Hi Raunak,

I don't know if cultural awareness is a stand alone solution to racism, but it certainly helps. Have a look at Ted Cantle's work on Community Cohesion. I'm using his work for the basis of the 'Grey Space' project I'm leading on. All material on the project is available on my Grey Space page. I also suggest contacting Amanda Ptolemy, who is also on Research Gate.

Cheers,

Martin

For contact hypothesis, check out meta analysis by Petigrew and Tropp (2006).  

I think that 1) cultural awareness is created at very young age. It has to do how people view others and how they appreciate diversity. Such in later life is confirmed through how people perceive their environment. 2) I doubt that racism is mainly an aspect caused by the lack of cultural awareness. Often in history people who were threatened to loose their status / privileges / jobs were particularly unable to accept others coming to their societies. Possible job losses, or declining wages or at least the perception that e.g. refugees causing this, the angst that social security schemes will be eroded and no longer able to provide to people of the country what they were used to get, however, caused racism also spread among better protected middle classes.

Still I feel that cultural awareness programs can help especially to reduce peer pressures, as often group dynamics also play important roles in racism and many follow the strange ideas of leaders as they feel they otherwise isolate them from groups they want to be part. Cultural awareness would try to build confidence for e.g. young people to follow the ideas they actually have; I feel that far less people are really racist than those who behave racist. Some literature

Hill, M. E., & Augoustinos, M. (2001). Stereotype change and prejudice reduction: short‐and long‐term evaluation of a cross–cultural awareness programme. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 11(4), 243-262.

Beagan, B. L. (2003). Teaching social and cultural awareness to medical students:“It's all very nice to talk about it in theory, but ultimately it makes no difference”. Academic Medicine, 78(6), 605-614.

White, A. A., Logghe, H. J., Goodenough, D. A., Barnes, L. L., Hallward, A., Allen, I. M., ... & Llerena-Quinn, R. (2017). Self-Awareness and Cultural Identity as an Effort to Reduce Bias in Medicine. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, 1-16.

Kernahan, C., & Chick, N. L. (2017). How Do You Listen to Your Students to Help Them Learn about Race and Racism?. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2017(151), 17-30.

Hudson, D. J. (2017). On “diversity” as anti-racism in library and information studies: A critique. Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, (1).

Thanks all of y'all

Hi Raunak

Cultural awareness can only minimize structural violence or racism but can not solve it. Yes awareness is power and knowledge is everything, but there are structural factors or basis for such violence or racism. Therefore the solution will lie in changing or modifying the structural foundations of the violence or racism and not necessarily through cultural awareness.