A guide to building and sustaining Antiracist Learning-Action Communities in academia

Institutional racism in academia is longstanding and deeply embedded into policies and practices surrounding grading, hiring, mentorship, retention, and more. Academics who value racial equity can challenge such institutional racism by leveraging our collective power. Moreover, political threats to institution-sanctioned equity initiatives underscore a need for our collective antiracist practices to include grassroots actions that operate beyond and in parallel to academic bureaucracies. While many of us hold values that align with grassroots antiracist change, implementable frameworks for building and sustaining grassroots antiracist collectives in academia are scarce. This article introduces the Antiracist Learning-Action Community framework developed by graduate students, research assistants, postdoctoral fellows, and professors at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Using our framework and experiences as a blueprint, we detail how academics who value racial equity can create their own Antiracist Learning-Action Communities as one way to implement sustainable, grassroots antiracist actions.