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Under the transformational leadership of the University Librarian, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries shifted from having an education- and programming-based “diversity committee” to a council of librarians advocating for action, anti-racism and social justice, both within our organization and across campus. As our University Librarian noted, “you cannot read your way out of racism.”

With support from library leadership, the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA) Council has advanced anti-racism work in the libraries by serving as facilitators for a book discussion series, organizing a 21-day racial equity challenge, supporting staff in integrating anti-racism practices into their daily work through brown bag conversations, and facilitating the development of inclusion-focused performance management goals.

What does an anti-racist library look like, and how does our organization envision this future? These questions anchor the IDEA Council's strategies. The libraries have witnessed a positive shift in staff participation: two-thirds of library staff participated in a Racial Equity Institute Groundwater presentation and in a library-wide book discussion series; approximately half the staff committed to our 21-day racial equity challenge. Participants were asked to reflect in conversation and through surveys.

The first wave of a newly established grant program funded eight staff-led projects to advance social justice in the libraries. Additional steps included caucusing by racial identity, staff-wide discussions about racial equity, and a second wave of funding for the grant program. The authors approach this work with cultural humility: seeking to learn from one another, our peers and fellow activists.

In describing these projects, the authors hope to encourage academic librarians and archivists to participate in, and even facilitate, similar work at their own institutions. Although both of these projects began in the library and included readings and discussions related to library and archival practices, the most generative conversations rapidly shifted from “how should the library handle these materials?” to “what might this institution do to reckon with its history?” When traditional library practices were de-centered and community perspectives were sought on the college archive, the authors were able to have more inclusive, authentic conversations about the college's history and future.

This case study explores two projects undertaken at a liberal arts college: a working group and a credit-bearing course intended to reckon with racist, xenophobic or otherwise harmful materials in the college archive. Both projects were informed by the authors' engagement with Tema Okun's White Supremacy Culture and guided by inclusive pedagogies and practices that participants had explored in workshops and within the context of the college's Engaged Pluralism Initiative.

The working group and the course underscore the centrality of relationships, trust-building and time to the work of addressing difficult histories. The “campus-wide conversations” the authors had hoped to have about the college archive evolved into smaller spaces developed with intention and care. The diverse perspectives of working group members and students in the course demonstrate the value of bringing together viewpoints from outside the library and beyond institutional or disciplinary silos, to consider far-reaching systemic issues.

Many US colleges and universities have begun, or will begin, to investigate the myriad ways in which racism, racial exclusion, or racial violence have marked their institutions and how these troubled legacies persist in the present day. This case study proposes possible approaches that academic libraries and librarians may take to contribute to this essential work.

These two projects propose that work that typically happens solely within libraries and archives (cataloging and description of potentially harmful materials) or within institutional or disciplinary silos (reckoning with legacies of racism and bias) can be discussed, debated, and shared among the campus community. All of the participants in the working group and the course, regardless of their title, role, or academic credentials, bring necessary expertise and experience to these projects. Inclusive practices, when paired with grassroots energy, suggest ways in which a college archive can be used as a site of evidence, reflection, interrogation, and repair.

The racial reckoning of 2020, alongside the collective trauma of the global Covid-19 pandemic, led to a proliferation of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) offerings within the US higher education system. At the same time, university social justice spaces found a reduction in their staffing, restriction of their work, and an increase of outsourced DEI contributions from non-justice focused locations. This research based, and semi-autobiographical chapter situated Buolamwini's work on coded bias, is grounded in the work of Spivak and Butler, and O'Neil's contributions on mathematical mismanagement. It charts the systematic dismantling of social justice efforts at one mid-sized regional public university as their work was replaced with invalidated and outsourced DEI efforts and gamed with numerical retention requirements, which did little to remedy the genuine inequity built within higher education systems. This chapter offers inferences regarding what those changes mean for inclusion efforts within higher education writ large, particularly with regard to students with marginalized identities (queer, trans, and BIPOC students) who face systemic oppression in the higher education system.

In the US, a growing number of organizations and industries are seeking to affirm their commitment to and efforts around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as recent events have increased attention to social inequities. As health care organizations are considering new ways to incorporate DEI initiatives within their workforce, the anticipated result of these efforts is a reduction in health inequities that have plagued our country for centuries. Unfortunately, there are few frameworks to guide these efforts because few successfully link organizational DEI initiatives with health equity outcomes. The purpose of this chapter is to review existing scholarship and evidence using an organizational lens to examine how health care organizations can advance DEI initiatives in the pursuit of reducing or eliminating health inequities. First, this chapter defines important terms of DEI and health equity in health care. Next, we describe the methods for our narrative review. We propose a model for understanding health care organizational activity and its impact on health inequities based in organizational learning that includes four interrelated parts: intention, action, outcomes, and learning. We summarize the existing scholarship in each of these areas and provide recommendations for enhancing future research. Across the body of knowledge in these areas, disciplinary and other silos may be the biggest barrier to knowledge creation and knowledge transfer. Moving forward, scholars and practitioners should seek to collaborate further in their respective efforts to achieve health equity by creating formalized initiatives with linkages between practice and research communities.

