Racial Justice and Anti-racism Resources

The 16 point list originated as an instructional aid for people allied with indigenous groups. This list serves as a good inventory of opportunities where you can easily engage and take action, identify knowledge gaps, and explore ways to learn.

Your personal inventory of behaviors that should be avoided.

When you are an ally, it is of utmost importance to realize that there are certain things you should and should not do when you have taken on that responsibility.

Racism, white privilege and white supremacy are challenges that people of color neither created nor should be expected to resolve.

There are simple things you can keep in mind and do in order to be a better person “currently operating in solidarity with” the marginalized or oppressed. And while this list is not comprehensive, it’s definitely somewhere to start.

The most recent literature on allyship notes that being an ally is not an identity. However, Keith Edwards's earlier work on developing a social justice ally identity offers a conceptual model that is helpful in understanding the motivations of an ally. He examines why individuals choose to operate in solidarity with marginalized groups and breaks down those motivations into three categories (self-interest, altruism, and social justice) explaining the challenges and consequences of each category.

From the Harvard Business Review. Change starts with individual leaders’ taking responsibility for their own attitudes and behaviors.

Is attending the annual celebration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer unity a show of allyship, or a sign you’re coopting a community?

Integrity and honesty necessitate engaging questions of climate for a marginalized group with an interrogation of the influence of privileged groups. Too often, the people most hurt by such dynamics are further strained by minimizations and demands that they do the remedial work alone.

Practical ways to become an ally, and even an accomplice. The acts of an accomplice are "meant to directly challenge institutionalized racism, colonization, and White supremacy by blocking or impeding racist people, policies, and structures."

Research reveals a potentially important arena for “shoring up” White people's ability to take action that is perceptible by and meaningful to people of color.

The most common mistakes concerned heterosexuals' pointing out that they know someone who is gay, emphasizing their lack of prejudice, and relying on stereotypes about LGBTQ+ people.

Advantaged group allies must effectively communicate support for social change, understand the implications of their own privilege, offer autonomy‐oriented support, and resist the urge to increase their own feelings of inclusion by co‐opting relevant marginalized social identities.

Inter/intragroup dialogues have the potential to change higher educational institutions in positive ways, and that learning can in turn have a ripple effect as these emerging white allies apply their knowledge and skills to their spheres of influence within the broader community.

A stated commitment to LGBT equality cannot by itself eliminate a lifetime of participation in heteronormative assumptions and sexual prejudice. Thus, it is incumbent upon heterosexual‐cisgender allies and the institutions with which they are affiliated to examine their sexual prejudice at both explicit and implicit levels.

Based on 70 in-depth interviews with college students who identify as allies to one or more marginalized groups, we analyze how they construct allyship in ways that ultimately reproduce patterns of social inequality by (1) assigning responsibility for inequalities to minorities, and (2) suggesting individualized, rather than structural, remedies for combatting unequal systems. We find that the combination of these strategies allows them to claim identities as allies without having to engage in concrete efforts that could challenge systems of oppression.