In conceptualizing strategic collaboration for antiracist, queer and feminist futures, adrienne maree brown addresses labor and harm that, by extension, applies to the work of antiracist film and media pedagogues.[2] The work of antiracist pedagogues is hard, exhausting, and at times, enraging. For those minoritized by their institutions—colleagues of color who are also women, queer and gender variant—making change includes labor as educators and employees. These antiracist pedagogues can experience violent pushback from anonymized actors of white supremacy and patriarchy, emboldened by structures of opacity in the academic institution. In “Remote Learning and the Politics of Refusal” Dutt-Ballerstadt, Duncan and Lo use the term “cultural taxation” to describe physical and psychological injury for women of color faculty “caused by our obligations and expectations to show good citizenship by serving the diversity missions of our institution.”[3] Critically and urgently, minoritized antiracist educators need co-conspirators acting to make strategic and structural change.

Co-conspiracy differs from allyship. The “Racial Equity Tools Glossary” defines allyship as knowledge and recognition of privilege while co-conspirators, according to Figueroa and Kast “take action regardless of the consequences,” and recognize they face less harm than others (emphasis mine.)[4] Co-conspirators commit to strategically and politically supporting minoritized and marginalized educators leading change. Co-conspirators make themselves vulnerable, find money in the institution, and give up power inherited through whiteness and cis gender masculinity. This conscientious action happens daily.

I am white and was mentored into the professorate by a senior professor, renowned filmmaker and scholar, and Black feminist who course corrected me readily and generously at the beginning of my career. She indicated the differences in my own actions between those that were ineffectively ally-like, versus those that would more effectively become conspiratorial. As my antiracist pedagogy developed over these twenty years through my lived experience as a queer, first gen college kid, who is non binary trans, and disabled, I’ve been reprimanded and ridiculed by chairs and students alike. From my first job interview, when the chair asked, “So, you’re a feminist. How will you support your male students?” to a recent student evaluation indicating I’m “forcibly guilting” white students, messages of disapproval remain clear. Yet, I understand the privileges afforded white professors; who receive space to respond and defend these infrequent allegations. For faculty of color, these criticisms are ubiquitous and repetitive. As a program director for seven years, I read thousands of student evaluations of teaching, witnessing—and documenting—irrefutable bias against educators of color. Student comments toward faculty of color, even when attempting to be ‘positive,’ occupy a place of knowledge over said faculty member: about their dress, the faculty’s scholarly expertise, the faculty’s artistic and professional experience, and very often, the faculty member’s accessibility and availability (which is presumed.) Similarly, the presumed accessibility and availability of faculty of color by white colleagues appears in documented evaluations and through more gossipy mechanisms, doing harm.

From this place, I suggest institutional and department strategies to accompany antiracist pedagogy. Idealistically, everyone genuinely participates in antiracist pedagogical efforts. But realistically, in this white supremacist, homophobic, misogynist, and transphobic society, the project remains unequal. As such, these are calls to action for co-conspirators and strategies for consideration by antiracist non-white educators, minoritized by their institutions, rightfully asking who does antiracist pedagogy benefit?

Antiracist Pedagogy Requires Collaboration

Of the many tools of the white supremacist hetero-patriarchy, siloing has been perfected in academia. Reward comes to professors who evidence expertise in niche areas. But in filmmaking as practice, we seek to work in expansive collaboration. If we are to change white supremacist dominance in film and media education, siloing within academic departments must succumb to connection, humility, information sharing, and resource access. Further, centering the philosophies, artistry, and knowledge of scholars and makers of color is a requirement of antiracist restructuring.[5] All the while, white professors must recognize what they do not know or have been unwilling to learn because of assigned and embodied privilege that is both cultural and disciplinary. Action involves devising mechanisms for resource-sharing which include compensation, recognition of the labor involved, promotions, job security and advancement.

Antiracist Pedagogy Has a Budget

Value in the institution is expressed through rank and dollars. Co-conspirators budget for the expert labor of those informing antiracist film pedagogy. The educators making change in their classrooms and curricula command multiple bodies of research often including queer, trans, and disability film studies, feminist film scholarship, anti-colonialist and ethnic studies, and filmmaking of the Global South, alongside the white-boy canon.

Another cost of antiracist pedagogy includes budgeting for lower enrollments, building more courses, and creating more course sections. When I joined George Mason as program director, our senior and junior level directing classes had 25-30 students per class. Student films were ripe with imagery of guns and problematic depictions of intimate partner violence. Women lacked dialogue while Black and Asian characters acted solely in fulfillment of white protagonists’ goals. Faculty recognized these issues and struggled to address them largely because of workload. Their work was further challenged by an interdisciplinary curriculum wherein students took a majority of their lower-level classes in other departments. While our developing antiracist pedagogy expanded course readings and viewings, the greatest shifts in problematic representations specifically resulted from financial and curricular investments in the program itself. We reduced production course sizes and designed more required courses, giving space for Film instructors to guide student development over time. Within just two years, we saw a drastic turnaround in problematic representations. More classes that served a broader and more diverse group of students, meant higher overall enrollments, thus increasing our budget. We hired more staff and faculty who reflected the diversity of our student body and enrolled more diverse students now applying for admission. As faculty had more time for each student in their classrooms, these student filmmakers felt more supported. Students began exploring family stories, their ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender, disability, and frankly, their survival. This storytelling has become a hallmark and source of pride for our program.[6]

Antiracist Pedagogy Takes Time

As a marathon, and not a sprint, antiracist pedagogy is labor requiring time for long-game strategy involving collaborating, connecting, revising, recruiting, retaining, mentoring, and convincing. Even those doing the reading anew need time to apply this information. Stipends alone don’t create time. Course releases, sabbatical leaves, additional tenure lines, and summer pay do.

