Creating a Just Community
While we continue to work with our coalition of campus partners in response to specific community needs, we have listed selected education, initiatives, programs, and resources focused on antiracism that are available to the Pitt community. We encourage you to use the information and resources in tandem with other resources available to you across Pitt, and other personal and professional networks.
Please contact the Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion with questions at diversity@pitt.edu.
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Antiracism Resources
- Education/Initiatives
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Antiracism Education and Dialogue Series
Civil Rights and Title IX training
Institutional Equity Workshops
- Resource Guides
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Antiracism and Social Justice LibGuide
Dietrich School antiracism resources
Center on Race and Social Problems – Understanding Racism Resources
Office of Health Sciences Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Anti-racism and Equity Resources
- Distinguished Keynotes
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Blue, Gold, & Black: Reflections Of The Black Pitt Experience Through The Years (February 24, 2021)
- Town Hall Programs
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First Peoples Past & Present: Native Health and Voting Power (January 27, 2021)
What Just Happened? Race, Justice, and Politics after the Capitol Siege (January 18, 2021)
What Just Happened? Race and Soul Searching after Election 2020 (November 19, 2020)
Neighborhood as Nexus: Building Healthy and Resilient Communities (October 7, 2020)
COVID-19: The Pittsburgh Latinx Community Experience & Response (September 25, 2020)
Education in a Time of COVID: Safety, Access and Equity (September 23, 2020)
What Does It Mean To Be Hispanic/Latina/e/o/x In The United States? (September 16, 2020)
Organs of Inequity: The Social Determinants of Organ Donation (August 26, 2020)
Polarized Pandemics: The Politics of COVID-19 and Racism (August 12, 2020)
Toxic Recipe: The Historical Ingredients of American Inequity (July 14, 2020)
Juneteenth: A Prelude to True Social Justice and Equity at Pitt (June 23, 2020)
'I Can’t Breathe: From Agony to Activism' (June 3, 2020)
Allyship and Advocacy Responses to Xenophobia and Hate Crimes (May 24, 2020) - Diversity Forum
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2020 Programs
Working Together/Healing Together: Transforming Care via Social Justice (July 30, 2020)
The Contagion of Xenophobia (July 29, 2020)
Oppressive Systems (July 29, 2020)
A Call to Activism: Witnessing Globally, Responding Locally (July 28, 2020)
- School of Education Center for Urban Education Programs
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CUESEF 2020:
Center for Urban Education Summer Educator Forum (CUESEF) 2020 (July 2–30, 2020)
Lunch and Learns:
Building Abolition in Our Communities, Now (October 8, 2020)
Lunch & Learn Featuring Kali Akuno (November 5, 2020)
Surrendered: Why Progressives are Losing the Biggest Battles in Education (February 25, 2021)
Scholarly Work and Organizing at the Intersections (March 25, 2021)
Liberated Territories: Pedagogy as Social Transformation (April 1, 2021)
- Center on Race and Social Problems #CRSPCast programs
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Xenophobia and COVID-19: Strategies to Support Asian American Communities Training Video
Antiracism Principles
- Fostering Antiracist Practices
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We encourage our community members to consider these key principles in fostering antiracist practices (Ivey-Colson and Turner, 2020):
- Education: You cannot acknowledge or change that which you deny or choose not to see. Thus, the first step toward dismantling racism is breaking through that denial, by educating oneself about the history of racism and the impact on the Black/African Americans experience. You will have to confront anti-Black racism! There are other forms of racism and bias to educate yourself on also. This is a learning journey!
- Courage: Facing racism, white privilege, and white supremacy is hard. Reckoning with shame, blame, guilt, and anger takes courage and vulnerability. Courage allows us to be an everyday hero and to inspire collective heroism. To be antiracist, you have to sit with the discomfort and put courage, compassion, and vulnerability over comfort.
