essay about racial justice

Black people are still seeking racial justice – why and what to do about it

Subscribe to how we rise, kwadwo frimpong kwadwo frimpong research associate.

November 12, 2020

On July 9 th 2020, in the wake of nation-wide protests over George Floyd and other Black victims of police violence, David M. Rubenstein Fellow in Governance Studies Rashawn Ray joined actor and producer Boris Kodjoe to talk about policy solutions to address systemic racism and police brutality. Below are highlights from their conversation for the Instagram podcast series #19for20 , which aims to inspire public dialogue about difficult topics in social justice. You can watch the full interview here .

What is different about today’s climate compared to prior national uprisings around race?

Ray highlighted how both the visceral public display of George Floyd’s murder and COVID-19 had engulfed the nation in a manner markedly distinct from Ferguson, Black Lives Matter (BLM) and other previous nation-wide racial justice movements.

“George Floyd is the twenty first century Emmett Till, a moment similar to [his] murder in 1955 [and] by his mother having the foresight and also the bravery to show his decomposed body in that casket”, he said.

The gruesome imagery of witnessing another human being lose their life , with their neck buried under the knee of a police officer for roughly 8 minutes and 46 seconds languishes us psychologically, emotionally and physically. At the same time, with the globe and mainstream media gripped in the sweeping standstill of the pandemic, BLM took to social media, unleashing raw footage of Floyd and other Black victims to signify that they were not isolated, but were the remnants of a larger scourge of racially charged police violence rippling across the country.

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CCcTIIUIu1K/?igshid=ri56lt8dfddf

Why do Black Lives continue to be devalued and over-criminalized?

Ray remarked on how the nation’s historical legacy of slavery continues to be the foundational epicenter of racial discrimination against Blacks and other minorities. “Bad apples often times come from a rotten tree. And that tree in the United States of America is rooted in systemic racism, particularly when it comes to law enforcement that has roots back to slavery”, he explained. What’s more, according to recent research , disturbing levels of white nationalism and domestic extremist groups have been shown to have infiltrated law enforcement.

Kodjoe described a personal encounter he had had with a white businessman in his own neighborhood while dressed in a hoodie and flip flops to illustrate what he referred to as “ the magic pause ”: how Black individuals continually internalize and deflect a series of micro-aggressions and discriminatory behavior from white individuals. The man was initially disdainful towards Kodjoe but after noticing that he owned one of the most opulent houses in the community, he sharply reversed his tone, adopting a more friendly and positive demeanor. “And that criminalization of Black people is the direct result of the lack of those muscles and the lack of consideration for the fact that I’m a father, I’m a husband, I’m a professional, I have family, I have a job,” Kodjoe emphasized.

Ray concurred, remarking that “ the magic pause ” also reflects the collective memory of traumatic experiences that Blacks have undergone in the past, triggering fresh waves of encounters that either did or could have ended fatally, but also revealing how a white person will attempt to code-switch according to the perceived social class of a Black person. “And I think fundamentally it highlights that we can’t outclass racism. It doesn’t matter if you’re Boris Kodjoe [and] that you have the biggest house on the street….all that matters is that in that moment, he’s seen your skin tone and his skin tone, [which gives] him the script for how to make sense of what was going on,” he added.  In essence, these racial attitudes undergird and perpetuate the over-policing and dehumanization of Black people and the long-standing perceptions that they are not only one-dimensional but are more likely to engage in crime. Conversely, crime is inherently racial but there is a tendency to zero in on Black related violence. “ 94% of Black people kill other Blacks, 86% of white people kill other whites. But we never say white-on-white crime. It’s only talking about Black-on-Black crime,” Ray underscored.

What remedies can help shape the path forward?  

1.  Re-allocate and re-invest in police departments

Simply assigning more police officers to these crises will not solve the underlying issues. Further, not only is crime hovering at historic lows but existing law enforcement funds are not being utilized efficiently: Roughly 40% of homicides and 70% of robberies go unresolved and  9 out of 10 response calls handled by law enforcement stem from non-violent issues, ranging from mental health to homelessness. Defunding the police or re-assigning non-violent crimes to entities better equipped to handle these societal challenges will help to boost efficiency and augment the clearance rate for resolving violent crimes.

2.  Implement accountability & transparency in law enforcement

Not only does the status quo reward police officers who ratchet up the highest quotas of tickets and arrests but taxpayers routinely foot the bill for civil payouts involving victims of police brutality and even then, the culpable officers are rarely held financially or criminally liable.

• Institute police department liability insurance: By shifting the source of funds for civilian payouts from taxpayers to police budgets , police departments will not only have a greater incentive to hold police officers accountable for misconduct but the aggrieved families will receive more just recompense for the loss of their loved ones, through the parties that are directly responsible as opposed to through their own hard-earned tax dollars.
• Create a national registry : This will allow police officers to be terminated for misconduct or if they resigned under trial for misconduct as outlined in the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act .
• Remove qualified immunity : This is a legal safeguard currently upheld by the Supreme Court which shields police officers from criminal liability and being sued financially, however, recently enacted state led reforms such as in Colorado can serve as a promising model.

3.  Active civic engagement, particularly down ballot

Activism across the electoral spectrum is paramount but local politics largely determines the policies and outcomes within one’s immediate community. Rallying and electing local officials such as state representatives and attorney generals who can impact the judicial system can yield concrete pathways towards significant results.

4.  Corporate America needs to embrace meaningful action, not just slogans and words

Black assets and intellectual property have been systematically disenfranchised and under-invested in and members of the C-suite and other large conglomerates have a significant role to play in not only reshaping the narrative and incentive structure around business but by also leveraging the existing resources within the Black community to drive sustainable and meaningful change. ”[We] don’t need handouts, we need real partnerships and corporate allies that are ready to invest in us,” Kodjoe reiterated.

• Invest in minority-owned small businesses . Roughly 40% of black small businesses went under because 90% didn’t receive relief funds, however, large corporates can leverage their existing sub-contracts to combat this area.
• Diversity upper management; there is a rich pool of untapped talent to be capitalized upon.
• Compensate individuals for doing the emotional work of anti-racism; they are not there to do it for free.
• Institute bi-annual surveys for minorities to capture their experiences in the workplace and promote greater equity.
• Implement reparations to close the racial wealth gap.

In essence, Black people don’t want a seat at the table, they want their own table, apportioned with equal weight and size to be acknowledged, seen, and heard across all spectrums of society. W.E.B Dubois encapsulated this enduring plight of Black individuals over a century ago as “ double consciousness ”, a longing to be both Black and American without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in one’s face. And yet Blacks are still clamoring for that promise of equal justice and opportunity to be recognized as fully equal citizens in America.

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Racial Justice in America: A deeper look

Berkeley News series examines the roots and impact of systemic racism in American society

By Public Affairs , Public Affairs

September 22, 2020

Racial justice protests in America have existed for centuries, yet the nation has not fully reconciled with a violent and racist history that continues to impact communities of color to this day. Berkeley News will take a deeper look through a “Racial Justice in America” series. (Photo courtesy of UC Berkeley Bancroft Library)

You see it on your social media feed: Videos of police called to investigate a Black person for doing something as simple as swimming in a pool, sitting at a café, sleeping in their car or going for a morning jog.

You see it in the racial makeup of your typical American prison and in the homogenous white population of a suburban Bay Area neighborhood. You see it in the lack of polling stations in communities of color and in the typical skin color of the political candidates on their ballots.

And, you see it in the monuments that represent Confederate leaders and slave owners throughout the country, and in the very halls and buildings at UC Berkeley named after white men who advocated and defended anti-Blackness.

Systemic racism is part of the very foundation of America, from the violent colonial conquests of indigenous lands to state-sponsored slavery that fueled the country’s burgeoning economy.

America, though, has yet to fully reconcile with its racist past, despite generations of social movements rallying against the nation’s violent foundations. Earlier this year, the death of George Floyd has once again sparked public outrage toward systemic racism and provided proof for those who didn’t know the deadly price of institutions built from white supremacy .

But today, we see a growing movement of people joining racial justice protests around the country. Protests that represent an angst and cynicism toward a system that many feel has oppressed people of color and their communities for far too long.

UC Berkeley’s Office of Communications and Public Affairs will seek to make sense of American racism through a new “Racial Justice in America” series. The Berkeley News editorial team will probe some of the world’s best minds in fields of study including social welfare, public health, education, history and law.

The series will aggressively explore the history of white supremacy and racism that is being manifested in every facet of American society.

“We find ourselves in a moment that demands deep introspection, a profound soul-searching that transcends the horrific slayings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery,” said Roqua Montez, Berkeley’s executive director of communications and media relations. “Ultimately, it’s about rectifying the very real, very pervasive and very perverse conditions that led to these killings and the violent deaths of so, so many more before them.

“To move forward, we as Americans have to dismantle these violent systems — systems that enforce inequality with a brutal efficiency — and build more just, equitable systems.”

How America and its institutions were created matters.

This is our history. It’s not anti-American to teach it. It’s incredibly American.”

– Professor Denise Herd

“This is our history,” said Denise Herd, a Berkeley professor of public health who is also associate director of the campus’s Othering and Belonging Institute. “It’s not anti-American to teach it. It’s incredibly American. I think there are a lot of people who are interested in working on racial justice issues right now, so there’s an urgency to talk about this and to write about it, and there should be, because everybody needs to really understand this history in order to tackle its contemporary effects.”

The series will also illuminate research by Berkeley scholars, including studies examining why older, unarmed Black men who suffer from mental illness are particularly vulnerable to violence during police encounters, or the psychological dynamics of racism.

While tackling anti-Blackness will be a priority for the new series, the impact of racism on all people of color will be presented, including the stories of indigenous women and girls who have gone missing near oil pipeline camps and studies about the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Native populations.

Berkeley News will examine race justice in America in a new series of stories.

Berkeley students, faculty and staff activism will also be covered, including a profile on performance studies professor Angela Marino, who runs a theatre on campus to build community among people of color.

New courses that examine the role of race in our democratic systems will be analyzed, such as an African American studies and public policy class focused on the racial inequalities that exist in the U.S. Constitution and how they continue to impact American elections.

Berkeley historians will help us to recognize America’s checkered past, including through a feature story on a new documentary about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre being worked on by a Berkeley faculty member.

“If we are at all serious about ending racism, we must have a precise and clear-eyed comprehension of what it is we are ending,” said Berkeley history professor Waldo Martin, who also teaches courses in African American studies. “In turn, our multi-leveled and multi-pronged efforts to achieve the destruction of racism must be guided by that comprehension.”

