In honor of Black History Month, and in the light of events over the past year and semester, the Antiracism and DEI Education Subcommittee of the President's Commission on Diversity and Community has created several seminars and programming that will serve to educate and evaluate our community regarding racism and its historic roots. Other programming includes the semester’s first Cultivating Community series dialogue.
Throughout the semester, the Antiracism and DEI Education Subcommittee of the President's Commission on Diversity and Community has created a series of Cultivating Community dialogues in an effort to become an anti-racism campus. (Photo courtesy of Kara Burke)
The Anti-Racism & DEI Education Subcommittee has initiated several educational seminars for students to attend to learn about racism and anti-racism through different mediums. These include the 2021 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Keynote Address by Reverend Myra Brown, a discussion of Ava DuVernay's documentary "13th" with Kevin Gannon, professor of history and director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Grand View University, and a panel on Black women’s health.
Geneseo hosted the first dialogue of this semester’s Cultivating Community series on Feb. 24 about how higher education institutions might respond to bias-related incidents, but the Anti-Racism & DEI Education Subcommittee is actively working to educate the community, provide resources and identify racism in college policies.
“It’s one of the only programs I know of that brings students, faculty, staff, administrators, and non-college affiliated members of our community together around the same table,” Chief Diversity Officer and co-coordinator of the series robbie routenberg said. “A lot of times there’s a student program and there’s a faculty professional development program, and there’s really only a couple programs that do that work of putting everybody together.”
This month’s Cultivating Community Dialogue focused on the question: “In the aftermath of a bias-related incident at a public institution of higher education, how might campus officials effectively communicate with members of the community,” according to the Cultivating Community series’ website.
“And so, this semester, we decided to focus broadly on the topic of how the college responds to bias-related incidents. We're using sort of a case study,” routenberg said. “There's an article that we're using, and a toolkit that's made by an external organization for how colleges might respond to bias.”
Based on this case study and toolkit, participants will discuss what they like about the proposed response, and what they wish was different. Their recommendations are submitted to the bias prevention and response team for review, according to the Office of Diversity and Equity.
In addition to the educational programs, the Antiracism and DEI Education Subcommittee also makes recommendations to the administration about potential racist policies at Geneseo. The committee listens to members of the BIPOC community about their experiences, and students can join this process by attending seminars.
“Part of our goal is to really educate and inform the campus community and beyond around issues of race and racism, not just only on our campus but again, things that we're seeing in our society and the ways in which racism is embedded in our institutions,” Crystal Simmons, co-chair of the subcommittee, said.
David Parfitt, co-chair of the subcommittee, detailed the official goals of the subcommittee in his interview with The Lamron.
“We came up with three things that we wanted to do; One was to come up with this series of programs that we're doing this month of February for Black History Month,” Parfitt said. “The second one was to come up with a website that had a lot of resources for anti-racist pedagogy for the campus. And then the third, kind of long-term goal was to start to look at the policies that are racist policies of the college, and what we do in fact have the ability to change.”