Racial Justice Certificate

Racial Justice Certificate

Central to Advocating for Equality.

Central Connecticut State University’s interdisciplinary Certificate in Racial Justice teaches students to see racism as a system. The certificate fosters reflection on how race shapes what persons know, notice, and miss about race, including in their own lives. Our courses examine how racism moves through institutions like housing, schools, policing, and work, and how it combines with class, gender, and other systems of power to produce distinct harms. Students also weigh competing visions of racial justice against real cases and ask what each remedy would change. This foundation empowers students to contribute to building racial justice in their own communities and workplaces. 

Program Features

  • Starts every January and August
  • 15-credit program
  • Offers flexible scheduling to accommodate working professionals
  • Professionals in fields such as education, nursing, social work, business and management, political reform, and criminal justice learn to holistically serve various cultural groups with an understanding and appreciation of the social, political, and racial contexts of their lives
  • Taught from multiple perspectives by faculty from such fields as Criminal Justice, Philosophy, Literary Studies, and Anthropology
  • Features the new interdisciplinary course, RJ200: Introduction to Racial Justice, which draws students from a variety of backgrounds and fields

Learning Outcomes

  1. Articulate one’s own racial identity and positionality and its impact on one’s perspective and experiences.
  2. Analyze racism as a system of privilege and oppression that intersects with other systems of power and oppression.
  3. Demonstrate how activism and cultural resources have and can be used to create social change and racial justice. 

As an activist and community organizer, Central’s Racial Justice program has equipped me with crucial background knowledge to understand complex systems of oppression and to challenge systemic racism. I learned the truths of American history that my K-12 schooling didn’t teach me, and I learned how to trace those deep roots of oppression to the injustices around me today. More importantly, the classes I took taught me how to challenge both systems of privilege and oppression with a definitively anti-racist framework. I would recommend any student enroll in the racial justice program if you want to learn why the world around you works the way it does, and what you can do about it.

Lily Mercado
Student, Class of 2024

Did You Know?

The Certificate in Racial Justice Program collaborates with such campus groups as MOSAIC, The African American Studies Program, and the Africana Center. Recent collaborative events include hosting Dr. Eddie Glaude, author of Begin Again, in 2022, and Dr. Scott Gac, author of Born in Blood, in 2024.