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Toward Racial Equity

The issue of race, public space, and who belongs was at the forefront this week when Starbucks closed its 8,000 U.S. stores for an afternoon to provide unconscious-bias training to its employees. The large-scale training came about in response to an incident in Philadelphia where two Black men, who were waiting for a business associate without having ordered anything and had asked to use the bathroom, were arrested after an employee called the police.

Some see Starbucks’ anti-bias training as an important first step to address racial profiling. But there is also a danger. Anti-bias or unconscious-bias training rarely goes beyond curbing individual behavior and thus can actually reinforce negative stereotypes instead of exploring the structural nature of racism.

Cyndi Suarez, a Senior Editor at Nonprofit Quarterlyreminds us that “in system thinking language, this would be akin to solving the problem at the same level at which it was created, which, as we know, does not bring systems change, but in fact reinforces the system while appearing, to the white person, to be making change.”

Adding to this conversation, Christopher Petrella and Ameer Hasan Loggins describe how “racial-bias trainings, therefore, often fail to ground their curricula on the historical and contemporary systems, practices, policies, and ideologies that produce, sustain, and legitimize white supremacy.” The better alternative? Anti-racist education, which “seeks to challenge the way white supremacy organizes meaning, access, worth, and history through time, space, and memory,” and, importantly, “understands that history does not pass; it accumulates.”

Implementing a racial equity approach allows us to better address the root causes of racial profiling and race. By focusing on systems rather than individuals, such an approach requires us to reassess and reimagine the rules, policies, and narratives that uphold white supremacy and rob those who are most affected by injustice of their power and self determination. It also challenges us to reexamine how resources are allocated.

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Photo: Justice Not Jails

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