Near the beginning of his huge bestseller How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi says, “Some of my most consequential steps toward being an antiracist have been the moments when I arrived at basic definitions. To be an antiracist is to set lucid definitions of racism/antiracism, racist/antiracist policies, racist/antiracist ideas, racist/antiracist people” (p. 17). Unfortunately, for those who wish to be antiracists, Kendi’s definitions are anything but lucid. In fact, they are quite murky. This is particularly (...) the case with respect to Kendi’s definitions of racist and antiracist. (shrink)

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning comes a “groundbreaking” (Time) approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society—and in ourselves. “The most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.”—The New York Times ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—The New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Shelf Awareness, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews Antiracism is a (...) transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism—and, even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. At its core, racism is a powerful system that creates false hierarchies of human value; its warped logic extends beyond race, from the way we regard people of different ethnicities or skin colors to the way we treat people of different sexes, gender identities, and body types. Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas—from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities—that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves. 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. (shrink)

During an April 12, 1860, Senate debate, Senator Jefferson Davis spoke against a bill to fund Black education in Washington, D.C. Davis argued that the United States government was founded “by white men for white men” and “not for negroes.” According to Davis, the inequality of the white and black races was “stamped from the beginning.”Davis’s phrase forms the basis of Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 National Book Award–winning study, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas (...) in America. Kendi currently serves as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and as the founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. Stamped from the Beginning has won a large... (shrink)

This text examines recent illiberal trends in traditionally liberal institutions. Specifically, it critiques radical “anti-racism” approaches based on critical race theory (CRT) and the ideas of academics such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. It also focuses on Unitarian Universalism, a historically liberal church whose national leadership has adopted an extreme version of critical race theory. -/- Racial and other inequities are problems in all societies and all of human history, and there are no simple, easy (...) or objectively correct solutions. While critical race theory (CRT) offers important insights on racism and racial disparities, I believe in liberalism, freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas, things that extreme CRT adherents, Kendi and DiAngelo oppose. -/- Freedom of speech and expression and the free exchange of ideas support diversity, multiculturalism and marginalized groups. Illiberalism, dogmatism and authoritarianism are oppressive of all groups, minority and majority, and should be rejected wherever they appear. (shrink)

With growing public health and health equity challenges brought to the forefront — following racialized health inequities resulting from COVID-19 and a national reckoning around the deaths of unarmed Black victims at the hands of police — an antiracist health equity agenda has emerged naming racism a public health crisis.

Legal, medical, and public health professionals have been complicit in creating and maintaining systems that drive health inequities. To ameliorate this, current and future leaders in law, medicine, and public health must learn about racism and its impact along the life course trajectory and how to engage in antiracist practice and health equity work.

This book unearths and outlines the semantic foundations of white fragility and their consequences for racial justice in the United States. It argues that by expanding our racial vocabulary in certain ways, we can make progress toward justice equally enjoyed by all.

Many health care organizations made public commitments to become antiracist in the wake of George Floyd's murder. These actions raise questions about the appropriateness of health care's engagement in racial justice and social justice movements generally. We argue that health care organizations can be usefully thought of as having two roles: a functional role to care for the sick and a meta‐role as an organizational citizen. Fulfilling the role of citizen may require participating in the pursuit of social justice, (...) including efforts to achieve racial equity. The demands of these two roles will need to be balanced, but the role of organizational citizen has been largely ignored and merits serious attention. (shrink)

This paper is premised on the understanding that racism is deeply and widely entrenched in our culture and the ethical claim that we operate within complex networks of habituated practices. Within this framework, we ask how do we disrupt these calcified, complex, and racist ways of being? Specifically, we explore how teachers are habituated into particular ways of seeing and acting. We argue generally that conscious cultivation can promote greater equity and specifically that changing teacher talk is a necessary part (...) of this cultivation if racist norms are to be disrupted and replaced with more equitable ways of seeing in schools. In making this argument, we draw on a practice, Descriptive Inquiry, to cultivate more equitable talk and describe how it led to changes in four urban public schools. (shrink)

Negative characteristics are sometimes attributed to racial groups on the basis of culture. Sometimes these cultural characteristics are invoked to explain racial disparities. Many antiracist activists and intellectuals argue that such attributions are racist and, in this respect, are no different than attributions of negative characteristics to a racial group based on biology. In a recent essay, Lawrence Blum provides a typology of different kinds of views that attribute negative cultural characteristics to racial groups. One of (...) the views that Blum identifies treats the relevant cultural characteristics as malleable but does not attribute those characteristics to existing structural factors. Blum characterizes this type of thinking as a form of racist thought. I argue that Blum is mistaken in doing so and that there are good reasons for academics not to treat cultural explanations for racial disparities as too taboo to even consider. (shrink)

This article is motivated by a concern about the increasing embrace of apolitical and ahistorical notions of racial “mixedness” and “impurity.” It draws on recent examples from the United States and South Africa in order to direct attention to the difficulties of identifying logics that, on the face of it, seem to evade conventional claims of racism, but nevertheless, as it will argue, rely on racist notions that must be challenged. These include examples in the United States and South (...) Africa of individuals self-identifying as a stand-alone mixed race category as well as white Afrikaners in South Africa uncritically appropriating claims to mixed heritage. This article is critical of these phenomena because of what it finds to be a lack of politically and historically situated understandings of the notions of purity and impurity and their relation to racism. (shrink)

Race and racism are matters of urgent concern for the international nursing community. Recent global events have presented the discipline with an opportunity to generate and sustain long overdue discussions. However, with this opportunity comes a need to consciously attend to what we mean by race and racism, especially in the context of the nursing literature. Indeed, the development of antiracism depends on how we conceptualise race and racism; it is these conceptualisations that actively shape the scope and priorities of (...) antiracist organising and action. The aim of this critical interpretative synthesis (CIS) is to examine conceptualisations of race and racism in the nursing literature by drawing on contemporary race scholarship. The synthesis of diverse literature is enabled through the explorative and expansive process of the CIS method. This review generates three synthesising arguments—a problem ‘of’ not ‘for’; conceptual inconsistencies and drift; and reliance on the lens of experience—that both critique and contribute to the nursing literature. In the pursuit of antiracism, this article urges us to pay close attention to our conceptualisations of race and racism by illuminating the pitfalls that occur when our conceptualisations are inconsistent, contradictory, or simply neglected. (shrink)

In the profession of nursing, whiteness continues to be deeply rooted because of the uncritical recognition of the white racial domination evident within the ranks of nursing leadership. White privilege is exerted in its ascendency and policy-making within the nursing discipline and in the Eurocentric agenda that commands nursing pedagogy. While attention to antiracism has recently increased, antiracism pedagogy in nursing education is nascent. Pedagogical approaches in the nursing profession are essential. Because it encompasses the strategies used to transmit (...) the science in how nurses practice and teach, which has predominantly been informed using a Eurocentric lens. This paper presents a literature review on antiracist pedagogy in nursing education, discussing how nurse educators can integrate antiracism pedagogy in nursing education, highlighting examples presented by the authors. Key terms related to antiracism are reviewed. The resultant themes from the literature review include resistance to antiracist pedagogy, managing emotional responses, and supporting transformative learning using an antiracist approach. The primary implementation of Eurocentric pedagogical approaches whiteness pervasive in nursing education must be uprooted. Antiracist and other antioppressive learning approaches must be embraced to understand the insidiousness of racial inequities and its power in sustaining structural oppression in nursing academia. (shrink)

Preemption is a substantial threat to achieving racial equity. Since 2011, states have increasingly preempted local governments from enacting policies that can improve health and reduce racial inequities such as increasing minimum wage and requiring paid leave.

