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Racism occurs in many ways and varies across countries, evolving and adapting to sociocultural history, as well as contemporary economic, political and technological changes. This chapter discusses the multilevel dimensions of racism and its diverse manifestations across multiracial societies. It examines how different aspects of racism are mediated interpersonally, and embedded in institutions, social structures and processes, that produce and sustain racial inequities in power, resources and lived experiences. Furthermore, this chapter explores the direct and indirect ways racism is expressed in online and offline platforms and details its impacts on various groups based on their intersecting social and cultural identities. Targets of racism are those who primarily bear the adverse effects. However, racism also affects its perpetrators in many ways, including by limiting their social relations and attachments, and by imposing social and economic costs. This chapter thus analyses the many aspects of racism both from targets and perpetrators' perspectives.

The current study evaluated (1) characteristics of the community leadership development program associated with successful participant recruitment, (2) active ingredients that promoted fellow engagement and program completion and (3) how the program addressed blackness and racism.

Individual interviews were conducted with a representative subset of former program fellows.

Results indicated that offering training in small cohorts and matching fellows with individual mentors promoted program interest. Program strengths and unique ingredients included that the program was primarily led by people from the Black community, program malleability, and that the program was a partnership between fellows and leadership. Additionally, the program was responsive to fellows’ needs such as by adding a self-care component. Fellows also noted dedicated space and time to discuss race and racism. Results offer a unique theoretical perspective to guide leadership development away from the uniform or standardized approach and toward one that fosters diversity and equity in leadership.

Altogether, this work demonstrates how leadership development programs can be participant-informed and adapted to participants’ social and cultural needs.

This chapter examines the connections between race and class divisions and examines how they shape racial inequities in the distribution of resources, power and privilege. Throughout history, racial identity has been a key factor in determining a person's position in modern capitalist societies. As such, issues of race and class have preoccupied sociologists and other scholars with diverse ideological orientations. This is highlighted in debates around the nexus of race and class in the production of racial structures, laws and institutions that legitimate and perpetuate the normalisation and centrality of whiteness. This chapter summarises some of the historical and ongoing debates, providing a synthesis of how race and class divisions continue to shape contemporary intergroup relations and social policy. It delves into racial capitalism and how race intersects with other social identities to determine socio-economic hierarchy in many western countries.

Racial stigma and racial criminalization have been centralizing pillars of the construction of Blackness in the United States. Taking such systemic injustice and racism as a given, then question then becomes how these macro-level arrangements are reflected in micro-level processes. This work uses radical interactionism and stigma theory to explore the potential implications for racialized identity construction and the development of “criminalized subjectivity” among Black undergraduate students at a predominately white university in the Midwest. I use semistructured interviews to explore the implications of racial stigma and criminalization on micro-level identity construction and how understandings of these issues can change across space and over the course of one's life. Findings demonstrate that Black university students are keenly aware of this particular stigma and its consequences in increasingly complex ways from the time they are school-aged children. They were aware of this stigma as a social fact but did not internalize it as a true reflection of themselves; said internalization was thwarted through strong self-concept and racial socialization. This increasingly complex awareness is also informed by an intersectional lens for some interviewees. I argue not only that the concept of stigma must be explicitly placed within these larger systems but also that understanding and identity-building are both rooted in ever-evolving processes of interaction and meaning-making. This research contributes to scholarship that applies a critical lens to Goffmanian stigma rooted in Black sociology and criminology and from the perspectives of the stigmatized themselves.

This article sheds light on the impact of collective characteristics of microaggression in a community and how this affects the perception and experiences of its underrepresented members through the lens of critical race theory (CRT). Using the Springfield community of the southwest Missouri Ozarks region in the United States of America as the authors' focus, the authors explore the barrier of microaggression in the lived experiences of a community striving for diversity and inclusion.

The authors performed a systematic analysis using four CRT tenets: race is a social construct; racism is systematic, racism is commonplace and listening to lived experiences is essential. A sample of underrepresented professionals from the region was surveyed to obtain their lived experiences. Qualitative media analysis on varied media pieces was conducted to obtain context for the environment that precipitated these experiences.

When residents from marginalized backgrounds face consistent microaggressions, their sense of belonging and contributions to the community significantly diminish, which has adverse implications for the community. If these issues are unaddressed, they might choose to leave due to feelings of underrepresentation. Community leaders must proactively implement strategies to welcome an evolving population and educate stakeholders about the detrimental effects of microaggressions on community cohesion.

Historically, the heartland of the United States of America has been a bellwether of the pulse of its average citizen. This region is currently experiencing an increase in diversity along with a significant rise in persistent microaggressions. Using CRT to analyze the impact, lessons learned and challenges, the authors provide recommendations for potential changes that could benefit the nation as a whole.

