justice.

Changing Eyes and Ears: Using Racial Lifemaps to Address Microaggressions with Interracial Couples

Microaggressions can adversely impact the relational quality of interracial couples comprised of Black women and White men. Microaggressions are verbal, non-verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities that convey negative racial slights to individuals of color (Sue et al., 2007). Although couple and family therapists are implored to discuss microaggressions within therapy, a specific intervention to explore this dynamic is lacking. However, a lifemap could be utilized by therapists who assist interracial couples. Lifemaps are a client-constructed pictorial detailing the life events of a specific personal trajectory (Hodge, 2005b). This intervention has been used to ascertain an individual’s spiritual awareness, but they have not been modified in the clinical literature to assess an individual’s racial awareness. The theoretical framework for modifying spiritual lifemaps into racial lifemaps is Critical Race Theory (CRT). The themes of endemic racism and voices of color within CRT are particularly insightful for exploring the experiences of interracial couples. This paper will provide a composite case study of Black women married to White men demonstrating the use of racial lifemaps to address unresolved microaggressions and strategies for future microaggressive experiences.

Why Add "Abolition" to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Social Care Framework?

Abundant evidence demonstrates that enduring, endemic racism plays an important role in determining patient health. This commentary reviews a patient case about disease self-management and subsequent health outcomes that are shaped by social and economic circumstances. We analyze the case using a framework for social care developed in 2019 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). We then propose that the NASEM framework be adapted by adding the category abolition, which could make the other social care practices transformative for historically marginalized populations.

The child as mediator of racial ambivalence in Australia: ‘Egg Boy’ and the racist girl

ABSTRACT In white settler-colonial Australian imagination, ‘the child’ historically has both signalled the colony’s flourishing and is charged with anxiety about belonging and identity. This article analyses a set of events in which children were the occasion through which Australians managed racial violence and/or publicly distanced the mainstream from endemic racism. Differences between the mediating power of ‘white’ childhood versus Indigenous childhood are analysed, with a view to exploring how children are either problematized or positioned as figures of redemption, through processes of racialization.

Rhetoric, Racism, and the Reality for the Indigenous Maori Nursing Workforce in Aotearoa New Zealand

Indigenous Māori nurses in Aotearoa are a critical part of the health workforce. They know their communities and are trusted. But rather than being valued, they are often silenced, rendered invisible, and oppressed, driven by unfilled rhetoric in the Māori nursing workforce and endemic racism within nursing that other colonized Indigenous nurses also experience. Despite inequities within the Māori nursing workforce and Māori health outcomes in general, nursing within Aotearoa, New Zealand has yet to meaningfully increase and value the role of Māori nurses. In this article, we discuss the history and impact of the concept of Kawa Whakaruruhau, a term to describe cultural safety. We also critique the rhetoric, racism, and reality of the Indigenous Māori nurses and discuss its significance as is relevant to the international Indigenous nursing workforce and minority nursing populations.

Endemic Racism in Trump’s America: A Racialized Female Faculty Member’s Experience

ABSTRACT This self-study addresses the embedded racism experienced by a racialized female professor who taught in the USA during Trump’s presidency. The article presents two incidents that reflect the emboldened racist behaviors and actions of teacher education students during the Trump administration. The study is based on the author’s experiences as a racialized female faculty member in the Midwest. Using critical pedagogy and critical race theory frameworks, the article argues that racism needs to be dismantled in spaces of teacher education programs that have been deeply impacted by the ultra-right politics of the Trump administration. This article calls attention to endemic racism, particularly as experienced by racialized faculty. The author calls on teacher educators to take action in response to such incidents and in support of racialized faculty.

Critical Race Pedagogy for More Effective and Inclusive World Language Teaching

AbstractTo address racial inequity and the exclusion of African Americans in applied linguistics, second-language acquisition, and world language (WL) education, our field must reckon with social justice problems of racism and anti-Blackness. Theoretical frameworks of critical race theory (CRT) and critical race pedagogy (CRP) elucidate how such injustices are perpetuated, plus, propose solutions for them. This article discusses racism and anti-Blackness in WL curriculum, materials, and instructional practices. It presents a post-hoc CRT analysis of findings from two studies: (i) an ethnographic study examining Spanish curriculum and instructional practices at two minority serving postsecondary institutions and (ii) a participatory action research collaboration with Spanish instructors examining curriculum at a predominantly white institution—both studies linked by how they reveal endemic racism and anti-Blackness in WL programmes. Ultimately, this article addresses how African Americans can more authentically and successfully participate in WL programmes. It introduces to the field a proposal of CRP for more effective WL teaching to promote practices in antiracism, equity-mindedness, and inclusivity for greater retention and success of Black students.

