What does it mean for academics to practice anti-racism? Too often, the discussion is reduced to whether scholars acknowledge the existence of racism or whether they include key concepts like “racialization” and “Othering” in their syllabi. While these are important, they remain insufficient if anti-racism is treated only as intellectual awareness. Practicing anti-racism in academia requires more: it is a continual effort to reflect on one’s own complicity in sustaining racialized dynamics, whether in seminars, conferences, or hallway conversations. In other words, anti-racism involves not only learning about racism but also unlearning ingrained norms and reimagining the practices that shape academic life.
Learning the Languages of Power
Critical race studies, postcolonial theory, and sociology provide tools for naming the processes that sustain racial hierarchies. Concepts like privilege, racialization, essentialization, and stereotyping help us recognize how race is not a natural category but a social construction reproduced daily through language, interactions, and institutions.
For instance, the idea of racialization reveals how individuals are marked, categorized, and made hyper-visible—or invisible—because of perceived racial difference. In academia, this can manifest in subtle yet pervasive ways: colleagues talking at rather than with racialized scholars, exclusion from informal networks such as coffee room conversations, or dismissive engagement with their research. These are not trivial slights; they reinforce hierarchies of credibility and belonging within the university.
Access to resources is another terrain where racialization plays out. Funding schemes restricted to citizens, opaque criteria for grants, or networks that privilege insiders disproportionately disadvantage international and racialized academics. The impact is cumulative: lack of early-career funding diminishes chances of future success, locking scholars into precarious positions. Such structural barriers are not separate from academic knowledge production; they shape whose voices are amplified and whose are silenced.
The Work of Unlearning
If learning equips us with vocabulary, unlearning forces us to confront our own thought patterns. It means interrogating assumptions that present Western perspectives as universal, or framing kinship systems, social norms, or intellectual traditions as either “modern” or “backward.”
Unlearning does not suggest passivity but requires deliberate mindfulness. It calls for attention to how we, often unconsciously, reproduce Eurocentric or racialized assumptions. For racialized academics, this can involve shedding a colonial mentality that equates legitimacy with Western forms of knowledge. For white academics, it demands recognizing how privilege structures not just opportunities but also ways of thinking, speaking, and listening.
Crucially, unlearning highlights that anti-racism cannot be externalized. It is not something scholars do out there in their research topics while leaving their everyday academic practices untouched. Instead, it demands continual self-reflection about how one engages with colleagues, students, and texts.
Re-Norming the Academic Space
Anti-racism also requires reimagining the norms of academic practice. What counts as legitimate argumentation? Who is listened to in a seminar, and whose contributions are overlooked? How might discussions be organized so that participants feel empowered to think independently rather than merely conform to dominant paradigms?
These questions open space for envisioning academic life differently. Re-norming might mean designing seminars that actively resist hierarchies of voice, contextualizing knowledge rather than treating it as universal, and recognizing the coexistence of multiple epistemologies without forcing them into opposition. It also calls for moving beyond declarative “positionality statements” toward practices that actually disrupt racialized and gendered power relations in everyday academic life.
Toward an Inclusive Knowledge Community
The broader implication is that anti-racism in academia is not only about fairness in treatment of colleagues; it is about the quality of knowledge itself. When certain voices are systematically marginalized, the scope of what can be known shrinks. Conversely, when universities make space for diverse perspectives and question their own Eurocentric assumptions, the horizon of scholarship expands.
Practicing anti-racism, then, is inseparable from the pursuit of intellectual rigor and truth. It involves a constant negotiation between learning and unlearning, between self-reflection and collective transformation. The question that follows is whether universities are willing to institutionalize such practices—not as optional commitments, but as integral to their mission.
