Racism

When Gail Christopher, executive director of the National Collaborative for Health Equity and a Mason senior scholar, talks about “ensuring a future,” she’s really talking about creating a system of equity that produces opportunities for everyone to “actualize their potential.”

As a junior and senior at Annandale High School in Virginia, Emily Sample spent her summers as a docent at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She was a teenager who had just lost a friend to police violence, she said, and joining the museum’s Young Ambassadors Program resonated with her.

“I was fascinated and continue to be fascinated by this highly illogical idea of genocide,” said Sample, a PhD candidate at George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution.

With racial tension high in the United States, and the need for equity growing ever stronger, students and faculty at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School participated in a 21-Day Racial Equity Habit-Building Challenge virtually in March and April.

The challenge, created by diversity expert Eddie Moore Jr., focuses on the Black American experience and is designed to advance deeper understandings of the intersections of race, power, privilege, and oppression, and guide participants in becoming more aware and engaged regarding racial equity.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it so most museums are closed, but students and researchers at George Mason University’s John Mitchell, Jr. Program (JMJP) are working hard to create a digital one that sheds light on civil rights pioneers with largely untold stories.

Thanks to an $8,000 grant from Virginia Humanities, the team is building a digital exhibit on the life of anti-lynching advocate John Mitchell, Jr., and his colleagues Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells. The grant is part of $181,500 in funding awarded to 25 nonprofits.

MLK Evening of Reflection

President Gregory Washington has revealed the members of his Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence (ARIE) Task Force, a major university-wide initiative that will examine practices and traditions at George Mason University to see if racial biases exist. he 32-member core task force is headed by co-chairs Shernita Rochelle Parker, Mason’s assistant vice president for HR strategy and talent management, and Wendi Manuel Scott, a professor of history in the School of Integrative Studies within the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the former director of the African and African American Studies Program.

The Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence Task Force will be led by Wendi Manuel-Scott, Associate Professor (CHSS), and Shernita Parker, Assistant Vice President for Human Resources.

George Mason University is set to open a campus center focused on creating awareness about the effects of racism, as well as preparing the next generation of leaders dedicated to promoting racial and social justice.