The exploring difference workshop: group relations methodology to deepen anti-racist education in Toronto, Canada

Though the Tavistock group relations paradigm is now more than seventy years old, its unique conceptualisation of unconscious group processes remains nonetheless essential for understanding and affecting this volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous time. An adapted Tavistock group relations event called the Exploring Difference Workshop (EDW) takes place in the context of: 1) increasing attention to endemic racism within Canadian society; and 2) increasingly obvious limitations of dominant modes of anti-racism training framed within discourses of equity and multiculturalism. This article discusses new contributions group relations methodology can provide through the EDW to engage with the intractable and painful aspects of talking about racism in "the here and now". The article offers an analysis of key themes emerging from the workshops and the consultations supporting participants' learning about "difference" and self–other relationships. It proposes that the EDW enables deeper understanding of, and dialogue about, the (un)conscious processes affecting racism and anti-racism education, and offers a means for enhancing collaboration across difference in these times.

Vicarious Racism and Vigilance During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Mental Health Implications Among Asian and Black Americans.

Experiences of vicarious racism-hearing about racism directed toward one's racial group or racist acts committed against other racial group members-and vigilance about racial discrimination have been salient during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study examined vicarious racism and vigilance in relation to symptoms of depression and anxiety among Asian and Black Americans. We used data from a cross-sectional study of 604 Asian American and 844 Black American adults aged ≥18 in the United States recruited from 5 US cities from May 21 through July 15, 2020. Multivariable linear regression models examined levels of depression and anxiety by self-reported vicarious racism and vigilance. Controlling for sociodemographic characteristics, among both Asian and Black Americans, greater self-reported vicarious racism was associated with more symptoms of depression (Asian: β = 1.92 [95% CI, 0.97-2.87]; Black: β = 1.72 [95% CI, 0.95-2.49]) and anxiety (Asian: β = 2.40 [95% CI, 1.48-3.32]; Black: β = 1.98 [95% CI, 1.17-2.78]). Vigilance was also positively related to symptoms of depression (Asian: β = 1.54 [95% CI, 0.58-2.50]; Black: β = 0.90 [95% CI, 0.12-1.67]) and anxiety (Asian: β = 1.98 [95% CI, 1.05-2.91]; Black: β = 1.64 [95% CI, 0.82-2.45]). Mental health problems are a pressing concern during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results from our study suggest that heightened racist sentiment, harassment, and violence against Asian and Black Americans contribute to increased risk of depression and anxiety via vicarious racism and vigilance. Public health efforts during this period should address endemic racism as well as COVID-19.

Black Lives Matter, and Yes, You are Racist: The Parallelism of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.

The United States of America is at a crossroads, one that we have been at before. This is not the first time that we have battled a pandemic while experiencing an economic downturn, state sanctioned violence and racial terror against Blacks, the boiling over of racial tensions encouraged by the president of the United States, and a movement focused on forcing America to reckon with its endemic racism, anti-Blackness, and state-sanctioned violence against Blacks. This article provides a brief overview of that history and its striking parallel to what is happening today. It pushes White social workers to understand how they are beneficiaries of racism. It reminds social workers of their ethical obligation to be change agents. Finally, it provides basic suggestions for those who are willing to see their complicity and are still willing to work on dismantling the injustice that impacts Black people in America.

Mendez v. Westminster: Domestic and International Forces Underlying the Fight for School Desegregation

Abstract This article examines how the desire for ideological and military dominance by the United States facilitated civil rights for Mexican Americans during World War II and the early years of the Cold War. The article relies on Mendez v. Westminster, the case that led to the end of legal segregation in California, as a lens to view the connection between domestic and foreign policy. Mendez came to trial when shifting geopolitical realities increased pressure on the United States to project an image of inclusive democracy, prompting an externally oriented elite to recognize the ideological gap between the country’s ideals and its practice. Although the case’s success provided activists and liberal members of the Truman administration with a measure of political authority to propel rights legislation forward, the rise of de facto segregation points to the limits of democratic activism when it confronts endemic racism without support from larger institutions.