- Allyship: To be an ally is to take on this struggle as if it is your own. It means that you do what is uncomfortable. You are committed to taking a risk, sharing any privilege you have to center marginalized people / communities. When you see something, you say something. You imagine and act as if you do not have a choice. You fight to dismantle injustice.
- Individuality: Seeing another person’s individuality means noticing the details and qualities, both positive and negative, that set them apart from the group. To be antiracist, it’s critical to understand and recognize that Black people have historically been assigned a negative group identity, being labeled lazy, irresponsible, dangerous, and angry. Realizing that these stereotypes can prevent us from seeing Black people as individuals is an important awareness because, according to research, when we view people who are “not like us” in terms of their own individual tastes and preferences, we feel less threatened by them.
- Equality to Equity: To be antiracist is to advance equality in the fight for equity. It is to understand that corrective action is needed to create equity in outcomes specifically for communities that have been underrepresented and underserved.
- Intention: Antiracism is a way of life. Like starting any new habit, antiracism requires a conscious decision to pursue it as a goal and way of being. Intention brings mindful presence and awareness to what we say and what we do.
Engaging Antiracism Through a DEI Lens
- Diversity
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Diversity: the wide variety of shared and different personal and group characteristics among human beings. The concept of diversity encompasses acceptance and respect. It means understanding that each individual is unique and recognizing our individual differences. These can be along the dimensions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio- economic status, age, physical abilities, religious beliefs, political beliefs, or other ideologies.
A focus on diversity entails seeking to increase the numbers of underrepresented racial populations and retain them once they are a part of the campus community. It asks questions like:
- Of those who seek to be at Pitt, who is actually selected to be here?
- How do various groups fare through every step of our admissions and hiring processes?
- Which criteria, formal and informal, determine who gains entry to Pitt?
- Who opts not to even try to be here, and why might that be
Diversity Examples
- Establishment of URM recruitment goals with timeline
- Pipeline programs within Pittsburgh or region
- Evaluation of use of standardized tests
- Review student debt burden by race
- Equity
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Equity: the proportional distribution of desirable outcomes across groups. Sometimes confused with equality, equity refers to outcomes while equality connotes equal treatment. More directly, equity is when an individual’s race, gender, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, etc. do not determine their educational, economic, social, or political opportunities.
An equity focus seeks to ensure that underrepresented racial groups “move” through the organization as freely as those who are proportionally/over-represented. It asks questions like:
- How do we know that everyone is treated fairly?
- What skills or behaviors would managers / educators need to adopt to be prepared to engage their employees / students?
- Do our systems of justice or conflict resolution treat everyone with equal dignity and respect?
- What systems track these interactions, and how often are they reviewed?
Equity Examples
- Establishing regular salary equity reviews
- Establishing unit turnover review
- Infrastructure to monitor interactions between URM communities and justice systems
- Adding DEI competencies to performance evaluation systems, particularly for managers
- Establishing regular review of employee and student sanctions for potential race inequity
- Targeted professional development
- Inclusion
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Inclusion: authentically bringing traditionally excluded individuals / groups into processes, activities and decision/policy making in a way that shares power. Inclusion promotes broad engagement, shared participation, and advances authentic sense of belonging through safe, positive, and nurturing environments. Inclusion is key to eliminating systemic inequality.
An inclusion focus seeks to understand the campus environment with an emphasis on how underrepresented racial groups experience other people and the spaces they inhabit. It asks questions like:
- What visual cues do our campus spaces convey about who “belongs” here?
- Where, how, and with whom is informal knowledge shared?
- What does our organization assume about a community member’s home life with respect to housing, transportation, childcare, technology, etc.?
- Which people, including which groups of people, are given deference, authority over others, or the “benefit of the doubt?”
Inclusion Examples
- Including DEI competencies in all job descriptions
- Examine named gifts to establish goals for diversification
- Establish and support employee resource groups
- Intentionally inclusive campus art
- Regular, university-wide DEI programming that employees can attend without using personal leave
- Review of media and publications for equitable representation
- Explore teleworking options for those with elder or childcare concerns