The Berkeley News series follows campuswide initiatives that encourage increased campus programs to explore social justice and racism. Additional Berkeley efforts include reforms to the campus police department ; an examination of proposals to unname particular campus buildings, on the heels of denaming the Berkeley Law building ; and new scholarships for students of color that help to increase diversity on campus.

Chancellor Carol Christ said that members of the Berkeley community have a responsibility to do what they can to confront and vanquish racism and racial injustice.

“While American democracy was founded on the principles of equal rights, justice and opportunity, those ideals have not been realized for all. We have failed to destroy the plagues of racism and anti-Blackness in the present day,” Christ said. “The combination of Berkeley’s excellent academic resources and our community’s long-standing dedication to making the world a better place means we are uniquely positioned — and motivated — to propel societal change. We have an opportunity, an opportunity that must not be squandered.”

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A pandemic that disproportionately affected communities of color, roadblocks that obstructed efforts to expand the franchise and protect voting discrimination, a growing movement to push anti-racist curricula out of schools – events over the past year have only underscored how prevalent systemic racism and bias is in America today.

What can be done to dismantle centuries of discrimination in the U.S.? How can a more equitable society be achieved? What makes racism such a complicated problem to solve? Black History Month is a time marked for honoring and reflecting on the experience of Black Americans, and it is also an opportunity to reexamine our nation’s deeply embedded racial problems and the possible solutions that could help build a more equitable society.

Stanford scholars are tackling these issues head-on in their research from the perspectives of history, education, law and other disciplines. For example, historian Clayborne Carson is working to preserve and promote the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and religious studies scholar Lerone A. Martin has joined Stanford to continue expanding access and opportunities to learn from King’s teachings; sociologist Matthew Clair is examining how the criminal justice system can end a vicious cycle involving the disparate treatment of Black men; and education scholar Subini Ancy Annamma is studying ways to make education more equitable for historically marginalized students.

Learn more about these efforts and other projects examining racism and discrimination in areas like health and medicine, technology and the workplace below.

Update: Jan. 27, 2023: This story was originally published on Feb. 16, 2021, and has been updated on a number of occasions to include new content.

Understanding the impact of racism; advancing justice

One of the hardest elements of advancing racial justice is helping everyone understand the ways in which they are involved in a system or structure that perpetuates racism, according to Stanford legal scholar Ralph Richard Banks.

“The starting point for the center is the recognition that racial inequality and division have long been the fault line of American society. Thus, addressing racial inequity is essential to sustaining our nation, and furthering its democratic aspirations,” said Banks , the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and co-founder of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice .

This sentiment was echoed by Stanford researcher Rebecca Hetey . One of the obstacles in solving inequality is people’s attitudes towards it, Hetey said. “One of the barriers of reducing inequality is how some people justify and rationalize it.”

How people talk about race and stereotypes matters. Here is some of that scholarship.

For Black Americans, COVID-19 is quickly reversing crucial economic gains

Research co-authored by SIEPR’s Peter Klenow and Chad Jones measures the welfare gap between Black and white Americans and provides a way to analyze policies to narrow the divide.

How an ‘impact mindset’ unites activists of different races

A new study finds that people’s involvement with Black Lives Matter stems from an impulse that goes beyond identity.

For democracy to work, racial inequalities must be addressed

The Stanford Center for Racial Justice is taking a hard look at the policies perpetuating systemic racism in America today and asking how we can imagine a more equitable society.

The psychological toll of George Floyd’s murder

As the nation mourned the death of George Floyd, more Black Americans than white Americans felt angry or sad – a finding that reveals the racial disparities of grief.

Seven factors contributing to American racism

Of the seven factors the researchers identified, perhaps the most insidious is passivism or passive racism, which includes an apathy toward systems of racial advantage or denial that those systems even exist.

Scholars reflect on Black history

Humanities and social sciences scholars reflect on “Black history as American history” and its impact on their personal and professional lives.

The history of Black History Month

It's February, so many teachers and schools are taking time to celebrate Black History Month. According to Stanford historian Michael Hines, there are still misunderstandings and misconceptions about the past, present, and future of the celebration.

Numbers about inequality don’t speak for themselves

In a new research paper, Stanford scholars Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt propose new ways to talk about racial disparities that exist across society, from education to health care and criminal justice systems.

Changing how people perceive problems

Drawing on an extensive body of research, Stanford psychologist Gregory Walton lays out a roadmap to positively influence the way people think about themselves and the world around them. These changes could improve society, too.

Welfare opposition linked to threats of racial standing

Research co-authored by sociologist Robb Willer finds that when white Americans perceive threats to their status as the dominant demographic group, their resentment of minorities increases. This resentment leads to opposing welfare programs they believe will mainly benefit minority groups.

Conversations about race between Black and white friends can feel risky, but are valuable

New research about how friends approach talking about their race-related experiences with each other reveals concerns but also the potential that these conversations have to strengthen relationships and further intergroup learning.

Defusing racial bias

Research shows why understanding the source of discrimination matters.

Many white parents aren’t having ‘the talk’ about race with their kids

After George Floyd’s murder, Black parents talked about race and racism with their kids more. White parents did not and were more likely to give their kids colorblind messages.

Stereotyping makes people more likely to act badly

Even slight cues, like reading a negative stereotype about your race or gender, can have an impact.

Why white people downplay their individual racial privileges

Research shows that white Americans, when faced with evidence of racial privilege, deny that they have benefited personally.

Clayborne Carson: Looking back at a legacy

Stanford historian Clayborne Carson reflects on a career dedicated to studying and preserving the legacy of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

How race influences, amplifies backlash against outspoken women

When women break gender norms, the most negative reactions may come from people of the same race.

Examining disparities in education

Scholar Subini Ancy Annamma is studying ways to make education more equitable for historically marginalized students. Annamma’s research examines how schools contribute to the criminalization of Black youths by creating a culture of punishment that penalizes Black children more harshly than their white peers for the same behavior. Her work shows that youth of color are more likely to be closely watched, over-represented in special education, and reported to and arrested by police.

“These are all ways in which schools criminalize Black youth,” she said. “Day after day, these things start to sediment.”

That’s why Annamma has identified opportunities for teachers and administrators to intervene in these unfair practices. Below is some of that research, from Annamma and others.

New ‘Segregation Index’ shows American schools remain highly segregated by race, ethnicity, and economic status

Researchers at Stanford and USC developed a new tool to track neighborhood and school segregation in the U.S.

New evidence shows that school poverty shapes racial achievement gaps

Racial segregation leads to growing achievement gaps – but it does so entirely through differences in school poverty, according to new research from education Professor Sean Reardon, who is launching a new tool to help educators, parents and policymakers examine education trends by race and poverty level nationwide.

School closures intensify gentrification in Black neighborhoods nationwide

An analysis of census and school closure data finds that shuttering schools increases gentrification – but only in predominantly Black communities.

Ninth-grade ethnic studies helped students for years, Stanford researchers find

A new study shows that students assigned to an ethnic studies course had longer-term improvements in attendance and graduation rates.

Teaching about racism

Stanford sociologist Matthew Snipp discusses ways to educate students about race and ethnic relations in America.

Stanford scholar uncovers an early activist’s fight to get Black history into schools

In a new book, Assistant Professor Michael Hines chronicles the efforts of a Chicago schoolteacher in the 1930s who wanted to remedy the portrayal of Black history in textbooks of the time.

How disability intersects with race

Professor Alfredo J. Artiles discusses the complexities in creating inclusive policies for students with disabilities.

Access to program for black male students lowered dropout rates

New research led by Stanford education professor Thomas S. Dee provides the first evidence of effectiveness for a district-wide initiative targeted at black male high school students.

How school systems make criminals of Black youth

Stanford education professor Subini Ancy Annamma talks about the role schools play in creating a culture of punishment against Black students.

Reducing racial disparities in school discipline

Stanford psychologists find that brief exercises early in middle school can improve students’ relationships with their teachers, increase their sense of belonging and reduce teachers’ reports of discipline issues among black and Latino boys.

Science lessons through a different lens

In his new book, Science in the City, Stanford education professor Bryan A. Brown helps bridge the gap between students’ culture and the science classroom.

Teachers more likely to label black students as troublemakers, Stanford research shows

Stanford psychologists Jennifer Eberhardt and Jason Okonofua experimentally examined the psychological processes involved when teachers discipline black students more harshly than white students.

Why we need Black teachers

Travis Bristol, MA '04, talks about what it takes for schools to hire and retain teachers of color.

Understanding racism in the criminal justice system

Research has shown that time and time again, inequality is embedded into all facets of the criminal justice system. From being arrested to being charged, convicted and sentenced, people of color – particularly Black men – are disproportionately targeted by the police.

“So many reforms are needed: police accountability, judicial intervention, reducing prosecutorial power and increasing resources for public defenders are places we can start,” said sociologist Matthew Clair . “But beyond piecemeal reforms, we need to continue having critical conversations about transformation and the role of the courts in bringing about the abolition of police and prisons.”

Clair is one of several Stanford scholars who have examined the intersection of race and the criminal process and offered solutions to end the vicious cycle of racism. Here is some of that work.

Police Facebook posts disproportionately highlight crimes involving Black suspects, study finds

Researchers examined crime-related posts from 14,000 Facebook pages maintained by U.S. law enforcement agencies and found that Facebook users are exposed to posts that overrepresent Black suspects by 25% relative to local arrest rates.

Supporting students involved in the justice system

New data show that a one-page letter asking a teacher to support a youth as they navigate the difficult transition from juvenile detention back to school can reduce the likelihood that the student re-offends.

Race and mass criminalization in the U.S.

Stanford sociologist discusses how race and class inequalities are embedded in the American criminal legal system.

New Stanford research lab explores incarcerated students’ educational paths

Associate Professor Subini Annamma examines the policies and practices that push marginalized students out of school and into prisons.

Derek Chauvin verdict important, but much remains to be done

Stanford scholars Hakeem Jefferson, Robert Weisberg and Matthew Clair weigh in on the Derek Chauvin verdict, emphasizing that while the outcome is important, much work remains to be done to bring about long-lasting justice.

A ‘veil of darkness’ reduces racial bias in traffic stops

After analyzing 95 million traffic stop records, filed by officers with 21 state patrol agencies and 35 municipal police forces from 2011 to 2018, researchers concluded that “police stops and search decisions suffer from persistent racial bias.”

Stanford big data study finds racial disparities in Oakland, Calif., police behavior, offers solutions

Analyzing thousands of data points, the researchers found racial disparities in how Oakland officers treated African Americans on routine traffic and pedestrian stops. They suggest 50 measures to improve police-community relations.

