The Racial Healing Project seeks to engage students, staff, faculty and administration at IU Indianapolis in the movement and process of racial healing by aiding participants in understanding the current covert and overt manifestations of racism, reconciling the historical trauma and legacy of racism in the United States, and providing strategies to cope with and combat racism across campus.
Our vision is to seriously engage IU Indianapolis in efforts to recognize the trauma visited upon populations of color both historically and contemporarily within the US, and to position our campus to become a leader in facilitating opportunities for racial healing, collaboration, growth, and support. We hope that these efforts will provide opportunities for the campus to become better informed regarding the status of people of color at IU Indianapolis that moves beyond basic climate studies. We also hope that these efforts will result in:
1. The creation of circles of support that can nourish and support the emotional, spiritual, and physical well-being of people of color around campus;
2. Facilitate collaborative institutional decision-making around issues of race; and
3. Provide faculty, staff, and students of color with campus-wide communities focused on intentionally inclusive initiatives that empower and support them.
The goal of this initiative is to transform the IU Indianapolis campus into a place where racial healing is accounted for in the variant manifestations of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts directed towards creating a more welcoming campus.
• Providing speakers who can offer different perspectives on the historical violence of racism in the United States;
• Engaging in dialogue that focuses on racial healing across different racial, ethnic, and political perspectives by providing literature, speakers, and workshops;
• Educating the community on the intersecting and variant manifestations of racism using an historical orientation, e.g., native genocide, slavery, internment camps, Jim Crow, and other forms of segregation and their continued manifestations including family separation aimed at particular groups of immigrants, persecution based on religion or sexual orientation/transgender status, and blatant as well as micro-aggressions based on race/religion/sexual orientation;
• Educating the community regarding IU Indianapolis' founding and its disenfranchisement and removal of people of color;
• Educating the community on variant manifestations of racism that are covert and overt;
• Introducing concepts that account for the emotional experiences attached to racist practices;
• Affirming experiences of racism across campus;
• Providing space to share and workshop ideas to address racist actions on campus;
• Providing tools to account for and address racism at the individual and institutional level; and
• Providing coping strategies to support the perseverance and preservation of students, staff, and faculty of color at IU Indianapolis.
