Moving toward Emergence
New Purpose, New Values, Same Classroom
Where We Are
It’s been more than two years since we started the Antiracist Classroom. What now?
There are lots of transitions going on in the organizers’ lives that also suggest the Antiracist Classroom should evolve as an organization. All of the original co-founders have graduated from ArtCenter [hallellujah], a new cohort of organizers has skillfully taken over and remade the group to manifest their own visions, and we all recognize that something different is emerging.
The conversations and projects we’ve become a part of have evolved since we first started: The most significant distinction is that our frame of reference has expanded. ArtCenter is where we met; our shared experiences in its classrooms are the moments that drew us together; and its distinct brand of racism is the catalyst that initially motivated us to organize. Students at ArtCenter will continue organizing and responding to their immediate environment, but even (especially) current students recognize the limitations of situating this work in the context of the school. This shift is partially a response to the challenges and benefits afforded by the compressed way in which we experience “institutional time.” Coalitions build among “cohorts” of students and (at times) faculty each term or year and then disperse. There’s impermanence and precarity but also networking and expansion catalyzed by the fact that students’ on-campus experiences last just two to four years depending on the degree program and teachers’ are often bound by semester-long to five-year contracts.
We reached a point where that institutional frame of reference became a constraint. Now, ArtCenter faculty are initiating their own projects and collaborating to exchange pedagogical tools with each other; alumni are working in different fields but still interested in contributing to anti-racism through their own work and the ongoing conversation; and students, faculty, and professionals are enmeshed in new relationships and collaborations across and beyond multiple institutions. This seemed like a natural moment to reflect on what we’ve done and find the words to articulate what we see emerging.
Emerging Values
At times, it feels dangerous to allow for things like strategy, shared values, direction, meaning, or objectives to simply emerge from action or reflection, no matter how intentional those actions and reflections might be. In a way it feels like building the plane while flying it; at the same time, I can’t imagine how we’d know how to build it before we tried it out. Now, it feels like we’re at a point where we need to define some of our shared values as a group — the things that keep us in community, the things that guide our work, or at least the things that drew us together and continue to bind us.
To be antiracist is aspirational and impermanent. Anti-racism is a recurring practice — like a creative practice —but some of the following core values have emerged from the ways we’ve tried to practice collectively: They’ve emerged from the work of organizing events and writing publications and making projects together, mistakes we’ve made, and our reflections as organizers. Acknowledging that each of us initiates and invests in anti-racist practices in our daily lives in different ways, The Antiracist Classroom:
[ 1 ] Centers People of Color — to be clear, in our experience this has meant students who are Black, mixed-race, Mexican-American, Indian, Native American, Filipinx, Chinese, and plenty more — by:
- Inviting and uplifting our work through exhibits and film festivals and conferences;
- Amplifying our voices as leaders or experts on panels, as writers;
- Spending our money with businesses owned by People of Color and trying, to the best of our ability, to compensate those who contribute their labor in a way that honors their offering and sustains them (money!);
[ 2 ] Unsettles prevailing power dynamics that serve racism and don’t serve anti-racism:
- For the most part, this has meant recognizing and accounting for the reality that the hierarchy within institutions of higher learning — which cuts in many directions across students, staff, adjunct faculty, full-time faculty, and administrators — fundamentally shapes the ways we relate to each other and our comfort / willingness to express ourselves freely and fully participate in rooms where we’re pursuing anti-racist projects:
- Coordinating events that are exclusively for students (and not faculty or administrators);
[ 3 ] Prioritizes practicing how to be anti-racist together in our relationships, studies, and creative practices so we can go out and be anti-racist and encourage the same of others wherever we operate;
[ 4 ] Understands racism as a form of oppression that intersects with, upholds, and is maintained by many other dimensions of oppression — coloniality, sexism, gender discrimination, homophobia, transphobia, language accessibility, xenophobia, so on — and tries to account for that in the ways we approach this work:
- Making public and intentional indigenous land acknowledgments and centering indigenous ;
- (Trying to) arrange for gender-neutral restrooms at events;
- Consciously using folks’ appropriate gender pronouns and creating ways to challenge gender binaries while normalizing gender fluidity
[ 5 ] Encourages solidarity across cultural / linguistic / racial identities so that people can find ways to support one another;
- Examining how we respond (and could respond differently) to racism when we experience or witness it through a student-focused workshop;
[ 6 ] Cultivates spaces and conversations to reflect on the ways in which race / racism show up in art and media that we produce and consume;
- This might look like having informal conversations after watching popular movies to process what we encountered;
- Rests squarely on bonds between people — especially People of Color and our white co-conspirators — and friendships that are strengthened by and exceed our work together;
In a way, these values or principles respond to a question that resides quietly beneath the surface of everything we do and precedes us as a pronouncement thanks to our name: “What does it mean to be an anti-racist artist, designer, person?” This isn’t an exhaustive list of principles, but it captures some of the ones that have risen to the top and that we can recognize looking back at our attempts to practice anti-racism together through the Antiracist Classroom. Above all, these are the principles we share as organizers and that we expect our collaborators to align with, too.
Our Revised Purpose
The Antiracist Classroom encourages and facilitates anti-racist art and design practice. To this end, we curate spaces, ways of working, and relationships through which artists and designers, especially, can practice cultivating anti-racist creative practices — from our actual classrooms to our studios to our neighborhoods.
We pursue this purpose through many avenues that have evolved over time to reflect the interests, priorities, and talents of the organizers: Producing creative projects together, convening conversations and celebrations, and documenting and reflecting on emergent ideas and learning through writing and making work together.
- Core Organizers — These are the folks who take responsibility for initiating projects, planning events, writing things under the banner of the group; this means we’re also the ones who write proposals for funding, define the group’s directions, mission, and values, coordinate collective meetings to solicit collaborators / help / buy-in / ideas / concerns from others. Right now, this includes folks like Sophie DeLara, Sade Young, Melissa Fernandez, Lauren Williams, and Arden Stern.
- Contributors — These are the folks who come speak at events, contribute time as volunteers, submit work when we issue calls for work, offer advice and review things, or initiate their own projects and invite us to help in some way. This list is too long to name everyone, but you’ll see folks listed as contributors on project websites and such.
- Everybody Else — This is the much larger but more tenuous group of people who (at varying levels of consistency and depth) attend events, read things we write, share or respond to our work on social media, buy our books, share offline with friends.
The Classroom? The Classroom.
At one point, I worried that the “classroom” language in our name was limiting — that it would constrain our work to contexts associated only with higher education and pedagogy and our participants to students, faculty, and staff at places where art and design are taught and studied. I feared that our name would prevent us from considering how to practice anti-racism in our creative practices professionally or in the communities beyond school where we want our work to live. Instead, what emerged from our retreat was that we want this group — in all its current and as-yet-unimagined future manifestations — to function as a classroom in its capacity to inspire and equip us to continually study and practice and construct anti-racist art and design. It’s never been about being a classroom in a conventional sense; and it’s certainly not a classroom where we expect to show up and get fed what to believe or understand. It’s a classroom where we’re responsible for our education and evolution. Maybe this means unlearning what we learned in institutions of higher education. Instead of limiting us to “classrooms,” it transforms every space where we operate into a classroom: a space where learning happens, where we evolve, and where we shape and re-shape our minds and actions.