Photo ID 72893750 © Rawpixelimages|Dreamstime.com ABSTRACT Solidarity is a concept increasingly employed in bioethics whose application merits further clarity and explanation. Given how vital cooperation and community-level care are to mitigating communicable disease transmission, we use lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic to reveal how solidarity is a useful descriptive and analytical tool for public health scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. Drawing upon an influential framework of solidarity that highlights how solidarity arises from the ground up, we reveal how structural forces can (...) impact the cultivation of solidarity from the top down, particularly through ensuring robust access to important social determinants of health. Public health institutions can support solidarity movements among individuals and communities by adopting a lens of social justice when considering public health priorities and, in turn, promote health equity. INTRODUCTION Over the past two decades, scholars have invoked the concept of solidarity when assessing a wide range of topics in bioethics, from CRISPR-Cas9 technology to organ donation to structural racism.[1] However, the growing literature on solidarity has not fully examined the roles and responsibilities of institutions and governments in fostering solidarity, especially regarding public health measures that implicate entire populations. We argue that it remains unclear how public health institutions should engage with solidarity and how their engagement will affect public health and its ethics. We first take Prainsack and Buyx’ three-tiered framework as an analytical starting point.[2] We then explore how public health institutions can foster solidarity by carefully considering factors that may bolster it on an interpersonal, community, and national scale. We conclude that public health institutions should adopt a lens of social justice to promote solidarity at the interpersonal and community levels, thereby promoting equity in future public health efforts. BACKGROUND Calls for solidarity in bioethics raise longstanding normative questions about the nature and limits of our duties to one another and how to weigh autonomy over considerations of justice.[3] Though the term is diversely applied, Prainsack and Buyx propose a potentially unifying definition in the 2011 Nuffield Council report, “Solidarity: Reflections On An Emerging Concept in Bioethics.” The report defines solidarity as an activity involving “shared practices reflecting a collective commitment to carry financial, social, emotional, and or other ‘costs’ to assist others.” Their conceptualization also includes important features that distinguish solidarity from other values like empathy or altruism: solidarity emphasizes action rather than mere internal feeling and recognition of connection as motivation.[4] Bioethicists have since applied this conceptualization when analyzing issues in public and global health, given that population-level efforts need cooperation from individuals and communities. Prainsack and Buyx further note that solidarity is relevant in bioethics discourses about justice and equity, in support of providing aid to low- and middle-income countries, and as a value exemplified by European welfare states.[5] Other bioethicists have argued that promoting solidarity can contribute to community engagement, partnership with Tribal communities, and global health equity.[6] Most recently, scholars have applied solidarity as a lens to assess the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting the pitfalls of national mitigation efforts and global disparities in disease outcomes.[7] I. Solidarity at Three Levels It seems impossible to foster solidarity in public health if we cannot identify it in general contexts. Prainsack and Buyx articulate three levels of solidarity: interpersonal solidarity, group solidarity, and legal or contractual codifications of solidarity.[8] They argue that each level inherently informs the one ‘above’ it in a unilateral direction. In other words, solidarity is fundamentally a bottom-up phenomenon. Solidarity among individuals influences group norms, which then have the potential to shape policy and institutional practice.[9] Within the Prainsack and Buyx framework, it would seem nonsensical to posit how solidarity might be expressed vertically or from the “top down.” It appears intuitively odd to imagine how a government entity might ‘be’ in solidarity with a person or group if solidarity requires some cognition about their condition per Prainsack and Buyx’ definition. Some have argued that solidarity does not seem like something that one can impose, as instances of it arise from agents recognizing and acting upon some bond rather than in response to a command. Indeed, people may be rightfully hesitant to engage in solidarity if the official messaging is overly paternalistic or coercive.[10] However, some authors have countered that governments can express solidarity through enacting structural and policy changes, though it is ambiguous how these actions are distinct from a justice-driven approach.[11] If a bottom-up approach is thus the most practical means of achieving policy that reflects solidarity, then it does not add much to public health. Institutions would be ineffective without the population’s initiation of the corresponding social norms. However, we find this conclusion overly pessimistic. Fostering a culture of solidarity to improve public health has potential merit. Prainsack and Buyx’ framework overlooks how public health actors can influence solidarity between individuals and across communities. To clarify, we agree with the view that solidarity is a bottom-up phenomenon. Solidarity may not be able to originate in a top-down fashion, but we suggest that public health institutions can take a more active role in providing the public with accurate information, promoting social justice, and intervening in the social determinants of health. II. The COVID-19 Pandemic as a Case Study Lessons learned from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic support our argument. The pandemic deepened socioeconomic disparities in the US and hindered access to vital resources such as food, housing, and healthcare.[12] Prainsack recently noted: “[n]ext to the immediate health effects of the virus, poverty and grave inequalities have been the root causes of human suffering during the pandemic.”[13] Prior to the pandemic, many rural and low-income populations lacked reliable access to the internet and devices like laptops or smartphones. This continued lack of access restricts the flow of information and prevents people from accessing telemedicine services.[14] Preexisting social, political, and health inequities worsened health outcomes among many marginalized racial and ethnic groups. It is well-documented that communities of color, including Black, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Latinx populations, had greater COVID-related mortality and morbidity due to the effects of structural racism.[15] Although federal US agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention enacted laws that provided safety nets (e.g., the Federal Eviction Moratorium), the majority of such programs have ended, leaving many with little assistance and the threat of further hardship.[16] These disparities are relevant because Prainsack, Buyx, and others note that solidarity arises from agents recognizing and acting on some perceived attainable collective goal(s). Income inequality and disparate access to food, education, and health care may lead people to consider public health goals unattainable. This could limit the desire to work toward those goals collectively.[17] The existing literature on collective action theory supports this intuition. It emphasizes that structural conditions, such as an absence of perceived hope for social change among a group, can lead to low ‘group efficacy’ and little willingness to cooperate, both within and across socioeconomic strata.[18] The pandemic spurred countless messages from public health agencies. The messaging did not recognize or attend to the different material realities and circumstances of the US population. How can people feel comfortable getting vaccinated if they deeply distrust the government, including public health institutions? How can people remain motivated to wear masks and distance themselves if they cannot afford basic necessities and work jobs without adequate pay and leave policies? We ask these questions to illustrate how socioeconomic disparities can marginalize people if they feel ignored, apathetic, or resentful of those better off or those in power whom they perceive to “not be doing enough.” This marginalization precludes the formation of solidarity. There are instances when a population has disparate access to resources and social capital, but solidarity may still emerge from a shared goal or vision for the future. For example, a heterogeneous population living in the same town may come together to protest an environmental injustice that impacts their water supply with the common goal of securing access to safe drinking water. However, many populations in the US failed to recognize shared goals of this kind during the COVID-19 pandemic. A significant minority of the US population was reluctant to acknowledge the severity of COVID-19 infection and thus refused to participate in efforts to mitigate its spread. Even between groups who shared the goal of slowing COVID-19 transmission, the methods were widely debated. Approximately 20 percent of the adult population eligible for vaccination remains unvaccinated.[19] Governmental bodies responsible for disseminating information, coordinating the allocation of resources, and establishing guidelines have a large role in mediating these disagreements and intervening in socioeconomic conditions that impact people's ability and willingness to engage in solidarity. III. Solidarity, Social Justice, and the Role of Public Health Institutions Adopting a lens of social justice provides further insights into how public health actors impact solidarity. Powers and Faden argue that the “foundational moral justification for the social institution of public health is social justice.”[20] Their theory of social justice has two aims. First, it ensures that everyone has a sufficient amount of the six core elements of well-being and that public health institutions are responsible for “adopting policies and creating environments” where all can flourish.[21] Second, public health institutions should distribute resources meant to promote well-being and focus on the “needs of those who are the most disadvantaged.”[22] Public health institutions should enact policies that address injustice. In doing so, public health institutions can seed the opportunity to build solidarity from the bottom up. Equipping individuals and communities with resources will foster cooperation and adherence to policies that require solidarity, such as masking and vaccination. This is consistent with arguments illustrating how institutions such as Tribal governments promote the conditions needed for their group, and especially its most vulnerable members, to flourish.