Preventing Racial Injuries, Promoting Racial Justice

Abstract Although most people publicly abhor individual, interpersonal, and institutional forms of racism, racial oppression persists in the United States. This oppression manifests itself in a host of racial inequalities. In this chapter, we define racism and its corollary White privilege and we outline their contemporary expressions. We present the disrupting racism ecological model to describe the multiple and interlocking systems that create and perpetuate racial oppression. We discuss tertiary and social justice prevention-interventions on college campuses that are designed to increase students’ critical consciousness and antiracism action. Next, we review the empirical literature on the influence of diversity courses in general, dialogue courses more specifically, and particular pedagogical practices on developing students’ critical consciousness. Additionally, we review the research supporting the effects of cocurricular diversity experiences such as interracial friendships. We conclude with a discussion of the limitations of the extant research and provide future directions for prevention-intervention researchers.