Following the 2019 Truth and Transformation conference, the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability (IARA) Project's Erica Licht sat down with core trainers Addys Castillo and Justin Freitas from the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB) for a closer look at their work. The conversation includes an overview of their approach to antiracist change grounded in community organizing, as well as personal commitments to creating a shared analysis of structural and systemic racism in their communities.
Following the 2019 Truth and Transformation conference, the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability (IARA) Project's Erica Licht sat down with core trainers Addys Castillo and Justin Freitas from the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB) for a closer look at their work. The conversation includes an overview of their approach to antiracist change grounded in community organizing, as well as personal commitments to creating a shared analysis of structural and systemic racism in their communities.
About IARA
The Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project, housed at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School, was formed in 2018 with the goal to use research and policy to promote antiracism as a core value and institutional norm.
While diversity and inclusion work is an important step in this process, antiracism work encompasses demographic change at every level of the institution in conjunction with the adoption of antiracist institutional norms, values, and practices. For profound transformation of institutions, diversity and inclusion work is not sufficient when addressing structural processes that are rooted in traditions of racial exclusion and privilege and/or which discriminate based on group disparities.
Implicit bias training, for example, helps uncover the problem of racial prejudice and racist stereotypes among individuals but it does not answer the question of how to change institutions whose policies and practices are based on racist ideas. Individual awareness of bias is one thing; institutional transformation based on that training is something else.
About the Ash Center
The Ash Center is a research center and think tank at Harvard Kennedy School focused on democracy, government innovation, and Asia public policy. AshCast, the Center's podcast series, is a collection of conversations, including events and Q&As with experts, from around the Center on pressing issues, forward-looking solutions, and more.
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