Capacity Building Resources

Capacity Building 

Academic:

Enhancing Campus Climates for Racial/Ethnic Diversity: Educational Policy and Practice
Hurtado, Milem, Clayton-Pederson, & Allen (1998) 

Disarming Racial Microaggressions: Microintervention Strategies for Targets, White Allies, and Bystanders
Sue, Alsaidi, Awad, Glaeser, Calle, & Mendez (2019)

Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation -- CHAPTER ONE
Sue (2010)

Being an Active Bystander: Strategies for Challenging the Emergence of Bias
Lena Tenney (2017)

Beyond Cultural Competence, Toward Social Transformation: Liberation Psychologies and the Practice of Cultural Humility
Jennifer Abe (2019)

Empowerment

Resources for Student and Community Activism, Criminal Justice and Police Reform, and more

• Anguish and Action: Provides resources to learn about police violence and antiracism as well as actions you can take to encourage reform from organizations who have been working on these issues at the local and national level for years
• How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change: Three ways to implement criminal justice and police reform by former President Barack Obama.
• Knowing Your Rights if Stopped by the Police: A description of what the law requires and also strategies for handling police encounters. 
• Promoting Diversity at LMU: Work with the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Ethnic and Intercultural Services, and other units to encourage the recruitment and hiring of diverse faculty, to diversify course curricula and teaching methods, and promote inclusive excellence in other areas of the university.  
• Confronting Prejudice: Understand specific definitions and statistics surrounding prejudice and bigotry in the U.S. and learn actions you can take to be an ally. 
• No Going Back: Policies for an Equitable and Inclusive Los Angeles: #NOGOINGBACKLA is a movement focused on the legacy of injustices against the Black community in the U.S. and calls for a proactive agenda that explicitly dismantles anti-Black racism and an independent study on the state of African Americans in Los Angeles County.

Support and Activism

Support Black businesses:

• Supporting the growth of Black-owned businesses goes a long way in empowering communities in the long run, not just in this exceptionally dire landscape. There is no doubt that the pandemic has disproportionately affected black communities. Here is a Google doc of all the Black-owned restaurants in Los Angeles. Other ways to find Black-owned businesses:
• WeBuyBlack
• Official Black Wall Street

Submit general inquiries, comments, and concerns to: [email protected] 

• Organize to lobby the LAPD Commission for reform: http://www.lapdonline.org/police_commission
• Contact your local, county, state, and federal representative.  You can find out who represents you in all levels of government through this website: https://myreps.datamade.us/

 Self-Care

LMU Student Psychological Services - LMU Student Psychological Services (SPS) provides confidential individual and group therapy; walk-in consultations; emergency psychological services; and psycho-educational outreach programming. SPS also offers psychological consultation to students, faculty, staff or parents who are concerned about a student. There is no charge for our services. SPS is accredited by the International Association of Counseling Services, Inc. Make an appointment here.

Explore LMU’s Wellness Opportunities

Other Resource Lists:

• Sunshine Behavioral Health: Mental Health Issues Facing the Black Community
• The College of New Jersey provides Self-Care Resources for Discrimination, Racism and HateUniversity of North Texas: Racial Trauma and Self Care in Tragedy

D & I Quick Tips

1. Helpful Principles to Fostering Inclusive Excellence (printable)
2. Implementing a Universal Design for Learning (printable)
3. Disarming Microaggressions (printable)
4. A Practice of Cultural Humility at Three Levels (printable)
5. Using Pronouns to Promote Inclusivity (printable)
6. Individual Strategies to Mitigate Implicit Bias (printable)
7. Equity-Minded Practices for Remote Environments

Overview of The Anti-Racism Project (Emelyn dela Peña, VP for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion)

Cultural Consciousness Conversations

Seek Understanding

Structural Racism VS Individual Racism

Capacity Building 

Media:

5 Accessibility Features Every Learner Should Know
Luis Peréz, The Website of Luis Perez (2016)

9 Tips for Promoting Gender-Inclusive Planning
Gender Inclusive Planning How to, Tools for the Trade (2020)

9 Questions to Guide Your Cultural Proficiency
Randall B. Lindsey, Corwin Connect (2016) 

How Search Committees Can See Bias in Themselves
Lucy A. Leske, The Chronicle (2016) 

'Minoritized:' a violent word
K. Ward Cummings, Baltimore Sun (2019)

Please also see DEI's Inclusive Excellence Glossary (2018) 

Statements of Solidarity

LMU This Week Special Edition, June 2, 2020

Beyond Words: President Snyder's Letter to LMU, June 16, 2020

Acknowledgement of Understanding: Response to BlackatLMU Students' and Black Faculty & Staff Alliance demands, September 4, 2020

Books:

• How To Be An Antiracist by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi
• White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color by Ruby Hamad
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou 
• Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
• Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad
• Raising Our Hands by Jenna Arnold
• Redefining Realness by Janet Mock
• Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
• So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
• The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
• Autobiography of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
• Audiobook available on YouTube

The William H. Hannon Library staff also created a Black Lives Matter resource guide and the DEIA LibGuide. 

