Confronting Institutionalized Racism In Higher Education

This book chronicles the experiences of faculty at predominantly white higher education institutions (PWI) by centering voices of racialized faculty across North America. Drawing on Critical Race Theory and critical, feminist, and auto-ethnographic approaches, the text analyzes those narratives, situating people’s words in a landscape of institutionalized racism within higher education. In order to support newer under-represented faculty, administrators committed to supporting faculty, and doctoral students interested in a future in higher education, the book offers strategies and implications for institutional reform and anti-racist faculty organizing/survival in academia. Despite claims by university administrations about commitments to diversity, this book demonstrates otherwise, offering counter-narratives from racialized faculty members who share their struggles.

Racism and ignorance churn on college campuses as surely as they do in society at large. Over the past fifteen years there have been many discussions regarding racism and higher education. Some of these focus on formal policies and dynamics such as Affirmative Action or The Dream Act, while many more discussions are happening in classrooms, dorm rooms and in campus communities. Of course, corollary to these conversations, some of which are generative and some of which are degenerative, is a deafening silence around how individuals and institutions can actually understand, engage and change issues related to racism in higher education. This lack of dialogue and action speaks volumes about individuals and organizations, and suggests a complicit acceptance, tolerance or even support for institutional and individual racism. There is much work to be done if we are to improve the situation around race and race relation in institutions of higher education. There is still much work to be done in unpacking and addressing the educational realities of those who are economically, socially, and politically underserved and oppressed by implicit and overt racism. These realities manifest in ways such as lack of access to and within higher education, in equitable outcomes and in a disparity of the quality of education as a student matriculates through the system. While there are occasional diversity and inclusion efforts made in higher education, institutions still largely address them as quotas, and not as paradigmatic changes. This focus on “counting toward equity rather” than “creating a culture of equity” is basically a form of white privilege that allows administrators and policymakers to show incremental “progress” and avoid more substantive action toward real equity that changes the culture(s) of institutions with longstanding racial histories that marginalize some and privilege others. Issues in higher education are still raced from white perspectives and suffer from a view that race and racism occur in a vacuum. Some literature suggests that racism begins very early in the student experience and continues all the way to college (Berlak & Moyenda). This mis-education, mislabeling and mistreatment based on race often develops as early as five to ten years old and “follows” them to postgraduate education and beyond.

Confronting Racism in Teacher Education aims to transform systematic and persistent racism through in-depth analyses of racial justice struggles and strategies in teacher education. By bringing together counternarratives of critical teacher educators, the editors of this volume present key insights from both individual and collective experiences of advancing racial justice. Written for teacher educators, higher education administrators, policy makers, and others concerned with issues of race, the book is comprised of four parts that each represent a distinct perspective on the struggle for racial justice: contributors reflect on their experiences working as educators of Color to transform the culture of predominately White institutions, navigating the challenges of whiteness within teacher education, building transformational bridges within classrooms, and training current and inservice teachers through concrete models of racial justice. By bringing together these often individualized experiences, Confronting Racism in Teacher Education reveals larger patterns that emerge of institutional racism in teacher education, and the strategies that can inspire resistance.

The mission statements and recruitment campaigns for modern Canadian universities promote diverse and enlightened communities. Racism in the Canadian University questions this idea by examining the ways in which the institutional culture of the academy privileges Whiteness and Anglo-Eurocentric ways of knowing. Often denied and dismissed in practice as well as policy, the various forms of racism still persist in the academy. This collection, informed by critical theory, personal experience, and empirical research, scrutinizes both historical and contemporary manifestations of racism in Canadian academic institutions, finding in these communities a deep rift between how racism is imagined and how it is lived. With equal emphasis on scholarship and personal perspectives, Racism in the Canadian University is an important look at how racial minority faculty and students continue to engage in a daily struggle for safe, inclusive spaces in classrooms and among peers, colleagues, and administrators.

