Anti-Racism Resources

What can stigmatized individuals do to reduce stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination when they interact with a biased individual? This paper reviews the social psychological literature that examines how targets can be active agents of prejudice reduction for themselves and their group.

The article explores two intertwined ideas: that the United States is a settler colonial nation-state and that settler colonialism has been and continues to be a gendered process. The article engages Native feminist theories to excavate the deep connections between settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy, highlighting five central challenges that Native feminist theories pose to gender and women's studies. From problematizing settler colonialism and its intersections to questioning academic participation in Indigenous dispossession, responding to these challenges requires a significant departure from how gender and women's studies is regularly understood and taught.

Despite the presence of programs such as ALA’s Spectrum Scholarship and the ARL Initiative to Recruit a Diverse Workforce, library and information science (LIS) has not been successful in increasing the number of racial/ethnic minorities in the profession, especially in academic libraries. This article will identify steps that White academic librarians can take to prevent and address racial microaggressions in order to become better allies to our colleagues of color.

An exploration into the relationship between libraries and institutional oppression. It begins with with an examination at how the enlightenment provides the ideological foundation and framework for public libraries and the historical processes that created the library as institution. It then examines this institution using the three logics of white supremacy: slavery, Indigenous genocide, and Orientalism.

When librarians discuss the lack of underrepresented populations in librarianship, the solutions suggested most often are recruitment and awareness. But these discussions focus on one matrix of identity, like race or class, and ignore the fact that people embody multiple, layered identities. By treating these matrices of identity and marginalization as separate entities, librarians fail to fully understand how oppressions work in varying contexts. We need to go beyond the traditional diversity rhetoric and speak instead of intersectional librarianship. This article defines intersectionality, how it differs from the current discourse, and how it can be used to help librarians understand and serve diverse populations better.

In the article, Justin E. H. Smith bemoans this kind of deference with the university. We ought to include “submerged and forgotten voices” in our syllabi and our research because we are intellectually curious and they are intrinsically interesting, not merely for the sake of representation.

In an effort to investigate academic librarians’ experiences and observations of racial microaggressions, a survey was sent to three ACRL listservs in the spring of 2012. In a preliminary analysis of the 129 comments left by survey participants, seven themes were identified: microassaults, microinsults, microinvalidations, environmental microaggressions, uncertainty or racism not observed, being excluded or isolated, and implications for recruitment and retention.

This article introduces a new strategic framework developed for addressing microaggressions that moves beyond coping and survival to concrete action steps and dialogues that targets, allies, and bystanders can perform (microinterventions).

Few white people socialize or work politically with people of other races, even when our goals are the same. We don't want to be racist - so much of the time we go around trying not to be, by pretending we're not. Yet, white supremacy is basic in American social and economic history, and this racist heritage has been internalized by American white people of all classes. We have all absorbed white racism; pretence and mystification only compound the problem.

The article discusses the author's insights on the inequalities faced by people who are perceived to be different in the work environment. It mentions the major issues, such as unequal benefits, and little issues, such as little acts of failures, that are faced by non-traditional employees. It explores the definition of micro-inequities which are unrecognized discriminatory acts and of micro-affirmations which are unconscious acts to help people perform well and correct weakness. It states that the concept of micro-inequalities and micro-affirmations can be used by managers to improve work environment. It suggests ways on how to change behaviors including bad behavior punishments.

The deleterious effects of microaggressions on members of marginalized groups are well documented. Less clear are the practice skills needed to intervene when microaggressions take place, particularly in ways that maintain strong relationships with students, colleagues, and/or clients. Furthermore, too often discussions of responses to microaggressions are restricted to the position of bystander, ignoring the ways that human service providers may also perpetrate or be targets of injustice. Using vignettes from our practice experience, we provide guiding principles for constructive microaggression intervention from three key social locations: perpetrator, witness, and target.

Microaggressions are a new moral category that refers to the subtle yet harmful forms of discriminatory behavior experienced by members of oppressed groups. Such behavior often results from implicit bias, leaving individual perpetrators unaware of the harm they have caused. Moreover, microaggressions are often dismissed on the grounds that they do not constitute a real or morally significant harm. My goal is therefore to explain why microaggressions are morally significant and argue that we are responsible for their harms. I offer a conceptual framework for microaggressions, exploring the central mechanisms used for identification and the empirical research concerning their harm.

The article offers the author's insights on the five explications of oppression which have been used in social movements in the U.S. since 1960. The author mentions how oppression affects social groups in terms of political philosophy and in aggregates. Moreover, the author mentions various categories connected to oppression including the exploitation theory of Karl Marx, marginalization in racial groups, and cultural imperialism in social groups.

