What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions

Apr 14, 2025

Susan Sturm, a leader in law and social responsibility at Columbia, shares her insights on anti-racist approaches in institutions. She discusses the backlash leaders face when introducing these changes and identifies three key paradoxes in anti-racism work. Sturm emphasizes multiracial collaboration and the need for inclusive discussions on systemic racism. She highlights 'microspaces of justice' as essential drivers of local change with global impact, and advocates for transformative education approaches to empower marginalized communities. Her pragmatic solutions aim to bridge divides and reimagine institutions.

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ANECDOTE

Transformative Collaboration with Lonnie

Susan Sturm's collaboration with Lonnie Guineer transformed her ability to advance multiracial collaborations authentically.
Lonnie helped Susan recognize the limits of her perspective and learn to create inclusive environments.

INSIGHT

Contradictions Built Into Institutions

Contradictions around race are built into law, institutions, and social systems.
These contradictions sustain exclusion while claiming to uphold justice, requiring us to navigate them rather than deny them.

ADVICE

Create Microspaces of Justice

Build 'microspaces of justice' where inclusive values and practices are nurtured on a manageable scale.
Connect these microspaces to larger networks for sustained, systemic transformation.

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Leaders who introduce anti-racist approaches to their organizations often face backlash. In What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions (Princeton UP, 2025), 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. Professor 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, she 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. The book includes thoughtful and critical responses from Goodwin Liu, Freeman Hrabowski, and Anurima Bhargava.

Our guest is: Professor Susan Sturm, who is the George M. Jaffin Professor of Law and Social Responsibility and the Founding Director of the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School. She is the coauthor with Lani Guinier, of Who's Qualified? A New Democracy Forum on the Future of Affirmative Action.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a developmental editor for scholars, and is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.

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