For a More Equitable America, Understand Race and Racism as Actions We Do and Can Undo

(Photo by iStock/franckreporter)

As the new coronavirus pandemic continues to inflict immense suffering around the world, it is also spotlighting Americans’ ongoing failure to recognize and respond to the powerful role that race plays in society and people’s lives.

Leaders like President Trump and Andrew Yang, for example, initially appeared taken aback by coronavirus-related racist attacks against the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. Yet such animus in the United States is unfortunately not new. Additionally, as concerns grew around racial disparities in testing, infection rates, and mortality, it was revealed that White House officials and experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) failed to collect and analyze critical data about the virus by race. They struggled to explain why, even though racial disparities in health and access to health care are well documented.

As social scientists who work on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), we know that people often fail to recognize race for well-intentioned reasons. Many people embrace colorblindness, claiming they "don't see race" out of a genuine but misguided hope that it will bring racial disparities to an end. But if people don’t acknowledge race, they can’t understand where racial disparities come from or how to remedy them. At Stanford SPARQ, we aim to help people recognize when, where, how, and why race matters, and how racial disparities arise and are reproduced. We work with organizations of all types, from investment firms to foundations. Our goal is to help people recognize racial disparities and respond to them effectively.

With the coronavirus crisis placing a magnifying lens over the deep inequities in American society, we believe the nation has an opportunity to face longstanding injustices that could allow us to go beyond just mourning our collective failures or patching over them with emergency measures. Americans have an opportunity to recognize and understand race in ways they never have before, ways that will help us transform and rebuild American society to be stronger and fairer to all.

Civil society organizations, often at the forefront of racial justice, will be critical to the effort. Before the pandemic, many of them were implementing implicit bias and diversity trainings to instill DEI into their teams and their work on social change. However, research shows that these trainings are often ineffective. Why? We believe that they lack a more accurate and useful understanding of race as a verb, rather than a noun.

A noun-oriented perspective is behind the pernicious and oppressive view of race as an "essence"—an innate mental, moral, or physical characteristic that is shared within a group of people. Race becomes racism when one group, intentionally or not, casts another group as inherently deficient, inferior, or lesser because of these imagined essences. This dynamic has informed colonialism, slavery, and other subjugations of non-white people around the world throughout history.

Race is instead better understood as a verb—as something people do, not something they are. Our everyday practices, social institutions, and cultural narratives together produce and reinforce race and racial disparities. They are not natural or just simply there. Instead, they are created and maintained, by people, past and present—they are "doings." People "do" race through everyday activities that are rooted in implicit, often unspoken assumptions that have been built into the design and machinery of society about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care or worry about, whom to include, and why. Differences by race arise because people who are situated differently in society have different experiences and social interactions with others and the world around them. Phenotype, ancestry, biology, or some kind of physical or cultural essence have nothing to do with it. Decades of research in the social sciences and humanities supports this view.

For example, black and brown people in the United States experience poorer health compared to white people. It has nothing to do with their "essential" characteristics. The disparity arises from the experiences they share in how social institutions and others treat them. Black and brown people face stress-inducing discrimination. They are also less likely to have access to wealth and resources. Taken together, these differences affect the outcomes of their lives, touching upon everything from being able to see a high-quality doctor to having a choice of a less-polluted neighborhood to live in.

In our work, we have found that helping people perceive how race is "done" in society—and then mapping how racial disparities are also "done"—can empower them to devise strategies and solutions to “undo” racism. This approach is described in RaceWorks, an evidence-based toolkit that we created with our colleagues at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. As civil society leaders envision ways to create transformative change in the wake of COVID-19, a "doing race and undoing racism" framework can help empower their organizations and stakeholders to develop solutions with a focus on racial equity.

To get started with recognizing when race and racism are "done," organizations need to examine the hidden biases that might be built into ostensibly neutral practices. Even purportedly fair ways of rationing ventilators in hospitals, for example, can have biases built in them. A seemingly colorblind approach to saving the most lives does not account for structural and historical differences in health by race, income, and other factors. Similarly, we see disparate impacts of seemingly neutral health and safety policies, such as being required to wear face coverings in public. Asian Americans report wearing sunglasses along with their masks when they go out disguise their race as a protective strategy against being wrongly attacked for being a potential carrier of the virus. African Americans, especially African American men, fear the face coverings would increase their risk of racial profiling or other forms of biased treatment.

Second, while understanding race and racism as "doings" will help move the United States closer toward racial justice, that goal will require more than putting an end to biased practices. Civil society leaders also need to help people imagine how we can do race differently as a society. We need to see, read, and hear examples, stories, and questions that counter homogenous and limiting racialized representations. We also need to highlight and celebrate media and art that helps us learn and imagine, including films like Queen and Slim and The Farewell, novels like There, There, and musicals like Hamilton. Imagining how the world can and should be different will enable us to put practices, policies, and systems in place that disrupt and dismantle racist legacies of the past.

Finally, we must also face difficult questions, both organizationally and individually. Have I accepted racial inequality in the issues I work on or among the social change efforts that I am involved in? Do people recognize racial disparities in the space I work in? How are disparities being explained, and why are some explanations favored in place of others? In what ways are the organizations, institutions, or systems that I participate in set up to create advantages for people in some groups relative to others? What role have I or my organization played in maintaining these unequal institutions or systems? What can I do to change them? In sum, how am I part of the problem, and how can I be part of the solution?

Long after COVID-19, American society will continue to be diverse, but it doesn’t have to be divided or unequal. This pandemic will continue to force us to change, adapt, and rebuild. As we do so, we can transform our world with racial equity at its center.

Read more stories by MarYam Hamedani, Hazel Rose Markus & Jeanne Tsai.