Using a discourse analytic approach, the purpose of this paper is to examine how genre impacts white readers when reading about historic acts of racial violence. Specifically, this study explores one white high school student’s stance-taking as she read an informational text and an eyewitness narrative about the Tulsa Race Massacre.

This study used discourse analysis (Gee, 1999) and the think-aloud method (Pressley and Afflerbach, 1996) to explore the white student’s interactions with genres of historical texts. The authors coupled iterative coding and memoing with discourse analysis to analyze the stances she adopted while reading.

The findings illustrate that the informational text allowed for a distancing from the racialized violence in the text, whereas the narrative created an opportunity for more connection to those who experienced the violence.

While genre and reader response has long been explored in English Education research, little research has examined the impact of genre on reading historical texts. This study demonstrates the influence that genre may have on white readers’ emotional responses and stance-taking practices when reading about historic acts of racial violence.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways that history curriculum has worked to legitimise dispossession through narratives that elide questions of Indigenous sovereignty, and which construct and consolidate white settler identity and possession.

The paper uses two case studies to compare history education documentation and materials at key moments where dominant narratives of settler legitimacy were challenged in public discourse: (1) the post-war humanitarian agenda of fostering “international understanding” and; (2) the release and educational recommendations of the 1997 Bringing them Home Report.

The paper shows that in two moments where narratives of settler legitimacy were challenged in public discourse, the legitimacy of settler possession was reiterated in history curricula in various ways.

This research suggests that the prevailing constructivist framework for history education has not sufficiently challenged criticisms of the representation of Aboriginal history and the history of settler-colonialism in the history syllabus.

The paper introduces two case studies of history curriculum and shows how, in different but resonant ways, curricular reforms worked to bolster the liberal credentials of the settler state.

Recently, efforts to fight discriminatory behaviour in many sports and to eliminate racial preferences among fans have intensified. However, uncovering discriminatory preferences may not be easy as they may be deeply rooted and even unconscious. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned issues.

Unfortunately, professional soccer and fantasy sports participation serves as a vehicle for explicit racial discrimination at a micro-level, but does it translate to the macro-level through fantasy team selection? The current study explored the potential of implicit racial discrimination in Czech participants in the English Premier League.

Discriminatory behaviour in this context is defined by a consumer demonstrating preference for a white player over a non-white player in the fantasy soccer labour market when both players are performing at equal levels. Controlling for additional factors such as nationality and historically dominant team biases and accessing a more homogenous sample, the results confirmed previous research that racial discrimination cannot be found in team selection decisions among fantasy soccer participants in the Czech Republic. The manifestations of racism are still present at Czech stadiums and among Czech athletes. This contradiction is the major finding of this paper.

Previous research found no evidence of racial discrimination among participants controlling for some game factors. However, the study had many limitations including a heterogeneous sample and not controlling for additional factors of participant bias. Given those concerns, the current study analysed line-up decisions of English Premier League participants, but did so with participants solely within the Czech Republic, a more homogenous sample, controlling for additional important factors that could impact racial discrimination among fantasy participants.

Ethnoracial minorities report a variety of discriminatory experiences due to systemic racism. Yet, few studies have examined whether gender and race/ethnicity interact to predict institutional discrimination and racial microaggressions through an intersectional approach.

A predominantly female (60%), ethnoracial minority (20.8% Black, 31.6% Asian, 30.8% Latina/o, 8.2% White, 6.6% Middle Eastern) sample of 895 undergraduates attending a minority-serving public university in an urban setting completed self-report measures of sociodemographic characteristics, experiences of racial microaggressions and institutional discrimination.

Significant (p < 0.05) gender × race/ethnicity interaction effects were found in several institutional discrimination domains: Males reported more police/court discrimination overall, but gender differences in police/court discrimination were less pronounced for non-Black vs Black students. While males tended to report more institutional discrimination than females, the reverse was true for the Middle Eastern group: Middle Eastern females reported institutional discrimination in more domains and more discrimination getting hired than their male counterparts. There was a significant race/ethnicity × gender interaction effect for environmental microaggressions: White males reported more environmental microaggressions than White females, but gender differences were not found in the overall sample.

This study is the first to the authors’ knowledge to assess the interactive effects of gender and ethnicity on the type of microaggressions experienced in a diverse sample that includes individuals of Middle Eastern descent. The authors highlight the range of discriminatory events that ethnoracially minoritized undergraduates experience, even at a minority-serving institution.

This study aims to examine how teacher candidates of Color (TCoCs) experienced and perceived culturally responsive teaching across three teacher education programs at a predominately White institution in the USA. At the time of the study, the campus was reeling from a series of racist incidents on- and off-campus, and the teacher education programs were attempting to recruit more TCoCs.

Drawing on a critical race theory counternarrative approach and qualitative research focus-group interviews, the authors centered the voices of seven TCoCs and their experiences with culturally responsive teaching in their coursework.

The TCoCs experienced and perceived culturally responsive teaching as promising yet fleeting, missing the mark, and a misuse of culture and language that resulted in harm. The TCoCs urge teacher education to hire racially–ethnically–linguistically diverse faculty, provide affirming spaces for TCoCs, and curricular transformation.

Study findings contribute to recent calls for teacher education programs to attend to the lived experiences, concerns and expectations of future teachers of color.