Racism Doesn't Survive By Accident

Systems don’t change because we want them to. They change when we’re willing to admit they were built to produce the results we’re living with, then do the hard work of redesign. That’s the core of our conversation with Dr. Kathy Hogarth, Associate Vice President of Global Strategy at Wilfrid Laurier University, and a scholar-practitioner whose journey spans Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Canada.We talk candidly about the immigrant experience of credential recognition in Canada and what it means to be told your education “doesn’t count,” even when you’ve done the work and earned the degrees. From there, we dig into community psychology and why a macro lens matters: policies, institutions, and power shape who gets access, who gets believed, and who gets left behind. Dr. Hogarth challenges the temptation to settle for easy fixes, reminding us that many inequities aren’t signs of broken systems, but signs of systems working exactly as designed.The conversation also moves into higher education internationalization and global strategy, where competition for international students can mask deeper patterns of extraction and brain drain. We push on what ethical internationalization should demand from universities, and why EDI, representation, and data are not optional if we’re serious about equity. Dr. Hogarth also shares the striking story behind why she sometimes begins by saying, “I am Black,” and what that reveals about covert bias and “racism without racists” in professional spaces.If you care about anti-racism, systemic change, community development, and the future of Canadian universities, you’ll leave with sharper questions and a longer view of what progress really takes. Subscribe, share this conversation with someone who needs it, and leave us a review so more listeners can find Speak Up International.Video: https://youtu.be/AQwuGvof2LUFeel free to contact Dr. Hogarth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/khogarth/Thoughts on the podcast? Send us a text message.Support the show