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Injuries resulting from racism are largely hidden by silence. Community services to provide healing from racism are missing in at least one Canadian city. The purpose of this paper is to identify the injuries suffered by immigrants who experienced racism and discuss the development of culturally appropriate programs and tools to address injuries from racism.

Participants representing visible minorities service providers from non-profit, public-funded organizations in a major Canadian city took part in two focus groups. Data from focus groups were thematically analyzed.

Racism produces traumatic and persistent psychological, social and intergenerational injuries. An ostensible gap exists in services, professional education and skills to address the psycho-social effects of this complex problem. The complicity of silence in both dominant and subordinated groups contributes to its perpetuation. A dearth of screening and assessment instruments is a barrier in identifying individuals whose mental health and addiction problems may have underlying racism-related etiology. Creation of community healing circles is recommended as a preferred method over individual “treatment” to expose and deconstruct racism, strengthen ethnic identity and intergenerational healing.

These qualitative findings were generated based on the perspectives of a small purposive sample (n=8) of immigrant service providers and immigrants from one Canadian city. Many of these findings are consistent with the existing literature on internalized racism and racism injuries. Generalizability to the wider population of the province and of Canada requires further research.

Practitioners in health and social care as well as educators need to understand the injuries and internalized effects of racism to provide appropriate services and leadership. Development of anti-racism professional knowledge and skills, healing circles, and assessment instruments will contribute to deconstructing racism and mitigating its injuries.

Community-driven studies exploring racism and the lack of services to address the issue are scarce. This study pulls together the experience of service providers and their insights on ways to break the detrimental silence surrounding racism.

College classrooms are an important socializing site, preparing students to critically reflect upon their viewpoints and engage in democratic citizenship and civic leadership. Yet this very notion of educational environment can serve to produce racial inequality and ethnically and culturally blind pedagogical space. In this chapter, the author describes how students articulate their internalized social position and racism in a given college classroom and understands the process by which students’ sense of self is internalized and (re)constructed through the practice of reflective journaling.

During the Autumn of 1991 the author became involved in a process of “conscientization” (awakened critical consciousness) as she sought to gain understanding of herself, of other black women managers and the realities of their status and positions in organizations, and UK society at large. The author, a Black British woman manager and educator of Afro‐Caribbean origin, shares her particular reflections on her personal management learning process ‐ a journey towards self‐knowledge and “liberation” unleashing blocked potential. The reflections are primarily intended to provide black managers and professionals ‐ past, present and potential seekers ‐ with a vicarious experience of important challenges encountered; an attempt at “theorizing our experience”. The reflections are also intended for white managers who seek better intercultural understanding and relationships in the workplace. Important challenges included the identification of an appropriate research methodology for researching and understanding the black experience. Outlines the author’s process of identifying strategies for overcoming the fear of addressing and confronting the issues of race and “silence” in the workplace.

The monograph argues that American racism has two colours (white and black), not one; and that each racism dresses itself not in one clothing, but in four: (1) “Minimal” negative, when one race considers another race inferior to itself in degree, but not in nature; (2) “Maximal” negative, when one race regards another as inherently inferior; (3) “Minimal” positive, when one race elevates another race to a superior status in degree, but not in nature; and (4) “Maximal” positive, when one race believes that the other race is genetically superior. The monograph maintains that the needs of capitalism created black slavery; that black slavery produced white racism as a justification for black slavery; and that black racism is a backlash of white racism. The monograph concludes that the abolition of black slavery and the civil rights movement destroyed the social and political ground for white and black racism, while the modern development of capitalism is demolishing their economic and intellectual ground.

To be actively antiracist requires an internal reckoning, what Chicana activist and scholar Gloria E. Anzaldúa referred to as “el arrebato.” Used to describe the first of seven cycles through which conocimiento, or knowledge, is formed, el arrebato presents a shift in the understanding of the world as it has been prescribed by both patriarchy and white supremacy. This paper will use Anzaldúa's Seven Stages of Conocimiento to trace a Latinx librarian's journey in unlearning white supremacy toward a shift to antiracist practices.