Preface

preface Within the current context in the United States, we tend to think of “choice” as the leading slogan of the liberal movement to expand women’s reproductive rights, particularly the right to elective abortion. But choice depends on context: on what is available, what is mandated, what is prohibited or discouraged, and what has not yet been imagined. This issue of Feminist Studies expands our thinking about available and potential choices, both individual and social. The issue opens with Stephanie Yingyi Wang’s ethnographic study of companionate marriage in China, in which she describes cooperative marriage partnerships that look heterosexual and appear to fulfill traditional familial expectations, but that facilitate same-sex liaisons and so create new family structures. Other essays in this issue describe the kinds of choices available to those who seek nontraditional or less conventional family and erotic bonds. Leila J. Rupp discusses the “queer dilemmas of desire” that perplex undergraduate queer women in US colleges , and Sonny Nordmarken opens possibilities for new trans epistemologies that disrupt and produce new gender practices, claiming that queer instability provides “infinite possibilities” for individual and social change. More traditional choices and families take differing shapes in other historical and cultural contexts. Carla Pascoe Leahy compares the levels of maternal satisfaction felt by three historical cohorts of Australian women: those of the immediate post-World War II generation, the later generation of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the current generation . Miriam Kienle examines how two designers, Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, decided to explore alternatives to big data by sending each other weekly postcards that quantified their lives according to “small/slow data” points. Other essays and poems emphasize constraint rather than choice about the kinds of identities that take shape within current social structures. Bettina Judd ponders the effects on herself and others of her own rage at racial injustice and of the stereotype of raging black women perpetuated by a society that has chosen not to 8Preface deal with its endemic racism. Similarly, Vivyan Adair’s memoir on the stigmata of growing up in poverty exposes the limitations of individual choice in the context of violence, a theme echoed in the poems by Elisabeth Blair, which dramatize her experiences in an abusive institution for troubled teens. Trysh Travis reviews four books published in 2017 that together, but differently, tackle the difficult situations of the “drug-using woman” and her recovery. Marilyn Strathern and Jade S. Sasser review Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway’s edited volume Making Kin, Not Population : Reconceiving Generations, with responses from multiple authors featured in the book. Finally, a short story by Mary Anna Evans and poetry by Hannah Baker Saltmarsh and Abigail G. H. Manzella voice other individual dilemmas related to choice. We end the issue with a News and Views piece by Sonja Thomas that offers more context on the recent Women’s Wall protest in Kerala, India. In “When Tongzhi Marry: Experiments of Cooperative Marriage between Lalas and Gay Men in Urban China,” Stephanie Yingyi Wang frames cooperative marriage in mainland China between gay men and lalas (same-sex loving women), or tonghzi marriage, as an experiment in queer kinship. Such marriages appear to fulfill traditional roles on the surface , providing women and men who desire same-sex relationships a sanctioned institution—marriage—within which to fulfill these desires. According to Wang, these relational strategies are shaped simultaneously by China’s heteronormative policies and by the global circulation of gay rights narratives, “transforming the heteronormative family institution from within.” In this ethnography, Wang describes relationships as varied as those in which married partners are mutually supportive close friends who confide in one another about their same-sex relationships , to others in which subjects suffered from differing expectations between the partners, sometimes with gay husbands expecting deferential behavior from their lala wives, or between the couples and their parents and in-laws. Wang suggests applying a “decolonizing feminist methodology” to go beyond dichotomies of public/private, local/global, and success/failure and thus to better understand tongzhi marriage and critical queer subjectivities at this global juncture. Wang’s article is a co-winner of the 2018 Feminist Studies Award for the...

Cognitive Bias: Interracial Homicide in New Orleans, 1921–1945

White killers of African Americans in New Orleans between 1921 and 1945, nearly half of whom were policemen, insisted that they acted in self-defense, only after their victims had threatened them, often by reaching for weapons. But many of their victims were unarmed. The conventional interpretation is that white residents invoked a formulaic justification of self-defense to mask their real intention, to uphold the city's racial hierarchy. Recent studies by cognition researchers, however, suggest a more complicated interpretation—that endemic racism can influence how the brain processes information, even to the extent of causing people to see a weapon where none exists.

Urban Schools

Addressing the seemingly perpetual turbulent landscape of urban schools, the role that elementary educators and teacher educators can play in reversing negative trends and trajectories is considered. Three urban education journals were examined over a 5-year period (2005-2010) to determine the emphasis on elementary students or schools. Of the 429 articles, only 8% focused on the elementary years. Schools and teacher education programs that are willing to learn from existing successful models and to straightforwardly and vigilantly address endemic racism in policies and practices offer the most hope for transforming urban schools. Collaborative grassroots efforts are recommended.

Aboriginal Assimilation and Nyungar Health 1948–72

The policy of assimilation in mid-twentieth-century Australia holds a major place in the history of Aboriginal health. For the first time Australian governments endorsed equal citizenship for Aboriginal people with full access to mainstream medical and hospital services previously denied to them. After decades of neglect Aboriginal families could look forward to better health. Politicians were convinced that disparities in Aboriginal health would be readily assimilated into the profile of the general population. However, this case study of assimilation’s mainstreaming of health services for Nyungar people in Western Australia demonstrates that the outcome was a mix of significant advances and enduring legacies of discrimination. Improvements were frustrated by endemic racism, contested understandings of assimilation, and the government’s failure to meet its promises. A consequence was a legacy of suspicion and anxiety that continues to impact adversely on Nyungar health today.

