In a continued effort to educate myself, I have been exploring content in the Kudos platform relating to systemic / institutionalized racism, white privilege, and related topics. I have created a collection here, and picked some of the most shocking, thought-provoking, enlightening and / or sobering examples to share below.

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Policing

“Gaslighting is part of a systemic, historical process of racism that has been used by the police and government organizations to both illegally target people of color and deny complicity in racial profiling.”

“For years, experts have asserted that group cultural traumas arise out of shocks to expected or the usual. This article explains how cultural trauma can also arise out of routine occurrences, such as the routine acquittals or non-indictments of white men or officers who have killed non-threatening or unarmed black males.”

Academia

“There are fewer than 1% of black female professors in the United Kingdom … The findings show that for changes to be made, the embedded structures of racism and white supremacy need to be dismantled in preparation for an education system that is based on equitable practices and processes.”

“The influence of Critical Race Theory … its US origins and its unapologetic roots in critical black Atlantic thought have prompted opposition in some academic quarters. …this antipathy tells us very little about CRT or about contemporary race and class relationships but is actually rooted in a longstanding paternalistic suspicion of race-conscious social analyses.”

“Teacher candidates of color had difficulty positioning themselves among the overwhelming silencing power of whiteness in the class. … The teacher education program’s structure allowed the white candidates to impose strong negative peer pressure on the teacher candidates of color.”

Cultural institutions

“Museums serve to preserve the histories of people. However, in doing so they often emphasize the importance of one culture, race, or ethnicity over another. They also limit who has access. … In a society that is increasingly fractured by racism, we examine spaces in society in order to think about ways institutions such as museums must, and can be less exclusive.”

Healthcare

“Providers are often of different ethnic, socio-economic and cultural backgrounds from the patients they serve. …My hope in writing this article is that people become aware of the affects of racism on the health of patients of color and that they think about the skills needed in order to provide high quality care to a patient population that has a history of marginalization by the institution that now seeks to properly care for them.”

Technological solutions

“Offensive language identification (OLI) in user generated text is automatic detection of any profanity, insult, obscenity, racism or vulgarity that degrades an individual or a group. It is helpful for hate speech detection, flame detection and cyber bullying. Due to immense growth of accessibility to social media, OLI helps to avoid abuse and hurts.”

White privilege

“Race often brings to mind people who are not white, while whiteness remains unmarked and serves as a benchmark category‚ as if white is not a race. … The construction of race is a process that emphasizes subjection and responsiveness to the demands of others.”

  • Dr Alexa Alice Joubin, Professor of English, Theatre, International Affairs, Women’s Studies, and East Asian Languages and Cultures; Department of English, Columbian College of Arts & Sciences, George Washington University, USA
    Plain language summary (via Kudos) of “Race in the World“, the concluding chapter of Race by Martin Orkin and Alexa Alice Joubin, January 2019

“Many people of color learn to accommodate White people’s needs, status, and emotions, such as avoiding racial discourse to minimize White fragility and distress. We ask that researchers and practitioners … recognize the pervasiveness and normal-ness of White supremacy and its underpinning function in structural racism.”

Thank you to all these researchers, and the many others whose work is in my broader collection on this topic, for their work and insights.

Thanks to the American Psychological Association (Special Issue: Racial Trauma: Theory, Research, and Healing), Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Emerald Publishing (Black Lives Matter collection), SAGE Publications (Structural Racism and Police Violence collection), Springer Nature (Black Lives Matter Collection) and Taylor & Francis for making articles referenced here open access. Full disclosure: I am a co-founder of Kudos.

Charlie Rapple

Charlie Rapple

Charlie Rapple is co-founder of Kudos, which showcases research to accelerate and broaden its reach and impact. She is also Vice Chair of UKSG and serves on the Editorial Board of UKSG Insights. @charlierapple.bsky.social, x.com./charlierapple and linkedin.com/in/charlierapple. In past lives, Charlie has been an electronic publisher at CatchWord, a marketer at Ingenta, a scholarly comms consultant at TBI Communications, and associate editor of Learned Publishing.

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