This ethnography follows the author from her time as a Diversity Alliance resident librarian in an R1 library to her current position as a tenure-track librarian in a primarily white institution, outlining how the seven stages have led toward active interrogation of not only library structures but with the legacy of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous discourse within her own Latinx identity.

As an ongoing reflective practice, this paper presents a journey of learning and unlearning toward critically deconstructing the culture of “niceness” within librarianship, where the principles of neutrality and vocational awe lend to library structures that place responsibility on the individual for institutional trauma rather than rightly examining and reconstructing the environments and structures themselves.

This autoethnography presents the viewpoint of a first-generation Latinx librarian growing up in a tricultural context in the Midwest.

Lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) employees constitute one of the largest, but least studied, minority groups in the workforce. This article examines what we know, and what we need to know, about the career and workplace experiences of this understudied population. The construct of sexual identity is defined, followed by a review of the research on sexual orientation in the workplace. Then an analysis of the differences between LGB employees and other stigmatized groups is presented. Three unique challenges facing LGB employees are identified, and conceptual models are developed that explain underlying processes. Finally, career theories are critically analyzed, and an identity-based longitudinal theory of LGB careers is presented.

This chapter details the instructional experiences of a group of graduate students, who are emerging Human Systems Intervention practitioners – men and women who self-identify as white and work in organizational, community, and educational leadership settings. I outline a series of learning experiences that supported a group of MA students to uncover white supremacist thinking in their work – their approaches to intervention and their mental models regarding effective organizational or community functioning. Using contemplative practices to dig out oppressive, invisible dimensions of white identity, we examined how our whiteness shaped and warped how we enacted our work in community and organization development. We did this by reflective reading, meditation, contemplative arts, deep listening and storytelling, singing and music, and ceremony. This chapter illustrates how higher education can address a fundamental mental model and world view that influences how social responsibility is envisioned and how issues of social justice can be advanced within graduate professional education through socially responsible teaching and learning strategies and activities.

This paper argues that to preserve black lives, teacher educators and teacher candidates need to develop a decolonial lens. A decolonial lens can provide clarity in understanding how the centering of Western epistemic perspectives perpetuate hierarchies and processes of racialization and invisibilized structures of domination that (re)produce differential learning experiences and outcomes for black students. This study aims to build on prior research to help teacher candidates more effectively recognize and challenge racism and anti-blackness in their schools and teaching practices.

In this paper, the author discusses how racism and anti-blackness are perpetuated in schooling and why teacher educators must address them in our work with teacher candidates. Drawing upon existing literature on teacher education, my experiences as a teacher educator and social justice scholar, and insights from the decolonial scholarship, the discusses the importance of a decolonial lens for disrupting racism and anti-blackness, and I offer examples of how teacher educators and teacher candidates can engage in this work.

Multicultural education has done little to change the conditions of black students in schools. While most teacher education programs have made efforts to become more oriented toward social justice, there is a wide gap between program goals and teachers who can work effectively with the diversity of students that they serve.

This paper outlines an approach that teacher educators can use to further develop an antiracist decolonial teaching and research agenda and support teacher candidates regardless of their racial/ethnic group.

A decolonial analysis can help teachers develop a better understanding of the structural and school inequalities that create disparate outcomes for black students and how to intervene. This is urgently necessary, as schooling remains a site of non-belonging and marginalization for black children and youth.

This paper offers a new race-conscious approach to disrupt systemic racism and anti-blackness in education.

This paper aims to examine how a Black male teacher made sense of the ways racism and white supremacy function in schools and constrains his practice by addressing the question: How does a culturally relevant Black male teacher engage a racial perspective in his pedagogy and make sense of the socio-political context of his practice?

This qualitative case study draws its data from semi-structured interviews and participant observations and was situated within a transfer high school in the Northeastern region of the USA.

This study elucidates the ways in which a Black male teacher’s racial literacy enabled him to make sense of the socio-political context of his school, the profession and help his Black male students negotiate how they are racialized in schools and society.

This paper closes with a call for additional research that further examines the relationship racial literacy plays in retaining teachers of color in the profession and for racial literacy to be positioned as a vital component of teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge in both teacher education and professional development.

This study contributes to the literature on critical Black male teachers by forwarding a framework that helps us to understand how they engage in transformative work within assimilationist educational spaces.