[23] Addressing social determinants of health with a social justice lens will create the circumstances under which more individuals and groups can find common causes and foster solidarity. In the long run, such efforts may result in the establishment of values and practices from the bottom up. There are societal and public health preconditions required before institutions can expect their audience to act in solidarity with one another. Through their great influence over information and resources, public institutions do have the power to impact what values are most widespread. Furthermore, public health may foster trust and hope, which are important psychosocial factors that influence collective action,[24] if policies increase access to resources that promote well-being. Messaging efficacy also depends on the context of public trust, education, and whether the institutions meet one’s basic needs. Disparate messaging across different public institutions may confuse or disillusion individuals. To apply our theory of solidarity to the decision to vaccinate, a policy would be to foster conditions that facilitate access to vaccines and information about vaccine efficacy instead of imposing a top-down mandate without first eliciting public trust. IV. Counterargument Some argue that discordant public health messaging, ineffective government, and inadequate social programs can also bring people together under pressure and foster solidarity. One may argue that the most powerful motivators towards solidarity are strife and disparity, as evidenced throughout history. During the pandemic alone, political struggle and personal hardship inspired solidarity in the US, from individual neighbors helping each other to mutual aid groups forming across communities. We thus do not claim that solidarity is possible only when our government programs and public health institutions are most effective. We instead point out that solidarity can be further hindered when people feel alienated, hopeless, and pitted against each other. CONCLUSION Many competing conceptualizations of solidarity persist in the bioethics literature, and Prainsack and Buyx offer one compelling framework that public health ethicists continue to draw upon.[25] However, their framework fails to acknowledge how public health institutions impact interpersonal and group solidarity. Public health institutions can foster solidarity through actions other than mere messaging, invoking catchphrases like “we are all in this together.” Efforts to address socioeconomic preconditions and alleviate health disparities can cultivate group solidarity. As we saw during the pandemic, cooperation and solidarity go hand-in-hand with disease mitigation efforts; solidarity has clear intrinsic value.[26] As this relationship becomes more apparent, we will continue to see attempts from public health institutions to foster or invoke solidarity. Therefore, public health institutions would be remiss to ignore their role in addressing the social determinants of health. Adopting a social justice lens when planning public health interventions will clarify and strengthen their role in facilitating solidarity. Ultimately, if health disparities continue to persist or widen, it is very hard to imagine how group solidarity can ever be achieved. The widescale adoption of many public health measures needed to promote health and well-being would be conducive to solidarity. - Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are the authors’ and do not represent the views of the NIH, DHHS, or the U.S. government. Funding Disclosure: This work was supported in part by the Intramural Program of the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. - [1] John J Mulvihill et al., “Ethical Issues of CRISPR Technology and Gene Editing through the Lens of Solidarity,” British Medical Bulletin 122 (2017): 17–29, https://doi.org/10.1093/bmb/ldx002; Ben Saunders, “Altruism or Solidarity? The Motives for Organ Donation and Two Proposals,” Bioethics 26, no. 7 (September 2012): 376–81, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8519.2012.01989.x; -Vanessa Y Hiratsuka, “SPECIAL REPORT: A Critical Moment in Bioethics: Reckoning with Anti-Black Racism through Intergenerational Dialogue A Call for Solidarity in Bioethics: Confronting Anti-Black Racism Together,” 2022, https://doi.org/10.1002/hast.1380. [2] Prainsack and Buyx, Solidarity: Reflections on an Emerging Concept in Bioethics London: Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 2011; Prainsack and Buyx, “Solidarity in Contemporary Bioethics--towards a New Approach.” Bioethics 26, no. 7 (September 2012): 343–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1467-8519.2012.01987.X. [3] Bob Simpson, “A ‘We’ Problem for Bioethics and the Social Sciences: A Response to Barbara Prainsack,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 43, no. 1 (January 12, 2018): 45–55, https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243917735899. [4] Barbara Prainsack and Alena Buyx, Solidarity: Reflections on an Emerging Concept in Bioethics (London: Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 2011). [5] Barbara Prainsack and Alena Buyx, “Solidarity in Contemporary Bioethics--towards a New Approach,” Bioethics 26, no. 7 (September 2012): 343–50, https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1467-8519.2012.01987.X. [6] Bridget Pratt, Phaik Yeong Cheah, and Vicki Marsh, “Solidarity and Community Engagement in Global Health Research,” The American Journal of Bioethics : AJOB 20, no. 5 (May 3, 2020): 43–56, https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2020.1745930; Sara Chandros Hull, F. Leah Nez (Diné), and Juliana M. Blome, “Solidarity as an Aspirational Basis for Partnership with Tribal Communities,” The American Journal of Bioethics 21, no. 10 (October 3, 2021): 14–17, https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2021.1965258; Mbih J. Tosam et al., “Global Health Inequalities and the Need for Solidarity: A View from the Global South,” Developing World Bioethics 18, no. 3 (September 1, 2018): 241–49, https://doi.org/10.1111/DEWB.12182. [7] Peter West-Oram, “Solidarity Is for Other People: Identifying Derelictions of Solidarity in Responses to COVID-19,” Journal of Medical Ethics 47, no. 2 (February 1, 2021): 65–68, https://doi.org/10.1136/MEDETHICS-2020-106522; Barbara Prainsack, “Solidarity in Times of Pandemics,” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (December 1, 2020): 124–33, https://doi.org/10.3167/DT.2020.070215; F. Marijn Stok et al., “Social Inequality and Solidarity in Times of COVID-19,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 12 (June 2, 2021), https://doi.org/10.3390/IJERPH18126339; Ming Jui Yeh, “Solidarity in Pandemics, Mandatory Vaccination, and Public Health Ethics,” American Journal of Public Health 112, no. 2 (February 1, 2022): 255–61, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306578; Barbara Prainsack, “Beyond Vaccination Mandates: Solidarity and Freedom During COVID-19.,” Am J Public Health 112, no. 2 (February 1, 2022): 232–33, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306619. [8] Prainsack and Buyx, Solidarity: Reflections on an Emerging Concept in Bioethics London: Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 2011; Prainsack and Buyx, “Solidarity in Contemporary Bioethics--towards a New Approach.” Bioethics 26, no. 7 (September 2012): 343–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1467-8519.2012.01987.X. [9] Prainsack and Buyx, Solidarity: Reflections on an Emerging Concept in Bioethics London: Nuffield Council on Bioethics, 2011; Prainsack and Buyx, “Solidarity in Contemporary Bioethics--towards a New Approach.” Bioethics 26, no. 7 (September 2012): 343–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1467-8519.2012.01987.X. [10] Yeh, “Solidarity in Pandemics, Mandatory Vaccination, and Public Health Ethics”; Prainsack, “Beyond Vaccination Mandates: Solidarity and Freedom During COVID-19.” [11] Ho, Anita, and Iulia Dascalu. "Relational solidarity and COVID-19: an ethical approach to disrupt the global health disparity pathway." Global Bioethics 32, no. 1 (2021): 34-50; West-Oram, Peter. "Solidarity is for other people: identifying derelictions of solidarity in responses to COVID-19." Journal of Medical Ethics 47, no. 2 (2021): 65-68. [12] Monica Webb Hooper, Anna María Nápoles, and Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, “COVID-19 and Racial/Ethnic Disparities,” JAMA 323, no. 24 (June 23, 2020): 2466, https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.8598. [13] Prainsack, Barbara. “Beyond Vaccination Mandates: Solidarity and Freedom During COVID-19.” Am J Public Health 112, no. 2 (February 1, 2022): 232–33. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306619. [14] Camille A Clare, “Telehealth and the Digital Divide as a Social Determinant of Health during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Network Modeling Analysis in Health Informatics and Bioinformatics 10 (2021): 26, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13721-021-00300-y. [15] Patrick Nana-Sinkam et al., “Health Disparities and Equity in the Era of COVID-19,” Journal of Clinical and Translational Science 5, no. 1 (March 16, 2021): e99, https://doi.org/10.1017/cts.2021.23. [16] Kathryn M Leifheit et al., “Expiring Eviction Moratoriums and COVID-19 Incidence and Mortality,” American Journal of Epidemiology 190, no. 12 (December 1, 2021): 2503–10, https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwab196. [17] Barbara Prainsack, “Solidarity in Times of Pandemics,” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (December 1, 2020): 124–33, https://doi.org/10.3167/DT.2020.070215 [18] Maximilian Agostini and Martijn van Zomeren, “Toward a Comprehensive and Potentially Cross-Cultural Model of Why People Engage in Collective Action: A Quantitative Research Synthesis of Four Motivations and Structural Constraints.,” Psychological Bulletin 147, no. 7 (July 2021): 667–700, https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000256. [19] Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (HHS/CDC), “COVID Data Tracker,” 2023, https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker. [20] Powers, Madison, and Ruth Faden. Social Justice: The Moral Foundation of Public Health and Health Policy. 1st editio. New York: Oxford Press, 2006, p. 9 and Chapter 4 [21] Powers and Faden, Social Justice: The Moral Foundation of Public Health and Health Policy; Madison Powers and Ruth Faden, Structural Injustice: Power, Advantage, and Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). [22] Powers, Madison, and Ruth Faden. Social Justice: The Moral Foundation of Public Health and Health Policy. 1st editio. New York: Oxford Press, 2006, p. 10 [23] Bobby Saunkeah et al., “Extending Research Protections to Tribal Communities,” The American Journal of Bioethics 21, no. 10 (October 3, 2021): 5–12, https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2020.1865477. [24] Agostini and van Zomeren, “Toward a Comprehensive and Potentially Cross-Cultural Model of Why People Engage in Collective Action: A Quantitative Research Synthesis of Four Motivations and Structural Constraints.” [25] Prainsack and Buyx, Solidarity: Reflections on an Emerging Concept in Bioethics. [26] Ruth Chadwick, “COVID‐19 and the Possibility of Solidarity,” Bioethics 34, no. 7 (September 8, 2020): 637–637, https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12813. (shrink)

