This case study was written with Dr. Susan Rahman, who supervised the writing and editing A People’s History of Structural Racism in Academia: From A(dministration of Justice) to Z(oology), and Elle Dimopoulos, who provided additional technical support.

A People’s History of Structural Racism in Academia: From A(dministration of Justice) to Z(oology) is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). 

• PDF version: A People’s History of Structural Racism in Academia: From A(dministration of Justice) to Z(oology)
• LibreText:  A People’s History of Structural Racism in Academia: From A(dministration of Justice) to Z(oology)

Overview

The Structural Racism Guidebook, A People’s History of Structural Racism in Academia: From A(dministration of Justice) to Z(oology), was written to call out the limits of higher education, specifically due to the ways in which structural racism and gender bias has shaped it from its inception. Higher education’s growth and development continue to be tainted by structural racism, which manifests as a lack of representation in students, faculty, research opportunities, and overall contributions. 

The primary motivation to write this guidebook stemmed from a desire to create a less racist world overall but particularly in higher education. Many disciplines within higher education explore institutional racism and its impact on wider society, but this resource was created to explicitly recognize that higher education itself is a racist institution. 

Likely, structural racism in academia will continue to occur long after this book is published but we hope that with newfound knowledge, a push for policy changes, and a recognition that diversity of thought is very valuable; some future incidents may be avoided and a progression toward a truly inclusive higher educational system in the U.S. can be realized.

Introduction, “A People’s History of Structural Racism in Academia: From A(dministration of Justice) to Z(oology)”

For faculty, the hope is that they will use this primer as a tool to teach the history of their field to students in ways that include how structural racism shaped their field. With this brief introduction into their field’s history, faculty are encouraged to further examine with their students what has happened historically, how it affects present-day representation in their field, and how to address and change this. 

For students, the hope is that they will examine the hidden racist history and be exposed to diverse thinkers who have contributed to each field. Additionally, this diverse representation can help students from traditionally marginalized communities see themselves as thinkers in their field as well 

Guidebook Description

The structural racism guidebook’s goal is to provide readers with a subject-by-subject overview of the role structural racism plays in each of the disciplines represented in the text. While the overviews presented are only snapshots of a much larger problem within higher education, this book serves as a survey of structural racism in higher education writ large.

Guidebook Content 

Structural racism has shaped all social institutions in the creation of these United States. This guidebook covers 44 different subjects ranging from Administration of Justice, Biology, Career Technical Education, all the way to Zoology. Its goal is to briefly introduce the reader to the role structural racism plays in each of the academic disciplines, with the caveat that there is much more to tell. The goal is not to tell the whole story, merely to invite further investigation, as a primer is intended to do. Since the guidebook is openly-licensed, the hope is that readers will build upon, remix, and reuse its content to serve their educational needs.

Within broad subjects, there are also explorations of subdisciplines and some related subdisciplines are divided between chapters. For example, the Arts chapter explores racism within the performing arts, dance, visual arts, and art history.  The Career Technical Education chapter discusses graphic design, multimedia studies, and fire technology.

Chapters largely align with materials that are taught in California’s community colleges, supporting one of the textbook’s objectives: to help instructors understand and address structural racism in their classrooms, leading to change in their respective fields. With nearly 29% of the University of California graduates and 51% of California State University graduates starting at a community college, the California Community Colleges system is ideally positioned to help drive anti-racist efforts in academia from the ground up.

Table of Contents

• A Tipping Point
• A Look at Structural Racism by Discipline (44 in total, including:)
  • Administration of Justice
  • Art
  • Biology
  • Career Technical Education
  • Chemistry
  • Computer Science
  • Early Childhood Education
  • English
  • Human Sexuality
  • Music
  • Philosophy
  • Psychology
  • Zoology

• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Reflections from the Authors
• References

Development Process

Dissatisfaction with the typical texts that highlight white male thinkers and give little to no credit to anyone else motivated the creation of this text. For instance, the creation of the chapter on Sociology came about as a result of the minimal to non-existent credit given to the birthplace of American Sociology – the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory (ASL) (now Atlanta University). All texts currently in print incorrectly give all the credit to the University of Chicago and Albion Small. ASL was, and is, a historically Black College/University (HBCU), and W.E.B. DuBois was the founder of the program there.

There was no blueprint or other openly-licensed resources to pull from, so this project started from scratch. Three students co-wrote sections of the guidebook with contributions, mentorship, and supervision from COM faculty member Dr. Susan Rahman. Dr. Rahman also wrote and edited the sections of the guidebook. The team met bi-weekly and updated one another on their findings. Those meetings proved to be rich and fulfilling as they were able to identify core themes around structural racism in academia.

Outside of the core team, contributors also received support, peer review, and resource suggestions from multiple faculty across disciplines at COM. Elle Dimopoulos provided support as the Assistive Technology Specialist at the College of Marin’s Student Accessibility Services office, and as the CC ECHO project team lead for the COM.

