Paper Sample on Antiracism and Institutional Change: A Comprehensive Exploration

According to Ibram Kendi’s “How To Be an Antiracist” extract of 2019, he defines racist and antiracist. A racist supports a racist policy through their actions, while an antiracist is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea. He further continues by giving out the most consequential steps towards being an antiracist. The following questions remain; why is racism still a significant factor in most developed countries, including the United States? What are the significant causes of racism? What characteristics are considered for one to be an antiracist? What is the significance of antiracist in curbing racism? The list of questions is endless.

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I agree with his definition and meaning of the two words, especially because racial inequity has been a critical factor that has seen "Black People" in the United States as the minority group and inferior in social classes, schools, workplaces, and even in leadership. The idea and belief that color contributes to the majority in countries with white people as the majority have historical roots since the 17th century in the founding of the U.S. and connection to settler colonialism, according to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Daniel Solorzano’s definitions. For instance, there are Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the United States but do not have historically white ones even though that was the reason why HBCUs were created. On the same note, you have "black" T.V. shows such as The Cosby Show, but not "white" T.V. shows despite popular sitcoms like Friends having exclusively white lead roles.

There has been a long period of racial discrimination experienced in the United States and other developed countries. The discrimination dictated who had the required skill, who was to be hired for a particular job, and who was given permission to live in peace and security in their respective states. This contributed to racial injustices, exemplified by the deaths of George Floyd and other Unarmed Black men. The end of any racial injustice starts with a single individual (Johnson, 2020). The Black Lives Matter Movement and other solidarity movements serve as an example. No human being chooses to be black or white, racist, or antiracist being racist or antiracist is one's practice. For example, Barack Obama, the former president of the United States, took it as an initiative to drop the uninsured rates for three million African Americans and four million Latinx by securing health insurance through the Affordable Care Act to around 11 percent. Still, after he left office, more the 28.5 million remained uninsured.

Quoting Angela Davies, “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be antiracist," proves that actions are a critical factor in ensuring a society full of antiracists only. The antiracist practices and actions employed in an institution should not reinforce (white) normative standards of excellence. Instead, they should look for those actions that are indicators of commitments to antiracism and racial justice. Many sources in the United States have been advocating for more than a decade the need for diverse faculty. California community colleges, and many civil rights organizations, serve as examples of institutions that advocate for equity for all people in each department in the country. The report by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLGU) and the USC Race and Equity Center has been at the forefront of educating Americans on how they can live without seeing the differences in another person's body makeup. They advocated for equal opportunities for all people living on American soil. These plus many other sources outlined ways to deal with the antiracist practices differently by formulating actions which included:

Cluster hiring. Institutions that are antiracists usually practice cluster hiring. In this method, they usually go for a multiply of faculties that differ in color at once; therefore, the feelings of a particular individual different from the other regarding color, region, or ethnicity having been isolated is not the case. This is not the case with the previous practices whereby holders of positions that have a lot of privileges were based on a person's color, a person's nationality, and so forth, thereby spearheading marginalization, exclusion, and mineralization against black and indigenous people of color(Stevanin,2019).

Post Hiring Autopsy: Organizations that use a post-hiring report for them to determine the number of candidates that applied for that position, those that got an invitation for the interview in addition to that group that was forwarded as the finalists are considered as an equity-minded institution. Through this approach, the recruitment process will consider hiring only those candidates that have the required set targets and potentials in the particular job compared to the previous system that had their recruitment resumes based on personal background, family history, and color.

Intentional Recruitment: The creation of partnerships with several organizations and institutions of education intentionally provides employers with an opportunity to see past a particular network and base their consideration on a pool of candidates (Guh et al., 2019). The hiring by-referral method practiced in racially based organizations usually constructs their networks within our circle. In most cases, it does not include everyone; instead, it leads to a homogenous workplace.

Making Inclusion a Priority in Workplaces: Employers can put in place the inclusion of every person and antiracism in their institutions. This can be done through the allowances of flexible hours, supporting prayers in the workplace, assigning mentors, and supporting safe spaces to discuss diversity, race, and racism in their workplace. Complaints submitted to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (Calvasina, 2019) about employment discrimination based on race in higher learning institutions offering employment opportunities based on race showed that racially discriminated cases totaled 35,890 cases in 2010.

Allocation of incentives. The incentives provided an implicit bias in training and fund allocation for Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) programs. However, these incentives did not stimulate change due to the racism in the structure that is within the campus organization. Since those in hiring committees are those in the departments and faculties, it is still clear that academic senates and human resources at the campus and district levels develop race-conscious policies and provide race-conscious training to counter systemic racism (Jacobson Frey, 2020) actively. Previously, laws and human personnel were the most critical factors that counter systemically inherent racist systems. This, however, is not enough in our current era. As a result, a more diversified faculty is required because the systemic change in an institution requires going beyond talk, that is, more action and accountability.

The only remedy to antiracism is to understand the idea and policies of racism and antiracist and work on a particular dimension towards changing the suspense by Thomas Jefferson, “The blacks, whether originally a distant race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”

References

Jacobson Frey, J. (2020). Actively working to be more antiracist in the employee assistance field. Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health, 35(2), 69-79.

Johnson, K. (2020). Racial Equity Is Everyone's Responsibility: A Critical Action Research Study on Building Institutional Capacity to Take Antiracist Action (Doctoral dissertation, Azusa Pacific University).

Stevanin, M. (2019). Race and Language Teaching: Making a Case for Anti-Racist Practices in EFL\ESL classrooms (Bachelor's thesis, Università Ca'Foscari Venezia).

Guh, J., Harris, C., Martinez, P., Chen, F., & Gianutsos, L. P. (2019). Antiracism in residency: a multimethod intervention to increase racial diversity in a community-based residency program. Family medicine, 51(1), 37-40.

Calvasina, G. E. (2019). EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY COMMISSION (EEOC) PERFORMANCE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE 2018 FISCAL YEAR REPORT. ASBBS Proceedings, 26, 129-129.