Negative characteristics are sometimes attributed to racial groups on the basis of culture. Sometimes these cultural characteristics are invoked to explain racial disparities. Many antiracist activists and intellectuals argue that such attributions are racist and, in this respect, are no different than attributions of negative characteristics to a racial group based on biology. In a recent essay, Lawrence Blum provides a typology of different kinds of views that attribute negative cultural characteristics to racial groups. One of (...) the views that Blum identifies treats the relevant cultural characteristics as malleable but does not attribute those characteristics to existing structural factors. Blum characterizes this type of thinking as a form of racist thought. I argue that Blum is mistaken in doing so and that there are good reasons for academics not to treat cultural explanations for racial disparities as too taboo to even consider. (shrink)

This new edition explains why developing an anti-racist white identity is an important part of cultivating an effective antiracist practice and is a necessary part of subverting the weaponizing of white identity cultivated by the far right.

Shannon Sullivan has criticized Richard Rorty for the discrepancy in his treatments of Cornel West and Marilyn Frye's prophetic philosophies, which Sullivan reads to indicate a racial bias on Rorty's part. This article defends Rorty from this criticism, first clarifying his view of the discontinuous relation of philosophy to politics, then, on the basis of this clarification, arguing that Rorty's different treatments of West and Frye do not reveal a racial bias as Sullivan claims. Finally, revisiting Rorty's exchange (...) with Nancy Fraser, it is argued that although Rorty has no philosophy of race, he does offer a strong antiracist politics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Royce, Racism, and the Colonial IdealWhite Supremacy and the Illusion of Civilization in Josiah Royce's Account of the White Man's Burden1Tommy J. CurryNo colony can be made by a theory of Imperialism, it can only be made by people who want to colonize and are capable of maintaining themselves as colonists.—Sir Sydney OlivierIntroductionAs with most historic white figures in philosophy, their repopularization and reintroduction into contemporary circles commits their (...) work, regardless of its initial silence, to speak to the problem of anti-Black racism in America. Josiah Royce is no different in this regard. In recent years, white scholars like Jacquelyn Kegley and Shannon Sullivan have introduced revisions to Royce's thought that make it appear multicultural and antiracist, despite the anachronism of such a contention. According to Kegley, "Royce believes, as others in the contemporary scene, that 'race' as a concept cannot be eliminated, [because] it plays too crucial a role, both positive and negative, in self- and social identification" (216). While Kegley is correct that contemporary scholars like Lucius Outlaw and Cornel West have adamantly defended the importance of race as a social and cultural entity, her claim is in stark contradiction to the racial eliminativism of other scholars like Anthony Appiah and Alain Locke, whom she also contends that Royce agrees with simultaneously.2 While it makes perfect sense for Kegley to try to put Royce in conversation with contemporary Black thinkers in race theory, her work is indicative of a trend aiming to gain currency for historic white thinkers in current race debates at the expense of historical accuracy. Black scholars who studied under Royce and applied his theories to the race problem from the mid-1900s onward, like William H. Ferris3 and William T. Fontaine,4 are ignored by white scholars because the first application of Roycean philosophy supported assimilationism. It is only today with the political and ideological [End Page 10] ethicizations of racial diversity and multiculturalism that Royce's work is interpreted as critically conserving race.5In contrast to contemporary works on Royce and race, this article seeks to evaluate the current claims for the relevance of Royce's views in contemporary debates on race. I maintain that only by taking Royce out of his historical context (late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century thought) do his ideas on race acquire a level of importance that cannot be supported by the actual evidence he himself advances. Conversely, by actually placing Royce in his historical context, this article will demonstrate that Royce's 1905 article entitled "Race Questions" (later published as "Race Questions and Prejudices" in 1906) is an unapologetic extension of his 1900 article entitled "Characteristic Tendencies of American Civilization," where Royce adamantly champions British colonialism and assimilation as the remedy to the burgeoning race problem both at home and abroad. I begin with a critical analysis that places Josiah Royce's attitudes firmly within the boundaries of his times. In what follows, I will attempt to contextualize Royce's seemingly progressive stance on Japan as part of a more general reaction whites had during the early 1900s to Russia's defeat by the Japanese. Instead of reading Royce's stance on Japan as a moment of exceptionalism, I contend that Royce's attitude was in fact a popular disposition that signaled the inevitable shift of race science away from biological determinism toward more environmentalist explanations. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I will show that Royce's disposition toward Blacks was firmly rooted in a colonial and assimilationist logic that ultimately sought the cultural destruction of African-descended people. A closer look at Royce's prefatory remarks on British colonialism from 1900 and his valorization of English colonial administration in Jamaica actually reveals an insidious racial dynamic in Royce's thought that is anything but antiracist. Finally, having established Royce's philosophical stake in American assimilation and Western domination, I argue that the "provincial revision" currently in vogue amongst American philosophers working with Royce is simply not enough to overturn Royce's clearly racist investments in dealing with the race question.If I Can Think It... Then I Can Do It—Reading Royce... (shrink)