Legislators continue to label Critical Race Theory (CRT) and other race-based concepts as divisive. Nevertheless, CRT, at its core, is committed to radical transformation and addressing issues of race and racism to understand how People of Color are oppressed. Through rhetoric and legislative bans, this current anti-CRT movement uses race-neutral policies and practices to limit and eliminate CRT scholars, especially faculty members, from teaching and researching critical pedagogies and other race-based topics.

Through semi-structured interviews using Critical Race Methodology (CRM), the authors sought to understand how 40 faculty members challenged the dominant narratives presented by administrators through their responses to CRT bans. Additionally, this work aimed to examine how administrators’ responses complicate how faculty make sense of CRT bans.

Findings describe three major themes: (1) how administrators failed to respond to CRT bans, which to faculty indicated their desire to present a neutral stance as the middle ground between faculty and legislators; (2) the type of rhetoric administrators engaged in exemplified authoritarian approaches that upheld status quo narratives about diversity, exposing their inability to stand against oppressive dominant narratives; and (3) institutional leaders’ refusal to address the true threats that faculty members faced reinforced the racialized harm that individuals engaging in CRT work must navigate individually.

This study is one of the few that provide empirical data on this current anti-CRT movement, including problematizing the CRT bans, and how it affects campus constituents such as faculty members.

Exploring how racism continues to persist throughout public and nonprofit organizations is central to undoing persistent society-wide injustices in the United States and around the globe. The authors provide two cases for identifying and understanding the ways in which philanthropy’s whiteness does harm to K–12 students and communities of color.

In this article, the authors draw on critical race theory and critical whiteness studies, specifically Cheryl Harris' work to expose the whiteness of philanthropy, not as a racial identity, but in the way that philanthropy is performed. The authors characterize one of the property functions of whiteness, the right to exclude, as working through two mechanisms: neoliberal exclusion and overt exclusion. Drawing on this construction of the right to exclude, the authors present two cases: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the City Fund.

Whether intentional or not, the Gates Foundation and the City Fund each exclude communities of color in several ways: from changes to schools and districts, parents' experiences navigating school enrollment due to these changes, to academic assessments and political lobbying.

These cases provide a way for researchers and practitioners to see how organizations in real time reify the extant racial hierarchy so as to disrupt such organizational processes and practices for racial justice.

Anti-racism has been practiced in various ways, with varying degrees of effectiveness. This chapter engages with the body of scholarship that focuses on approaches aimed at promoting anti-racist actions, policies and social change. It discusses some of the main anti-racism strategies that have been deployed across different countries and examines anti-racism practices in interpersonal, intergroup and community settings. These approaches encompass civil rights campaigns, legislative and policy interventions, affirmative action, diversity and inclusion training, prejudice reduction, intergroup contact, organisational development and holistic anti-racism approaches. Some anti-racism practices and policies, such as awareness campaigns, social marketing and diversity training, also extend to digital platforms, with social media and multimedia networks deployed to broaden the reach and impact of anti-racist endeavours. This chapter specifically engages with local anti-racism movements and draws principles for broader implementation of anti-racism policy and practice. It concludes with a brief discussion of the effectiveness of contemporary anti-racism approaches.

First-generation college students in the United States are a unique demographic that is often characterized by the institutions that serve them with a risk-laden and deficit-based model. However, our analysis of the transcripts of open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 22 “first-gen” respondents suggests they are actively deft, agentic, self-determining parties to processes of identity construction that are both externally imposed and potentially stigmatizing, as well as exemplars of survivance and determination. We deploy a grounded theory approach to an open-coding process, modeled after the extended case method, while viewing our data through a novel synthesis of the dual theoretical lenses of structural and radical/structural symbolic interactionism and intersectional/standpoint feminist traditions, in order to reveal the complex, unfolding, active strategies students used to make sense of their obstacles, successes, co-created identities, and distinctive institutional encounters. We find that contrary to the dictates of prevailing paradigms, identity-building among first-gens is an incremental and bidirectional process through which students actively perceive and engage existing power structures to persist and even thrive amid incredibly trying, challenging, distressing, and even traumatic circumstances. Our findings suggest that successful institutional interventional strategies designed to serve this functionally unique student population (and particularly those tailored to the COVID-moment) would do well to listen deeply to their voices, consider the secondary consequences of “protectionary” policies as potentially more harmful than helpful, and fundamentally, to reexamine the presumption that such students present just institutional risk and vulnerability, but also present a valuable addition to university environments, due to the unique perspective and broader scale of vision their experiences afford them.