UC establishes Center for Truth, Racial Healing, Transformation

The center and its mission are an outgrowth in part of UC’s strategic direction Next Lives Here, which promotes diversity and inclusion among the university’s leadership, students, faculty and staff.

Earlier this year, in response to a college-wide call for proposals to bring inclusive excellence to A&S, Gaynor proposed the TRHT Center, to be housed in the department of Political Science. The center has been approved at the college level, and is looking for additional funding opportunities to support its mission.

Through racial healing dialogues that will occur on- and off-campus, the center will connect with community residents, the university community, nonprofit organizations and the private sector to advance narrative change around racial hierarchy while promoting racial healing. TRHT will also engage in research that works to mindfully dismantle white supremacy and redress the harms caused by systemic racism, Gaynor says.

“TRHT reimagines a new society and campus community, in the absence of racial hierarchy, that has processed the rage of those impacted by oppression and marginalization, and has enacted reparations, in its various forms,” the center's vision statement reads.

The center will work to serve the greater Cincinnati community while focusing on the racial injustice often experienced by people with marginalized identities, including but not limited to those who identify as Black, Indigenous, or a person of color), LGBTQ, people with a disability and those at the intersections.

“It’s important that our work, while focusing on race, recognizes that identity is intersectional and injustice, in all its forms, impacts a significant portion of our community. We have been explicit, in this regard, to design the mission and vision of TRHT to consider these intersections and the impact of injustice for all people who experience marginalization and oppression," says Gaynor. 

The center’s inaugural leadership team includes Gaynor; UC alumna Christina Brown, social justice activist and founder of the Cincinnati chapter of Black Lives Matter; UC alumna Amy Howton, who facilitates racial justice and healing with the Episcopal Church and the Diocese of Southern Ohio; and Carolette Norwood, associate professor of sociology and assistant department head in UC’s department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and director of the Social Justice Certificate Program.