Greetings antiracist changemakers!
This past spring, along with two of my Mandel School colleagues, Dr. Jenny King and doctoral candidate Braveheart Gillani, I launched an antiracism course, Operationalizing Antiracism for Everyday Impact. The course aims to equip students with tools, techniques and practices to help disrupt racism in all its manifestations at the internalized, interpersonal, institutional, and system levels. This graduate-level course is built around my Everyday Antiracism Framework including a week dedicated to each of the eight elements: Curiosity, Structure, Perception, Belonging, Truth, Healing, Restitution and Power.
Teaching Everyday Antiracism
I’m thrilled to report that this was the most gratifying and challenging teaching experience of my career. I am amazed at how ready the students were to take a vulnerable look at themselves, their mindsets, their personal networks and influences, and to honestly identify ways in which their thoughts and actions were perpetuating racism in small and large ways. We were teaching a self-selected group for sure, and this certainly ensured a consistency of openness to growth, and an openness to a degree of discomfort. I leave this class experience with a deepened conviction that, with intentionality and a willingness to be self-aware, we can each take significant daily steps to counteract racism in ourselves and our surroundings. And these daily steps can accumulate to larger, meaningful positive impacts and ripple effects.
Designing this course was a wonderful opportunity to fully build out my Everyday Antiracism Framework with lectures, group activities, and curated readings, including my own recently completed antiracism short stories. See the syllabus summary. And we were able to test the usefulness and applicability of the eight core concepts through the students’ learning experience, in which they reflected on the concepts and then applied them to a real-world context which they each selected at the beginning of class. Some focused on their workplaces and colleagues, some focused on their families, and several focused on themselves and their own internalized racism. One (White) student recorded a series of podcasts called Talking with White People, one episode for each concept, exploring the concepts with various people in her life. Another student created a comic book conveying the concepts. Perhaps most touchingly, an African-American mother focused on how she could be more intentional in how she was raising her two adolescent children to understand and navigate challenges of race, passing on the healthy parts of her own experience while avoiding the transfer of her own negative mindsets or habits.
One particularly successful class activity was the antiracism journal entries submitted by students each week. Providing a structured space for regular reflection and self-assessment, with feedback from class instructors, proved to be instrumental in their increased intentionality and self-awareness. Another key element was that each student selected a racial equity buddy for peer support and accountability. Some selected other students in the class, others selected spouses, friends or roommates.
A validating moment came in the first class session from one of the students, an elder African-American artist-activist taking the course through our school’s Classroom Without Walls program, which offers enrollment tuition-free for community practitioners. She asked: “Is the antiracism that we will learn in this class relevant to Black people too?” To which I replied, “Great question. Yes, because we will be discussing the internalized racism that Black people often have in their own mindset and outlook.” To which she replied: “Awww, this is gonna be GOOD!”
And based on the feedback from student evaluations, her expectations were fulfilled. Here’s a sampling:
“This was a fantastic course and I would highly recommend it to anyone and everyone! I feel like this should be a required course as it really allows people to take a deeper look at themselves and the world we live in. It truly was a pleasure to be in the class - I will miss it!”
“This course was well-developed and executed. The material covered was extremely informative. Both the readings and assignments helped me to better understand what it means to be an everyday antiracist and implement meaningful change in my life, both personally and professionally.”
“There has not been another class in my graduate school career where I felt as seen and heard and most importantly cared for. Every week all three instructors showed up for all of us. This was quite simply a crowning experience of my graduate school career and I am so happy that it was my very last class I took because it created so many beautiful memories.”
Lessons Learned
Reflecting on the experience of teaching and learning through this course, I’m taking away many insights. Perhaps the most important one is to be far more prepared to support students as they lean into self-examination, vulnerable conversations in class, and begin to raise challenging questions among their co-workers, family and friends.
In future, we will spend more time orienting students early in the class to self-care techniques and navigating difficult conversations. We will also inform the supervisors of the students’ internships about the expectations of the class and the discussions that interns may bring into the workplace.
It is also important to anticipate the uncertainty and discomfort that students who do not identify as Black or White may experience, particularly multiracial students and White-presenting LatinX and Asian students. On a couple of occasions, students were excluded or miscategorized when racial affinity groups formed or when discussions lapsed into a Black-White binary frame, particularly in a demographic context like that of Cleveland, Ohio.
For the most part the students were able to apply the Everyday Antiracism concepts quite well in their professional and personal lives, however the concept of “restitution,” making victims of racism whole, proved challenging to operationalize in a day-to-day manner.
Personal Impact
As a professor, teaching this course with such esteemed colleagues and engaged students was extremely rewarding. Seeing the students enthusiastically embrace the concepts and the personal growth opportunity was deeply meaningful – hearing about brave antiracism conversations, they were having with family, friends and colleagues for the first time in their lives was exhilarating. On the other hand, even as I reveled in the demonstrated applicability of the Everyday Antiracism framework, I also more fully grasped the depth of my responsibility to deploy this tool with care and vigilance. It would be irresponsible to invite students onto a path of self-exploration and behavior change without being prepared to support the ups and downs of that process.
With all of this in mind, we will be offering the class again in the upcoming Fall and Spring semesters, with limited slots for online participants from around the country. Let me know if you are interested in being added to our growing waiting list for a future class.
Onwards!
Mark
mark.joseph@case.edu