54 Anti-Racism
Antiracism Inc.: Why the Way We Talk about Racial Justice Matters
Edited by Felice Blake (University of California, Santa Barbara), Paula Ioanide (Ithaca College), and Alison Reed (Old Dominion University)
2019
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA
Antiracism Inc. traces the ways people along the political spectrum appropriate, incorporate, and neutralize antiracist discourses to perpetuate injustice. It also examines the ways organizers continue to struggle for racial justice in the context of such appropriations. Antiracism Inc. reveals how antiracist claims can be used to propagate racism, and what we can do about it. While related to colorblind, multicultural, and diversity discourses, the appropriation of antiracist rhetoric as a strategy for advancing neoliberal and neoconservative agendas is a unique phenomenon that requires careful interrogation and analysis. Those who co-opt antiracist language and practice do not necessarily deny racial difference, biases, or inequalities. Instead, by performing themselves conservatively as non-racists or liberally as ‘authentic’ antiracists, they purport to be aligned with racial justice even while advancing the logics and practices of systemic racism. Antiracism Inc. therefore considers new ways of struggling toward racial justice in a world that constantly steals and misuses radical ideas and practices. The collection focuses on people and methods that do not seek inclusion in the hierarchical order of gendered racial capitalism. Rather, the collection focuses on aggrieved peoples who have always had to negotiate state violence and cultural erasure, but who work to build the worlds they envision. These collectivities seek to transform social structures and establish a new social warrant guided by what W.E.B. Du Bois called “abolition democracy,” a way of being and thinking that privileges people, mutual interdependence, and ecological harmony over individualist self-aggrandizement and profits. These aggrieved collectivities reshape social relations away from the violence and alienation inherent to gendered racial capitalism, and towards the well-being of the commons. Antiracism Inc. articulates methodologies that strive toward freedom dreams without imposing monolithic or authoritative definitions of resistance. Because power seeks to neutralize revolutionary action through incorporation as much as elimination, these freedom dreams, as well as the language used to articulate them, are constantly transformed through the critical and creative interventions stemming from the active engagement in liberation struggles. (Description from publisher Punctum Books)
Format: PDF
“I Can’t Breathe”: International Responses to the BLM Movement
Ibis Sierra Audivert and Hannah A. Matangos (Pennsylvania State University)
2022
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA
This module is intended for students interested in having a global perspective on the impact of George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Students will survey BLM in the U.S. context and its international iterations around the globe by addressing the complexity of race in relation to social justice, political oppression, and the role of the media and technology. Through the assigned materials, students will grasp the ways in which racism manifests across cultural contexts and local histories, with particular attention to the regions of Central Europe (Germany and France), East Asia (China, South Korea, and Japan) and Latin America and the Caribbean (Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic).
Formats: PDF
A People’s History of Structural Racism in Academia: From A(dministration of Justice) to Z(oology)
Susan Rahman, Prateek Sunder, and Dahmitra Jackson
2022
Licence: CC BY
The goal of this open educational resource is to briefly introduce the reader to the role structural racism plays in each of the academic disciplines discussed throughout it, with the caveat that there is much more to tell. The goal of this book is not to tell the whole story, merely to invite further investigation, as a primer is intended to do. We will briefly define each discipline and move into a sampling of the impact structural racism has had on that specific area. While much of this book is historical, it also looks at present day effects and sadly, incidents of individual and structural racism that are still happening today. In some cases, we also highlight great thinkers of colour, LGBTQIA+, or women who were overlooked, or ways in which individual academic fields are confronting this historical legacy in hopes of changing it.
Formats: Online, PDF
Slavery to Liberation: The African American Experience
Norman W. Powell, Gwendolyn Graham, Lisa Day, and Ogechi E. Anyanwu (Eastern Kentucky University)
Joshua Farrington (Bluegrass Community and Technical College)
2019
Licence: CC BY-NC
A comprehensive and up-to-date account of African Americans’ cultural and political history, economic development, artistic expressiveness, and religious and philosophical worldviews in a critical framework. It offers sound interdisciplinary analysis of selected historical and contemporary issues surrounding the origins and manifestations of White supremacy in the United States. By placing race at the center of the work, the book offers significant lessons for understanding the institutional marginalization of Blacks in contemporary America and their historical resistance and perseverance.
Formats: PDF
Toolkits for Equity Series
Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications
2020
Licence: CC BY-NC-SA
While a growing awareness of racial disparities has resulted in a groundswell of support for inclusivity in scholarly publishing, the resulting initiatives would be more effective if our professional associations were able to provide training materials to help transform our workplaces and organizational cultures. As evidence of the interest and need, the project leaders of this guide have been contacted by individuals across scholarly publishing asking for resources about how to replicate workplace equity groups, what to do in cases of discrimination or microaggressions, and how to begin conversations about race. In support of necessary change, the Toolkits for Equity project leaders embarked on creating three toolkits to provide resources for our community, for allies, for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, and for organizations. These toolkits provide a common framework for analysis, a shared vocabulary, and best practices to address racial disparities specific to the scholarly publishing community.
The series includes:
Antiracism Toolkit for Organizations
Antiracism Toolkit for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color