Race and the death penalty

As questions about racial bias in the criminal justice system dominate the headlines, research by Stanford law Professor John J. Donohue III offers insight into one of the most fraught areas: the death penalty.

Diagnosing disparities in health, medicine

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted communities of color and has highlighted the health disparities between Black Americans, whites and other demographic groups.

As Iris Gibbs , professor of radiation oncology and associate dean of MD program admissions, pointed out at an event sponsored by Stanford Medicine: “We need more sustained attention and real action towards eliminating health inequities, educating our entire community and going beyond ‘allyship,’ because that one fizzles out. We really do need people who are truly there all the way.”

Below is some of that research as well as solutions that can address some of the disparities in the American healthcare system.

Stanford researchers testing ways to improve clinical trial diversity

The American Heart Association has provided funding to two Stanford Medicine professors to develop ways to diversify enrollment in heart disease clinical trials.

Striking inequalities in maternal and infant health

Research by SIEPR’s Petra Persson and Maya Rossin-Slater finds wealthy Black mothers and infants in the U.S. fare worse than the poorest white mothers and infants.

More racial diversity among physicians would lead to better health among black men

A clinical trial in Oakland by Stanford researchers found that black men are more likely to seek out preventive care after being seen by black doctors compared to non-black doctors.

A better measuring stick: Algorithmic approach to pain diagnosis could eliminate racial bias

Traditional approaches to pain management don’t treat all patients the same. AI could level the playing field.

5 questions: Alice Popejoy on race, ethnicity and ancestry in science

Alice Popejoy, a postdoctoral scholar who studies biomedical data sciences, speaks to the role – and pitfalls – of race, ethnicity and ancestry in research.

Stanford Medicine community calls for action against racial injustice, inequities

The event at Stanford provided a venue for health care workers and students to express their feelings about violence against African Americans and to voice their demands for change.

Racial disparity remains in heart-transplant mortality rates, Stanford study finds

African-American heart transplant patients have had persistently higher mortality rates than white patients, but exactly why still remains a mystery.

Finding the COVID-19 Victims that Big Data Misses

Widely used virus tracking data undercounts older people and people of color. Scholars propose a solution to this demographic bias.

Studying how racial stressors affect mental health

Farzana Saleem, an assistant professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education, is interested in the way Black youth and other young people of color navigate adolescence—and the racial stressors that can make the journey harder.

Infants’ race influences quality of hospital care in California

Disparities exist in how babies of different racial and ethnic origins are treated in California’s neonatal intensive care units, but this could be changed, say Stanford researchers.

Immigrants don’t move state-to-state in search of health benefits

When states expand public health insurance to include low-income, legal immigrants, it does not lead to out-of-state immigrants moving in search of benefits.

Excess mortality rates early in pandemic highest among Blacks

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been starkly uneven across race, ethnicity and geography, according to a new study led by SHP's Maria Polyakova.

Decoding bias in media, technology

Driving Artificial Intelligence are machine learning algorithms, sets of rules that tell a computer how to solve a problem, perform a task and in some cases, predict an outcome. These predictive models are based on massive datasets to recognize certain patterns, which according to communication scholar Angele Christin , sometimes come flawed with human bias . 

“Technology changes things, but perhaps not always as much as we think,” Christin said. “Social context matters a lot in shaping the actual effects of the technological tools. […] So, it’s important to understand that connection between humans and machines.”

Below is some of that research, as well as other ways discrimination unfolds across technology, in the media, and ways to counteract it.

IRS disproportionately audits Black taxpayers

A Stanford collaboration with the Department of the Treasury yields the first direct evidence of differences in audit rates by race.

Automated speech recognition less accurate for blacks

The disparity likely occurs because such technologies are based on machine learning systems that rely heavily on databases of English as spoken by white Americans.

New algorithm trains AI to avoid bad behaviors

Robots, self-driving cars and other intelligent machines could become better-behaved thanks to a new way to help machine learning designers build AI applications with safeguards against specific, undesirable outcomes such as racial and gender bias.

Stanford scholar analyzes responses to algorithms in journalism, criminal justice

In a recent study, assistant professor of communication Angèle Christin finds a gap between intended and actual uses of algorithmic tools in journalism and criminal justice fields.

Move responsibly and think about things

In the course CS 181: Computers, Ethics and Public Policy , Stanford students become computer programmers, policymakers and philosophers to examine the ethical and social impacts of technological innovation.

Homicide victims from Black and Hispanic neighborhoods devalued

Social scientists found that homicide victims killed in Chicago’s predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods received less news coverage than those killed in mostly white neighborhoods.

Algorithms reveal changes in stereotypes

New Stanford research shows that, over the past century, linguistic changes in gender and ethnic stereotypes correlated with major social movements and demographic changes in the U.S. Census data.

AI Index Diversity Report: An Unmoving Needle

Stanford HAI’s 2021 AI Index reveals stalled progress in diversifying AI and a scarcity of the data needed to fix it.

Identifying discrimination in the workplace and economy

From who moves forward in the hiring process to who receives funding from venture capitalists, research has revealed how Blacks and other minority groups are discriminated against in the workplace and economy-at-large. 

“There is not one silver bullet here that you can walk away with. Hiring and retention with respect to employee diversity are complex problems,” said Adina Sterling , associate professor of organizational behavior at the Graduate School of Business (GSB). 

Sterling has offered a few places where employers can expand employee diversity at their companies. For example, she suggests hiring managers track data about their recruitment methods and the pools that result from those efforts, as well as examining who they ultimately hire.

Here is some of that insight.

How To: Use a Scorecard to Evaluate People More Fairly

A written framework is an easy way to hold everyone to the same standard.

Archiving Black histories of Silicon Valley

A new collection at Stanford Libraries will highlight Black Americans who helped transform California’s Silicon Valley region into a hub for innovation, ideas.

Race influences professional investors’ judgments

In their evaluations of high-performing venture capital funds, professional investors rate white-led teams more favorably than they do black-led teams with identical credentials, a new Stanford study led by Jennifer L. Eberhardt finds.

Who moves forward in the hiring process?

People whose employment histories include part-time, temporary help agency or mismatched work can face challenges during the hiring process, according to new research by Stanford sociologist David Pedulla.

How emotions may result in hiring, workplace bias

Stanford study suggests that the emotions American employers are looking for in job candidates may not match up with emotions valued by jobseekers from some cultural backgrounds – potentially leading to hiring bias.

Do VCs really favor white male founders?

A field experiment used fake emails to measure gender and racial bias among startup investors.

Can you spot diversity? (Probably not)

New research shows a “spillover effect” that might be clouding your judgment.

Can job referrals improve employee diversity?

New research looks at how referrals impact promotions of minorities and women.

14 influential essays from Black writers on America's problems with race

• Business leaders are calling for people to reflect on civil rights this Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
• Black literary experts shared their top nonfiction essay and article picks on race. 
• The list includes "A Report from Occupied Territory" by James Baldwin.

For many, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a time of reflection on the life of one of the nation's most prominent civil rights leaders. It's also an important time for people who support racial justice to educate themselves on the experiences of Black people in America. 

Business leaders like TIAA CEO Thasunda Duckett Brown and others are encouraging people to reflect on King's life's work, and one way to do that is to read his essays and the work of others dedicated to the same mission he had: racial equity. 

Insider asked Black literary and historical experts to share their favorite works of journalism on race by Black authors. Here are the top pieces they recommended everyone read to better understand the quest for Black liberation in America:

An earlier version of this article was published on June 14, 2020.

"Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases" and "The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States" by Ida B. Wells

In 1892, investigative journalist, activist, and NAACP founding member Ida B. Wells began to publish her research on lynching in a pamphlet titled "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases." Three years later, she followed up with more research and detail in "The Red Record." 

Shirley Moody-Turner, associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Penn State University recommended everyone read these two texts, saying they hold "many parallels to our own moment."  

"In these two pamphlets, Wells exposes the pervasive use of lynching and white mob violence against African American men and women. She discredits the myths used by white mobs to justify the killing of African Americans and exposes Northern and international audiences to the growing racial violence and terror perpetrated against Black people in the South in the years following the Civil War," Moody-Turner told Business Insider. 

Read  "Southern Horrors" here and "The Red Record" here >>

"On Juneteenth" by Annette Gordon-Reed

In this collection of essays, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annette Gordon-Reed combines memoir and history to help readers understand the complexities out of which Juneteenth was born. She also argues how racial and ethnic hierarchies remain in society today, said Moody-Turner. 

"Gordon-Reed invites readers to see Juneteenth as a time to grapple with the complexities of race and enslavement in the US, to re-think our origin stories about race and slavery's central role in the formation of both Texas and the US, and to consider how, as Gordon-Reed so eloquently puts it, 'echoes of the past remain, leaving their traces in the people and events of the present and future.'"

Purchase "On Juneteenth" here>>

"The Case for Reparations" by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates, best-selling author and national correspondent for The Atlantic, made waves when he published his 2014 article "The Case for Reparations," in which he called for "collective introspection" on reparations for Black Americans subjected to centuries of racism and violence. 

"In his now famed essay for The Atlantic, journalist, author, and essayist, Ta-Nehisi Coates traces how slavery, segregation, and discriminatory racial policies underpin ongoing and systemic economic and racial disparities," Moody-Turner said. 

"Coates provides deep historical context punctuated by individual and collective stories that compel us to reconsider the case for reparations," she added.  

Read it here>>

"The Idea of America" by Nikole Hannah-Jones and the "1619 Project" by The New York Times

In "The Idea of America," Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones traces America's history from 1619 onward, the year slavery began in the US. She explores how the history of slavery is inseparable from the rise of America's democracy in her essay that's part of The New York Times' larger "1619 Project," which is the outlet's ongoing project created in 2019 to re-examine the impact of slavery in the US. 

"In her unflinching look at the legacy of slavery and the underside of American democracy and capitalism, Hannah-Jones asks, 'what if America understood, finally, in this 400th year, that we [Black Americans] have never been the problem but the solution,'" said Moody-Turner, who recommended readers read the whole "1619 Project" as well. 

Read "The Idea of America" here and the rest of the "1619 Project here>>

"Many Thousands Gone" by James Baldwin

In "Many Thousands Gone," James Arthur Baldwin, American novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and activist lays out how white America is not ready to fully recognize Black people as people. It's a must read, according to Jimmy Worthy II, assistant professor of English at The University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

"Baldwin's essay reminds us that in America, the very idea of Black persons conjures an amalgamation of specters, fears, threats, anxieties, guilts, and memories that must be extinguished as part of the labor to forget histories deemed too uncomfortable to remember," Worthy said.

