Racial Equality Research Articles

Integrations: The Struggle for Racial Equality and Civic Renewal in Public EducationLarryBlum and ZoëBurkholderUniversity of Chicago Press, 2021, Pp. 280.

Integrations: The Struggle for Racial Equality and Civic Renewal in Public EducationLarryBlum and ZoëBurkholderUniversity of Chicago Press, 2021, Pp. 280.

Fear and Loathing: How Demographic Change Affects Support for Christian Nationalism

Abstract Christian nationalism, the fusion of religious and national identities, has emerged as an important factor shaping public opinion on a range of issues. However, debates in the existing literature on the motivations behind support for Christian nationalism remain unresolved: Is Christian nationalism a response to secularization and/or a cover for discomfort with racial diversity and equality? Is Christian nationalism rooted in fear of social change, disgust about social change, or something else? We use an experiment embedded in a national survey of adults to isolate the effects of knowledge of both religious and racial demographic change among White Christians. Our analysis suggests that exposure to religious demographic change shifts support for Christian nationalism and perceptions of discrimination against Whites and Christians, but exposure to racial demographic change has limited impact. This effect is mediated by emotion—religious demographic change increases fear and disgust, which then influence support for Christian nationalism and perceptions of discrimination against Whites and Christians. Although our treatment suggesting exposure to racial demographic change had null effects, we note that racial attitudes do independently influence support for Christian nationalism and perceptions of discrimination against Whites and Christians.

Equity and Justice in Family Medicine Clinical Care and Teaching Must Incorporate a Reproductive Justice Framework.

Since European settlement, the United States has controlled the reproduction of communities of color through tactics ranging from forced pregnancies, sterilizations, and abortions to immigration policies and policies that separate children from their families. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or questioning), asexual, intersex, and gender diverse people (LGBTQIA+) have been persecuted for sexual behavior and gender expression, and also restricted from having children. In response, women of color and LGBTQIA+ communities have organized for Reproductive Justice (RJ) and liberation. The Reproductive Justice framework, conceived in 1994 by the Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice, addresses the reproductive health needs of Black women and communities from a broad human rights perspective. Since then, the framework has expanded with an intersectional approach to include all communities of color and LGBTQIA+ communities. Notwithstanding, reproductive injustice negatively impacts the health of already marginalized and oppressed communities, which is reflected in higher rates of maternal mortality, infant mortality, infertility, preterm births, and poorer health outcomes associated with race-based stress. While the impact of racial injustice on disparate health outcomes is increasingly addressed in family medicine, Reproductive Justice has not been universally incorporated into care provision or education. Including the RJ framework in family medicine education is critical to understanding how structural, economic, and political factors influence health outcomes to improve health care delivery from a justice and human rights perspective. This commentary describes how an RJ framework can enhance medical education and care provision, and subsequently identifies strategies for incorporating Reproductive Justice teaching into family medicine education.

Historical criminology and colonialism

Historical criminology, developing over the last few decades as a defined field of inquiry, has had a recent renaissance, resulting in the publication of leading texts, edited collections and scholarship, setting agendas for its methodologies and impact. We discuss the epistemological and methodological focus of this body of literature, which has been primarily centred on class-based historical criminal justice studies of Britain and the United States. We show that there has long been a parallel development of historical criminology and criminal justice research on colonialism, racial justice and state harm. Drawing upon anti-colonial and anti-criminological research, we challenge current approaches to historical criminology’s epistemological orientations to widen its vision for research, method, ethics and impact, and we highlight the risks of not doing so. This article makes a case for why research and theories of colonialism must be analytical pillars of ‘historical criminology’ and sets out possibilities for future approaches that can push historical criminology in productive directions. Most importantly, we stress the problems for future researchers of analyses that reproduce the structural harms already rampant in criminology.

Institutional Racism and Social Norms: On the Debate Between Rawls and Mills

In this paper, I engage with the debate between John Rawls and Charles Mills. In the first part, relevant works by Rawls and Mills are mainly examined. To this end, I first begin by examining Rawls’s ideal theory of justice and its relevance to the issue of racism. I then consider Mills’s non-ideal critique of Rawls and supplement it with the help of the notion of social norms. Whereas Rawls’s view can deal with racial injustice as discrimination, in my view, I argue that Mills’s theory is mostly concerned with racist injustice as oppression. Between racial injustice as discrimination and racist injustice as oppression, however, there are varying degrees of race-related wrongs, which can be elucidated by harmful social norms. As a result, I conclude that Mills’s point can be shown without supposing that the Rawlsian basic structure is inherently racist.

