Which resources for anti-racism research?

Hi folks.

The short version:

A group of IASSIST members has been discussing a project to compile resources useful for anti-racist/anti-racism research. We would like wider input on what type of resource would be most helpful.

The longer version:

You may remember, my original idea was to compile datasets documenting racism and the Black experience internationally. Then I met Nancy Kassam Adams (virtually), who was working on compiling tools, articles, and rubrics for building anti-racism into the process of working with data across the research lifecycle. Conversations with a larger group of members resulted in other suggestions:

• To document advice about combining and cleaning data around particular topics or to handle difficult analysis issues;
• To focus on datasets that are harder to find instead of compiling datasets that will turn up in a simple Google search. U.S. examples of harder-to-find datasets might include data on police violence against blacks since there is no national database of this; data on sexual violence against women of color; or sentencing data by race from courts. We of course would welcome suggestions of international datasets.

We want to compile resources that would be of the most use to our members, so we ask you to please respond to this message with what you would most like to see included, whether out of these options or a new suggestion. We believe open dialogue yields rich results so are inviting comments both on the IASSIST list by email and on the IASSIST blog.

To more quickly accomplish our goals, the IASSIST Admin Committee has approved formation of the Anti-Racism Resources Action Group. Current members have been added to a new action group email list. Please let me know if you would like to be added to the email list to participate (or be removed from it). Please believe that we all go into this with good intentions. If we need to correct course, we’re open to having that pointed out.

Thanks,

Michele Hayslett & Nancy Kassam-Adams

For the Anti-Racism Resources Action Group