A Survivor’s Guide to Institutional Racism

This article is a very short guide to navigating institutional racism within universities. Focal points of this piece are how institutional racism works, how it can be diagnosed, and how one can invent ways to survive it. The first section of this article is an overall analysis of how institutional racism is set up, particularly in the humanities and arts departments of North American universities. The second section is a step-by-step guide to surviving institutional racism in the university, and particularly in graduate programs. This article is distilled through and explained by first-hand experiences and observations and is written both to archive the structure and affect of the current atmosphere of institutional racism and to document and propose some strategies of awareness and resistance.