Discusses white fragility--a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves, including the outward display of anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation.
Presents strong evidence that straight talk about our racial identities (whatever they may be) is essential if we are serious about facilitating communication across racial and ethnic divides.
Challenges you to do the essential work of unpacking your biases. Helps white people take action and dismantle their privilege within themselves so that you can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too.
What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son.
How do educators confront the issue of race without fostering further alienation? This book addresses racial incidents directly and offers practical insights into how P-20 educators can transform these events alongside students and colleagues.
Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism. This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society.
Offers instructors perspectives and reflections on engaging anti-racist inclusive practice.
A collection of seventeen original essays that address the extent to which attitudes about race, impacted by the current political moment in the United States, have produced pedagogical challenges for professors in the humanities.
Streamed film. Kanopy. 1 hour, 9 minutes. 2013.
Offers a fascinating look at race-based white entitlement programs that built the American middle class. Argues that our societal failure to come to terms with white privilege perpetuates racial inequality and race-driven political resentments.
Streamed film. Kanopy. 2 hours, 52 minutes. 2003. Three episodes: The Difference Between Us, The Story We Tell, The House We Live In.
Race has no biological foundation but still shapes life chances and opportunities.
Streamed film. AVON. 49 minutes. 2006.
Chronicles the experiences of a diverse group of college students as they probe and confront each other about such issues as underrepresentation, the limitations of multiculturalism, social equity, affirmative action, and their own responsibilities for making a difference.
Streamed film. Kanopy. 1 hour 33 minutes. 2016. An Oscar-nominated documentary narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, I Am Not Your Negro explores the continued peril America faces from institutionalized racism.
Brooms, D., & Davis, A. R. (2017). Staying focused on the goal: Peer bonding and faculty mentors supporting Black males’ persistence in college. Journal of Black Studies, 48(3), 305-326.
This qualitative study investigated the collegiate experiences of 59 Black males at three different historically White institutions. Specifically, we explore how these students construct meaning from their collegiate experiences and their efforts for educational success. As Black males, they were confronted by a deficit perspective that often translated into lowered expectations of them across the college milieu—both academic and social—and posited them as outsiders on campus. In response, the students articulated two critical components of their college experience that positively shaped their persistence efforts: (a) peer-to-peer bonding and associations with other Black males and (b) mentoring from Black faculty members. Findings suggest that these social networks and micro-communities both enhance and support Black males’ persistence in college.
Case, K. F. (2013). Teaching strengths, attitudes, and behaviors of professors that contribute to the learning of African-American and Latino/a college students. Journal of Excellence in College Teaching, 24(2), 129-154.
For students of color, succeeding at predominantly white campuses may be more challenging than at minority-serving institutions. Educational leaders must strive to enhance the learning of this growing group of college learners as campuses increase in ethnic diversity. Culturally responsive teaching (Gay, 2000) and exemplary teaching (Bain, 2004) frameworks were used to examine characteristics of professors whom students of color identified as helping them to learn the most. Professors exhibited relational strengths, cultural awareness, and passion for connecting subjects to students' lives. They valued students' voices in classroom learning and exercised discernment when inviting students to contribute cultural perspectives. These strengths and attitudes were catalysts for creating a respectful classroom climate that was supportive of African-American and Latino/a students.
Miller-Kleinhenz, J. M., Kuzmishin Nagy, A. B., Majewska, A. A. Adebayo Michael, A. O., Najmi, S. M., Nguyen, K. H., Van Sciver, R. E., & Fonkoue, I. T. (2021). Let's talk about race: Changing the conversations around race in academia. Communications Biology, 4(1), 1–6.
Jasmine Miller-Kleinhenz et al. highlight the risk of science and academia's general neutrality to discussions around race and social justice. Their collectively-developed course represents a framework to begin these important discussions and improve conversations on race in academia.
Ozaki, C. C., Johnston-Guerrero, M. P., & Renn, K. A. (2020). Engaging students of color. In Quaye, S. J., Harper, S. R., & Pendakur, S. L. Student engagement in higher education (3rd ed., pp. 17-36). Routledge.
Print book in Bishop Library. Provides an excellent overview of what colleges may do to engage students of color.
Zembylas, M. (2012). Pedagogies of strategic empathy: Navigating through the emotional complexities of anti-racism in higher education. Teaching in Higher Education, 17/(2), 113-125.
This paper constructs an argument about the emotionally complicated and compromised learning spaces of teaching about anti-racism in higher education. These are spaces steeped in complex structures of feeling that evoke strong and often discomforting emotions on the part of both teachers and students. In particular, the author theorizes the notion of strategic empathy in the context of students’ emotional resistance toward anti-racist work; he examines how strategic empathy can function as a valuable pedagogical tool that opens up affective spaces which might eventually disrupt the emotional roots of troubled knowledge—an admittedly long and difficult task. Undermining the emotional roots of troubled knowledge through strategic empathy ultimately aims at helping students integrate their troubled views into anti-racist and socially just perspectives.