"Letter from a Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King Jr.

On April 13 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. and other Civil Rights activists were arrested after peaceful protest in Birmingham, Alabama. In jail, King penned an open letter about how people have a moral obligation to break unjust laws rather than waiting patiently for legal change. In his essay, he expresses criticism and disappointment in white moderates and white churches, something that's not often focused on in history textbooks, Worthy said.

"King revises the perception of white racists devoted to a vehement status quo to include white moderates whose theories of inevitable racial equality and silence pertaining to racial injustice prolong discriminatory practices," Worthy said. 

"The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action" by Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde, African American writer, feminist, womanist, librarian, and civil rights activist asks readers to not be silent on important issues. This short, rousing read is crucial for everyone according to Thomonique Moore, a 2016 graduate of Howard University, founder of Books&Shit book club, and an incoming Masters' candidate at Columbia University's Teacher's College. 

"In this essay, Lorde explains to readers the importance of overcoming our fears and speaking out about the injustices that are plaguing us and the people around us. She challenges us to not live our lives in silence, or we risk never changing the things around us," Moore said.  Read it here>>

"The First White President" by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This essay from the award-winning journalist's book " We Were Eight Years in Power ," details how Trump, during his presidency, employed the notion of whiteness and white supremacy to pick apart the legacy of the nation's first Black president, Barack Obama.

Moore said it was crucial reading to understand the current political environment we're in. 

"Just Walk on By" by Brent Staples

In this essay, Brent Staples, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer for The New York Times, hones in on the experience of racism against Black people in public spaces, especially on the role of white women in contributing to the view that Black men are threatening figures.  

For Crystal M. Fleming, associate professor of sociology and Africana Studies at SUNY Stony Brook, his essay is especially relevant right now. 

"We see the relevance of his critique in the recent incident in New York City, wherein a white woman named Amy Cooper infamously called the police and lied, claiming that a Black man — Christian Cooper — threatened her life in Central Park. Although the experience that Staples describes took place decades ago, the social dynamics have largely remained the same," Fleming told Insider. 

"I Was Pregnant and in Crisis. All the Doctors and Nurses Saw Was an Incompetent Black Woman" by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an author, associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and a faculty affiliate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. In this essay, Cottom shares her gut-wrenching experience of racism within the healthcare system. 

Fleming called this piece an "excellent primer on intersectionality" between racism and sexism, calling Cottom one of the most influential sociologists and writers in the US today.  Read it here>>

"A Report from Occupied Territory" by James Baldwin

Baldwin's "A Report from Occupied Territory" was originally published in The Nation in 1966. It takes a hard look at violence against Black people in the US, specifically police brutality. 

"Baldwin's work remains essential to understanding the depth and breadth of anti-black racism in our society. This essay — which touches on issues of racialized violence, policing and the role of the law in reproducing inequality — is an absolute must-read for anyone who wants to understand just how much has not changed with regard to police violence and anti-Black racism in our country," Fleming told Insider.  Read it here>>

"I'm From Philly. 30 Years Later, I'm Still Trying To Make Sense Of The MOVE Bombing" by Gene Demby

On May 13, 1985, a police helicopter dropped a bomb on the MOVE compound in Philadelphia, which housed members of the MOVE, a black liberation group founded in 1972 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Eleven people, including five children, died in the airstrike. In this essay, Gene Demby, co-host and correspondent for NPR's Code Switch team, tries to wrap his head around the shocking instance of police violence against Black people. 

"I would argue that the fact that police were authorized to literally bomb Black citizens in their own homes, in their own country, is directly relevant to current conversations about militarized police and the growing movement to defund and abolish policing," Fleming said.  Read it here>>

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• Black Americans Have a Clear Vision for Reducing Racism but Little Hope It Will Happen

Many say key U.S. institutions should be rebuilt to ensure fair treatment

Table of contents.

• Black Americans see little improvement in their lives despite increased national attention to racial issues
• Few Black adults expect equality for Black people in the U.S.
• Black adults say racism and police brutality are extremely big problems for Black people in the U.S.
• Personal experiences with discrimination are widespread among Black Americans
• Black adults see voting as the most effective strategy for moving toward equality in the U.S.
• Some Black adults see Black businesses and communities as effective remedies for inequality
• Black Americans say race matters little when choosing political allies
• The legacy of slavery affects Black Americans today
• Most Black adults agree the descendants of enslaved people should be repaid
• The types of repayment Black adults think would be most helpful
• Responsibility for reparations and the likelihood repayment will occur
• Black adults say the criminal justice system needs to be completely rebuilt
• Black adults say political, economic and health care systems need major changes to ensure fair treatment
• Most Black adults say funding for police departments should stay the same or increase
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Supplemental tables
• The American Trends Panel survey methodology

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to understand the nuances among Black people on issues of racial inequality and social change in the United States. This in-depth survey explores differences among Black Americans in their views on the social status of the Black population in the U.S.; their assessments of racial inequality; their visions for institutional and social change; and their outlook on the chances that these improvements will be made. The analysis is the latest in the Center’s series of in-depth surveys of public opinion among Black Americans (read the first, “ Faith Among Black Americans ” and “ Race Is Central to Identity for Black Americans and Affects How They Connect With Each Other ”).

The online survey of 3,912 Black U.S. adults was conducted Oct. 4-17, 2021. Black U.S. adults include those who are single-race, non-Hispanic Black Americans; multiracial non-Hispanic Black Americans; and adults who indicate they are Black and Hispanic. The survey includes 1,025 Black adults on Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP) and 2,887 Black adults on Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel. Respondents on both panels are recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses.

Recruiting panelists by phone or mail ensures that nearly all U.S. Black adults have a chance of selection. This gives us confidence that any sample can represent the whole population (see our Methods 101 explainer on random sampling). Here are the questions used for the survey of Black adults, along with its responses and methodology .

The terms “Black Americans,” “Black people” and “Black adults” are used interchangeably throughout this report to refer to U.S. adults who self-identify as Black, either alone or in combination with other races or Hispanic identity.

Throughout this report, “Black, non-Hispanic” respondents are those who identify as single-race Black and say they have no Hispanic background. “Black Hispanic” respondents are those who identify as Black and say they have Hispanic background. We use the terms “Black Hispanic” and “Hispanic Black” interchangeably. “Multiracial” respondents are those who indicate two or more racial backgrounds (one of which is Black) and say they are not Hispanic.

Respondents were asked a question about how important being Black was to how they think about themselves. In this report, we use the term “being Black” when referencing responses to this question.

In this report, “immigrant” refers to people who were not U.S. citizens at birth – in other words, those born outside the U.S., Puerto Rico or other U.S. territories to parents who were not U.S. citizens. We use the terms “immigrant,” “born abroad” and “foreign-born” interchangeably.

Throughout this report, “Democrats and Democratic leaners” and just “Democrats” both refer to respondents who identify politically with the Democratic Party or who are independent or some other party but lean toward the Democratic Party. “Republicans and Republican leaners” and just “Republicans” both refer to respondents who identify politically with the Republican Party or are independent or some other party but lean toward the Republican Party.

Respondents were asked a question about their voter registration status. In this report, respondents are considered registered to vote if they self-report being absolutely certain they are registered at their current address. Respondents are considered not registered to vote if they report not being registered or express uncertainty about their registration.

To create the upper-, middle- and lower-income tiers, respondents’ 2020 family incomes were adjusted for differences in purchasing power by geographic region and household size. Respondents were then placed into income tiers: “Middle income” is defined as two-thirds to double the median annual income for the entire survey sample. “Lower income” falls below that range, and “upper income” lies above it. For more information about how the income tiers were created, read the methodology .

More than a year after the murder of George Floyd and the national protests, debate and political promises that ensued, 65% of Black Americans say the increased national attention on racial inequality has not led to changes that improved their lives. 1 And 44% say equality for Black people in the United States is not likely to be achieved, according to newly released findings from an October 2021 survey of Black Americans by Pew Research Center.

This is somewhat of a reversal in views from September 2020, when half of Black adults said the increased national focus on issues of race would lead to major policy changes to address racial inequality in the country and 56% expected changes that would make their lives better.

At the same time, many Black Americans are concerned about racial discrimination and its impact. Roughly eight-in-ten say they have personally experienced discrimination because of their race or ethnicity (79%), and most also say discrimination is the main reason many Black people cannot get ahead (68%).  

Even so, Black Americans have a clear vision for how to achieve change when it comes to racial inequality. This includes support for significant reforms to or complete overhauls of several U.S. institutions to ensure fair treatment, particularly the criminal justice system; political engagement, primarily in the form of voting; support for Black businesses to advance Black communities; and reparations in the forms of educational, business and homeownership assistance. Yet alongside their assessments of inequality and ideas about progress exists pessimism about whether U.S. society and its institutions will change in ways that would reduce racism.

These findings emerge from an extensive Pew Research Center survey of 3,912 Black Americans conducted online Oct. 4-17, 2021. The survey explores how Black Americans assess their position in U.S. society and their ideas about social change. Overall, Black Americans are clear on what they think the problems are facing the country and how to remedy them. However, they are skeptical that meaningful changes will take place in their lifetime.

Black Americans see racism in our laws as a big problem and discrimination as a roadblock to progress

Black adults were asked in the survey to assess the current nature of racism in the United States and whether structural or individual sources of this racism are a bigger problem for Black people. About half of Black adults (52%) say racism in our laws is a bigger problem than racism by individual people, while four-in-ten (43%) say acts of racism committed by individual people is the bigger problem. Only 3% of Black adults say that Black people do not experience discrimination in the U.S. today.

In assessing the magnitude of problems that they face, the majority of Black Americans say racism (63%), police brutality (60%) and economic inequality (54%) are extremely or very big problems for Black people living in the U.S. Slightly smaller shares say the same about the affordability of health care (47%), limitations on voting (46%), and the quality of K-12 schools (40%).

Aside from their critiques of U.S. institutions, Black adults also feel the impact of racial inequality personally. Most Black adults say they occasionally or frequently experience unfair treatment because of their race or ethnicity (79%), and two-thirds (68%) cite racial discrimination as the main reason many Black people cannot get ahead today.

Black Americans’ views on reducing racial inequality

Black Americans are clear on the challenges they face because of racism. They are also clear on the solutions. These range from overhauls of policing practices and the criminal justice system to civic engagement and reparations to descendants of people enslaved in the United States.

