Addressing Anti-Black Racism in Higher Education: Love Letters to Blackness and Recommendations to Those Who Say They Love Us

Abstract


 
 
 We write this love letter to Black students, faculty, staff, executive leadership in higher education, and the surrounding community to center their/our Blackness. We want to acknowledge your frustration and anxiety. The “Dear” sections of this letter are written in raw language, specifically to Black people – acknowledging that it is ok to be pissed, fatigued, and not wanting to engage in performative anti-racist expressions of love for Black people. We do not want you to dismiss your own racial battle fatigue you have been coping with this summer. We hope through this letter you consider centering and recentering your wellness through this pandemic and the recent performative gestures of love for Blackness in academe. We were invited by JCSCORE’s Editor-in-Chief Cristobal Salinas Jr. to write this letter from the Editorial Board Members with the goal “to center and amplify Blackness in academia”.
 
 

A Queer of Color Challenge to Neutrality in Undergraduate Stem Pedagogy as a White, Cisheteropatriarchal Space

“…Racial unrest in the United States recently mobilized higher education institutions to interrogate how pedagogical practices uphold ideologies of white supremacy (Beatty et al, 2020). With few models of equitable STEM instruction available and instructors receiving little formal pedagogical training (Walczyk et al, 2007), faculty often have limited resources for developing curricula and enacting instruction in racially equitable ways, which constrict opportunities to support QTSOC through instruction.…”

Pivoting from Problems to Possibilities in Response to Dual Pandemics

“…The collaborative inquiry and reflection process engaged in by the authors provided an opportunity for the self-reflexive analysis supported by Beatty et al (2020) and Strom and Porfilio (2017). This process provided the critical insight needed to name the issue of active racist practices in a seemingly anti-racist program.…”

“… Using an ethic of care (Capello, 2023) as the lens, identify and critique the racist and anti-racist practices perpetuated on your campus (Beatty et al, 2020) and in your program.…”

“…These incidents compounded with the disproportionate percentage of deaths related to COVID-19 within the Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities (Coley & Thomas, 2023;Jones, 2021) resulted in outcries and demonstrations in cities across the U.S. and abroad. Subsequently, both new and continued demands for antiracism quickly materialized (Beatty et al, 2020). During this time, colleges and universities crafted statements denouncing racism and called forth task forces devoted to enacting anti-racism and addressing racist incidents on their campuses and in their local communities.…”

Further Contextualizing Racial Identity: Multiracial Students at Hispanic-Serving Institutions

“…A function of anti-Blackness is tokenization, where a Black person, even a mixed Black person, is biologically essentialized and valued insofar as their white appeasing representation of their race (Beatty et al, 2020). Amy feeling like the "the token black guy" is an example of anti-Blackness functioning at Amy's HSI.…”