A significant number of universities and colleges responded to the Black-led, multiracial uprisings against state violence that emerged in the spring and summer of 2020 by releasing public statements that described their commitments to struggling against racism. Readers of these statements can likely recall some of their major features. They included details of hiring plans; descriptions of expanded course offerings on race and ethnicity; pledges to review policies; and announcements of new committees, task forces, and reading groups, all of which administrators framed as long overdue changes to the ways institutions of higher education work. Barnard College’s contribution to this wave of statements took the form of a message released on July 30, 2020, titled “Barnard’s continued work toward access and racial equity.” In it, President Sian Beilock described the administration’s effort to transform “words into substantive action” by exploring changes to the college’s curriculum and structures of academic support, dedicating resources to hiring and retaining diverse faculty, student, and staff populations, and announcing a forthcoming evaluation of the campus’s climate and the college’s public safety practices. This statement added to one of the most notable phenomena in higher education during the 2020-2021 academic year: in conjunction with the unequal effects of the pandemic, this time may very well be remembered as one in which college leaders across the United States, in rapid succession, claimed anti-racism as an institutional value. 

The ultimate effects of the pledges that so many institutions made are still in development. But how have these explicit commitments to inclusion, access, and anti-racist inquiry played out in the classroom? At the Center for Engaged Pedagogy, we had many conversations with Black students and students of color who suggested to us just how much work still needs to be done to achieve these goals in the everyday practice of teaching and learning. One important observation these students made was that many instructors who sought to make the subjects of race and racism central to their courses were also burdening Black students and students of color with becoming impromptu teachers to their classmates. On these occasions, they described a dynamic of racial recruitment in which they were tasked (sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly) with relating their experiences of oppression for the educational benefit of their colleagues, but without gaining a clear sense of what this process contributed to their own learning. Indeed, a recent Teen Vogue article by Mishma Nixon, an undergraduate student at University of Iowa, suggests that this phenomenon—in which a teacher’s vocal commitment to anti-racist education becomes coupled with exploitative classroom interactions and processes—has been widespread. Just as importantly, while this phenomenon may have become particularly palpable in the context of the 2020-2021 school year, these students also suggested that it is far from new. Their experiences tell those of us who are responsible for designing and teaching classes that racial marginalization and oppression are not merely subjects of study. Instead, they produce dynamics that can and do animate even those classes with the most direct orientations toward social justice.

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Over the course of two weeks in July 2021, a group of 10 students met with Alex Pittman, the CEP’s Associate Director, to examine how the burdening of students of color occurs in Barnard classrooms and to recommend practices that teachers can cultivate to anticipate, recognize, and intervene in this dynamic. During these meetings, the group supplemented their discussions by reading essays and working papers on affirmative facilitation practices, dominant approaches to diversity in higher education, and the emotional tolls that students and faculty of color experience while teaching and learning about oppression. Throughout, this group concerned itself less with evaluating the sincerity of any person’s dedication to social justice than with accounting for what remains both painful and transformable in the practices of instructors who are invested in anti-racist pedagogy. The narratives and recommendations in this resource represent the collective labor of this group, which was made up of students who hold a range of social identities and identifications, come from a variety of departments and programs, and have been enrolled at Barnard for different amounts of time. 

One important question the group took up concerned how readers should be invited to engage with the learning community's work. Because this collaboration took place during a period that has seen a proliferation of examples of an emergent genre that one might call “anti-racist advice literature,” the group agreed that the document should be engaged as something other than a “guide” on inclusivity, racial justice, or anti-oppression. Why? As a genre, guides on anti-racism cannot help but take a didactic approach to their subject that compels readers to engage their contents as a series of steps or quick fixes. If even the most carefully crafted social justice guide can exhibit this and other patterns of reduction, then what genre can do justice to the desire for an anti-oppressive education? What form and frame can signal that this document does not hover with disinterested authority above the phenomenon it addresses, but is instead a product of a specific group of people who came together to make a contribution to a topic that both exceeds their collaboration and involves each of them intimately? In the limited amount of time that this learning community spent together, it never arrived at definitive answers to these questions. But raising and exploring them did allow the group to think deliberately about how to frame and write this document in ways that invite readers to engage in reflective and reflexive processes of transformation. 

For this reason, this document is subtitled “A Dialogical Resource on Racism, Anti-Racism, and Pedagogy” and includes reflective questions for both faculty and students at the end of each subsection. If you would like to share your responses to these questions, then you are encouraged to send them to Alex Pittman (at apittman@barnard.edu), who will be developing other collaborative projects that extend the broad goals of this group.