Changing U.S. institutions such as policing, courts and prison systems

About nine-in-ten Black adults say multiple aspects of the criminal justice system need some kind of change (minor, major or a complete overhaul) to ensure fair treatment, with nearly all saying so about policing (95%), the courts and judicial process (95%), and the prison system (94%).

Roughly half of Black adults say policing (49%), the courts and judicial process (48%), and the prison system (54%) need to be completely rebuilt for Black people to be treated fairly. Smaller shares say the same about the political system (42%), the economic system (37%) and the health care system (34%), according to the October survey.

While Black Americans are in favor of significant changes to policing, most want spending on police departments in their communities to stay the same (39%) or increase (35%). A little more than one-in-five (23%) think spending on police departments in their area should be decreased.

Black adults who favor decreases in police spending are most likely to name medical, mental health and social services (40%) as the top priority for those reappropriated funds. Smaller shares say K-12 schools (25%), roads, water systems and other infrastructure (12%), and reducing taxes (13%) should be the top priority.

Voting and ‘buying Black’ viewed as important strategies for Black community advancement

Black Americans also have clear views on the types of political and civic engagement they believe will move Black communities forward. About six-in-ten Black adults say voting (63%) and supporting Black businesses or “buying Black” (58%) are extremely or very effective strategies for moving Black people toward equality in the U.S. Smaller though still significant shares say the same about volunteering with organizations dedicated to Black equality (48%), protesting (42%) and contacting elected officials (40%).

Black adults were also asked about the effectiveness of Black economic and political independence in moving them toward equality. About four-in-ten (39%) say Black ownership of all businesses in Black neighborhoods would be an extremely or very effective strategy for moving toward racial equality, while roughly three-in-ten (31%) say the same about establishing a national Black political party. And about a quarter of Black adults (27%) say having Black neighborhoods governed entirely by Black elected officials would be extremely or very effective in moving Black people toward equality.

Most Black Americans support repayment for slavery

Discussions about atonement for slavery predate the founding of the United States. As early as 1672 , Quaker abolitionists advocated for enslaved people to be paid for their labor once they were free. And in recent years, some U.S. cities and institutions have implemented reparations policies to do just that.

Most Black Americans say the legacy of slavery affects the position of Black people in the U.S. either a great deal (55%) or a fair amount (30%), according to the survey. And roughly three-quarters (77%) say descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid in some way.

Black adults who say descendants of the enslaved should be repaid support doing so in different ways. About eight-in-ten say repayment in the forms of educational scholarships (80%), financial assistance for starting or improving a business (77%), and financial assistance for buying or remodeling a home (76%) would be extremely or very helpful. A slightly smaller share (69%) say cash payments would be extremely or very helpful forms of repayment for the descendants of enslaved people.

Where the responsibility for repayment lies is also clear for Black Americans. Among those who say the descendants of enslaved people should be repaid, 81% say the U.S. federal government should have all or most of the responsibility for repayment. About three-quarters (76%) say businesses and banks that profited from slavery should bear all or most of the responsibility for repayment. And roughly six-in-ten say the same about colleges and universities that benefited from slavery (63%) and descendants of families who engaged in the slave trade (60%).

Black Americans are skeptical change will happen

Even though Black Americans’ visions for social change are clear, very few expect them to be implemented. Overall, 44% of Black adults say equality for Black people in the U.S. is a little or not at all likely. A little over a third (38%) say it is somewhat likely and only 13% say it is extremely or very likely.

They also do not think specific institutions will change. Two-thirds of Black adults say changes to the prison system (67%) and the courts and judicial process (65%) that would ensure fair treatment for Black people are a little or not at all likely in their lifetime. About six-in-ten (58%) say the same about policing. Only about one-in-ten say changes to policing (13%), the courts and judicial process (12%), and the prison system (11%) are extremely or very likely.

This pessimism is not only about the criminal justice system. The majority of Black adults say the political (63%), economic (62%) and health care (51%) systems are also unlikely to change in their lifetime.

Black Americans’ vision for social change includes reparations. However, much like their pessimism about institutional change, very few think they will see reparations in their lifetime. Among Black adults who say the descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid, 82% say reparations for slavery are unlikely to occur in their lifetime. About one-in-ten (11%) say repayment is somewhat likely, while only 7% say repayment is extremely or very likely to happen in their lifetime.

Black Democrats, Republicans differ on assessments of inequality and visions for social change

Party affiliation is one key point of difference among Black Americans in their assessments of racial inequality and their visions for social change. Black Republicans and Republican leaners are more likely than Black Democrats and Democratic leaners to focus on the acts of individuals. For example, when summarizing the nature of racism against Black people in the U.S., the majority of Black Republicans (59%) say racist acts committed by individual people is a bigger problem for Black people than racism in our laws. Black Democrats (41%) are less likely to hold this view.

Black Republicans (45%) are also more likely than Black Democrats (21%) to say that Black people who cannot get ahead in the U.S. are mostly responsible for their own condition. And while similar shares of Black Republicans (79%) and Democrats (80%) say they experience racial discrimination on a regular basis, Republicans (64%) are more likely than Democrats (36%) to say that most Black people who want to get ahead can make it if they are willing to work hard.

On the other hand, Black Democrats are more likely than Black Republicans to focus on the impact that racial inequality has on Black Americans. Seven-in-ten Black Democrats (73%) say racial discrimination is the main reason many Black people cannot get ahead in the U.S, while about four-in-ten Black Republicans (44%) say the same. And Black Democrats are more likely than Black Republicans to say racism (67% vs. 46%) and police brutality (65% vs. 44%) are extremely big problems for Black people today.

Black Democrats are also more critical of U.S. institutions than Black Republicans are. For example, Black Democrats are more likely than Black Republicans to say the prison system (57% vs. 35%), policing (52% vs. 29%) and the courts and judicial process (50% vs. 35%) should be completely rebuilt for Black people to be treated fairly.

While the share of Black Democrats who want to see large-scale changes to the criminal justice system exceeds that of Black Republicans, they share similar views on police funding. Four-in-ten each of Black Democrats and Black Republicans say funding for police departments in their communities should remain the same, while around a third of each partisan coalition (36% and 37%, respectively) says funding should increase. Only about one-in-four Black Democrats (24%) and one-in-five Black Republicans (21%) say funding for police departments in their communities should decrease.

Among the survey’s other findings:

Black adults differ by age in their views on political strategies. Black adults ages 65 and older (77%) are most likely to say voting is an extremely or very effective strategy for moving Black people toward equality. They are significantly more likely than Black adults ages 18 to 29 (48%) and 30 to 49 (60%) to say this. Black adults 65 and older (48%) are also more likely than those ages 30 to 49 (38%) and 50 to 64 (42%) to say protesting is an extremely or very effective strategy. Roughly four-in-ten Black adults ages 18 to 29 say this (44%).

Gender plays a role in how Black adults view policing. Though majorities of Black women (65%) and men (56%) say police brutality is an extremely big problem for Black people living in the U.S. today, Black women are more likely than Black men to hold this view. When it comes to criminal justice, Black women (56%) and men (51%) are about equally likely to share the view that the prison system should be completely rebuilt to ensure fair treatment of Black people. However, Black women (52%) are slightly more likely than Black men (45%) to say this about policing. On the matter of police funding, Black women (39%) are slightly more likely than Black men (31%) to say police funding in their communities should be increased. On the other hand, Black men are more likely than Black women to prefer that funding stay the same (44% vs. 36%). Smaller shares of both Black men (23%) and women (22%) would like to see police funding decreased.

Income impacts Black adults’ views on reparations. Roughly eight-in-ten Black adults with lower (78%), middle (77%) and upper incomes (79%) say the descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should receive reparations. Among those who support reparations, Black adults with upper and middle incomes (both 84%) are more likely than those with lower incomes (75%) to say educational scholarships would be an extremely or very helpful form of repayment. However, of those who support reparations, Black adults with lower (72%) and middle incomes (68%) are more likely than those with higher incomes (57%) to say cash payments would be an extremely or very helpful form of repayment for slavery.

• Black adults in the September 2020 survey only include those who say their race is Black alone and are non-Hispanic. The same is true only for the questions of improvements to Black people’s lives and equality in the United States in the October 2021 survey. Throughout the rest of this report, Black adults include those who say their race is Black alone and non-Hispanic; those who say their race is Black and at least one other race and non-Hispanic; or Black and Hispanic, unless otherwise noted. ↩

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• Racial Justice, Racial Equity, and Anti-Racism Reading List

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In the wake of violence against Black Americans and in a moment of national reckoning in Summer 2020, the HKS Library pulled together a reading list that is inspired and largely informed by Resources and Reading on Racial Justice, Racial Equity, and Anti-Racism published by the Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability Project (IARA) at the Ash Center and in partnership with the HKS Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging . 

This reading list is a starting place to find resources that speak to racial justice, racial equity, and anti-racism.  If you have suggestions or feedback, please send us an email: [email protected] . Books are linked to e-book versions where available.

In addition to access through Harvard Library, we believe these titles should be a part of other academic and public libraries. If these titles are not a part of your local libraries, most libraries solicit and support community requests. If you have questions about how to request a title for inclusion in your local library collection, please feel free to reach out to our staff ( [email protected] ) and we are happy to provide guidance.

The New Jim Crow

The New Jim Crow  has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by  Michelle Alexander’ s unforgettable argument that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” As the  Birmingham News  proclaimed, it is “undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S.”

Citation:  Alexander, Michelle.  The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness . New York: The New Press, 2020.

• Read e-book @ Harvard Library
• View @ Publisher Site

One Person, No Vote

Carol Anderson follows the astonishing story of government-dictated racial discrimination unfolding before our very eyes as more and more states adopt voter suppression laws. In gripping, enlightening detail she explains how voter suppression works, from photo ID requirements to gerrymandering to poll closures. And with vivid characters, she explores the resistance: the organizing, activism, and court battles to restore the basic right to vote to all Americans.

Citation:  Anderson, Carol.  One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy . New York: Bloomsbury, 2018.

Carefully linking historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Carol Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage.

Citation:  Anderson, Carol.  White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide . New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.

The Fire Next Time

At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin ’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters,” written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both Black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism.

Citation:  Baldwin, James.  The Fire Next Time . New York: Vintage, 1992.

• Read e-book @ Harvard Library

White Fragility

Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration,  Robin DiAngelo  examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

Citation:  DiAngelo, Robin.  White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism . Boston: Beacon Press, 2018.

Never Caught

A startling and eye-opening look into America’s First Family, Erica Armstrong Dunbar tells the powerful narrative of Ona Judge, George and Martha Washington’s runaway slave who risked it all to escape the nation’s capital and reach freedom.

