Tools for self-reflection
For most white educators, self-reflection on racial bias, structural racism, and our roles in perpetuating these inequalities is not a skill that most of us grew up practicing. Yet we must do the work of self-reflection and turn it into action, since the goal is to create an equitable environment for BIPOC students.
"How do I...?" Self-reflections
The Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning at Yale University has an online resource to help faculty develop and enhance their antiracist teaching practices. By asking ourselves the questions they pose below, we can move toward practicing antiracist pedagogy:
Writer Marlon James, winner of the Booker Prize and the National Book Award, reflects on the difference between being "nonracist" and "antiracist"
If one of my goals as an antiracist educator is to reduce racial bias (and it is), then I must first become aware of my own implicit biases. Project Implicit provides one tool for doing this. It is a series of 10-minute online tests that aim to “[measure] the strength of associations between concepts (e.g., black people, gay people) and evaluations (e.g., good, bad) or stereotypes (e.g., athletic, clumsy)” that remain “outside of conscious awareness and control.” When you find implicit bias, you can consciously work to root it out.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie graduated from Eastern in 2001. Her TedGlobal talk has been watched over 27 million times. In it, she talks about what she calls "the danger of a single story." Originally from Nigeria, she discusses her experience as an undergraduate student, where her white roommate wondered if Ms. Adichie knew how to use a stove or if she liked "tribal music." Her roommate had a "single story" of people from the continent of Africa.
I have shown Ms. Adichie's TedGlobal talk in my Sociology Senior Seminar course as a way for students to reflect on their own biases about the populations they are researching.
But as white educators, we should ask ourselves, what "single stories" do we have of our BIPOC students? How do our biases contribute to white supremacy on campus?
Is my university (or classroom) racist?
These are not comfortable questions for predominantly white institutions (PWI) or white faculty. Dr. Bedelia Nicola Richards, a sociologist at the University of Richmond, published an article in Inside Higher Education in which she suggests asking 5 questions to identify social inequalities at the institutional level. They can be adapted to our classrooms as well.
Which group or groups feel most at home on the campus and which ones feel like (unwanted) guests?
Whose norms, values and perspectives does the institution consider to be normal or legitimate? Whose does it silence, marginalize or delegitimize?
Who inhabits positions of power within the institution?
Whose experiences, norms, values and perspectives influence an institution’s laws, policies and systems of evaluation?
Whose interests does the institution protect?