As film departments increasingly shift to models of antiracist pedagogy, minoritized students can feel the impact. Classroom discussions and disingenuous efforts from some educators can harm their learning. This increases expectations upon women of color educators particularly from students needing advocacy and emotional support. Educators shouldering this additional burden must make their needs clear in safe space to co-conspirators who will act. Actions include increased compensation for service, lowering teaching loads, providing more institutional resources for student advocacy and support, higher valuation of service for advancement, and clear documentation of service in all forms of formal evaluations. Further, co-conspirators and students must reevaluate whom they assume will be available for these concerns.[7]

For the whole of academia, not just film and media studies alone, the time taken by service demands on women and gender variant people of color requires immediate change. In 2017, the Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group at University of Oregon revealed where “cultural taxation and ‘invisible work’ of academia” leads to different reward structures for masculinized work (scholarship) vs. femininized work (service and teaching) restricting women of color, working class, and queer faculty from accessing senior levels in academia.[8] In 2016, following the Ferguson uprising against white supremacist police brutality, Patricia A. Matthew detailed the endless layers of service and expectation placed on Black women by administrators, colleagues and students[9] which continues with desperately low levels of tenure for Black women in the PWI professorate overall.[10] In Sejal Shah’s 2019 essay “Even If You Can’t See It: Invisible Disability and Neurodiversity” she unpacks the deleterious impact of the requirements placed upon her for committee service, university events, and more as the “diversity member.”[11] I worked across campus from Professor Shah when she was the sole faculty of color in her department. Her experience informs my understanding of the harm in DEI efforts. Without real change, faculty who diversify their departments as the ‘only one’ have the right to be suspicious of these efforts, protect their time, mental health, and career path.

Antiracist Pedagogy Needs an Archive

When building EDIT Media—a community fostering equality and diversity in film and media education—we co-founders did much resource sharing.[12] Our work together illuminated how most media collections in our home institutions were lacking. When we sought new resources, media librarians pointed to their dwindling budgets. They indicated how the pivot to curated online film catalogs has hurt media libraries and forced smaller institutions to choose catalog streaming licenses over expanding permanent collections. With rising prices in streaming catalogs (collections that change at the whim of catalog curators and business development staff) antiracist pedagogy and labor in the archive is challenged. Some collections dominating institutional media archives carry clear white supremacist bias. For example, in 2020 Criterion Collection was publicly criticized for its curatorial failings, detailing how of 1,034 titles in its DVD catalog, a mere four were by Black American directors. [13] Criterion’s new online project seeks to change this balance for streaming purposes, but for how long will these special initiative streaming titles be made available?[14]

Building a collection through hard copies and digital files, digitizing existing films in the catalog, and streaming all films through a library server and interface maintains antiracist educator knowledge. Co-conspirator librarians and administrators must rebuild and sustain collections, in collaboration with instructors and student scholars.

Antiracist Pedagogy Requires Protection

Co-conspirators in administration understand and combat retribution and retaliation in academia. Retaliatory actions pervade academia in anonymized promotion and tenure processes, biased student evaluations of teaching, deferred schedules for implementation of change, lower pay, contingent and adjunct labor, higher service expectations, devaluation of antiracist pedagogical work, rampant gossip, and minimal administrative, financial, and collaborative support. As such, co-conspirator chairs act in preparation. Some examples might include not pairing a junior or contingent educator with senior colleagues whose dusty syllabi do harm. Chairs, deans and provosts themselves convey “revise and resubmit” messages to unwilling faculty. Administrators protect junior colleagues expertly tasked with reimaging grandfathered courses. More urgently for our moment, administrators and University leaders confront white supremacist legislators calling to eliminate critical race theory (i.e. teaching about structural and historic racism and colonialism in the United States) from the classroom.

Co-conspirators understand the bias in student evaluations of teaching. This is well-researched and many compelling studies are detailed by Chavez and Mitchell.[15] As I shared earlier, when we teach material that expresses marginalized perspectives and expressions, some learners will see the object of study as a personal affront. Studying one’s own privilege can feel personal and uncomfortable. Discomfort isn’t often quantitatively positive and these numbers need not have a role in evaluating the hiring and firing of scholars and educators who seek change. Co-conspirators who are peers to minoritized educators understand that their own teaching scores are artificially inflated by privilege. Co-conspirators who are chairs or similar document the bias in student evaluations of teaching without citing harmful words verbatim. My hope is this drumbeat of explication will negate the power of these biased tools and eventually eliminate them.