Citation:  Dunbar, Erica Armstrong.  Never Caught: The Washington's Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge . 37Ink; Atria Books: New York, 2017.

• View @ Author Site

How to Be Less Stupid About Race

Crystal Fleming  provides your essential guide to breaking through the half-truths and ridiculous misconceptions that have thoroughly corrupted the way race is represented in the classroom, pop culture, media, and politics.

Citation:  Fleming, Crystal.  How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide . New York: Penguin Random House, 2019.

The Broken Heart of America

From Lewis and Clark’s 1804 expedition to the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, American history has been made in St. Louis. And as Walter Johnson shows in this searing book, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation’s past.

Citation:  Johnson, Walter.  The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States.  New York: Basic Books, 2020.

How to Be an Antiracist

Ibram X. Kendi 's concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America - but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. Instead of working with the policies and system we have in place, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it. 

Citation:  Kendi, Ibram X.  How to Be an Antiracist . New York: One World, 2019.

Kiese Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed Black son to a complicated and brilliant Black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, he asks us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.

Citation:  Laymon, Kiese.  Heavy: An American Memoir . New York: Scribner, 2018.

The Condemnation of Blackness

The idea of Black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans’ own ideas about race and crime. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of Black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants,  Khalil Gibran Muhammad  - HKS Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy - reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.

Citation:  Muhammad, Khalil Gibran.  The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

The Color of Law

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein , a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through  de facto  segregation—that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather,  The Color of Law  incontrovertibly makes clear that it was  de jure  segregation—the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments—that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.

Citation:  Rothstein, Richard.  The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America . New York; London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017.

• View @ Harvard Library

Courageous Conversations About Race

Glenn Singleton  explains the need for candid, courageous conversations about race so that educators may understand why student disengagement and achievement inequality persists and learn how they can develop a curriculum that promotes true educational equity and excellence.

Citation:  Singleton, Glenn.  Courageous Conversations about Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools . Los Angeles: Corwin, 2015.

This book is  Bryan Stevenson 's (MPP/JD 1985 LLD 2015) unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice. Stevenson was honored by HKS in 2018 with the 2018 Alumni Public Service Award .

Citation:  Stevenson, Bryan.  Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.  New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.

• View young adult adaptation @ Publisher Site

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, white, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy?  Beverly Daniel Tatum , a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues that straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about enabling communication across racial and ethnic divides.

Citation:  Tatum, Beverly Daniel.  Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations about Race . New York: Basic Books, 2003.

From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar  Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor  surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.

Citation:  Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta.  From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation . Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.

• R ead e-book @ Harvard Library

Race Matters

Race Matters  contains Cornel West ’s most powerful essays on the issues relevant to black Americans today: despair, black conservatism, black-Jewish relations, myths about black sexuality, the crisis in leadership in the black community, and the legacy of Malcolm X. And the insights that he brings to these complicated problems remain fresh, exciting, creative, and compassionate.

Citation:  West, Cornel.  Race Matters . Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.

As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not. In this book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

Citation: Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents . New York: Random House, 2020.

Charleston Syllabus

In the aftermath of the Charleston massacre, Professors  Chad Williams ,  Kidada E. Williams , and  Keisha N. Blain  sought a way to put the murder-and the subsequent debates in the media-in the context of America's tumultuous history of race relations and racial violence on a global scale. They created the  Charleston Syllabus  on June 19, starting it as a hashtag on Twitter linking to scholarly works on the myriad of issues related to the murder.

Citation:  Williams, Chad, Kidada E. Williams, and Keisha N. Blain. (Eds.)  Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence . Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2016.

Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence

If you believe that talking about race is impolite, or that "colorblindness" is the preferred approach, you must read this book.  Derald Wing Sue  debunks the most pervasive myths using evidence, easy-to-understand examples, and practical tools.

Citation:  Wing Sue, Derald.  Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race . Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2015.

The Sum of Us

The Sum of Us is a brilliant analysis of how we arrived here: divided and self-destructing, materially rich but spiritually starved and vastly unequal. Heather McGhee marshals economic and sociological research to tell an irrefutable story of racism's costs, but at the heart of the book are the humble stories of people yearning to be part of a better America, including white supremacy's collateral victims: white people themselves. With startling empathy, this heartfelt message from a Black woman to a multiracial America leaves us with a new vision for a future in which we finally realize that life can be more than a zero-sum game.

Citation: McGhee, Heather. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together . New York: One World, 2021.

• Hannah-Jones, Nikole. (2019). The 1619 Project .  The New York Times Magazine .
• Coates, Ta-Nehisi. (2014). The Case for Reparations .  The Atlantic .
• DiAngelo, Robin. (2017). Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism .  Huffington Post .
• McIntosh, Peggy. (1989). White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack . Peace and Freedom .
• Serwer, Adam. (2020). The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying .  The Atlantic .
• Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem. (2020). Don’t Understand the Protests? What You're Seeing is People Pushed to the Edge .  Los Angeles Times .
• Hinton, Elizabeth. (2020). The Minneapolis Uprising in Context .  Boston Review .
• Hannah-Jones, Nikole. 1619 .  The New York Times .
• Muhammad, Khalil Gibran and Ben Austen. Some of My Best Friends Are . Pushkin .
• Carroll, Rebecca. Come Through with Rebecca Carroll .  WNYC Studios .
• Biewen, John. Seeing White .  Scene On Radio .
• Raghuveera, Nikhil and Erica Licht. Untying Knots .  SoundCloud .
• Moyo, Thoko. A historic crossroads for systemic racism and policing in America .  PolicyCast . Featuring Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Erica Chenoweth .

Select Community Organizations, provided by the IARA

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Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability Project

An Ash Center project working at the intersection of community, academia, and policy to address questions of anti-racism policy, practice, and institutional change.

Maya Sen & Matthew Blackwell's "Deep Roots"

In this  Behind the Book  video, professors take an historical look at how the institution of U.S. slavery continues to shape the views of the present.

Fairness & Justice

HKS faculty tackle policy questions from racial equity, to the climate, to education, and beyond.

Justice Matters Podcast

Carr Center director Sushma Raman investigates a wide array of human rights issues at home and abroad.

Anti-Racism Book & Film Club

Harvard Library facilitates community discussions of anti-Black racism through books & film.

Addressing Racism and Social Injustice

• Posted June 16, 2020
• By Emily Boudreau

In a 2015 convening, the Harvard Graduate School of Education asked, “What strategies can educators use to promote justice, fairness, tolerance, and genuine communication in our schools and society?” The discussion came eight months after Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black male, was killed by a white police office in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking a campaign to confront racism and police violence. The conversation was moderated by Professor Paul Reville , director of the Education Redesign Lab , with panelists Tiffany Anderson, then the superintendent of the Jennings School District in Missouri; Tracey Benson , Ed.L.D.’16, now an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Charlotte; Ni’Cole Gipson, parent and social media activist; and Valeria Silva, former superintendent of St. Paul (Minnesota) Public Schools — all of whom offered insights on issues of race, inequality, and justice that resonate strongly today, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

Here are a few highlights from that discussion.

How Tiffany Anderson amplified student voice to make a difference

The Jennings District is directly outside of Ferguson. In the days following the murder of Michael Brown, Anderson found a way to bring her students together and provided them with the resources they needed to advocate for themselves and their communities. Here, she talks about that experience.

Tracey Benson on why schools are uniquely positioned to effect change and start the conversation

Schools play a role in perpetuating systemic racism and inequality. Benson explains why schools also may have the power to disrupt that very system.  

Ni’Cole Gipson on why schools need to partner with families and communities to promote justice

Gipson and other parents worked to create safe and loving spaces for Ferguson’s students. Here, she talks about her experience as a parent and the ways in which schools might better support the conversations she, as a black woman in America, needs to have with her son.

Valeria Silva on the work school personnel and leadership must do to pave the way for discussion

Racism often goes unnoticed because it’s engrained in the system of schooling. Silva talks about the work teachers and school leaders must do to be consciously anti-racist and uproot discriminatory practices.

Additional Resources

• Harvard EdCast: Notes from Ferguson
• Exploring the historical roots of the enduring segregation that undermines urban schools.
• Harvard EdCast: Unconscious Bias in Schools

Usable Knowledge

Connecting education research to practice — with timely insights for educators, families, and communities

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Higher Ed. at Harvard Event Addresses Looming End of Affirmative Action

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Freedom, Equality, Race

This essay explores some of the reasons for the continuing power of racial categorization in our era, and thus offers some friendly amendments to the more optimistic renderings of the term  post-racial.  Focusing mainly on the relationship between black and white Americans, it argues that the widespread embrace of universal values of freedom and equality, which most regard as antidotes to racial exclusion, actually reinforce it. The internal logic of these categories requires the construction of the “other.” In America, where freedom and equality still stand at the contested center of collective identity, a history of racial oppression informs the very meaning of these terms. Thus the irony: much of the effort exerted to transcend race tends to fuel continuing division.

JEFFREY B. FERGUSON is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Black Studies and American Studies at Amherst College. He is the author of  The Harlem Renaissance: A Brief History with Documents  (2008) and  The Sage of Sugar Hill: George S. Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance  (2005).

Our current era of race relations in America maintains racial distinctions largely through the expectation that they will soon disappear. This stands in contrast with previous periods, in which such categories as black and white counted as durable facts of descent and destiny. One side of the current race debate plays up the disappearance of racial distinctions, sometimes by exaggerating the virtues of color blindness. The other side guards against the diminishment of such distinctions, at times going so far as to equate current racial problems with the dark and distant past of slavery and Jim Crow. For the first camp–what we might call a “party of hope”– current racial realities signal the promise of a raceless future where skin color may have no more societal import than does eye color. The second –a “party of memory”–aims for a similar goal, but it generally casts its ultimate purpose in more pluralistic terms. This party finds the waning of timeworn forms of racial identity, along with the deeply etched barriers that gave rise to them, threatening to the very political movements that might bring about lasting positive change. Ironically, the party of memory finds what the party of hope would call racial progress somewhat dangerous to ultimate racial justice. No less curious is the party of hope’s prevailing expectation that after more than two hundred years of constant racial strife, black and white identity in the United States will simply fade away.

