Dr. Richard D. Langford’s twenty plus year career focuses on advancing student engagement, improving higher education attainment and developing career readiness initiatives for students of color. Through his dissertation – “Black Ostracism from Intangible Places” – Dr. Langford developed the Racial Courtesy Framework. In addition to serving as a Student Success Coach in Tucson Unified School District’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Department, Dr. Langford is the founder and CEO of Thrive Generations, Inc.
Racial Courtesy: The Antidote for Ostracism in Educational Spaces
Dr. Richard Langford’s dissertation – Black Ostracism from Intangible Spaces (May 2023) – interrogated how policy shapes educational spaces for Black students. As he worked to disrupt traditional and conventional policy analyses and increase imperative understandings of how Black ostracism is discursively constructed in public school’s student code of conduct policies, Dr. Lanford uncovered a strategy to reduce racial disparities in educational spaces. The theory of racial courtesy (RC) is a framework that seeks to visibilize injurious policy and practices perpetrated on marginalized communities, educate those in authority on the benefits, beauty, and joy of multi-culturalism and empower marginalized people to amplify their voices without fear of retribution and ostracization. Through a discussion of Transformative Justice, Abolitionist Teaching and Cultural Conditioning, Dr. Langford will provide a framework for ensuring the cultural capital of all participants in the educational arena is valued and dual systems are eliminated from educational spaces, tangible and intangible.