The Team

This work is made possible through the work of the following contributors, all of whom are former College of Marin students:

• Erika Abke: contributed to research for sections on Art and Career tech sections 
• Dahmitra Jackson: contributed to editing and wrote the section on Ethnic Studies and did the reference section
• Prateek Sunder: contributed to editing and wrote sections on Anthropology, Architecture, Computer Science, Environmental science, Health Education, Medicine, and Psychology

Peer Review

Dr. Yashica Crawford, Ph.D. Psychology faculty at the College of Marin, and Dr. Christopher Boyd, MFT, Ph.D. provided peer reviews of the guidebook.

Challenges

Many faculty are hesitant or uncomfortable with addressing racism within their respective fields. This presents challenges for finding or creating resources that engage critically with racism in higher education. The CC ECHO grant enabled the project team to seek out and compensate faculty for this work and to peer review relevant materials when found. 

Writing a book from scratch is hard and there are many skills I did not have. If I was working with a publisher they would have handled these issues. The OER movement is growing fast, which is wonderful, but publishing support services would be a place to focus more attention going forward so faculty feel like creating OER content is a manageable task.

Dr. Susan Rahman

Another challenge is that students only attend the College of Marin for a few years so it may not be possible to hire them for the entire length of the project. This project began in late 2019 and by its completion in 2022, all of the student workers had moved on. This made it difficult to identify exactly which portions each student had updated or edited. Ultimately, Dr. Rahman was responsible for the final edits and changes to the manuscript before publication.

Outcomes

The structural racism guidebook provides a resource for faculty who want to create more inclusive learning environments. It can improve their awareness of how disciplines affect and are affected by institutional racism and gender bias. The lack of diversity in academia is not just problematic for those who are not given a seat at the table but society at large suffers when the pool of experts is homogeneous. For example, the guide tells the story of Hungarian researcher Katalin Karikó who pioneered research on mRNA in the 1990s but had her work continually rejected. More support for her research could have enabled the development of life-saving mRNA vaccines like the ones developed for the COVID-19 pandemic decades earlier.

Katalin Karikó spent the 1990s collecting rejections. Her work, attempting to harness the power of mRNA to fight disease, was too far-fetched for government grants, corporate funding, and even support from her own colleagues” (Garde & Saltzman, 2020). Her grant proposals were rejected over and over and she was demoted at the University of Pennsylvania. It was only when a White male colleague signed on to her research that she received funding.  While we cannot know for certain that lives would have been saved, one has to wonder what would be different if this type of vaccine used for COVID-19 was tested and vetted years ago. What if the medical field listened to a woman scientist? Would it have saved lives? 

3.1: Conclusion – Social Sci LibreTexts 

Providing concrete examples of racism and gender bias in fields across higher education gives faculty a place to start when interrogating and eliminating their own biases. As an open educational resource, the guide can also serve as a foundation for lesson plans and course materials that aim to create more anti-racist learning environments. 

In a course on race and ethnicity, Dr. Rahman assigned students a research project where they chose a particular social institution, i.e. healthcare, mass incarceration, medicine, etc, and tracked the ways in which structural racism has limited the scope of its effectiveness or in fact targeted and harmed people of color. 

When writing this primer, there was pushback from faculty who did not see the value of unpacking the historical and present-day significance of structural racism. Faculty who wish to include this perspective in their course content will find this guide useful. It is divided into small digestible subject-area sections that can be used and built upon as faculty see fit. 

Lessons Learned

From the beginning to the end, this project was intentional in its organization with a flat non-hierarchical structure. Supervisors have been intentional with compensating students fairly both in labor and attribution. This collaborative approach to working with students as co-authors and designers rather than constricting their efforts to stereotypical “student job” tasks resonated with the students, as is evident in the authenticity of the work they produced.

It was critical to compensate students for their work. As a former student who worked for free for her professors, Dr. Rahman felt it was important to have funding for student authors. This compensation continued thanks to the CC ECHO grant. If she were to do it again without this grant, she would seek out ways to pay students in-house, whether it be financial-aid based or from funding from COM. Finding funding for students is an additional step but embodies the values of OER creation and open educational practices.

Students did move on during the writing process, so that is something faculty need to consider when beginning a project. The majority of this project was done over Zoom during the pandemic and as people left, others joined so it ended up working out. However, it would be advisable to have a concrete timeline with specific tasks and due dates.

Dr. Susan Rahman

Impact and Sustainability

The hope is that this guidebook will serve as a foundational document for practitioners across disciplines in higher education, giving faculty and students a jumping-off point in their efforts to make academia more anti-racist. In addition, the guidebook and its ancillary materials will be created in a variety of formats to help faculty find and use materials in a context that makes sense for their students. 

The authors emphasized accessibility in their work. This includes accessibility from an alternative media and assistive technology perspective by providing the material across a range of technology delivery platforms. This approach also includes focusing locally but thinking globally as a responsible world citizen – not every institution uses or has access to Canvas, reliable power, or high-speed internet.

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