In some ways, the expectation that race will disappear seems particular to our era of race relations; but in other ways, the thought goes back quite far. Most Americans have always regarded the abiding values of our country as universal, and therefore raceless. Because they think of such principles as equality and freedom in this way, they believe that eventually, in an essentially good and fair country such as ours, these high ideals will prevail over the more parochial values that keep us apart. Historically, this progressive mindset has come with many good intentions on the race question but much less follow-up. For this and other reasons it has long been an object of attack for scholars of the African American experience. Those who believe that racial problems will go away on their own tend not to act directly to solve them, or they put forth half-stepping measures that address some issues but invent, reinvent, or exacerbate others. Over time, this tendency has contributed mightily to the cloud of betrayal that hangs constantly, and sometimes ominously, over the American racial discourse. At its worst, the seemingly benign idea of progress, which many still regard as the soul of the American dream, can serve as a mask for crass class interest, or can allow racists to “blame the victim” and thus to deny the cruel meaning of their anti-democratic views. Yet these consequences of progress do not contradict the meaning of such foundational values as freedom and equality so much as they manifest their inner logic.

It is worth remembering the uncomfortable and often repeated fact that our most cherished American principles have as one of their most important sources the minds of slavemasters and slave traders. Discerning observers of the American experience, such as the historian Edmund Morgan, have demonstrated a necessary relationship between the freedom cries of slavemasters and their status as absolute rulers of stateless men and women who were regarded primarily as property and as human beings in a much less formal register. In American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), Morgan argues that ruling-class Southerners at the time of the American Revolution–Patrick Henry, for example–tended to associate all subordination with the wretched condition of their slaves. 1 They employed this analogy in their idealistic insistence on freedom from the British. Henry’s famous eruption on the floor of the Continental Congress, “Give me liberty or give me death,” marked him as a radical republican, one ready to pay the highest price for independence. Nevertheless, the reverberant utterance of this slaveholding Virginian (and others like him) bequeathed a cruel legacy to generations of Americans. Unlike free white men, Henry’s slaves lived under the very condition that would presumably have driven their freedom-loving master to kill and to die. Henry’s formulation, oddly, justified the degradation of African Americans by the very condition that the degradation caused; in no small measure, it associated blackness with shame. Though they lived to guarantee the freedom of supposedly independent men, and yearned for freedom in their own terms despite their abasement, African Americans suffered for how starkly they symbolized what white men both feared and despised.

Many writers have observed that the Enlightenment, through its emphasis on human powers, gave freedom its modern meaning; but it also codified the modern idea of race as one way to distinguish those worthy of liberty from the irrational, uncivilized, and superstitious “others” who supposedly lived in a perpetual past. In other words, this period handed down most of the reasons to believe in race along with the justifications for despising and resisting it. As the Enlightenment gave life to the modern concept of race, it created the conditions that force us to explain and theorize this category incessantly. In the hands of early race theorists such as Linnaeus, Blumenbach, and de Buffon, seemingly objective biological categories like skin color and skull size served as impartial measures that positioned man as a subject of his own scientific inquiry and thus as an object of new forms of power/ knowledge that enabled the shaping and control of populations. Thus, human freedom in this era, and thereafter, depended crucially on a thoroughgoing form of subjection that created its own human hierarchies, which in some ways reinscribed ancient ideas of descent and inheritance but now with new and highly influential scientific imprimatur. As the modern concept of freedom carried with it the inclusive language of universalism, it also privileged certain human qualities: rationality, possession of nature or property, power, resistance, and autonomy, to name a few. Instead of membership in humanity as it is, freedom signified communion with humanity as it ought to be . Those who failed to qualify for this imagined ideal often faced terrible consequences, as the long history of slavery, imperialism, sexism, and class oppression demonstrates amply.

From their inception, the concepts of freedom and race have reinforced each other in the making of modernity; they continue to do so today, though the concept of race has shifted in its definitional grounding, from nature to culture. Despite the fact that some of the old biological valences remain active, the post-civil rights concept of race relies mainly on values, modes of signifying, and behavior. Rather than membership in a biological group, “whiteness” represents a cultural norm that non-whites may receive rewards for adopting– though acquiring the necessary cultural capital to do so can prove almost impossible for many. Here, as the social theorist Etienne Balibar points out, the work of exclusion occurs through the regulation of inclusion rather than forming an absolute line of demarcation between the races. 2 Those able to conform to the normalizing logic of post-civil rights “whiteness” live freer lives than those who cannot, as the dismal statistics showing racial disparities in wealth, health, education, and criminal justice reveal so evidently. Under this regime, the work of racial exclusion can occur quite efficiently but without overt racism. In contrast with the frontal assault of the pre-civil rights racial regime, which occurred more or less in the open, the new dispensation conducts most of its oppressive labor behind a smokescreen of elaborate racial etiquette and discursive deflection that communicates racial fear and aversion across an ever wider range of signification.

In its more recent cultural guise, race continues to play a strategic role on the exclusionary side of modern freedom; for the excluded, however, racial identity still has deep attractions, partly because the sheer existence of barriers to full social advancement provides a backdrop against which group solidarity might be perceived in moral terms: as part of a long and righteous struggle for freedom. This idea is well established among African Americans, who, out of the necessity of historic struggle, have formed an alternately heroic, sacrificial, and sometimes melodramatic sense of group belonging laden with collective memories of struggle on the wrong side of the American color line. These struggles have served not only as ways of acquiring freedom, but also as a means of performing it culturally and politically across a great range that encompasses modes of self-fashioning, artistic styles, and direct forms of political resistance and protest. This tradition of performing freedom has helped raise African American identity above the level of mere external imposition as it has created a point of identification for those outside the group to symbolize their own freedom struggles.

As a dominant value in American life, freedom has always stood beside, and competed with, the idea of equality. Nowhere has the complex relationship between these two bedrock concepts had greater impact than in the history of race relations, and rarely has their mutual opposition and entanglement received more trenchant treatment than in the work of the nineteenth-century French aristocrat and social theorist Alexis de Tocqueville. In his classic Democracy in America (1840), he observed that in a country where all men are created equal, those not recognized as equals may not be regarded as men. Tocqueville’s eminently logical formula sets out in elegant form the intimate connection between a high universal ideal and a foundational violence that it maintains through masking. Following Tocqueville’s calculation, hierarchies of descent grow naturally from the inner tensions of democratic values, not out of a failure to attend to them. Americans constantly reinvent racial distinctions and invidious race theories in part to resolve the quandary of their national condition, which entails basic equality on one side and a battle for individual distinction or status on the other.

Basing his observations on an extensive tour of the United States during the 1830s, Tocqueville regarded American society as a test case for the prospects of a new and inexorable world-historical process in which equality, individualism, and democracy would increasingly displace privilege based on birth and permanent class structures. He contemplated America at an early stage of its development with the chaos and despotism of post-revolutionary France, and the slipping grip of his own class, well in view. Though he recognized the positive potential of democracy, he remained equally cognizant of its constitutional flaws: its tendencies toward conformity, dictatorship of the people, corruption, greed, envy, moralism, intellectual shallowness, voluntary isolation of the individual from collective life, and many other weaknesses both large and small. For Tocqueville, American society in the 1830s represented a wonderful opportunity to observe whether such defective tendencies would prevail because it offered a perfect photo-negative of the European social picture: a place where sheer newness put immigrants and near-immigrants, strangers to the land with no permanent barrier between them, in a society where they might arrange life according to their tastes, talents, and desires. Many of the saving graces and sustaining patterns that Tocqueville recognized in American democracy–its local associations and communal public life, its ascetic faith in the value of work, its dynamic and expansive world-altering will–stand endangered in our own age; thus, we may still wonder about the ultimate survivability of our way of life. Or, in light of American race relations from slavery to the present, we might wonder whether Tocqueville understood entirely the full array of forces that have made American democracy cohere. In the end, the stability of our democracy may depend as much on the maintenance of racial inequality, vouchsafed by the anxieties of equality, as it does on the values and structures that Tocqueville so famously cited.

Without “blackness,” or some such negative or countervailing category, “whiteness” would not have achieved its stability as the primary mode of identification in America. And without the stabilizing effect of “blackness,” one of the main justifications for the average white person to count himself a member of the same group as the richest would not exist. As several important scholars of whiteness studies, such as David Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, and Matthew Frye Jacobson, have shown, this formula has provided one of the greatest bulwarks against the formation of entrenched class identity, even as Americans of all colors and persuasions strive to climb the class ladder partly by blending in. 3 Whiteness, with all its confused connotations of universality and particularity, of destiny and sheer emptiness, still prevails as a reason for some of the poorest Americans to tolerate their condition, even as demographers anticipate the day, not more than forty years from now, when the American majority will, in numbers, take on a darker hue.

In his famous section “On the Three Races that Currently Inhabit America,” Tocqueville contributed a foundational pillar to a long tradition of social analysis that would regard the problem of black and white as an aberration rather than a constitutive feature of American social and political life. Though he analyzes the slave South in detail, he treats it as the opposite of the industrial North, which for him represented the future of American democracy because of its burgeoning productivity, culture of equality, and the competitive anxiety of its citizens. In the South, he surmised, the existence of slavery retarded development. Rather than productive, the South was lazy; instead of progressive, it remained mired in the past. Lacking ingenuity, it depended on a narrow range of cash crops; lacking equality, it suffered from the absence of inner drive in its rank-and-file citizens, who depended on relatively unproductive slaves to do most of the work. None of these characteristics augured well for the survival of the South. Underdeveloped by its own economic and cultural commitments, faced with an expansive and dynamic sectional competitor, and threatened by the natural increase of its slave population, it faced an imminent crisis. In time, Tocqueville imagined, the South would lose its grip on its slaves, in part because these unfree people, as members of a society that prized equality, would never accept their unequal station, and thus could never embrace the spirit of European peasantry. Yet, he thought, whites would never admit blacks as equals. A racist himself, Tocqueville believed that whites everywhere in the United States would understandably continue to discriminate against an inferior people, and that blacks stood little chance beyond establishing their own state by conducting a war against indolent Southern whites. Given their numbers, and what he regarded as the decrepit moral state of their white enemies, he liked their chances in such a conflict. 4

Tocqueville’s analysis of race in “On the Three Races that Currently Inhabit America” commands current interest much more for its connection to his larger theory than for its historical accuracy. Much of what he anticipated simply did not happen. Moreover, few current historians of American slavery would take up his dichotomous view of North and South, his dim account of slavery’s profitability, his unitary view of the slave system, or his somewhat mechanical rendering of the effects of the peculiar institution on the hearts, minds, and motivations of slaves and slaveholders. Nevertheless, Tocqueville’s theoretical terms in Democracy in America do provide a good foundation for understanding how the value of equality helped reinforce the perennial American obsession with racial distinction.