Kant scholars have paid relatively little attention to his raciology. They assume that his racism, as personal prejudice, can be disentangled from his core philosophy. They also assume that racism contradicts his moral theory. In this book, philosopher Huaping Lu-Adler challenges both assumptions. She shows how Kant's raciology--divided into racialism and racism--is integral to his philosophical system. She also rejects the individualistic approach to Kant and racism. Instead, she uses the notion of racism as ideological formation to demonstrate how Kant, (...) from his social location both as a prominent scholar and as a lifelong educator, participated in the formation of modern racist ideology. As a scholar, Kant developed a ground-breaking scientific theory of race from the standpoint of a philosophical investigator of nature or Naturforscher. As an educator, he transmitted denigrating depictions of the racialized others and imbued those descriptions with normative relevance. In both roles, he left behind, as one of his legacies, a worldview that excluded non-whites from such goods as recognitional respect and candidacy for cultural and moral achievements. Scholars who research and teach Kant's philosophy therefore have an unshakable burden to take part in the ongoing antiracist struggles, through their teaching practices as well as their scholarship. And they must do so with a pragmatic attention to nonideal social realities and a deliberate orientation toward substantial racial justice, equality, and inclusion. Lu-Adler pushes the discourse about Kant and racism well beyond the old debates about whether he was racist or whether his racism contaminates his philosophy. By foregrounding the lasting legacies of Kant's raciology, her work calls for a profound reorientation of Kant scholarship. (shrink)

Medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) integrate knowledge and practices from law and health care in pursuit of health equity. However, the MLP movement has not reached its full potential to address racial health inequities, in part because its original framing was not explicitly race conscious.

A common claim in the philosophy-of-race literature is that the unearned benefits of whiteness can by themselves burden their recipients with special antiracist obligations, i.e., that these benefits can impose duties unilaterally, without the mediation of their recipients’ wills, and that these duties go beyond our general antiracist duties, which derive from our common liberal-democratic citizenship and shared humanity. I will argue against this claim, though I acknowledge that there may be duties that follow from these benefits when they are (...) combined with the affirmation or assertion of, assent to, or even mere acquiescence in white identity. Without such ratification, however, there will be no basis for either special white duties or a distinctively white guilt. (shrink)

Building on research conducted in feminist organizations in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, this paper explores the role, relationship, and responsibility of advocating for antiracism and social justice in the context of antiracism projects in feminist nonprofit organizations. In doing so this paper asks: What do antiracism projects look like in feminist organizations? And how are these projects informed or interrupted by racialized and Indigenous activists within these spaces? (...) Using critical race theory’s composite counterstory, this paper uses storytelling methodologies to understand how racialized settlers and Indigenous folks can collaborate and thrive – as they have been doing – on occupied unceded territories in Canada. Based on a series of interviews with racialized and Indigenous activists engaging in feminist nonprofit organizations, these stories shed light on contemporary realities of colonization, including collaboration within white settler systems. (shrink)

In this essay Sandra Vanderbilt explores philosophies of peace and protest through a dialectical reading of the works of Martin Luther King Jr., Daisaku Ikeda, and Paulo Freire, and considers these philosophies in relation to her own activism, specifically in the context of dealing with White postracial myths and more overt acts of racism. This essay outlines what she learned from her dialectical reading across several works by King, Ikeda, and Freire, and how these philosophies of peace and protest informed (...) the ways in which she has been able to initiate and sustain conversations across the chasm that separates her antiracist positioning from the stance of friends and family members who deny and enact racism and White supremacy. The three theorists Vanderbilt focuses on here all point to ongoing engagement among individuals as necessary to sustaining the collective. Drawing on their work, Vanderbilt suggests that we have to begin with a critical understanding of Whiteness in our efforts to engage someone, in radically loving acts, in confrontation with their own words and behavior. Opportunities for this sort of confrontation have the potential to bridge the conversational chasm and to open discussions wherein one can practice the virtue of justice, and importantly racial justice. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that, in order for white racial consciousness and practice to shift toward an antiracist praxis, a relational understanding of racism, the "self, "and society is necessary We find that such understanding arises from a confluence of propositional, affective, and tacit forms of knowledge about racism and one's own situatedness within it. We consider the claims sociologists have made about transformations in racial consciousness, bringing sociological theories of racism into dialogue with research on whiteness (...) and antiracism. We assert that sociological research on white racism and "whiteness" tends to privilege propositional and tacit/common sense knowledge, respectively, as critical to shifting white racial consciousness. Research on antiracism privileges affective knowledge as the source of antiracist change. We examine some of Perry's recent ethnographic research with white people who attended either multiracial or majority white high schools to argue that the confluence of these three types of knowledge is necessary to transform white racial praxis because it produces a relational understanding of self and "other, "and, by extension, race, racism, and antiracist practice. (shrink)

Despite the resistance from radical antiracist formations, autonomously organised by racialized minorities and migrants themselves, that can be witnessed in many spaces, the success with which antiracism has been both appropriated and relativized by the state as well as hegemonic activist voices poses a significant threat. The politics of diversity and the consensus around the notion that western societies are post-race contribute to portraying the critique of racism from people of colour as inaccurate, alienating and counter-productive to the achievement of (...) social cohesion. The necessity of dismantling the idea of race as suggested by antiracist activists and scholars has been subverted in the deconstruction of the experience of racism by an ‘antiracialist’—rather than a more radical antiracist—agenda intent on relativizing the struggle against racism as one among many. The consequence of this in the context of postracialism is for racism itself to be departicularized and dissociated from its historical roots. Antiracism needs to reclaim the risk, that Goldberg argues is inherent to it, and rescue it from being universalised into meaninglessness. (shrink)

Withholding or withdrawing life-saving ventilators can become necessary when resources are insufficient. In the USA, such rationing has unique social justice dimensions. Structural elements of dominant allocation frameworks simultaneously advantage white communities, and disadvantage Black communities—who already experience a disproportionate burden of COVID-19-related job losses, hospitalisations and mortality. Using the example of New Jersey’s Crisis Standard of Care policy, we describe how dominant rationing guidance compounds for many Black patients prior unfair structural disadvantage, chiefly due to the way creatinine and (...) life expectancy are typically considered.We outline six possible policy options towards a more just approach: improving diversity in decision processes, adjusting creatinine scores, replacing creatinine, dropping creatinine, finding alternative measures, adding equity weights and rejecting the dominant model altogether. We also contrast these options with making no changes, which is not a neutral default, but in separate need of justification, despite a prominent claim that it is simply based on ‘objective medical knowledge’. In the regrettable absence of fair federal guidance, hospital and state-level policymakers should reflect on which of these, or further options, seem feasible and justifiable.Irrespective of which approach is taken, all guidance should be supplemented with a monitoring and reporting requirement on possible disparate impacts. The hope that we will be able to continue to avoid rationing ventilators must not stand in the way of revising guidance in a way that better promotes health equity and racial justice, both to be prepared, and given the significant expressive value of ventilator guidance. (shrink)

