Paula Ioanide is an Associate Professor in the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity at Ithaca College. Her university profile states that Ioanide “is passionate about social justice, equity, ending mass incarceration, and creating cultures of resistance that honor people’s dignity. She teaches courses of systemic racism, gender and sexual politics, mass incarceration, and the politics of whiteness in the United States.”

According to the website for her organization Rise to Equity, Ioanide studied under Professor Angela Davis in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. According to Fox News, “Davis is notorious for working with the Communist Party USA and the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and 70s. Her involvement in the armed takeover of a California courtroom resulted in four deaths and her placement on the FBI’s Most Wanted List.”

Ioanide is also a “Diversity and Inclusion Influencer” for Rise to Equity. Through this organization, Ioanide seeks to “make current DEI scholarship understandable and practical.” Ionaide also helps “people build equitable, diverse, and inclusive workplaces and organizations in two ways.”:

“I conduct general workshops focused on offering people ‘best practices’ related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. My extensive experience in facilitating workshops on these issues has taught me to approach this work with compassion, honesty, and commitment.”

“I offer personal consultation services to organizations and businesses that are interested in developing an DEI plan specific to their workplace needs and structures. I invite you to join me in co-creating a thrivable, equitable world for all.”

In her first book, titled “The Emotional Politics of Racism” (2015), Ioanide argued:

“Clearly, almost all the affective presumptions and embodied entitlements assumed by dominant Americans correlate with white racial identity and/or U.S. citizenship.”

Ioanide does not address what she means by “affective presumptions and embodied entitlements.”

She continues by discussing entitlements, which she claims white people are born with, along with other mental and behavioral patterns that they allegedly possess:

“Although we may presume that white people are born with such entitlements, it is important to understand that dominant white Americans’ embodied organization is also affirmed by projections, external gazes, and cultural assumptions expressed by other people, including people of color. In other words, it is not just that white American citizens give these entitlements to themselves, or that legal and institutional systems constantly reinforce them; the practices of other people award these entitlements to dominant Americans by virtue of not questioning, not disrupting, or not reformulating the cultural associations that coalesce into American-ness = citizenship = whiteness.”

Ioanide uses the term “dominant U.S. publics” in her book, which she defines in the following manner:

“[M]y phrase dominant U.S. publics tries to suggest that whiteness and American-ness manifest in embodied identities; but they are also ideological worldviews and value systems that people of color and minorities can (consciously or unconsciously) reinforce.”

Following “The Emotional Politics of Racism,” Ioanide co-edited and co-wrote a book titled, “Antiracism Inc. “Why the Way We Talk about Racial Justice Matters” (2019).

In the book’s first chapter, titled “Antiracism Incorporated,” co-authors Felice Blake and Ioanide and claim that Martin Luther King Jr. is a “moral authority.” This title is used when referring to Arizona Superintendent of Education Tom Horne’s allusion to King when he was arguing “for the state’s ban on ethnic studies programs.”

“Appropriating King’s moral authority, Horne declares himself the champion of antiracism. In a gross neutralization of King’s radical visions for racial justice, Horne mimics antiracist claims to reproduce racial oppression.”

Towards the end of the chapter, the authors explain the objective of the book:

“Antiracism Inc.: Why the Way We Talk about Racial Justice Matters grapples with the peculiar impasses produced when the empirical evidence of systemic racism’s persistence fails to make a diﬀerence due to the assumption that liberal democracies are already antiracist.

Moreover, they state that “Antiracism Inc…”

“[C]ontends with the very real problems people face in communities where their testimonies are refused, inverted, or incorporated toward agendas that further their oppression. [And the book] examines the ways intra-racial and intracommunal hurts and conﬂicts are negotiated given the dominant refusal to acknowledge systemic grievances.”

The authors also address what they deem are obstacles to “racial justice movements:”

“Currently, radical racial justice movements face the enormous challenge of ﬁghting the resurgence of overt forms of racism in the neo-fascist era of Trump, and the covert forms embedded in neoliberal institutional policies that endorse sanitized and de-radicalized forms of antiracism, diversity, multiculturalism, and colorblindness.”

They further claim that those who contest political correctness do so for racial purposes:

“Yet in practice, the opposition to political correctness in favor of free speech is a thinly veiled mechanism for protecting and reifying white racial hegemony.”

According to the authors, free speech is used as a guide to attack other racial groups:

“Hostility towards a politically correct term like “undocumented” for instance, is about preserving the right to discriminate against “illegal aliens” as a way to protect citizens and the nation. Resistance to the phrase “white privilege” and to critiques of traditional masculinity is about maintaining control over who represents the national collective.”

In an article for IC News, Ioanide “highlighted the flexibility of [Ithaca College’s Race, Power and Resistance]… major”:

“We conceptualized the race, power and resistance major with flexibility in mind. It was to allow students to not only explore our department, but also multiple departments to get those different interdisciplinary perspectives… The Ithaca Forever plan includes the goal that Ithaca College will become a model for diversity, equity and inclusion.”

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Racial Ideology