Chapter 39: Troubling the Familiar: The Institutionalized Racism Inquiry Project

The Institutional Racism Inquiry Project attempts to trouble teacher candidates’ familiarity with institutional racism by engaging in community mapping activities and lesson plan development.

The Institutional Racism Inquiry Project (IRIP) is grounded in the understanding that racism is embedded in the fabric of society. If social studies education is truly about preparing students for a democracy, then rooting out the inequities created by structural racism ought to be a primary objective. Moreover, because the omnipresence of Whiteness provides an alibi of detectability, exposing the prevalence of structural racism should be a primary objective for social studies teacher education programs.

The Institutional Racism Inquiry Project is a semester-long project that is completed in an urban middle or high school. The IRIP is intended to help candidates:

• Recognize the ways in which racism is institutionalized within the societal structures of a local community and how these permutations of racism are interconnected.

• Analyze and explain how institutionalized racism is maintained and reproduced.

• Create lesson plans that account for and interrogate the inequities created by institutional racism.