Antiracist Pedagogy Toolkit

Why am I on this journey?

Following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on Memorial Day 2020, Eastern Connecticut State University’s student NAACP organization sparked an ongoing conversation on campus regarding systemic racial inequities and the impact of white supremacy.

As a feminist sociologist, my teaching philosophy acknowledges that "the personal is political" and takes intersectionality seriously. I see it as my responsibility to critically engage in the work of antiracism with students by examining not only how the racial caste system operates in the world but by examining my own teaching policies, materials, and practices. Rather than a list of boxes to tick, dismantling white supremacy and building equity for BIPOC students is an ongoing process.

I invite other white faculty to engage in this work, even (and especially) if you think you're already doing "all the right things." We need to ask ourselves (and candidly answer) some difficult questions: Why am I doing this work? What parts of the work am I resisting? What do I need to rethink? How are students of color experiencing my classroom? How are my teaching policies and practices upholding white supremacy, even implicitly? This toolkit is partial, but it contains resources that have been helpful to me on my journey to move from ally to co-conspirator (in the words of Dr. Bettina Love, being interviewed by Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz below).