What Does An Anti-Racist Exeter Look Like?

By Maxine Park ‘22

What makes for an anti-racist Exeter?

This summer, the administration published a list of twelve anti-racism initiatives they intend to pursue over the next five years. Though ambitious, these initiatives prove promising in their specificity: increasing the number of faculty of color by at least 50%, appointing a new Assistant Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, extensive data collection projects, the development of reporting, accountability and education protocols, among several others. Compared to other prominent institutions (such as Harvard Business School) whose promises of allyship and change  are vague, Exeter’s initiatives provide the community with at least some concrete benchmarks that will hold us accountable for our progress. 

While these initiatives are laudable, they alone are not enough to achieve anti-racism at Exeter. So we must ask ourselves: What does an anti-racist Exeter really look like? 

Racism is systemic. It is engrained deeply—not only in our own implicit psychology, but also in the many systems, political, social, technological, our society has come to rely on. Racism is not just a belief—it is a culture. Over the past year, through social media pages such as Black@ Exeter and Asian@Exeter, our community came to realize just how deeply entrenched racism is in the Exeter experience.

Anti-racism, then, is a counterculture—it forces us to confront our own psychology and think differently about the things in society many of us have so easily accepted. As described by Ibram X. Kendi, one can either be a racist or an anti-racist—there is no in between. As a result, our efforts to maintain anti-racism have to be repeated and deliberate. This fall, Exeter at least began to do this on an institutional level through administrative initiatives and explicit shifts in policy. But again, because this bears repeating—policy alone will not be enough to establish a shift in culture.

Precisely how do we do this, then? In order to battle our own psychology, it is helpful to understand it from a scientific perspective. When confronting racism, research has shown that diversity workshops and implicit bias training largely do not result in permanent institutional change—they do not appear to alter discriminatory behaviors in the absence of underlying changes in procedure and process. A workshop, conference or meeting is not enough. The changes need to be embedded into our underlying culture and part of our social norms. 

A recently published paper in Nature Human Behavior shows that by giving a community pro-diversity and pro-inclusion messaging, the prevalence of individual pro-diversity attitudes increases significantly. This is referred to as “social norm messaging,” where people are consistently reminded of what behaviors and beliefs are considered “the norm.”

Thus, we want to reach the point where, as a community, we have norms that we are proud to discuss and reinforce. A shift in our culture must be accompanied by a constant dialogue of our progress that requires us to be thoughtful and intentional in the changes we make over time.

On a personal level, we as individual members of the Exeter community have to rethink our relationship with the dialogue surrounding race. We need to achieve a culture where we have a fundamental awareness and curiosity for understanding other people’s perspectives. In order to do this, we must make a deliberate effort to understand where people are coming from, racially, culturally, even historically and be willing to ask questions and learn from our mistakes. 

We need to train all faculty to encourage such discussions about race and to normalize these discussions in the classroom. And we should constantly survey the student body to assess—how comfortable are people talking about their identity, inside and outside of the classroom? How comfortable are we confronting our own perspective of race? How did our understanding of race evolve over last term? Last week?

We need to be unfailingly self-critical and curious. Especially when it comes to issues of race, people seem to avoid discussion in order to avoid making a mistake, whether it’s seeming ignorant or accidentally saying something “politically incorrect.” We will make mistakes and we will disagree, but in doing so we may create a culture where discussions about race are the norm—a culture where we are willing to sacrifice our personal notions of comfort and self-satisfaction in pursuit of a truly anti-racist community.

So how do we know we have done enough?

Perhaps no one could state it better than the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  “Sometimes I’m asked, ‘When will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court?” she said. Her answer? “When there are nine.” Just as equality in the Supreme Court cannot be achieved unless it is possible for all judges to be women, Exeter cannot be satisfied until it is possible that all faculty could be faculty of color, until it is possible that all students could be students of color. In order to be truly anti-racist, we must reach a point where minority students seeing a teacher that looks like them is not inspirational, but normal. We must reach a point where being free of the burden of representation in class is not a relief, but an expectation. We must reach a point where anti-racist policies are no longer needed to maintain an anti-racist culture.

This is the Exeter for which we must strive.

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