Episode 89 - Personal Agency Needed for Anti-Racist Work
Dialogue on Teaching, Wabash Center’s podcast series, is hosted by Nancy Lynne Westfield, Ph.D., Director of the Wabash Center. Amplifying the Wabash Center’s mission, the podcasts focus upon issues of teaching and learning in theology and religion within colleges, university, seminaries, as well as the publics impacted by these schools. Dialogues with faculty and administrators working in the wide range of institutional contexts illumine the complexity of teaching and the teaching life.
This podcast was originally featured as a webinar with Dr. Nancy Lynne Westfield, Dr. Melanie Harris (Texas Christian University), and Dr. Jennifer Harvey (Drake University). White America must challenge its high capacity to tolerate racism, to overlook racist acts, and to look past racist behaviors. Personal agency is required to become anti-racist. Disrupting systemic racism requires a shift in public policies as well as a rethinking of institutional norms, traditions, and procedures. These shifts require the work of dedicated people. Equally, personal agency is required to genuinely welcome persons targeted by racism. To shift personal and familial attitudes, beliefs and behaviors persons must speak out for justice. This requires education and action. Our questions for this webinar:
• If racism is so pervasive as to be like “smog in the air” (Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum) – how do we identify acts of racism?
• What does it mean to be complicit with racism?
• What kind of listening is needed to become anti-racist?
• Is there such-a-thing as “microaggression?”