Anti-racist courses would spark diversity awareness

Some of our country’s top college basketball coaches are calling for required collegiate coursework in African American history. This follows the recent news that the California State Senate passed a bill mandating coursework in Ethnic Studies for students within the nation’s largest four-year public university system.

Many view this as controversial. Universities have waged decades-long debates as to whether “diversity” requirements should be added to undergraduate education. The cultural impact of George Floyd’s killing and the reach of the Cal State system may have wide-reaching effects.

All universities should be moving to mandate coursework on race and racism. General education requirements exist to lay an intellectual foundation for students. Our society is growing increasingly diverse. We should prepare students to develop awareness and understanding of the experiences of diverse groups. Students should gain insight into how race and culture shapes their worldview and impacts their interactions with others.

There are predictable, systematic inequalities in experience and outcomes across race within all of our American institutions. We must ask students to consider and create solutions to our nation’s greatest, long-standing problem: We are a nation that has yet to enact our founding principles — freedom and equality — because our society is built on systematic exclusion and oppression of communities of color.

This isn’t the belief that if we could just teach white people, racism will go away. This is providing a curriculum that truly meets our universities’ commitments to diversity, cultivating intellectual and personal growth. This is fostering civic engagement, moral development, empathy, openness to diversity, awareness of oppression, and social justice action — all known outcomes of college diversity education. Experiential learning methods, such as Intergroup Dialogue (IGD), are particularly effective at reducing color-blind attitudes, helping students understand the structural nature of inequality, and building intergroup empathy and collaboration. For our future generations — our future teachers, doctors, CEOs, and representatives — these are qualities we should be bolstering.

Students of color benefit from anti-racist coursework. Black students can experience positive academic and psychological outcomes from taking Black Studies courses, including a sense of empowerment, increased self-determination, and positive perceptions of “counterspaces” that challenge deficit notions of Black people.

Scholarship on IGD finds that students of color experience benefits such as clarifying one’s beliefs, expressing their oppression more assertively, and increasing hope that people from different racial backgrounds can listen to one another.

Some have lamented the limits of the “education-as-cure-for-racism trope” when it isn’t combined with action that directly contributes to racial equity. Yes, education alone cannot disrupt anti-blackness and systemic racism. There will still be students who take anti-racist coursework and will continue to hold racist beliefs and uphold racist systems. That doesn’t mean this coursework isn’t needed or serving an essential purpose.

We should acknowledge: the Eurocentric teaching of academia — the centering of the contributions and ways of thinking of people of European descent — is part of the racial inequity embedded within higher education. Antiracist education and critical analysis of diversity issues should be infused throughout undergraduate coursework, in addition to coursework specific to race.

Every college should reassess its general education “diversity” requirements — or in many cases, lack thereof. Requiring antiracist coursework focused on the experiences of racially minoritized people — centering their experiences, worldview and contributions — is one small step toward disrupting the racial hierarchy of higher education. Generate specific shared objectives for this coursework and hire faculty with the appropriate expertise and experience. Create plans to assess its effectiveness. Radical interventions and policies are needed across American institutions to disrupt racial inequality. Yet, given the inescapable legacy of slavery and colonization in the United States, it’s critical to address and challenge anti-blackness and racism on all fronts — including in our higher ed curriculum.