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Neutrality and diversity are the bedrock of public libraries. Yet, public libraries are also steeped in white privilege and many have yet to examine the effects of anti-Black racism. Amidst an ever-growing crisis of inequity, this chapter explores the development of the Black Community Public Library and its roots in Black-centered and community-based perspectives. It provides important insights into how public libraries can transgress the centrality of whiteness in traditional public libraries through community-led and community-based partnerships within collaborative anti-racism and justice frameworks. Opening in January 2022, the Black Community Public Library is the first of its kind to conceptualize and highlight the need for Black-centered services and collections in Canadian public libraries. Located in the Where We Are Now Black Community Centre, the library is the result of a year-long partnership between the Black Community Centre, local higher education institutions, and the municipal library system. It holds an initial circulating collection of 600 titles representing a variety of equity-seeking perspectives. Detailing the development and launch of the Black Community Public Library, this case study demonstrates how to re-envision library spaces with and for communities that have been historically under-represented and provides invaluable insight into how the public library sector can support and engage with Black communities through meaningful partnership and collaboration. Furthermore, it will substantially contribute to the growing body of collaborative knowledge on advancing anti-racism in LIS.

Only by recognizing the consequences of state-sanctioned violence on the life of Black communities can teachers create learning conditions for students to engage in an education for humanization. Humanization disrupts dehumanization by teaching students' knowledge and love of self, solidarity, and self-determination. In this chapter, I examine the impact of an education for humanization on students' critical literacy and voice from the perspective of a teacher-researcher and educational activist in an urban classroom serving the needs of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). I offer a concrete example of praxis that positioned Black students to examine anti-Black oppression and radically imagine the possibilities of pro-Black social resistance in society and schools. I conclude the chapter with pedagogical implications for participating in the fight for Black life as teachers and humanizing the learning experiences of BIPOC students as a result.

African American males experience acute or chronic stress from discriminatory treatment and racial microaggressions, decreasing their biopsychosocial health. Racial microaggressions include but are not limited to merciless and mundane exclusionary messages, being treated as less than fully human, and civil and human rights violations. Racial microaggressions are key to understanding increases in racial battle fatigue (Smith, 2004) resulting from the psychological and physiological stress that racially marginalized individuals/groups experience in response to specific race-related interactions between them and the surrounding dominant environment. Race-related stress taxes and exceeds available resilient coping resources for people of color, while many whites easily build sociocultural and economic environments and resources that shield them from race-based stress and threats to their racial entitlements.

What is at stake, here, is the quest for equilibrium versus disequilibrium in a society that marginalizes human beings into substandard racial groups. Identifying and counteracting the biopsychosocial and behavioral consequences of actual or perceived racism, gendered racism, and racial battle fatigue is a premier challenge of the twenty-first century. The term “racial microaggressions” was introduced in the 1970s to help psychiatrists and psychologists understand the enormity and complications of the subtle but constant racial blows faced by African Americans. Today, racial microaggressions continue to contribute to the negative experiences of African American boys and men in schools, at work, and in society. This chapter will focus on the definition, identification, and long-term effects of racial microaggressions and the resultant racial battle fatigue in anti-black misandric environments.

Demographic shifts and increasing diversity have increased calls for more Black women in higher education teaching and leadership in Canada. This chapter examines how I navigate my practical and theoretical journey in academe through my ontological experiences as a Black female immigrant in large university in Southern Ontario Canada. Drawing on critical race theory (CRT) as a theoretical frame, I explore and theorize my resistance to racial microaggressions through what I describe as “navigational moves.” These “navigational moves” include decolonizing education, spirituality, self-care, and developing a supportive network. These “navigational moves” are grounded in my history and experiences. The chapter explores notions of resistance, empowerment, and sustenance as important factors in challenging racial microaggressions in academe.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is about understanding and acknowledging when racism has impacted a policy, person, system, and our history. This chapter examines CRT as a tool to understand what has happened in our history and educational system and as a tool to dismantle our current system to bring about true inclusive and authentic schools. It serves to analyze the practical use of CRT in our current public K-12 educational system. The purpose is to fast forward our discussion on race and to explicitly illustrate the dire need for an inclusive education fundamentally girded in an abolitionist mindset for school systems, educators, parents, and students. Although CRT has branched out to be inclusive of many populations, the core purpose was to examine anti-Blackness in America and how that has stained our education system. Inspired by the dissertation conducted by Ayanna Blackmon-Balogun, the aim of this chapter is to draw our attention to that essential purpose of CRT so that schooling can become more liberatory and meaningful to all.

