Building “Brave Spaces” Toward Anti-racism through Race-alike Affinity Groups

• In Event: Transformation from Within and Outside of Schools: Residency-based preparation for education professionals supporting systemic change

Abstract

Our program’s foundational equity orientation and commitment to anti-racism have drawn students with diverse social identities and the painful, stark learning opportunities that inevitably arise when humans aim to create community. Following the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020, a colleague in the program failed to support our students in their endeavor for critical community engagement. The spark of that failure lit fires of dissatisfaction that questioned the extent to which we, as a program and community, lived out our commitments. Reeling from that moment of reflection and striving to meet our goals as a program, we responded by instituting race-alike affinity groups for students, and ultimately incorporated them into the required curriculum starting with the 2020-2021 school year. In launching these affinity groups, we attempted to understand: How might we foster anti-racism among racially diverse emerging education leaders as an anchor for pursuing a socially just education?
This paper will explore the development and function of race-alike affinity groups as a key cross-concentration component of our efforts to answer this question. Fostering anti-racism requires building racial literacy (Sealy-Ruiz, 2021) and working through one’s racial identity development. Scholars argue that racial identity development happens in stages and requires “safe” or “brave” spaces for people of color and white people to engage honestly and openly with their experiences, perspectives, and biases (e.g., Tatum, 1992; Wijeyesinghe & Jackson, 2011). An emerging literature base has begun to document the potential for one form of such “safe” or “brave” spaces - race-based affinity groups - for K12 teachers to be powerful experiences that allow people of color to build community and solidarity (Pour-Khorshid, 2018) and for white people to develop the knowledge, skills, and orientation toward anti-racist action (Utt & Tochluk, 2020). Less is known about race-based affinity groups in higher education settings or with future education professionals specifically (Michael & Conger, 2009).
Following the summer course outlined in Paper 1, students self-select into race-alike affinity groups, and program faculty identify skilled facilitators who share the same racialized identity as the students. Groups – including students from both the teacher preparation concentration and the advocacy and policy concentration - meet approximately one hour a month as part of their existing residency course. During these meetings, groups engage in structured and emergent activities intended to allow space for students to explore aspects of their racialized identities and be in community and solidarity with each other. Drawing on analyses of written reflections by affinity group facilitators, as well as student surveys on their time in the affinity groups, this paper generates insights about the practical, theoretical, and pedagogical considerations related to incorporating race-alike affinity groups into an equity-oriented education MA program. Our findings suggest that race-alike affinity groups may act as necessary spaces outside of classrooms and offer a specific context for racial identity exploration and anti-racist development. This paper also examines the tensions and opportunities that facilitators and students alike face and provides recommendations and guiding questions for other programs considering taking up this work.

Author

• Kristin Sinclair, Georgetown University