In their article on the limited duty to reinterpret genetic variants, Watts and Newson argue that clinical labs are not morally obligated to conduct routine reinterpretation despite its potential clinical and personal value.1 We endorse the authors’ argument for a circumscribed duty to reclassify genomic variants in certain cases, including to promote diagnostic equity for racial and ethnic minority populations that have been historically excluded from and exploited by genomic research and medicine. However, given the history and resilience of (...) scientific racism, the use of socially constructed racial and ethnic categories to enhance diagnostic equity raises several ethical and practical challenges. In the short term, using socially constructed racial and ethnic categories to identify patients for variant reclassification is a practical approach for addressing concerns of diagnostic equity. In contrast, diagnostic accuracy depends on patients’ genetic similarity to reference genomes, rather than their socially determined race or ethnicity.2 Thus, in the long term, securing both diagnostic equity and diagnostic accuracy through targeted variant reclassification will require a shift away from relying on race and ethnicity and towards assessing genetic similarity. Critically, the identification of patients for genomic variant reclassification using socially constructed race or ethnicity runs the risk of perpetuating the harmful …. (shrink)

Although nursing has a unique contribution to advancing social justice in health care practices and education, and although social justice has been claimed as a core value of nursing, there is little guidance regarding how to enact social justice in nursing practice and education. In this paper, we propose a critical antidiscriminatory pedagogy (CADP) for nursing as a promising path in this direction. We argue that because discrimination is inherent to the production and maintenance of inequities and injustices, adopting a (...) CADP offers opportunities for students and practicing nurses to develop their capacity to counteract racism and other forms of individual and systemic discrimination in health care, and thus promote social justice. The CADP we propose has the following features: it is grounded in a critical intersectional perspective of discrimination, it aims at fostering transformative learning, and it involves a praxis‐oriented critical consciousness. A CADP challenges the liberal individualist paradigm that dominates much of western‐based health care, and the culturalist and racializing processes prevalent in nursing education. It also situates nursing practice as responsive to health inequities. Thus, a CADP is a promising way to translate social justice into nursing practice and education through transformative learning. (shrink)

While those who take a "structuralist" approach to racial justice issues are right to call attention to the importance of social practices, laws, etc., they sometimes go too far by suggesting that antiracist efforts ought to focus on changing unjust social systems rather than changing individuals’ minds. We argue that while the “either/or” thinking implied by this framing is intuitive and pervasive, it is misleading and self-undermining. We instead advocate for a “both/and” approach to antiracist moral education that explicitly (...) teaches how social structures influence ideas about race and how ideas about race shape, sustain, and transform social structures. Ideally, antiracist moral education will help people see how social change and moral progress depend on the symbiotic relations between individuals and structures. We articulate a conception of “structure-facing virtue” that exemplifies this hybrid approach to illuminate the pivotal role moral education plays in the fight for racial justice. (shrink)

Law and racism are intertwined, with legal tools bearing the potential to serve as instruments of oppression or equity. This Special Issue explores this dual nature of health law, with attention to policing in the context of mental health, schools, and substance use disorders; industry and the environment in the context of food advertising, tobacco regulation, worker safety, and environmental racism; health care and research in the context of infant mortality, bias in medical applications of AI, and diverse inclusion in (...) research; and anti-racist teaching and practice in the context of building an interprofessional curriculum and medical-legal partnerships. (shrink)

This paper examines the polemical nature of anti-racist education and discourse in America today. On one side of this issue are those who think of the efforts toward inclusion, diversity, and the pursuit of social justice in academia as serving positive ends. On the other side are those who oppose and vilify such efforts as evidence of the destructive ethos of liberal education. This has led to a situation where universities and schools across the country have seen professors and teachers, (...) including philosophers, experience backlash for speaking seriously and courageously about confronting the problem of racism in society. One recent example of this anomaly is the kind of faux outrage or moral panic that drives the hysteria against Critical Race Theory, an inquiry that examines the intersection of race and law in the United States, as well as unearthing the reality of structural racism in America, often disguised in the mainstream liberal approaches to racial justice. This faux moral panic has been used by legislatures across the country, as the raison d’être, to pass bans and enforce policies or rules that restricts how professors (including philosophers), and teachers can talk about race, systemic racism, structural oppression, or the problem of racial injustice in the classroom. In this paper, I explore how this polemical situation creates significant challenges and unique possibilities for the discourse of philosophy, especially for those who are interested in becoming antiracist philosophers, in the context of such legal rules and restrictions. This is not for the faint of heart. (shrink)

This article highlights the impasses of anti-racist struggles that understand racism as an opinion or a prejudice and use education as their only means for addressing it. Racism should rather be understood as a socio-historical subjective structure rooted in the process of constitution of the division of labour on a global scale through colonialism, a process that was crucial to the institution of capitalism. This is why we will put forth the importance of rejecting the narrations that camouflage colonization with (...) the idea of civilization, and the necessity to produce decolonial counter-histories. We will thus claim that such an endeavor should start from the struggles of racialized peoples against the different forms of coloniality—that is, from the refusal by racialized peoples of the representations that are imposed on them, and from their repositioning on the basis of their alterity. Only the position of a powerful alterity can in fact make possible a real equality.Cet article met en évidence les impasses des luttes antiracistes qui conçoivent le racisme comme une opinion ou un préjugé et utilisent l’éducation comme le seul moyen d’y remédier. Le racisme devrait plutôt être compris comme une structure socio-historique subjective qui s’enracine dans le procès de constitution de la division mondiale du travail par le colonialisme, un procès qui a été décisif pour l’institution du capitalisme. C’est pourquoi nous mettrons en avant le caractère problématique des récits qui recouvrent la colonisation de l’idée de civilisation et la nécessité de produire des contre-histoires décoloniales. Il s’agira alors de montrer que, pour ce faire, il faut partir des luttes des racisés contre les différentes formes de colonialité—c’est-à-dire du refus par les racisés des représentations qui leur sont adressées et de leur repositionnement à partir de leur altérité. Seule la position d’une altérité puissante peut, en effet, rendre possible une égalité réelle. (shrink)

Racism is a key driver of the social, political, and economic injustices that cause and maintain health inequities. Over centuries and across continents, racism has become deeply ingrained within societies. Therefore, we believe that it is our professional and ethical obligation as scientists, and public health scholars specifically, to address racism head on in order to ameliorate racialized health disparities. We argue that greater focus is needed on addressing racism rather than race and how race is described or defined. We (...) offer input from public health scholarship to help bioethicists and other scientists contribute to addressing racism. To do so effectively and comprehensively, public health scholars, bioethicists, and other scientists should work together to identify and implement equity-driven collaborations to eliminate the deleterious effects of racism on individuals, families, and communities. (shrink)

We propose that marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages to Black and Latino consumers results from the intersection of a business model in which profits come primarily from marketing an unhealthy mix of products, standard targeted marketing strategies, and societal forces of structural racism, and contributes to health disparities.

The dangerous memory of the crucified and risen Jesus confronts the “lie” of racism, past and present. The cross and resurrection disrupt our forgetfulness about the lie and awaken memory of our complicity in the reality of racism and its ongoing diminishment of the lives of racially-minoritized people. Indeed, the dangerous memory embodied in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus creates tension that evokes a relational and agitational community of resistance to racist ideas and policies.

Across the country, legal and health care professionals who understand that health outcomes are most influenced by social and environmental conditions have improved patient health by adopting the interdisciplinary MLP health care delivery model. However, the MLP field cannot advance population health, let alone long-term health equity, until it addresses the structural determinants of health inequity that are rooted in discrimination, segregation, and other forms of racial and ethnic subordination.