Disability, Space, and Racial Injustice: Life Writing at Angel Island Immigration Station, 1910–1940

Abstract This study integrates race and disability into a literary-historical analysis of the mostly anonymous poetry composed by Chinese migrants and inscribed onto the walls of the men's barracks of the US Immigration Station at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, 1910–1940. Scholarship in Asian American and Asian diaspora studies has approached this body of work as a modern reinvention of traditional Chinese poetic forms within a US context. This study considers the men's barracks a protest space created under disabling conditions of confinement, and it demonstrates how Angel Island detainees critiqued the racialized and ableist systems of social control that operated at the station. The poets attest to undergoing invasive imperial regimes of bodily inspection and medicalized racial exclusion, and they document lived experiences of chronic illness, depression, and the anguished temporality of detention space. As corpus of disabled life writing by early Asian American and Asian diaspora writers, Angel Island poetry offers wider access to non-English historical vocabularies of disability as well as environmental and holistic understandings of embodied conditions beyond Western diagnostic models. As a built environmental archive and a National Historic Landmark, Angel Island is a significant cultural site for exploring how race and disability operate concurrently as social constructions.

Female Chinese transracial adoptees' racial awakening amid dual racial pandemics.

2020 was marked by two racial pandemics-COVID-19-related attacks against Asians and the police brutality against Blacks that spurred the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement-calling attention to racial privilege and oppression in American society. The present study explores female Chinese transracial adoptees' unique lived experiences during this racially salient moment. A phenomenological approach captured how 20 female Chinese transracial adoptees navigated and made sense of the dual racial pandemics and the subsequent impact on their racial awareness, identity development, and advocacy. Data were collected using semistructured individual Zoom interviews and coded using phenomenological analysis. Findings suggest the dual pandemics acted as catalysts for female Chinese transracial adoptees' racial consciousness and reevaluation of their positionality within the racial hierarchy. Three core themes emerged: female transracial adoptees' new self-understanding as racial beings; their perspective on their place within the White-Black dichotomy; and their role in promoting racial justice. Our findings contribute to the literature by highlighting the complexities of female Chinese transracial adoptees' racialized selves as children of color who have been raised in White families; their motivations to foster racial justice; and their ability to facilitate race talk. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Reimagining Governance in a Racial Justice Coalition: A Case Study in Transforming Power

This case study elucidates the experiences of a mid-sized community-based nonprofit coalition whose mission is to address systemic racism and organize and advocate for racial justice. Following several years of operating as a fiscally sponsored coalition, their staff decided it was the opportune to establish themselves as an independent nonprofit with its own 501(c)(3) designation. This juncture presented a unique opportunity for the Coalition to design a governance model that was in alignment with their deep values of racial equity, shared leadership, democratic principles, nonhierarchal organizational structures, and the advancement of grassroots Black leadership, and the prioritization of individuals most adversely affected by systemic racism and oppression. This case study illustrates the Coalition’s transformational journey and the challenges encountered during the design process of their new governance model, based on the principles of the pioneering governance framework, Community Engagement Governance™ (Freiwirth, 2013).

Erasing Race and Disability from Educational Policies of a Chinese–English Dual Language Charter School

Background or Context: There is increasing research focusing on dual language (DL) education program policies and practices regarding who has access to bilingualism and whose bilingualism is valued and represented. However, limited research is situated in the context of Chinese–English DL education and its service of emergent bilingual learners with disabilities (EBLWDs). Purpose, Objective, Research Question, or Focus of Study: The current study examines DL policy documents from one Chinese–English DL charter school to answer the following research question: How do a Chinese–English DL charter school’s policies and practices address racial and disability injustice? Research Design: Textual analysis is conducted to examine publicly available educational policy documents from school, district, and parent-hosted websites; photos from school Facebook pages; and meeting minutes from the school principal, with permission. Conclusions or Recommendations: Drawing from a Disability Critical Race (DisCrit) stance, this study reveals textual silences on disability and race and the exclusion of EBLWDs through no-excuses accountability policies. Discourses of elite bilingualism and neoliberalism are perpetuated and reproduced by White, nondisabled, middle-class, English-speaking families who control the right to make policy decisions. These discourses shape the lived experiences of EBLWDs, who are deemed as deviant for their racial/ethnic identities and deficient for disability and linguistic status, and are thus denied access to bilingual DL education.

“We’re not fully us without our languages”: multilingual Latina educators and raciolinguistic ideological clarity

ABSTRACT Ideological clarity has been defined as a process in which one struggles to identify dominant society’s explanations for existing societal socioeconomic hierarchies and then juxtapose them with one’s own. In this paper, ideological clarity is used to analyze the ability of multilingual Latina educators to identify, name, and disrupt dominant raciolinguistic narratives and their effects on the students they teach. We present the anécdotas – short, illustrative stories frequently used for teaching and learning – of five K-12 multilingual Latina educators to show how they have developed and employed raciolinguistic ideological clarity. Our findings demonstrate that, in identifying, naming, and disrupting dominant raciolinguistic narratives through both their words and their actions, they actively dismantle racial injustice and construct educational possibilities for language minoritized students of color.

