Menu
The following is an assorted listing of articles and reading resources curated by our team for those looking to deepen their understanding of racial equity work across the corporate, education, and advocacy sectors.
“The phrase ‘achievement gap’ is one of the most commonly used expressions in the educational research and policy world. This phrase serves as shorthand for the widespread and persistent disparities in standardized test scores between Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students and their Asian and white peers. But questions about the “achievement gap” have become more prominent in recent years, with educators, researchers, parents, and students alike challenging this narrative for implying that it is students of color and their families who are failing, rather than schools and school systems failing them.”
“A decolonized syllabus infuses anti-racism and equity at the forefront. Student learning outcomes, the course outline of record, textbooks, and any ancillary materials should all address anti-racism rhetoric. Faculty need to reflect, rethink, and reconstruct course syllabi so that they support BIPOC engagement, validation, and sense of belonging in education. The design, content, and tone of the course syllabus will either engage or disengage students.”
“Discover characters and historical figures who stand up for peace, equity, and justice for gender, socioeconomic status, race, or the environment. These mentor texts suggest ways that students can enact change in their own communities.”
“Let me know if you’ve heard this one lately. Perhaps you are a part of a direct-service nonprofit that has a white dominant leadership structure—both demographically and culturally—despite the fact that most of the organization’s program work happens in black and brown communities. At some point, the white dominant leadership structure realizes, or has it pointed out to them, that “diversity” should be on their radar. The individuals within the leadership structure can’t fully articulate why having more people of color (POC) on the board or management team is important beyond the fact that it sounds good in theory and it looks bad in reality not to have more of it.”
“In my work as a DEI facilitator working with tech companies and in many less formal conversations, I’ve found that there’s widespread confusion. People get tripped up not only on definitions regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion, but also on using these terms to create goals and action plans for themselves and their organizational culture. When we can’t get on the same page, we can’t take the next step. So let’s take initiative and start at the beginning to create a shared understanding of DEI together.”
“This is a list of characteristics of white supremacy culture that show up in our organizations. Culture is powerful precisely because it is so present and at the same time so very difficult to name or identify. The characteristics listed below are damaging because they are used as norms and standards without being pro-actively named or chosen by the group. They are damaging because they promote white supremacy thinking. Because we all live in a white supremacy culture, these characteristics show up in the attitudes and behaviors of all of us – people of color and white people. Therefore, these attitudes and behaviors can show up in any group or organization, whether it is white-led or predominantly white or people of color-led or predominantly people of color.”
“A prominent sentiment repeated to me throughout my upbringing in the small town of Hawi, was ‘malama ka ‘aina,’ which means to care for the land so it supports life for multiple generations. To local communities, being stewards of the land is not about “fixing a problem,” it’s about healing and growing together to support an ever-strengthening community.”
“Being an ally doesn’t necessarily mean you fully understand what it feels like to be oppressed. It means you’re taking on the struggle as your own.”
“Decolonization…is not a metaphor. It is not a catch-all term that denotes any social justice movement. It is a living and breathing movement, aimed at ensuring Indigenous futurity and sovereignty through dismantling the broad structures of oppression that have and continue to prevent Indigenous people from striving.”
“Religion is neither practiced nor studied in a vacuum. Rather, it is always informed by social contexts and social conditions. Hence, religion often functions as a mirror of society’s broader assumptions and attempts to divide and discriminate, whether that be based on race, ethnicity, class, social status, nationality, religion, (dis)ability, gender, or sexuality.”
“What is the relationship between Jewishness and Whiteness? What is the nature of their entanglement? Such are the driving questions of this talk, which elaborates Whiteness as a geopolitical practice of religion, indeed as a practice of myth, that institutes the global idea of race or that organizes the planet through racial capitalism.”
“From North to South Africa; West to East Asia; and across Muslim diasporas in Europe, the Americas and Australasia; anti-black racism is a hardened social reality within the modern Muslim world. Anti-blackness, in the sense of racial discrimination based on one’s dark or black skin color, is something that precedes European colonial expansion in the Muslim world, whose relative boundaries traditionally laid between vast territories of what we now call Europe, Africa and Asia.”
