As a student, scholar, or educator, employing anti-racist strategies in your work makes your work more accessible to those outside of your social group and helps advance equity in scholarship. This page contains resources designed to help identify bias, write in a way that is more inclusive of all groups, and help researchers include more diverse resources in their body of research.
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Everyone has biases that are born from their life experiences. Many of these biases are unconscious and affect how we as students and scholars interact with the information we consume. Discovering your implicit biases and learning how to address them is an important step in becoming an actively anti-racist writer.
Biased by
How do we talk about bias? How do we address racial disparities and inequities? What role do our institutions play in creating, maintaining, and magnifying those inequities? What role do we play? With a perspective that is at once scientific, investigative, and informed by personal experience, Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt offers us the language and courage we need to face one of the biggest and most troubling issues of our time. She exposes racial bias at all levels of society--in our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and criminal justice system. Yet she also offers us tools to address it. Eberhardt shows us how we can be vulnerable to bias but not doomed to live under its grip. Racial bias is a problem that we all have a role to play in solving.
Language that perpetuates oppression:
1. Avoids discussing differences
2. Erases differences
3. Assumes uniform readership
4. Minimizes significance of discrimination
5. Speaks of oppression as only in the past
6. Exoticizes
7. Presents stereotypes as evidence
8. Disrespects sources from "other" perspectives
9. Fails to distinguish sources’ views from writers; own
10. Misunderstands or misrelates sources' views
Suhr-Sytsma, A. & Brown, S.E. (2011) Theory in/to practice: addressing the everyday language of oppression int he writing center. Writing Center Journal 31(2). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A356452954/AONE?u=klnb_fhsuniv&sid=AONE&xid=708f58ee
You can reduce bias in scholarly writing by:
1. Actively choosing clear and inclusive terms. e.g. refer to human beings as "people" or "individuals" not as "man" or "mankind" which excludes other genders.
2. Choosing labels carefully. Use the labels community members have chosen for themselves. Be aware that language can evolve over time.When in doubt, consult advocacy groups from within the community you are discussing so you can choose the appropriate language.
3. Avoiding dehumanizing language. Using nouns to label people has the effect of erasing their humanity. Do not refer to people as colors or use pejorative terms. e.g. "criminals" vs. "people with a criminal record" or "illegal aliens" vs. "undocumented immigrants."
4. Referring to non-White racial and ethnic groups by their specific names rather than treating them as a collective. e.g. referring to everyone who lives on the continent of Asia as "Asians" rather than by their nationality or lumping all Native Americans together irrespective of tribal affiliation.
American Psychological Association. (2020). Bias Free Language. APA Style Blog. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/bias-free-language
Anti-Racist Writing Strategies E-books
Writing Centers and the New Racism by
Noting a lack of sustained and productive dialogue about race in university writing center scholarship, the editors of this volume have created a rich resource for writing center tutors, administrators, and scholars. Motivated by a scholarly interest in race and whiteness studies, and by an ethical commitment to anti-racism work, contributors address a series of related questions: How does institutionalized racism in American education shape the culture of literacy and language education in the writing center? How does racism operate in the discourses of writing center scholarship/lore, and how may writing centers be unwittingly complicit in racist practices? How can they meaningfully operationalize anti-racist work? How do they persevere through the difficulty and messiness of negotiating race and racism in their daily practice? The conscientious, nuanced attention to race in this volume is meant to model what it means to be bold in engagement with these hard questions and to spur the kind of sustained, productive, multi-vocal, and challenging dialogue that, with a few significant exceptions, has been absent from the field.
Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies
This book is about antiracist classroom writing assessment as theory and a set of practices that are productive for all students and teachers.
These reading and resource lists provide information on a diverse set of resources to help people branch out of their comfort zone. They can help you discover resources related to anti-racism across the learning spectrum.