What Might Be: Confronting Racism To Transform Our Institutions

When corporations are following the U.S. government back to the longstanding patterns of racial injustice and inequity, the antiracist work that must be done will need to come from an organization’s leadership. Sturm (law, Columbia Law Sch.; coauthor of Who’s Qualified?: A New Democracy Forum on the Future of Affirmative Action) offers a clear-eyed assessment of the difficulties, contradictions, and paradoxes that leadership must face when doing antiracist work. Through selected case studies involving courthouses, theater companies, and college campuses, Sturm explores the biggest impediments to making an organization welcoming to all. These impediments are structured around three main paradoxes. First, the paradox of racialized power, a situation where white people lean into antiracist efforts while actually refraining from exercising the power that the work needs in order to succeed. The next is the paradox of racial salience, the often-uncomfortable work where leadership must explicitly address race when framing their goals in order to recognize the racism structures at play in the organization. The final paradox is that of becoming a racialized institution, which must drive antiracism work while simultaneously being the target of that work to improve.