May 14, 2025
Matt Crawford speaks with Columbia Law Professor Susan Sturm
about her book, What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our
Institutions. Even as anti-racism practices seemed to be gaining
momentum, the nation shows signs of falling back into long-standing
patterns of racial injustice and inequality. Leaders who introduce
anti-racist approaches to their organizations often face backlash
from white colleagues and skepticism from colleagues of color,
leading to paralysis. In What
Might Be, Susan Sturm explores how to navigate the
contradictions built into our racialized history, relationships,
and institutions. She offers strategies and stories for confronting
racism within predominantly white institutions, describing how
change agents can move beyond talk to build the architecture of
full participation.
Sturm argues that although we cannot avoid the contradictions built
into efforts to confront racism, we can make them into engines of
cross-racial reflection, bridge building, and institutional
reimagination, rather than falling into a Groundhog Day–like trap of repeated
failures. Drawing on her decades of experience researching and
working with institutions to help them become more equitable and
inclusive, Sturm identifies three persistent paradoxes inherent in
anti-racism work. These are the paradox of racialized power,
whereby anti-racism requires white people to lean into and yet step
back from exercising power; the paradox of racial salience, which
means that effective efforts must explicitly name and address race
while also framing their goals in universal terms other than race;
and the paradox of racialized institutions, which must drive
anti-racism work while simultaneously being the target of it. Sturm
shows how people and institutions can cultivate the capacity to
straddle these contradictions, enabling those in different racial
positions to discover their linked fate and become the catalysts
for long-term change.