Although spiritual practices such as prayer are engaged by many to support well‐being and coping, little research has addressed nurses and prayer, whether for themselves or facilitating patients' use of prayer. We conducted a qualitative study to explore how prayer (as a proxy for spirituality and religion) is manifest—whether embraced, tolerated, or resisted—in healthcare, and how institutional and social contexts shape how prayer is understood and enacted. This paper analyzes interviews with 21 nurses in Vancouver and London as a subset (...) of the larger study. Findings show that nurses' kindness can buffer the loneliness and exclusion of ill health and in this way support the “spirit” of those in their care. Spiritual support for patients rarely incorporated prayer, in part because of ambiguities about permission and professional boundaries. Nurses' engagement with prayer and spiritual support could become a politicized site of religious accommodation, where imposition, religious illiteracy, and racism could derail person‐centered care and consequently enact social exclusion. Spiritual support (including prayer) sustained nurses themselves. We propose that nursing's equity‐oriented knowledge encompass spirituality and religion as sites of exclusion and inclusion. Nurses must be supported to move past religious illiteracy to provide culturally and spiritually sensitive care with clarity about professional boundaries and collaborative models of spiritual care. (shrink)

Arendt’s concept of the social is at the heart of her interventions in racial politics in the United States. Readers of Arendt often focus on whether her distinction is too rigid to accommodate the reality of US racial politics, or whether it can be altered to be more capacious. The central issue here is that of closing the gap between conceptual abstraction and concrete reality. However, by extending our archive regarding the social and political beyond Arendt—to work in (...) subaltern studies and the thought of Arendt’s radical Black contemporaries—I argue that we can craft a concept of the social as a counterinsurgent logic by which political acts are reduced to social disorder, neutralizing the political edge and novelty of revolt. The distinction between the social and political is therefore useful not to describe or categorize kinds of revolts or struggles but to critically examine the way they are interpretatively and concretely transformed from ‘political’ to ‘social’ struggles. Situating Arendt among contemporary revolutionaries such as James and Grace Lee Boggs, I argue that they mobilized such a distinction, asking not what rebellions were but what might be made of them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:502 Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Jaime Madden Teaching Online: Issues of Equity and Access in Writing-centric Formats The COVID-19 pandemic has turned us all into online teachers. In the context of this crisis, we have quickly learned new technologies and the affordances of asynchronous and synchronous delivery. We have grappled with the challenges of building community and supporting active engagement, and we (...) have turned to adapting our assessment methods for the remote environment. We have done this work at traditional colleges and universities, where online teaching was formerly the purview of graduate students and adjunct instructors. Online learning can no longer be associated with those who struggle to access traditional classrooms, such as disabled students and those who attend for-profit colleges. Instead, access to online learning can now be associated with access to wealth and to health—specifically as relates to avoiding contact with the virus. In K-12 education, we have seen districts that largely enroll white students make the decision to continue online or go hybrid for the fall 2020 semester, whereas those that largely enroll students of color are returning to the classroom.1 Inequalities pervade the teaching landscape as well. Teaching is not a job usually marked as high risk, but within this environment, some 1. The work of activist and artist @bmore_radical shows how these decisions are being made in Baltimore, Maryland. See https://www.instagram.com /bmore_radical/?hl=en. Jaime Madden 503 bodies suffer at higher rates. In a recent article published in this journal, coauthors writing as the Brocher Foundation Feminist Collective describe their experience and knowledge “of the ways that academia produces sickness.”2 The authors are white and cisgender women at Anglo-American and European universities, and even though they acknowledge that they did not experience high levels of racism, classism, linguistic marginalization, and/or illness, they still found themselves—at different stages of their careers—“worn thin” in a system where “bodies are disposable.”3 Commenting on this problem in another context, disability studies scholar Alison Kafer notes that disability is “more fundamental, more inevitable, for some than others.”4 The pandemic has made this much clear: able-bodied people are “temporarily able-bodied,” and those who experience racism and classism are among the most frequently and intensely sickened. In attending to how teachers and students transition online en masse, we need to consider how we are differently positioned within institutions governed by the logics of racialized capitalism. It is important to recognize not only which students can access these online spaces but also which skills such spaces tend to reward. It is also important to ask which teachers are disproportionately impacted by the transition online. In this piece, I describe the challenges of assessment and then wrestle with broader questions of access as a scholar invested in feminist studies and disability studies. The tension in online education between its promise of access and its methods of assessment is, I argue, worthy of urgent attention. The Challenges of Assessment I have taught online courses at four institutions: two private colleges and two public universities. Good teaching and learning can undoubtedly happen across a range of spaces. In online environments, I have found that my best teaching happens in the feedback I give students. 2. Laura Bisaillon, Alana Cattapan, Annelieke Driessen, Esther van Duin, Shannon Spruit, Lorena Anton, and Nancy S. Jecker, “Doing Academia Differently: ‘I Needed Self-Help Less Than I Needed a Fair Society,” Feminist Studies 46, no. 1 (2020): 132. 3. Bisaillon, et al., “Doing Academia Differently,” 136, 140. 4. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 26. 504 Jaime Madden This is understandable since assessment practices are important teaching opportunities in all contexts. In online environments, and particularly in asynchronous teaching, I have found that it is while carrying out assessments of student work that my most intense teaching occurs. It is through grading and offering comments on papers and assignments that I am most directly in communication with students as their teacher. When I mark student work, I ask questions of students, I prompt them to consider how our course materials may be placed... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Josiah Royce's "Enlightened" Antiblack Racism?Dwayne A. TunstallThis article has not been written by some ideal Roycean mediator whose interpretive acts can help heal the deep-seated racial and ethnic divisions of contemporary American society. Nor has it been written by an impartial judge adjudicating a dispute. Rather this article has been written by a Roycean scholar and a philosopher of race who feels compelled to examine Royce's social philosophy (...) in order to determine whether his positions on race in the United States of America and on racialized colonialism in the British Caribbean presuppose the legitimacy of antiblack racism. What has compelled me to examine Royce's social philosophy critically are the presentations made by Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley and Tommy J. Curry at the joint Josiah Royce Society and Personalist Discussion Group session for the 2008 American Philosophical Association (APA) Central Division meeting.For those readers who might be familiar with Royce's philosophy, this entire article may seem pointless. I can imagine quite a few readers asking themselves the following questions: Why should we waste our time reading an article investigating whether Royce's social philosophy presupposes antiblack racism? Do we not already know that Royce's philosophy is an antiracist one? This response has been nurtured by those Roycean scholars who have interpreted his philosophy to be antiracist. Indeed, this has apparently been the standard approach to interpreting Royce's philosophy since the publication of his 1905 address to the Chicago Ethical Society, "Race Questions and Prejudices," in Race Questions, Provincialism and Other American Problems. These scholars have included American pragmatists, African-American philosophers, theologians, ethicists, and philosophers of race. Over the last forty years alone, these scholars have included William T. Fontaine, Cornel West, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Alain Locke, Shannon Sullivan, and Jacquelyn Kegley. [End Page 39]In this article I argue that the standard antiracist interpretation of Royce's philosophy is a mistaken one. This is an understandable mistake, though, given that many of those who interpret Royce this way presuppose that (1) one can analyze certain concepts and principles from Royce's ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics (e.g., his theory of interpretation) apart from his concrete social philosophy and (2) one can ignore his tacit acceptance of early twentieth-century, British-style racialized colonialism. I think Kegley's writings on Royce and race are paradigmatic examples of this reading of Royce.Kegley's recent APA presentation can be read as a further articulation of one of the central contentions in her 2005 article, "Is a Coherent Racial Identity Essential to Genuine Individuals and Communities?": "… Royce advocates and provides the foundation for an anti-essentialist and nonracialist understanding of race" (216). Following her earlier analysis, Kegley's presentation takes these two contentions for granted: First, when one criticizes an essentialist conception of race (that is, regarding race as a natural kind), that person is not racist. Second, when one regards the concept of race as a social kind, one is antiracist, if not an outright nonracist. However, I think that it is possible for one to criticize an essentialist conception of race and regard race as a social kind and still accept a form of cultural antiblack racism. Moreover, I think that Royce's social philosophy is a paradigmatic example of this phenomenon, with him being a nonessentialist with regards to the concept of race but yet being a cultural antiblack racist.Here, the significance of Curry's presentation for Royce scholars is obvious. In it he asks us Royce scholars if Royce's social philosophy, with regards to race issues, is an accomplice for the cultural perpetuation of white supremacy. I think that the answer to that question hinges on whether Royce's acceptance of British-style racialized colonialism in the West Indies is based on a misguided ethnocentrism or on a form of cultural antiblack racism.I take it for granted that Royce's recommendation that Southern Euro-Americans learn from the British colonial rule of Jamaica and Trinidad in "Race Questions and Prejudices" is evidence that he had accepted the legitimacy of British-style racialized colonialism. What I would like to do now is explain how Royce's... (shrink)