Messing with the Master Narrative: The Challenges of Challenging Meritocracy in Undergraduate Education “Diversity” Coursework

Higher education is working to diversify the undergraduate curriculum to support critical thinking and promote racial justice—pressing work, particularly at predominantly white colleges and universities. To support students’ critical thinking, we need to better understand their awareness of systemic inequities as they enter and exit undergraduate diversity courses. To inform the development of undergraduate curricula, we use iterative comparative analysis of students’ written work to investigate patterns in their thinking regarding issues of systemic inequalities in U.S. public schools before and after an undergraduate diversity course. We examine patterns in student language as they make sense of systemic inequities using course data that centers historic and systemic inequities in U.S schools. We find that students consider these data within their already-held narratives of meritocracy and individuality, resulting in troubled text regarding the role of race and class privilege, and the responsibility/culpability of systems versus individuals in educational attainment.

“#AsiatiquesDeFrance”: confronting anti-Asian racism in contemporary France through digital media

Anti-Asian racism and violence have escalated around the world, coinciding with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, in France, racially motivated violence against people perceived as “Asian” was already on the rise, even before the pandemic. Frustrated by the lack of public outrage and the inaction of government authorities, people of Asian heritage in France – who have come from a diverse range of countries, over several generations – have begun mobilizing collectively in new and more ambitious ways. Young people, in particular, have taken to the internet. Using social media platforms, they have not only organized in-person events, including protest marches in central Paris that have numbered in the tens of thousands of people, but have also cultivated online communities focusing on racial solidarity with just as many followers. Social media accounts, hashtags, YouTube webseries, podcasts, and internet-based projects aiming to combat anti-Asian racism while also promoting intersectional racial justice, have thus proliferated in the past few years. This article examines a few prominent examples of these works, including the viral video “#AsiatiquesDeFrance” (2017), to argue that all of these forms convey common messages that deal explicitly with issues of cultural assimilation, national belonging, racial othering, and racism faced by people of Asian heritage in France.

The Racial Justice Dilemma: Examining the Enforcement of Capital Punishment in Contemporary Legal Systems

This research aims to discuss the dilemma of racial justice that arises in the enforcement of capital punishment in various contemporary legal systems. Although legal principles mandate justice and equality before the law, the enforcement of capital punishment often reflects glaring racial imbalance. This study analyzes the factors causing racial disparities in the application of capital punishment, as well as its impact on public trust in the legal system. The research also investigates various reform efforts that have been proposed or implemented to address the issue of racial justice in the enforcement of capital punishment. Referring to various reports, studies, and official sources from Indonesia, it can be concluded that urgent reforms are needed to address this dilemma. Measures such as racial awareness training for legal professionals, increased access to legal aid, and a review of law enforcement policies are key to improving racial justice and rebuilding public trust in the justice system. Thus, this analysis not only provides a deeper understanding of racial justice issues in the context of capital punishment in Indonesia but also highlights the efforts needed to create a fairer, more inclusive legal system respected by all members of society.

“A Wound That Was Already Festering”: The Burdens of a Racial Justice Program on Teachers of Color

Background: Research that documents the influence of anti-racism programs on teacher practice shows some desired outcomes, including developing critical consciousness to support students of color and educate others about stereotyping; understanding how racial bias affects one’s teaching and relationships with students; and implementing anti-racist approaches in schoolwide policies and practice. At the same time, research on anti-racist professional development (PD) also highlights the challenges of engaging in this work when white teachers, in particular, respond defensively or dismissively. Studies have shown how these responses can reinforce stereotyping behavior among white participants and reinscribe unequal social relationships. Research Questions: This article aims to answer the following questions: (1) How do white educators, if they do at all, display resistance to racial justice work? (2) How does resistance among white educators, if it does so at all, shape the experiences of educators of color? (3) How can schools reduce the potential burden of racial justice work on educators of color? Research Design: This article draws on data from a case study of a New York City elementary school that participated in a yearlong racial justice program. Data sources include semi-structured interviews with school and program leaders; focus groups with members of the racial equity committee and other teachers; observations of professional development sessions, racial equity committee meetings, and other program activities; and artifacts related to the implementation of the program to deepen our understanding of the program’s implementation and responses from multiple stakeholders. Recommendations: Grounded in critical race theory (CRT), the findings from this study paint a complex picture of the behaviors that white teachers may employ that derail racial justice work, the emotional and professional burden of that resistance on educators of color, and promising approaches for confronting resistance in order to advance racial equity. Beyond identifying the potential costs of engaging in racial justice work, our findings also offer schools and educators promising approaches for challenging white resistance while not perpetuating racial harm. We propose an implementation model that intentionally shields educators of color from the remonstrations of white resistors and the additional toll they can take on their time and well-being. Moreover, given what we know about the outsized role school leaders play in shaping school environments and professional cultures, it is essential that school leaders show commitment to organizational transformation, while developing the skills required to confront varying degrees of white resistance.

