As a design team, we’ve been mourning the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Riah Milton, Dominique Fells, Rayshard Brooks, and so many other Black people whose lives have been cut short by racism and police brutality. We’ve been redoubling our efforts to learn about the history of systemic racism in America and evaluating what role we can play in fighting for equity for Black people and contributing to long-term systemic change.
As designers working to support and supplement the educational system, we must first examine the racism embedded within that system — racism that disadvantages Black students from the moment they enter school and funnels many Black students into the school-to-prison pipeline, ultimately locking them out of access to jobs, public services, and even the right to vote.
In the US, as early as preschool, Black students are more likely to be suspended than white students — they make up only 18% of preschoolers but represent almost 50% of all preschool suspensions. It only gets worse from there. Black K-12 students are suspended and expelled three times more often than white students. And after college, Black graduates are twice as likely to be unemployed as white graduates.
There are many factors behind these troubling statistics. Black children, whose behaviors are often criminalized by teachers who perceive them as being older, are set up to fail. Curricula, educational standards, testing, teacher training, and teacher evaluations were all designed predominately by and for white people and marginalize Black achievement. The uncomfortable truth is that our educational system is inequitable, biased, and upholds racism. The system is designed for racial disparity.
We must start the hard work to redesign racist systems now. Design plays a key role in shaping these systems and the way people understand them; doing nothing and remaining silent is, therefore, complicity. As designers we hold an enormous responsibility in the movement to uproot systemic racism.
Here are the actions we’re committing to now in order to actively practice and promote anti-racism on our team and through our brand and product:
- We will continue to deepen our understanding of systemic racism and its impact on education. We’ve started a calendar of events and a growing reading list and will block out professional development time and resources to study anti-racism.
- We will reassess our hiring processes and culture to identify opportunities to make them more inclusive and improve representation of BIPOC on our team. Given our mission to provide educational resources to underserved communities — so many of whom consist of BIPOC — it’s especially important that our team reflect the diversity of the people we serve. We will seek DEI training for our hiring managers and interviewers, set DEI targets to measure ourselves against, and audit our job descriptions, candidate sourcing, application reviews, and interview practices.
- We will reassess our design principles to ensure we are explicitly approaching design and product decision making with an anti-racist mindset.
- We will examine our design process to ensure it elevates the voices of the BIPOC we aim to serve. To start, we will create a product advisory team of teachers that includes a significant number of BIPOC voices in order to keep us aligned to the needs and priorities of BIPOC students and teachers.
We’ll continue to learn, iterate, and share as we push this work forward.
— The Khan Academy design team
Our commitment to cultivate anti-racism in our team and work was originally published in Khan Academy Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