In the new arena for anti-racist work in which we find ourselves, the neo-liberal, ‘post-race’ university, this interdisciplinary collection demonstrates common global political concerns about racism in Higher Education. It highlights a range of issues regarding students, academic staff and knowledge systems, and all of the contributions seek to challenge the complacency of the ‘post-race’ present that is dominant in North-West Europe and North America, Brazil’s mythical ‘racial democracy’ and South Africa’s post-apartheid ‘rainbow nation’. The collection makes clear that we are not yet past the need for anti-racist institutional action because of the continuing impact of coloniality on and in these nations. From within the colonial psyche which still exists in the 21st century these nations actively deracinate politics, subjectivities, political economy and affective relationalities when they re-imagine themselves to be ‘post-race’ states where all citizens can have a share in the good life because now only class matters. Universities have also taken on the mantle of upholding societal ‘post-race’ status through ineffective equality and diversity policies and strategies. The collection makes the case for the urgent need to decolonize the university in ‘post-race’, neoliberal times through a focus on institutional racism in HEIs in Canada, Brazil, South Africa, the UK and the USA. As such it addresses institutional whiteness; the transformation of organizational cultures; the presence and experiences of Black people, People of Colour and Indigenous people in HEIs; the development of curriculum interventions; widening participation and organizational change; and future directions for racial equality and diversity in a ‘post-race’ era. This book was originally published as a special issue of Race Ethnicity and Education.

This book reports on leading edge research on racism in higher education - a matter that has received far less attention in western societies than racism in schools. The book examines the evidence of institutional racism in higher education and prepares for the forthcoming web-based guide to assist institutional change. The chapters here are drawn from the presentations by leading social science researchers in the field at a conference at the University of Leeds in 2002. The conference made it possible to assess the extent and nature of racism in higher education institutions today, and the structural constraints on change. There are theoretical and philosophical explorations that further understanding, and also accounts of evidence of positive new responses to these issues. This important book is for managers, academics and teachers in Higher Education, for policy makers, professionals and academics concerned with race equality and for students of the social sciences.

Challenging Racism in Higher Education provides conceptual frames for understanding the historic and current state of intergroup relations and institutionalized racial (and other forms of) discrimination in the U.S. society and in our colleges and universities. Subtle and overt forms of privilege and discrimination on the basis of race, gender, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, religion and physical ability are present on almost all campuses, and they seriously damage the potential for all students to learn well and for all faculty and administrators to teach and lead well. This book adopts an organizational level of analysis of these issues, integrating both micro and macro perspectives on organizational functioning and change. It concretizes these issues by presenting the voices and experiences of college students, faculty and administrators, and linking this material to research literature via interpretive analyses of people's experiences. Many examples of concrete and innovative programs are provided in the text that have been undertaken to challenge, ameliorate or reform such discrimination and approach more multicultural and equitable higher educational systems. This book is both analytic and practical in nature, and readers can use the conceptual frames, reports of informants' actual experiences, and examples of change efforts, to guide assessment and action programs on their own campuses.

Increase your racial equity capacity for transformational change The years 2020 - 2021 will be remembered for COVID-19 and racial injustice. COVID illuminated long-standing structural inequities. Increased media focus on police brutality helped fuel a protest movement that underscored the urgency of the moment. In schools, non-profits, and various business sectors, conversations about race and institutional racism are becoming increasingly common. However, most of these conversations are performative and do little to disrupt the status quo. The authors of Humanity Over Comfort aim to move beyond the transactional response of using only conversations to respond to structural inequalities. Alternatively, the authors advance tools that promote transformational change that eliminates the access and opportunity gaps for Black and Brown individuals. Written to cultivate awareness that increases racial equity capacity, this book will help readers Understand historical context and the influence of racism in shaping reality Engage in reflections that connect learning to personal experience Understand the Conscious Anti-Racist Engendering Framework (CARE), which draws from adult learning theory to build community in organizations Leverage one’s span of control to implement practices that incrementally work to dismantle systems of oppressions Direct their increased capacity towards dismantling racially predictable policies and practices Transactional responses to racism perpetuate marginalizing narratives and outcomes and do little to support the humanity of a community, including White members. This book will guide readers towards transformational change to build a system that supports the restoration of our collective humanity.