Reflecting on Race, Racism and Transitional Justice

ABSTRACT∞ Following the racial justice uprisings of 2020, our world order continues to reel from the consequences of the systemic racism that is the product of colonial projects past and present. In this introduction to the International Journal for Transitional Justice’s (IJTJ) Special Issue on Race, Racism and Transitional Justice, we ruminate on key disciplinary critiques of the bounds of transitional justice. We analyze the IJTJ’s record of addressing race and racism, relying on data from a coding project of almost all its publications. We find that the explicit discussion and engagement with race and racism has been wanting in the Journal. This volume helps us to consider what it would mean for the field to begin to take race, racism and racial justice seriously. Our hope is that it will help catalyze the remembering, exposing and reimagining of the role of race and racism in transitional justice and beyond.

Carrying the Weight of Campus Change: The Role of Student Equity Leaders in Community College

ABSTRACT This article uses in-depth interviews to explore the experiences of four community college administrators leading policy efforts to advance racial justice efforts. Through a critical organizational lens, we document the unacknowledged labor associated with being the central figure driving institutional equity efforts and the primary person on campus responsible for overseeing and carrying out racialized organizational change. Our analysis yielded two themes: Feelings of taxation, isolation, and being burned out and the difficulty of navigating spaces of resistance to improve racial equity. The findings from this work have implications for policy and practice related to enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts, reframing community college leadership, and understanding racialized organizational change.

Ideological Connections: An Integrated Humanistic-Social Psychological Approach to Examining the Relationship Between Controversial Opposing Opinions

The social, economic, political, and civil unrest surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 United States election, and the increased activity of the racial justice movement has seemingly divided not just the nation but the world. Thoughts and behaviors are guided by ideological beliefs—collections of ideas or philosophies associated with power structures. I examined the overlap between positions on controversial topics and identified how ideological alignment, values, and identity characteristics influenced the holders’ views. I found significant relationships among the variables categorized as social, political, health and medical, and safety, security, and legal ideologies. The results indicated that participants’ views in one ideological category were similar to those in the other ideological categories. Finally, the current study presents models of integrating worldviews in which ideological viewpoints in the various categories align, supported by the Moral Foundations Theory, Ideological-Conflict Hypothesis, and the Rigidity-of-the-Right Hypothesis.

(Re)Placing Personalis: A Study of Placement Reform and Self-Construction in Mission-Driven Contexts

Recent movements in higher education have opened many opportunities for writing program administrators to reform first-year writing placement procedures, including continued development and adaptation of Directed Self Placement (DSP) models alongside ongoing research into their potential to foster student agency and advance linguistic, racial, and social justice in the academy. Our study traces and compares the efforts of two writing program administrators to reform flawed placement processes at their two mission-driven liberal arts institutions—one, a small Lasallian university and Hispanic-serving Institution in Northern California; the other, a private research Jesuit university located in New York City. Using inter-institutional, grounded theory research, this study examines students' reflections on their placement choices to understand “substantive validity,” inquiring intentionally into ways that students self-locate with regard to their self-placement assessments and connecting to the mission-based language of personalis, what belongs to the person. Findings indicate that students use four rhetorical moves to personalize their placement: proliferating, riffing, importing, and qualifying. Specifically, the study calls into question current understandings of under-placement in DSP models, complicating DSP’s fundamentals of choice, guidance, and justice.

Furthering a social justice mission

Portia Allen‐Kyle's career has focused on advocacy and driving meaningful change. Her work has involved advancing equity through nonprofit organizations, government, and academia. Currently Chief of Staff and Interim Head of External Affairs at Color of Change (COC), an online racial justice platform, she works to advance the organization's vision, impact, and efficiency.

China in African American cosmopolitanism, 1919–29

Abstract The betrayal of the Western powers at the Paris Conference of 1919 directly led to the eruption of extensive anti-imperialism in China. This influenced Chinese politics throughout the 1920s and helped secure the return of tariff autonomy and the start of extraterritoriality talks at the end of the decade. The development, though not prominently anti-racist, struck African American observers as a notable achievement against white supremacy. Including it into their imaginary of a global offensive against racial discrimination, they regarded association with China as a unique opportunity to strengthen themselves and weaken white racists. But because of the ineffectiveness of China, African American reactions stemmed mainly from empathy rather than admiration. China, for its part, served as a resolute co-fighter for racial equality in a relationship of mutual usefulness.