For educators doing antiracist educational work, threats emerge outside of the institution as well, requiring protection. In an AAUP report, 40% of LGBTQ+ faculty profiled in university external communication about their diversity and inclusion efforts received hate mail and threats.[16] I don’t wish to exacerbate a culture of fear and intimidation, but we must face the ongoing reality of white supremacist, homophobic and transphobic attacks and plan for them strategically and realistically.

Even as a partial list, I realize these strategies with a price tag will be squelched by many. Yet, waiting to make change is a tool of white supremacy. Those stalling progress at any institution likely benefit from stasis. There are educators seasoned in antiracist pedagogy who need a team of co-conspirators. And to those with cis-hetero and white privilege desiring change but thinking they lack institutional power, reconsider this now. Accomplices must be more than allies, following the lead of minoritized faculty, and leveraging privilege and power consistently. Co-conspirator colleagues must work in collaboration, with clarity, transparency, deference, and respect to those with more knowledge.

G. (Giovanna) Chesler is a filmmaker and professor of Film and Video Studies at George Mason University where they served as program director from 2013–2020. G directs, writes, and produces documentary and fiction films exploring gender, sexuality and racial justice. They have published essays on sound, pedagogy, documentary, and queering health, and write capsule film reviews at https://www.instagram.com/g6_pix/:: http://www.g6pictures.com

1. brown, adrienne marie, “You Have My Permission,” August 17, 2015, https://adriennemareebrown.net/2015/08/17/youhavepermission/. ↑

2. brown, adrienne marie, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017). ↑

3. Dutt-Ballerstadt, Reshmi, Patti Duncan and Marie Lo, “Remote Learning and the Politics of Refusal,” Inside Higher Ed, October 1, 2021, https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2021/10/01/reimagining-spatial-organization-institutional-power-opinion. ↑

4. Racial Equity Tools Glossary, accessed November 1, 2021, https://www.racialequitytools.org/glossary credit the source of their work as Project Change’s “The Power of Words.” Originally produced for Project Change Lessons Learned II while noting RacialEquityTools.org made some modification; Figueroa, Dijanna and DJ Kast, “Are You an Ally or a Co-conspirator in the Fight for Facial Equity,” National Marine Educators Association, January 6, 2021, https://www.marine-ed.org/news/dei-dispatch-column-are-you-an-ally-or-a-co-conspirator ↑

5. Lorde, Audre, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (Comments at the “The personal and the political panel,” Second Sex Conference, New York, September 29, 1979), in Sister Outsider (110–113). Sister Visions Press. (Original work published 1979) 1984. ↑

6. The Film and Video Studies Program at George Mason University’s mission, co-authored by faculty and staff, guides our work: “a community of cinematic storytellers that fosters creativity, analysis, and diverse perspectives, professional practice and socially conscious filmmaking.” https://film.gmu.edu ↑

7. Dutt-Ballerstadt, Reshmi, Patti Duncan and Marie Lo, “Remote Learning and the Politics of Refusal,” Inside Higher Ed, October 1, 2021, https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2021/10/01/reimagining-spatial-organization-institutional-power-opinion. ↑

8. Social Sciences Feminist Network Research Interest Group, “The Burden of Invisible Work in Academia: Social Inequalities and Time Use in Five University Departments,” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 39 (2017) 228–245, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/90007882. ↑

9. Matthew, Patricia A, “What is Faculty Diversity Worth to a University?” The Atlantic., November 24, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/11/what-is-faculty-diversity-worth-to-a-university/508334/ . ↑

10. Williams June, Audrey and Brian O’Leary, “How Many Black Women Have Tenure on Your Campus? Search Here,” May 27, 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-many-black-women-have-tenure-on-your-campus-search-here ↑

11. Shah, Sejal, “Even If You Can’t See It: Invisible Disability and Neurodiversity,” Kenyon Review, Jan/Feb 2019, https://kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2019-janfeb/selections/sejal-shah-656342/# . ↑

12. http://www.editmedia.org/ ↑

13. Buchanan, Kyle and Reggie Ugwu, “How the Criterion Collection Crops Out African-American Directors,” The New York Times, August 20, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/20/movies/criterion-collection-african-americans.html ↑

14. Brody, Richard, “What to Stream, Urgently: “Compensation,” a Modern Classic Rescued.” The New Yorker, June 4, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/what-to-stream-urgently-compensation-a-modern-classic-rescued . ↑

15. Chávez, Kerry, and Kristina M.W. Mitchell, “Exploring Bias in Student Evaluations: Gender, Race, and Ethnicity.” PS: Political Science & Politics 53, no. 2 (2020): 270–74. doi:10.1017/S1049096519001744. ↑

16. Tiede, Hans-Joerg, Samantha McCarthy, Isaac Kamola, and Alyson K. Spurgas, “Data Snapshot: Whom Does Campus Reform Target and What Are the Effects?” Academe. Spring 2021. https://www.aaup.org/article/data-snapshot-whom-does-campus-reform-target-and-what-are-effects#.YXrMhi-cboP. ↑