“Am I going crazy?!”: A Critical Race Analysis of Doctoral Education

The graduate school experience for students of color has been theorized as oppressive and dehumanizing (Gay, 2004). Scholars have struggled to document how students of color navigate and negotiate oppressive and dehumanizing conditions in their daily experiences of doctoral education. We provide a critical race analysis of the everyday experiences of Latina/o and black1 doctoral students. We draw from critical inquiry and critical race theory to establish and describe an overarching and powerful social narrative that informs, influences, and illustrates the endemic racism through which black and Latina/o students struggle to persist in pursuit of the doctorate. We call this social narrative, “Am I going crazy?!” Deconstructing the narrative into its core elements, we provide an extended definition that illustrates a dehumanizing cultural experience in the everyday lives of doctoral students. We problematize these cultural norms to promote a more humanizing experience of doctoral education for black and Latina/o students.

In the Eye of the China Storm: A Life between East and West by Paul T. K. Lin with Eileen Chen Lin (review)

Reviewed by: In the Eye of the China Storm: A Life between East and West by Paul T. K. Lin with Eileen Chen Lin Franklin J. Woo (bio) Paul T. K. Lin with Eileen Chen Lin. In the Eye of the China Storm: A Life between East and West. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011. 327 pp. Hardcover $39.95, ISBN 978-0-7735-3857-3. In the Eye of the China Storm is an account of the Canadian-Chinese family of Paul T. K. Lin (1920–2004), who with his wife, Eileen, and two young sons (ages four and five months) spent fourteen years (1950–1964) in Communist China participating in its revolutionary nation building. It is the saga of how one person whose passion and commitment for a new China contributed to the slow process of transforming North American Cold War attitudes and contentious relationships with the People’s Republic. The book was put together after Lin’s death by his wife, [End Page 358] who carefully selected the significant material from his personal archives and manuscripts. Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1920, Lin was the youngest of five children of the Rev. George Lim Yuen and Chiu Mon Son. Lim Yuen had come to Canada at age fifteen after a traditional Confucian education in Xinhui county near Guangzhou, leaving in 1897 a weak China, plagued with Western and Japanese encroachments. Supporting himself at first as a laborer in Canada’s salmon cannery industry and later as a domestic servant for a devout Christian, Lim attended church-sponsored Bible classes in English. Through his study and experience with church people, Lim became a Christian and eventually was invited to be the first Chinese clergy of the Church of England (Anglican) in Canada. Attributing to his father much of his diligence in learning and his compassion for a strong China and a better life for its people, Lin flourished in mind and spirit, growing up in the town of Vernon outside of Vancouver, as a Canadian-Chinese who was fully aware of his Chinese heritage and the need for a stronger China amid foreign hegemony. Despite his fondness in being a Canadian, he was equally aware of the endemic racism in white society, but his own “experience with racial discrimination was not as bad as that experienced by the ‘peasant Chinese,’ scorned by most white Canadians” (p. 8), as shown in Canada’s Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923, which lasted until 1947. Being a hyphenated person with dual attachments to two cultures, Lin in the late 1930s “was deeply anguished by Japan’s atrocities committed against the Chinese people” (p. 11). He was an active member of Vancouver’s Chinese Youth Association (CYA) and participated in the Student Christian Movement (SCM), being especially attracted to its social gospel. Unusually good at speech making with passion and intelligence, Lin became a much sought after orator, even at an early age. He won a scholarship to the University of British Columbia, where he stayed briefly with a major in engineering, before relocating to the United States. Lin continued his studies in the United States at the University of Michigan. Recognizing Lin’s talent in intellectual leadership, his wise and caring counselor (in engineering) persuaded him that engineering was not his calling. Lin, in turn, switched from engineering to international relations. At Michigan, Lin represented his university and was the unanimous winner of the first prize in the Northern Oratorical League Contest held at Northwestern University in 1942. (His gift as an orator and skillful use of the English language are attested to by the many speeches and excerpts over the years, gathered in this biography.) He graduated a year later, in 1943, with a BA degree (with honors). During his time in Michigan, Lin courted and then married, in 1944, Eileen Chen from Shanghai. They became parents of their first son, Christopher, in 1945, and their second son, Douglas, in 1949. His interest in international law led Lin to pursue graduate studies at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where he earned a master’s degree, followed by another master’s degree from Harvard’s Graduate...