The Systemic Racism Project, which aims to make research on systemic racism publicly-accessible, recently announced its collaboration with the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.
The project is directed by Tricia Rose MA’87 PhD’93 P’14, a professor of Africana studies and associate dean of the faculty for special initiatives. Since beginning a decade ago, researchers have delved into questions surrounding the impacts of systemic racism and how it functions in society today.
“We all face similar kinds of problems, but some people face additional, more compounded, extreme versions of those problems because they are Black,” Rose said.
The most recent productions stemming from the project are the 2024 publication of Rose’s book, “Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives―and How We Break Free” and the upcoming release of an interactive website.
These projects both focus on “translating and disseminating scholarly research” to “meaningfully contribute to the public understanding of those ideas,” Rose explained.
Her book incorporates the project’s research and breaks down what it means for something to be “systemic.” The effects of systemic racism, Rose said, are “more compounded than any single policy or practice.”
But over the past few months, Rose has been leading the integration of the project into the John Nicholas Brown Center. The project aligned with the goals of the Center to “shine a light” on University research and make academic findings more accessible to the general public, said Kevin McLaughlin, the director of the Center. The Center’s projects include books, articles, lecture series, social media and digital publications.
The Systemic Racism Project is “the kind of public engagement project that we were trying to support more broadly here,” he said. The project is now housed in the center’s laboratory space on Benefit Street.
The project is also planning on launching a new interactive website this spring, Rose said. The platform will follow a fictional African American family’s experience in a town, one simulated on observed characteristics from cities across the nation. These experiences range from segregation to the absence of proper healthcare to redlining — the historical practice of housing discrimination along racial lines.
The website is a more accessible way of introducing the public to the concept of systemic racism, Rose explained. It’s “a way of walking through and showing the connections we share with one another, but also showing the invisible structures and systems that put African Americans in a much more difficult position,” Rose said.
Several cohorts of undergraduate students helped contribute to the research behind the website, Rose’s book and the Systemic Racism Project as a whole. These students developed databases, compiled background data and “synthesized a tremendous amount of research,” Rose said.
Charlotte Haq ’24, a former student on the research team, emphasized the importance of finding real-life examples that supported the project’s theoretical concepts.
“Although the work itself varied, the vast majority of my work revolved around collecting as much information as possible on these people and their lives, in order to situate these real and familiar narratives within the data and theory of systemic racism,” Haq wrote in an email to The Herald.
Haq joined the project her sophomore year after taking a course with Rose during her first semester at Brown. She said she was inspired to join the project because of the unique way Rose approached the topic of systemic racism.
According to Rose, roughly 15 to 20 undergraduate students assisted with her research over the course of the past decade, which helped expand the project’s reach.
“Everywhere I look — elementary schools, banks, hospitals, suburban towns, cars on a highway — I see parts of this system we worked to dissect,” Haq wrote. “While it is true that systemic racism is currently horrifyingly pervasive in our society, I know that this project has empowered me and so many others to fight all the more relentlessly against this system.”
