Can we just talk? Exploring discourses on race and racism among U.S. undergraduates during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

Across the globe, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken an extraordinary toll on racially minoritised and economically disadvantaged communities. The United States has been no exception. In the U.S., serious illness and death are two- to three-times more common among Black, Latinx, and Native American populations than among white people. In the summer of 2020, growing outrage over the racialised impact of the pandemic coincided with weeks-long protests of police killings of Black Americans—George Floyd in Minnesota, Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, and Tony McDade in Florida, among others. The convergence of two racialised phenomena, a public health crisis and police violence, intensified public scrutiny of the practices that sustain racial inequalities, including within higher education. Even as U.S. colleges and universities issue statements decrying the burden of the pandemic and the concomitant racialised violence on communities of colour, racial inequalities persist in higher education and pedagogical practices centring racial justice remain largely uncommon. In this paper, we argue that U.S. institutions of higher education are complicit in the perpetuation of fallacies surrounding race and racism when their curricula fail to prepare students to understand and address these issues. Using survey data from two undergraduate courses taught at an elite, predominantly white institution in Fall 2020, this paper examines how specific pedagogical approaches led to increases in students’ self-reported confidence and capacity to discuss race and racism. Based on our findings, we demonstrate that undergraduates benefit from teaching that specifically develops their capacity to understand, discuss, and address racism.

KEYWORDS:

• Covid-19
• higher education
• racial equity
• anti-racism
• pedagogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Throughout this paper, the term “indigenous” will refer to the populations the Centers for Disease Control Prevention identify as native to the lands which encompass the present-day United States; this includes people of American Indian or Alaska Native backgrounds, who are non-Hispanic.

2 Henceforth, all references to “agreed” include responses of both “somewhat agree” and “strongly agree”.

3 Racial capitalism, as defined by Cedric Robinson (1983), refers to the state-sponsored exploitation of racial subjects as a fundamentally unequal economic system rooted in racial hierarchy.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Brandeis University Provost Teaching Innovation Grant: [Grant Number 00124].