CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new book by a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign design professor is a guide to talking about racism, identifying how it is perpetuated through racialized design and developing anti-racist approaches to counter it.
Lisa Mercer, a professor of graphic design and design for responsible innovation, wrote “Racism Untaught: Revealing and Unlearning Racialized Design” with co-author Terresa Moses, a University of Minnesota graphic design professor and the creative director of Blackbird Revolt, a social justice-based design studio.
Mercer and Moses developed their project Racism Untaught in 2018 as a way for participants to have meaningful conversations about race, diversity and inclusion with a shared language. Racism Untaught uses the design research process and seeks to infuse design practices with anti-oppressive interventions.
The project and book are not just for those who consider themselves designers though. Mercer said the book is aimed at a broad audience of anyone who wants to do anti-racist work.
“We see everyone as a designer,” she said.
Lisa Mercer, right, and her co-author Terresa Moses with items from their Racism Untaught toolkit.
They have used Racism Untaught in their classrooms and in workshops in academic, industry and community settings, and they developed a toolkit for organizations wanting to use the Racism Untaught process. Their industry partners include Target, Spotify and PayPal, and their academic partners include the University of Illinois, the University of Tennessee and Louisiana State University.
“Everything we learned from the workshops is what made the book possible. We had so much rich feedback and interactions with participants,” Mercer said.
The book guides users through the process, with chapters that examine the research behind it, how design can affect historically oppressed communities, how social identities can affect individuals, language that identifies aspects of racialized design, anti-oppressive interventions to the status quo, and how to critically assess and reimagine racialized design. Mercer and Moses also created a podcast that is a companion to the book.
When Mercer and Moses are working with groups, the participants are given prompts that reflect a concern expressed by their organization, and they use the Racism Untaught framework to analyze it. Each book chapter ends with a case study drawn from their work with industry, academia and community.
Mercer said that one of the areas of most concern to people from all kinds of industries is the hiring process – the recruitment of applicants, interviewing and the processes of hiring and retention.
“It’s not surprising. We often hear people say, ‘We’re trying to diversify, but we don’t know where to find people of color.’ If they’re reaching into the same spaces to find applicants, their scope is too narrow,” Mercer said.
She and Moses have conducted workshops with social workers, realtors and others from across disciplines and areas of practice.
“We were able to provide a space for participants to think outside the box and focus on specific forms of racialized design, whether it’s an artifact, system or experience,” Mercer said. “It isn’t us providing participants with answers. It’s asking questions that will allow them to think critically about how to make changes in their environments.”
One chapter of the book focuses on shared language, a topic that Mercer didn’t expect to become as important as it did during the workshops. She said that using terms that describe various racialized experiences gives people a shared language to have conversations about race and racism.
“We would have participants who could apply a word to a lived experience that they had, and they gained so much agency from that. It’s one of my favorite things in the whole process, to help people articulate to others a racialized experience,” Mercer said.
Other participants learned about situations they didn’t know were problematic. She gave the example of digital blackface, when a person uses an emoji or meme with a different skin tone than the user or uses a social media filter to make their skin appear darker.
In addition to racism, the book addresses ableism, sexism and capitalism.
The Racism Untaught process is designed to be used in a collaborative setting, Mercer said. “Racism will not be broken down in isolation. It requires that we work together.”
Editor’s note: To contact Lisa Mercer, email lemercer@illinois.edu.