Film and Television:

• 13th (Ava DuVernay) — Netflix
• American Son (Kenny Leon) — Netflix
• Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975 — Available to rent
• Blindspotting (Carlos López Estrada) — Hulu with Cinemax
• Clemency (Chinonye Chukwu) — Available to rent
• Dear White People (Justin Simien) — Netflix
• Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler) — Available to rent
• I Am Not Your Negro (James Baldwin doc) — Available to rent or on Kanopy
• If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins) — Hulu
• Just Mercy (Destin Daniel Cretton) — Amazon Prime Video
• King In The Wilderness  — HBO
• See You Yesterday (Stefon Bristol) — Netflix
• Selma (Ava DuVernay) — Amazon Prime Video & Netflix
• The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution — Available to rent
• The Hate U Give (George Tillman Jr.) — Hulu with Cinemax
• When They See Us (Ava DuVernay) — Netflix

Sources include Black Lives Matter (@blklivesmatter), A-List Pathway (@alistpathway) and Agency (@agencylmu).

Podcasts and Webinars:

• NPR's Code Switch
• Nicole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project
• The Appeal's Justice in America
• Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History Podcast  
• Miss Buchanan's Period of Adjustment
  Explores the legacy of racism in American schools, starting with the truth behind Brown v. Board of Education
• State V. Johnson
• Mr. Hollowell Didn't Like That
  Explores institutional racism and power dynamics
• The Hug Heard Around The World
  Explores race and tokenism
• The Association of Southeastern Research Libraries: DEI committees - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly  

de·mand
noun
plural noun: demands

1. an insistent and peremptory request, made as if by right.
   “a series of demands for far-reaching reforms” (Google’s English Dictionary)

Contextualizing the demands of LMU’s Black community

What does it mean for different groups within LMU’s Black community to make demands of the university? Insistently and peremptorily, as if by right? Some in the university may wish for more conciliatory language — the language of common goals, collaboration, and negotiation.  Demands may seem too harsh to our ears, even unreasonable. Yet, the time we are living in, with a growing collective awakening based on seeing the violence and death perpetrated on so many innocent Black people, has led Black people — along with their allies of all ages, races, gender identities, and religions — to demand change. This right to demand is based on the continued dehumanization and disrespect of Black people based in a brutal history of racism in the United States. In this context, the language of demands is required and exactly right. A right to demand that is based on waiting too long, witnessing repeated long cycles of laws and reforms, legislation and intentions, that never go far enough, never quite do enough to actually change these bitter patterns.

What does it mean for LMU to address demands?

What does it mean to address the demands of Black undergraduate and graduate students, Black faculty and staff, and to respect the experiences of Black alums, at LMU? At its most basic level, it means listening and responding. Recognizing and respecting that the demands come from a place of anger and frustration, yes, but also from a sometimes painful love and commitment to LMU. From this perspective, the demands represent a path forward to make the university a place where Black people are valued, respected, able to be fully themselves, and to thrive. And in thriving, contributing to the intellectual, spiritual, and cultural vibrancy of the university. This relationship between communal flourishing and university vitality reverberates outward for other groups, too – for Latinx, LGBTQ, API, Native American, Middle Eastern, Muslim, White, and others – creating a greater possibility for everyone, no matter who they are and where they come from, to experience the richness of a university community and an LMU education that fully embodies its mission.

What does LMU’s response to demands have to do with its mission?

How can addressing demands help us to embody the university mission more fully? We are talking about an education of the whole person, that recognizes and values all peoples in their fully embodied selves. An encouragement of learning that values the intellectual contributions of many traditions, communities, and cultures. And a service of faith and promotion of justice that is authentic and real, that respects and honors the lived experiences of all peoples. After all, don’t we all want to be part of a university that enables all members of its community to explore and live out their values, worldviews, cultures, and/or faith traditions, with greater integrity and meaning?

In sum, addressing the demands of the Black community at LMU means locating ourselves as a university in the world, reading “the signs of the times” and responding accordingly, out of our mission. LMU means all of us, as individuals and as part of the institution, we mean to change.  As individuals, it means learning, struggling, and growing together in authentic ways that have meaning and integrity in order to educate students for their futures. As part of LMU’s anti-racism project, it means examining our structures, processes, programs, and operations in unit-level reflections and expanding our awareness through campus-wide conversations. It is true that living the LMU mission can at times feel more aspirational than we wish, and the progress we make, individually and collectively, may seem too small and too slow. But we have set our feet to the ground, we see the path we must follow, and we encourage each other, even as we collectively push our institution, to keep moving ahead. That is how we will bring this change to fruition.

Although not listed on this website, the university also acknowledges Black graduate students on the Westchester campus, which do not yet have a formal organization or informal affinity group, represented by the leadership of Steven Fuller, a graduate student in the School of Education.  In addition, the Black Law Students Association (BLSA), under the leadership of Nicole Osunsanmi (President), Kayla Dillard (VP), Beatrice Greenberg (Advocacy Chair), and Eden Teferi (former President), has been working with the LMU Loyola Law School to effect change in the LLS curriculum and programs. Finally, the Presidential Black Advisory Council (P.B.L.A.C., co-chaired by Dr. Branden Grimmett, Associate Provost for Career and Professional Development and Dr. Bradley Stone, BCLA Associate Dean for Graduate Studies/Professor of Philosophy) represents a cross-section of Black faculty, staff, undergraduates, graduate students, law students, alums, and Board members that have been asked to come together to provide advice, feedback, and guidance to the university as part of the Anti-Racism Project.

Learn More

• #BlackatLMU Student Demands
• BFSA Actions Beyond Words
• APISC Demands
• Latinx Demands

The university reports its progress in addressing the demands of #BlackatLMU and BFSA each semester. Note that while the university actions to address the demands contribute to strengthening LMU’s Anti-Racism Project, addressing these demands represents a separate university responsibility and commitment.