Mission & Vision
The central mission of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity is to contribute meaningfully to the field of research and scholarship on race, ethnicity and social justice, to assist in reframing the way that we talk about, think about and act on race and ethnicity, and to deepen the understanding of the causes and consequences of and solutions to racial and ethnic hierarchy and disparity so that we can envision and realize a society that is fair and just for all people, where opportunity is not limited by race, ethnicity, gender, or class, where democratic ideals inform social policy, and where all people recognize and embrace the universal responsibility that each person has for the welfare of every other person. From day to day we are concerned about the internal workings of the Institute, but the real measure of our success must be the impact of our work in bringing about this vision of a true democratic society. For this reason, all of our research and scholarship is intended to have an implicit or explicit impact on policies in the real world. By creating a research-based structural lens to look at racism, we are shifting not only the way that racism is conceptualized, but also the way we conceive of strategies to counteract its impact. In shifting the way we talk about, think about and act on race, we hope to give new meaning to the proposition that human destinies are intertwined.