We report on an effort to characterize (changes in) teachers’ and school and district leaders’ race consciousness within their visions of equitable mathematics instruction. We analyzed interviews conducted over multiple years within a project in an urban school district in the U.S. that focused on racism and racial equity in secondary mathematics and included multi-week professional learning opportunities for teachers during the months between school years. Our analysis yielded a 4-level trajectory modelling the development of race consciousness in participants’ (...) discourse. Distinctions across levels pertain to the presence of race in individuals’ discourse, the directness with which they talk about race, and the extent to which they locate sources of an historical accumulation of racial inequity within systems. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On the Need for a New Ethos of White AntiracismShannon SullivanWhite people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.—James Baldwin, The Fire Next TimeIn his classic manifesto (...) on race, The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin passionately urges black people not to retaliate against white people by attempting to debase or dominate them in return. The reason is that doing so would harm black people most of all. As Baldwin (1963, 113) assures his readers,I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, for the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes may make to do to others what has been done to them. I think I know—we see it around us every day—the spiritual wasteland to which that road leads.... I would not like to see Negroes ever arrive at so wretched a condition.Likewise, when Martin Luther King Jr., urged his black church members to love their white enemies rather than return their racial hate, he did so because he believed that “hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the [End Page 21] individual who hates” (King 1957). While Baldwin was an avowed atheist and King a Christian minister, both warned of the devastating effects of white racism on “the souls of white folk,” and they pleaded and preached that black people should not stoop to white people’s debased level.1 Out of all the damage that white racism has done to African Americans and other people of color, the most damaging of all would be for it to turn them into the debilitated, deplorable people that white folk generally are.We might say that on Baldwin’s (and perhaps also King’s) view, white people are the truly “wretched of the earth” (Fanon 1965). It has been argued that white racism has cost white people their capability for intimacy, their affective lives, their authenticity, their sense of connection to other people, and their spiritual selves (Segrest 2001, 65). These claims are not an attempt to trump or erase the enormous physical, psychological, economic, spiritual, and other types of pain that white people have caused people of color around the world. They instead are a recognition that white people’s attempts to gain material riches and political power through the domination of people of color have impoverished and depleted their own souls. White people qua white are ill in that their racial habits largely have been built out of greed, hatred, jealousy, fear, and cruelty. Their psychosomatic health has suffered and continues to suffer because of their toxic racial identities.So much the worse for white people, we might think. But although understandable, this response would be misguided since white people’s psychosomatic depletion has implications for the well-being of others. Put succinctly, white people’s unhealthiness helps fuel their abuse and domination of people of color. It thus matters to struggles for racial justice whether white people are psychosomatically healthy and strong. It matters which affects, emotions, and passions fund white people’s actions in general, and their work for racial justice in particular. In this paper, I will draw from Friedrich Nietzsche, Teresa Brennan, and other scholars to explain the ontological and power-full aspects of affect, touching briefly on the toxicity of white guilt and shame and focusing especially on the healthiness of what Nietzsche calls a bestowing self-love. I will argue that in the context of white people’s contributions to racial justice movements, a positive effect of their bestowing self-love is that white people will be more likely and better able to clean up their own house... (shrink)

This paper examines the overt and covert racism Black professors experience within the context of mainstream university teacher education programs. Informed by literature from Canadian sources and the authors’ personal experiences, the paper challenges the perception that Canadian postsecondary teacher education is amenable to honest, open and civil debates regarding racism. The common view of Canada as an inclusive and welcoming society needs re-examining given the degree of resistance encountered by racialized professors while teaching controversial topics, including racism and antiracism. (...) A call is made for teacher education programs to revamp their curricula and to embed critical race and antiracist literature in all courses, in addition to recruiting, mentoring and retaining Black professors, senior administrators, staff and students. (shrink)

This article draws from the work of scholars in Critical Whiteness Studies to provide a nuanced analysis of ‘white shame’ in anti-racist education. In particular, it is argued that antiracist politics and pedagogy can be enriched by recognizing the affective and political complexities emerging from white shame and shaming. The purpose is to suggest that white shame has different manifestations depending on context and subject/group, and that those manifestations are related to feelings about white privilege, white ignorance, white fragility, and (...) white complicity. The author uses examples of white shame to discuss the pedagogical principles that inform the development of strategies for anti-racist education, emphasizing how educators can capitalize on teachable racial moments in the classroom that: move beyond white students’ tendency to default to shame; and, move beyond white students’ affective investments to racial inequality, while critically equipping white students to explore responsible ways of inhabiting their whiteness. (shrink)

Background Despite decades of anti-racism and equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) interventions in academic medicine, medical racism continues to harm patients and healthcare providers. We sought to deeply explore experiences and beliefs about medical racism among academic clinicians to understand the drivers of persistent medical racism and to inform intervention design. Methods We interviewed academically-affiliated clinicians with any racial identity from the Departments of Family Medicine, Cardiac Sciences, Emergency Medicine, and Medicine to understand their experiences and perceptions of medical (...) racism. We performed thematic content analysis of semi-structured interview data to understand the barriers and facilitators of ongoing medical racism. Based on participant narratives, we developed a logic framework that demonstrates the necessary steps in the process of addressing racism using if/then logic. This framework was then applied to all narratives and the barriers to addressing medical racism were aligned with each step in the logic framework. Proposed interventions, as suggested by participants or study team members and/or identified in the literature, were matched to these identified barriers to addressing racism. Results Participant narratives of their experiences of medical racism demonstrated multiple barriers to addressing racism, such as a perceived lack of empathy from white colleagues. Few potential facilitators to addressing racism were also identified, including shared language to understand racism. The logic framework suggested that addressing racism requires individuals to understand, recognize, name, and confront medical racism. Conclusions Organizations can use this logic framework to understand their local context and select targeted anti-racism or EDI interventions. Theory-informed approaches to medical racism may be more effective than interventions that do not address local barriers or facilitators for persistent medical racism. (shrink)

Witnessing Whiteness invites educators to consider what it means to be white, describes and critiques strategies used to avoid race issues, and identifies the detrimental effect of avoiding race on cross-race collaborations. The author illustrates how racial discomfort leads white educators toward ineffective teaching pedagogy and poor relationships with students and colleagues of color. Questioning the implications our history has for educational institutions, school reform efforts, and diversity initiatives, this book considers political, economic, socio-cultural, and legal histories that shaped (...) the meanings associated with whiteness. Drawing on dialogue with well-known figures within education, race, and multicultural work, the book offers intimate, personal stories of cross-race friendships that address both how a deep understanding of whiteness supports cross-race collaboration and the long-term nature of the work of excising racism from the deep psyche. Concluding chapters offer practical information on building knowledge, skills, capacities, and communities that support anti-racism practices, a hopeful look at our collective future, and a discussion of how to create a culture of witnessing educators who support allies for social and racial justice. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue S1, Page S46-S49, March‐April 2022.