Purpose: To critically explore the implications of the August 2020, decision by Carleton University’s Institute for Criminology and Criminal Justice (ICCJ) to end to its intern program with the Ottawa police, the RCMP, Correctional Services Canada and Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre starting in Fall 2021.

Findings: In contrast to the negative reaction of Kevin Haggerty to this decision, the authors offer a strong but qualified endorsement of the ICCJ’s move to put an end to its internship with coercive institutions. The ICCJ strategically mobilized discourses of anti-Blackness and inclusion in response to the murder of George Floyd and the individual and communitarian traumas of Black, First Nations and Metis and students colour in its program. The ICCJ did not, however, substantively engage with the ways that criminology, sociology and the university are complicit through the legitimation practices and processes of ideology, professionalization and research in the ‘violence work’ of the state. The critique, ethics and logical conclusion of abolitionism are obfuscated.

Methodology/Approach: The authors explicitly draw on the Black Radical Tradition, Neo-Marxism and radical neo-Weberianism to sketch research possibilities that resist the university as a space of violence work, both in criminology and in the professionalization of policing.

Originality/Value: The debate between the ICCJ and Kevin Haggerty is an important opportunity to critically analyze the limits of critical criminology and lacunae of a debate about abolitionism, anti-criminology and university-state nexus as a site for the production of ideological and hardware violence work. Grounded in the Black Radical Tradition, neo-Marxism and radical neo-Weberianism, the authors sketch a framework for a research agenda toward the abolition of criminology.

This chapter analyzes the campaign against race norming in the 2013 National Football League (NFL) concussion settlement that caregivers of retired players designed, and it considers how their collective action throws new light on activism in sport. While there is a substantial literature on how individual athletes engage in protest, less work has focused on how families – partners, children, siblings, and parents – of athletes organize as a group to answer back to anti-Black racism in professional sport. I argue that a group of spouses used their position as caregivers to shame the NFL, the presiding judge of the settlement, Class Counsel, and even the Department of Justice into acknowledging not only individual suffering from traumatic brain injury but also of the distribution of that suffering across households. Specifically, the wives group expanded definitions of risk and damage to include not only individual illness but also family and group suffering and demanded inclusion of gendered and racialized aspects of social care. Through their campaign, the group recast what is considered protest in the world of sport and who has the ability to access an activist subjectivity.

The history of empire, conquest, and the role of the university occurs at the confluence of White supremacy and anti-Blackness. Knowledge is classified not only in texts but also through images, artwork, and even statues—all of which are found on university campuses around the world. The production of knowledge is uniquely tied to power through empire, belief systems, and economy. When universities house knowledge that is rooted in a Eurocentric view of the world and are situated in Black and Brown communities in the global South, they function as conflicted carriers of White dominance. This is evidenced via monuments, statues, physical architecture, curricula, language of instruction, and codes of conduct which all serve as indicators that the university stands at the nexus of empire maintenance and the cultures they invaded. This chapter includes case studies in three regions of the world: South Africa, Brazil, and Oceania (particularly Australia and New Zealand). The ways in which universities are both complicit actors in invasion as well as byproducts make the examination of universities as carriers of White dominance a global and complex project. This historical and contemporary examination provides an in-depth view of university participation in global White dominance through a tenacious and lasting global anti-Black sentiment.