Previous literature on social identities focused largely on the oppression of people with marginalized identities without much attention paid to privileged, or dominant, group members. In conclusion to this special issue on privilege, I synthesize the authors' contributions and current research on various forms of group privilege. The authors vary in their approach to dissecting privilege, either intersectionally or examining a single group's privilege. This body of work is imperative to the growing academic field of Privilege Studies, as well as encouraging more mainstream discourse about privilege and oppression.

In this article I explore two activities commonly used for teaching about systems of oppression whose structures inadvertently support linear, single-issue thinking, and largely fail to account for intersectionality, despite educators’ best efforts to incorporate more complex content. I describe an alternative activity, structured around Iris Marion Young's The Five Faces of Oppression, that can be used to teach about multiple, interlocking systems of oppression while highlighting rather than obscuring the specificity of interrelationships among those systems.

An essay is presented on definitions of various social identity categories which include gender, race, sexual orientation. It offers information on superordinate forms of social identity and social interactions such as heteronormativity and transphobic conception, and assertion of centric and supremacist ideation.

This article introduces the notion White fatigue. White fatigue occurs for White students who have grown tired of learning and discussing race and racism, despite an understanding of the moral imperative of anti-racist and anti-oppressive practices. The article differentiates White fatigue from ideas like White resistance, White guilt, or White fragility, arguing that each of these phenomenon occur at different stages of White Racial Identity Development. Distinction is also drawn among White fatigue and other forms of racially based fatigue, specifically racial battle fatigue and White people fatigue syndrome.

Provides insights on the existence of privileges for the white population in academes. Daily effects of white privilege; Factors that shape white privilege; Types of privileges; Association of strength and power with privilege.

In this article, we incorporate the "systemic" model of community life into debates on the U.S. crime drop, and we focus on the role that local nonprofit organizations played in the national decline of violence from the 1990s to the 2010s. Using longitudinal data and a strategy to account for the endogeneity of nonprofit formation, we estimate the causal effect on violent crime of nonprofits focused on reducing violence and building stronger communities. Drawing on a panel of 264 cities spanning more than 20 years, we estimate that every 10 additional organizations focusing on crime and community life in a city with 100,000 residents leads to a 9 percent reduction in the murder rate, a 6 percent reduction in the violent crime rate, and a 4 percent reduction in the property crime rate.

We reviewed the rules governing police use of force in America's largest city police departments to determine whether they include meaningful protections against police violence.

Does increased militarization of law enforcement agencies (LEAs) lead to an increase in violent behavior among officers? We theorize that the receipt of military equipment increases multiple dimensions of LEA militarization (material, cultural, organizational, and operational) and that such increases lead to more violent behavior. The US Department of Defense 1033 program makes excess military equipment, including weapons and vehicles, available to local LEAs. The variation in the amount of transferred equipment allows us to probe the relationship between military transfers and police violence. We estimate a series of regressions that test the effect of 1033 transfers on three dependent variables meant to capture police violence: the number of civilian casualties; the change in the number of civilian casualties; and the number of dogs killed by police. We find a positive and statistically significant relationship between 1033 transfers and fatalities from officer-involved shootings across all models.

Police body-worn cameras (BWCs) have been widely promoted as a technological mechanism to improve policing and the perceived legitimacy of police and legal institutions, yet evidence of their effectiveness is limited. To estimate the effects of BWCs, we conducted a randomized controlled trial involving 2,224 Metropolitan Police Department officers in Washington, DC. Here we show that BWCs have very small and statistically insignificant effects on police use of force and civilian complaints, as well as other policing activities and judicial outcomes. These results suggest we should recalibrate our expectations of BWCs’ ability to induce large-scale behavioral changes in policing, particularly in contexts similar to Washington, DC.

Congress passed the Death in Custody Reporting Act in 2014, which created a national database on civilian deaths caused by law enforcement. The Federal Bureau of Investigations and the Bureau of Justice statistics have subsequently also announced new efforts to collect data on the frequency of deadly encounters between law enforcement and civilians. This Article explores how the federal government could use these newly amassed datasets to reduce police violence.

Most identity‐based models of activism assume that action is motivated either by a disadvantaged identity (predicting own‐group activism), or a feeling of solidarity with disadvantaged groups (predicting ally activism). They do not account for advantaged and disadvantaged identifications within the same person. Yet many activists have both advantaged and disadvantaged identities. Two interview studies from Hungary and the United States (N = 47) were used to examine how both disadvantaged and advantaged identities influence politicization and activism (both own‐group and ally), via both direct and indirect experiences of marginalization and privilege.