Ways to Participate
- Create a profile and connect with other InCommons members.
- Add helpful resources and discover resources shared by others.
- Start or participate in a discussion throughout the site.
- Learn about gatherings that bring people together to discuss, collaborate and solve problems.
Institutional Racism
Institutional racism jumps out at me as an overarching problem in the United States and Minnesota that is directly evident in the education gap. I appreciate that this issue was named in the introduction of this discussion and that participants in the in-person gathering narrowed this broad topic down to a specific example/symptom.
I think it's important for each of us to look at the systems we are a part of - ex. our family, our school, our work-place, our faith community, our neighborhood, etc - and ask ourselves who is present and who is not, and then begin to ask why and keep asking and learning.
As a white woman, a lot of the spaces I am in consist mostly of other white people, and asking and learning why that is is an ongoing process. It takes listening and reading (watching documentaries, etc) and talking and asking questions. And then, of course, the steps within that process of learning that are really important is acting to change both my personal behavior and the behavior of institutions I'm a part of, away from racist settings we learned explicitly or implicitly.
If each of us who are white do this (and of course, "doing it" is not a singulary, easy task!), how would we see things like the education gap begin to change? (There are roles for people of color in this process, too, but they have already been fighting institutional racism since the beginning of the country.) What are ways we can begin to change institutional racism each day?