anti-racism

When Gail Christopher, executive director of the National Collaborative for Health Equity and a Mason senior scholar, talks about “ensuring a future,” she’s really talking about creating a system of equity that produces opportunities for everyone to “actualize their potential.”

Mason’s Honors College has expanded an initiative launched last year to help cultivate an anti-racist community through discussion groups. The program, called “Honoring Our Community,” provides opportunities for students to have honest conversations about racial and social justice with the goal of cultivating an anti-racist culture and tighter sense of community.

With racial tension high in the United States, and the need for equity growing ever stronger, students and faculty at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School participated in a 21-Day Racial Equity Habit-Building Challenge virtually in March and April.

The challenge, created by diversity expert Eddie Moore Jr., focuses on the Black American experience and is designed to advance deeper understandings of the intersections of race, power, privilege, and oppression, and guide participants in becoming more aware and engaged regarding racial equity.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it so most museums are closed, but students and researchers at George Mason University’s John Mitchell, Jr. Program (JMJP) are working hard to create a digital one that sheds light on civil rights pioneers with largely untold stories.

Thanks to an $8,000 grant from Virginia Humanities, the team is building a digital exhibit on the life of anti-lynching advocate John Mitchell, Jr., and his colleagues Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells. The grant is part of $181,500 in funding awarded to 25 nonprofits.

Tuesday’s mass murder in Atlanta returns us to terrible, familiar ground, as we try again to make sense of violence, and calm the terror that was already building within an entire cultural community.

How are anti-racism efforts building on college campuses? How will Mason affirm its core values and mission of inclusion? President Gregory Washington speaks with Wendi Manuel-Scott and Shernita Parker, co-directors of Mason's Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence Task Force about the university's commitment to be a national leader in this dialogue.

In this fascinating conversation, President Gregory Washington speaks with Kevin Clark, director of original animation for preschool programming at Netflix, and retiring professor in the Learning Technologies Division in George Mason University’s College of Education and Human Development, about how technology and economics are helping fuel the rich entertainment content highlighting people of color, and how that programming can be a conduit for anti-racism efforts.

“It’s a dream job because I get to create content,” Clark said. “I get to be involved in what young people and their families see, especially at the preschool level. This is some of the first media they are exposed to besides books and stories that their parents and caregivers communicate to them, so we have to get it right.”

Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, assistant professor in the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, explains how using our democratic freedoms will help overcome racism in America.

MLK Evening of Reflection