“We Need to be Better”: Race, Outdoor Recreation, and Corporate Social Advocacy

The summer 2020 protests following the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and other African-Americans sparked important conversations about race, police brutality, and institutionalized racism in the United States. In response to widespread civil unrest, organizations across the country issued statements condemning anti-Black violence and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. This essay analyzes public statements released by 50 outdoor sport and recreation organizations. Extending scholarly literature on race and corporate social advocacy, our analysis develops the concept of conciliatory discourse, which functions by rhetorically constructing 1) a non-specification of grievance, 2) an obfuscation of commitments to action, and 3) a reinforcement of previous actions or processes. We argue that while many outdoor recreation organizations took action in support of racial justice, their public statements complicate long-term commitments for inclusivity and diversity.

Past, Present, and Future Potentialities of the Nova Scotian Education System

By tracing the long history of the institutionalized racism experienced by Black Nova Scotians within the education system a connection can be drawn to contemporary educational barriers that seek to hold back marginalized students. This article builds its foundation on the substantial history of Nova Scotia’s statewide denial of full citizenship for its Black inhabitants. Whether through informal or formal mechanisms, contemporary Black students continue to face the ramifications of such history, experiencing high rates of suspension, low academic scoring, and disproportionate enrollment into non-university preparatory courses.

Conclusion

The book concludes with a consideration of how northern Black debates over school integration versus separation transformed the Black civil rights movement. Black northerners who participated in acts of educational protest challenged institutionalized racism in American schools and enacted lasting, substantial improvements. They organized grassroots movements that demanded specific reforms in local public institutions, in the process mobilizing Black northerners to become involved in local, state, and national politics. The inherent tensions between school integrationists and separatists created a dynamic, evolving grassroots movement for Black educational reform that insists on racial justice in public education and moves Americans closer to the meaningful reforms that will create equitable and high-quality public schools for all.

Deconstructing Racist Humor: How Archie Boston’s Advertisements Provoke Institutionalized Racism

Humor is one of the most used mediums for overcoming the dominant power in society. One type of humor, Black Humor, was initially used by the Black community to speak their voice regarding the racism they face every day. However, it showed that even the most powerful tool could also act as a double-edged sword for its users. In this research, we analyzed three advertisements made by Archie Boston circa the 1960s that took the symbolism of the Ku Klux Klan, Uncle Sam, and slavery and turned these symbolisms into objects of humor. Using Kress and van Leeuwen’s Grammar of Visual Design, Barthes’ visual semiotics, and incongruity theory by Goldstein and McGhee, these advertisements were analyzed and then critically associated with the theory of Institutionalized Racism. The results revealed that these advertisements showed affiliation with how stereotypes are identified through symbolism by using humor and visual images. Therefore, these advertisements perpetuate negative stereotypes of the Black community by making Black people seem complicit in and supporting the racist acts that the symbols perpetuated.

Blak, Bi+ and Borderlands: An Autoethnography on Multiplicities of Indigenous Queer Identities Using Borderland Theory

Indigenous queer people often experience a conflict in identity, feeling torn between long-standing cultures and new LGBTIQA+ spaces; however, conflicts are being reframed by new generations of Indigenous queer academics who consider decolonising ideas about white heteronormativity. The following autoethnography of my own Indigenous queer journey (muru) uses narrative analysis to explore the challenges of living between worlds as well as the difficulties in gaining acceptance from multiple cultures. This story, like many others, highlights the power of narrative as it reflects the nuanced experiences of Indigenous queer people with identity multiplicity via the application of borderland theory. The narrative analysis forefronts the wide impact of internalised phobias (homophobia, biphobia, and racism) and its impact on performative self-expression of sexual identity, self-sabotage, institutionalized racism and shadeism, and community acceptance, particularly for bi+ sexual identities. This article will explore existing literature which illustrates how navigating the multiplicity of identities may result in poorer social and emotional wellbeing, particularly for Indigenous queer youth. The article concludes with final comments and suggests future directions in mixed method research with Indigenous queer Australians to better understand and improve their social and emotional wellbeing.

The Challenges of Achieving Equity Within Public School Gifted and Talented Programs

K–12 gifted and talented programs have struggled with racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, native language, and disability inequity since their inception. This inequity has been well documented in public schools since at least the 1970s and has been stubbornly persistent despite receiving substantial attention at conferences, in scholarly journals, and in K–12 schools. The purpose of this article is to outline why such inequity exists and why common efforts to combat it have been unsuccessful. In the end, poorly designed identification systems combined with larger issues of societal inequality and systemic, institutionalized racism are the most likely culprits. I end the article with a hierarchy of actions that could be taken—from low-hanging fruit to major societal changes—in order to combat inequity in gifted education and move the field forward.

Automated Risk Assessment in the Criminal Justice Process

This chapter addresses recent concerns about “algorithmic bias,” specifically in the context of the criminal justice process. Starting from a recent controversy about the use of “automated risk assessment tools” in criminal sentencing and parole hearings, where evidence suggests that such tools effectively discriminate against minority defendants, this chapter argues that the problem here has nothing in particular to do with algorithm-assisted reasoning, nor is it in any clear sense a case of epistemic bias. Rather, given the data set that we are given to work with, there is reason to think that no improvement to our epistemic routines would deliver significantly better results. Instead, the bias is effectively encoded into the data set itself, via a long history of institutionalized racism. This suggests a different diagnosis of the problem: in deeply divided societies, there may just be no way to simultaneously satisfy our moral ideals and our epistemic ideals.

The Retention of Educators of Color Amidst Institutionalized Racism

Representing approximately 20% of the workforce, educators of color (EOC) leave the field at a rate 25% higher than their White counterparts. Despite workforce diversification efforts, few studies investigate the psychosocial consequences of navigating racialized school climate as reasons EOC may leave the workforce. This study relies on survey data collected from educators of color (paraprofessionals through superintendents) across the state of Iowa. Applying a critical quantitative research design, we examined factors that link racialized school climate to their job satisfaction and psychological well-being. Findings indicate that a racialized school climate has a significant, direct effect on EOC’s race-based stress and professional racial self-efficacy. We argue that solely focusing on the retention of educations of color acts as a distraction from dismantling the institutionalized racism that continues to permeate our school systems.

Rejecting the myth of equal opportunity: an agenda to eliminate racism in nursing education in the United States

Background Unfortunately, racism and discrimination against Ethnic minority (EM) has been globalized, universally infecting industries worldwide, and the field of nursing has not been spared. In the United States (US), overt and institutionalized racism (IR) still permeates the fields of nursing, nursing leadership, and nursing education. Programs to address these disparities, and efforts by nursing professional societies and nursing education policymaking bodies to address racism in the nursing field, specifically with nursing leadership and education, have met with little success. Objective The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the existence and magnitude of racism and its impact on the fields of nursing, nursing leadership, and nursing education, and to make evidence-based recommendations for an agenda for reforming nursing education in the US. Methods A narrative literature review was conducted with a focus on pulling together the strongest evidence on which to base policy recommendations. Results Based on the available literature, we put forth five recommendations aimed at modifying nursing education in the US as a strategy to counter IR in the US in the nursing field. Conclusions Recommendations to address IR in nursing focus on nursing education, and involve implementing programs to address the lack of opportunity for both EM students and faculty in nursing, developing an anti-discriminatory pedagogy, and incorporating diversity initiatives as key performance indicators (KPIs) in the process of approval and accreditation of nursing programs.