It takes a deep commitment to change, and an even deeper commitment to grow. - Ralph Ellison.
Some key areas highlighted in the literature featured on this page:
-Representations of Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) in curricular materials — including textbooks, question banks, and course slides.
-Faculty preparedness to teach on identity, privilege, bias, and racism, and the potential for faculty development.
-Toolkits and workshop models to address identity, privilege, and microaggressions in clinical encounters.
-Methods to solicit feedback from students and other stakeholders on existing curricula as well as studies on student perception.
-Methods to increase recruitment of BIPOC within health professions programs and in faculty.
-The iterative development of anti-racist curricula through feedback — particularly “Incorporating Antiracism Coursework into a Cultural Competency Curriculum”by Gordon et al which details a lengthy and worthile process of creating full-semester courses for both students and faculty.
As educators, we can often feel the need to jump into action to address issues of the day in a timely manner. While these articles offer methods and opportunities to act, they also emphasize that dismantling white supremacy and its presence in healthcare and health professions education requires deliberate planning and administrative support. A few additional workshops on the topic are simply not enough. In “Changing How Race Is Portrayed in Medical Education,” Nieblas-Bedolla et al call such workshops that already exist "a patched-together solution to a much larger problem.” As a systemic problem, racism also requires approaches to change and challenge a system rather than only offering education to the individuals operating within it.