Tocqueville believed that white Americans, beyond their motivations rooted in racism, would find black Americans hard to accept because of the radically unequal station from which they started. Locked in an absorbing competition with their peers and exceedingly nervous about the prospects of rising and falling in the game of distinction, white Americans would always feel compromised by their association with a degraded and inferior people; their anxiety derived in part from how perfectly the condition of congenital inferiority and social invisibility reflected their own worst fears. The promise of American life, rooted in the idea that no permanent social barrier stands between even the lowest white man and the very richest, comes with the devastating prospect of freefall: those who can rise infinitely can also fall into uncharted territory of vulnerability, invisibility, and loss. Cut off from strong claims to a primordial past, and staked on the prospect of ever better days to come, white Americans needed to invent the nigger–the nameless, faceless, incompetent who warranted no respect –in order to hide from the real prospect of becoming one. The “psychological wage” of whiteness, which W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified in Black Reconstruction (1935) to explain what kept the white and black working classes apart, rested heavily on this formula, for no matter how far a white person fell in the competition with other whites, he could always look back and spot a dark face in his rearview mirror. Given the broad patterns of American politics since the late 1960s–from the success of the Republican “Southern Strategy,” to the disaffection of Northern working-class whites who abandoned the Democratic coalition in the 1970s and 1980s, to today’s racially inflected Tea Party movement and paranoid fears concerning a “Marxist,” “Fascist,” “Muslim,” African American president–it would appear that an unfortunately high proportion of whites still subscribe to this way of thinking.

In his many essays on race and American identity, Ralph Ellison wrote artfully of what he called the democratic “chaos” that white Americans sought to avoid through their various projections onto African Americans. Today, this process might have more varied economic and social consequences than in the pre-civil rights era when Ellison gave it such eloquent codification, but the moral consequences have not changed very much at all. According to Ellison, these projections have at their root the cowardly avoidance of ethical responsibility to give shape to the self within a democratic culture. At its best, Ellison suggested, such a culture demands sincere engagement with diverse human possibility; at its worst, it cowers behind candy-coated fantasies of goodness already achieved and bounty with no consequence. As diligent and successful shapers of a way of life, African Americans have affirmed democratic possibility under the toughest circumstances by facing the ultimate threat of nothingness and bringing themselves into being, though they have also succumbed in countless ways to illusions stemming from the anger, despair, and resentment endemic to their social circumstance. Ellison’s protagonist in the novel Invisible Man (1952) spends the larger part of the book living the false life of a black man on the make who takes his signals concerning who to be from whites, whose humanity he cannot clearly recognize for lack of facing his own. Just as whites project their desires onto him, he regards them as mere conduits to power, and thus as gods of a sort. His power fantasy engenders only weakness. 5

The game of projection at the heart of race relations comes, according to Ellison, with a large portion of paranoia, as whites, subject to the identity confusion so basic to American life, know on some unconscious level that black skin forms the mystic writing pad of their own desires. Of course, blacks sense the same thing: that in important ways, white Americans, for all their apparent strength as a group, remain vulnerable and always a bit worried that the person behind the black mask must know their desires– and with that truth in hand, may well be putting one over on them. Today, in our post-civil rights period, a large part of this game occurs around the public drama of continuing black anger, the notion of “pulling the race card,” and the seemingly bottomless need from whites for confirmation from blacks that racism no longer exists, or at the very least that they as individuals bear no visible trace of the unspeakable sin.

To this observation some might answer that black people no longer suffer from invisibility in the same way they did when Ellison penned his famous works. Over the last thirty years, although large portions of the black lower and working classes have remained poor–indeed, many have become even poorer–the black middle class has risen to unprecedented heights of professional achievement, inclusion in important institutions, and social exposure. Today, the appearance of black Americans in advertising and the media no longer surprises, nor do the images they portray necessarily reflect stereotypes. Some popular stars, such as Tiger Woods, whose multiracial background would not have spared him from being considered black in the pre-civil rights era, dwell in an apparent racial twilight zone that seems “neither black nor white, yet both.” 6 Though the country remains highly segregated residentially and educationally, and intermarriage rates between blacks and whites show only incremental increases, surveys of white Americans reveal a continuing diminishment of overt racism rooted in ideas of biological inferiority. And the clincher of this case needs almost no mention: our president is an African American.

Yet these signs of progress seem to engender their opposite. The effort that our society has exerted to make advances in race relations has also served at times to reinforce the importance of race in our politics and to encourage new styles of racial identification. Nothing reflects this fact better than the effect of affirmative action policies, which have granted middle-class blacks unprecedented access to important institutions, but at the same time have led many whites to think in zero-sum terms about racial progress: a job given to a black American is one denied to a more qualified white. At times, even our celebrations of racial progress serve to reinforce boundaries between the races because they require us to reinscribe race discursively by employing it as a mode of classification. Recently, a reporter commented after a speech by President Obama that, during the course of that address, he had forgotten Obama’s race. No doubt his thought reflected that of many Americans of every description. Of course, this reporter’s amazement at experiencing a supposedly raceless moment required him constantly to note, as Obama spoke, that he really was in the presence of the “other,” but in a fashion both new and unapproachable because otherness itself was absent. In a sense, Obama had provided a moment for the reporter that exceeded the limits of his racial categories. But recognizing this fact required the evocation of a highly reified and essential form of blackness, a virtual thing in itself requiring almost no content. Though Obama did not “talk black” or “act black”–apparently he did not even “look black” to this reporter– somehow he was black, nonetheless.

Such are the confusions of our moment, emanations of an undigested past. In Black Odyssey (1977), a book that over the years has become a classic in black studies for its challenge to the progressive brand of American historiography, Nathan Huggins reaches back in his epilogue to wonder how the sprawling green visage of the new world first appeared to the twenty slaves aboard the fateful Dutch ship that lay off the shore of Jamestown in 1619. 7 In making this gesture, he parodies (to some extent) the final scene of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), which famously reflects on the beauty and tragedy of the American insistence on remaining forever new. Though he does not say so directly, Huggins suggests that the powerful effect of Fitzgerald’s famous passage, in all its tragic wisdom, depends in part on the exclusion of those early black captives, who also brought dreams with them, however muted by misfortune. While these dreams, and the efforts they engendered, would over generations play a great role in constituting the American experience, so would the attempts to exclude them or to play down their importance. Our nation has certainly made some progress on this record, but it has not arrived at the new narrative of the American experience that Huggins thought necessary to align American dreams with the events that have made us who we are. Race has marked American culture trenchantly, as it has marked the basic principles that we regard as raceless. Recognizing the full meaning of this thought will require a new narrative, indeed. In his last sentence, both in homage and in mild derision, Huggins quotes the famous last line of Gatsby , which still merits our deepest reflection: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.”

• 1 On the connection between republicanism and slavery, see Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 363–390; also Edmund S. Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” The Journal of American History 59 (1) (June 1972): 5–29.
• 2 Etienne Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class (London: Verso, 1991), 17–28.
• 3 See Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (New York: Verso, 2007); and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
• 4 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 302–391.
• 5 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1995); Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Mask of Humanity,” Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1995), 24–29, 41; see also in the same volume, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” 53.
• 6 This is the title of Werner Sollors’s authoritative account of interracial literature in America; see Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
• 7 Nathan Irvin Huggins, Black Odyssey: The Afro-American Ordeal in Slavery (New York: Random House, 1990), 243–244.

Racial Justice 101: Definitions, Examples, and Learning Opportunities

Racial justice is the equal and fair treatment of everyone regardless of ethnicity or race. To achieve racial justice, societies must tackle racial prejudice, discrimination, and systems that disproportionately harm some while favoring others. What do you need to know about racial justice? In this article, we’ll explore important definitions, examples of racial justice, and learning opportunities like courses and books.

Racial justice reckons with the legacies of discrimination, removes existing barriers to racial equality, and promotes equity.

Definitions: Where do race and racism come from?

The world didn’t always believe in race. According to author and activist George M. Fredrickson, race and racism first emerged during the Middle Ages. The 13th and 14th centuries in particular saw an increase in antisemitism, which the Southern Poverty Law Center refers to as “the oldest hatred.” However, the word “race” didn’t start to have its modern meaning until the 17th century . Scientists, philosophers, and other academics were categorizing plants, animals, and other parts of the natural world using reason and science, so it only made sense to them to categorize humans in the same way. Through the 18th century, Europeans projected their ignorance, biases, and hatred into their categorizations, creating racial hierarchies that put white people on top. “Race science” justified the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonization, and other atrocities.

While race as a social construct is very real, research consistently disproves the merits of race science; there is no genetic basis for race. This is important to understand because inaccurate views about so-called “inherent” racial differences often justify inequality. In reality, racial injustice is sustained by three types of racism : interpersonal, institutional, and systemic racism.

Interpersonal racism springs from an individual’s beliefs and attitudes about race. It occurs between individuals and can include slurs, biases, and hate crimes. Institutional racism manifests within an organization and includes discriminatory behaviors, biased policies, and organizational practices that create inequitable outcomes. Systemic racism is society-wide and refers to systems of racial biases that privilege certain groups while disadvantaging others. Racial justice requires a reckoning with interpersonal, institutional, and systemic racism.

What do you feel is the biggest barrier to achieving racial justice?

• A lack of understanding about racism and racial justice
• A lack of funding for racial justice organizations and initiatives
• Hostility toward transforming institutions and systems

View Results

What are some examples of racial justice?

You now have a clearer idea of where ideas about race and racism come from. How have people fought against racial injustice over the years? Here are three major examples:

#1 Ending segregation

Case study: South Africa

For almost 50 years, South Africa had a society segregated by race. The process took centuries following the arrival of Dutch settlers in South Africa. Even though white settlers made up a minority of the population, they eventually gained total control of South Africa’s government and economy in 1948. The all-white National Party enforced harsh racial segregation , which separated people based on their race, criminalized interracial marriage, and denied Black South Africans equal rights and opportunities.

For the anti-apartheid movement, racial justice efforts took many forms. The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict lists strategies such as school boycotts, mass demonstrations, memorials, economic boycotts, and much more. In the late 1980s, change finally arrived. The government began negotiations with anti-apartheid groups and in 1993, the prime minister agreed to hold the first all-race, democratic election . Nelson Mandela was elected and in 1994, the apartheid system finally ended.

The legacy of segregation continues to impact South Africa. As an example, while the ANC funded almost 2 million homes for Black South Africans between 1994-2004, the homes’ locations reinforced segregation and existing issues like limited access to public services, high costs, and long commutes. In 2022, South Africa was the most unequal country in the world ; 10% of the population held more than 80% of the wealth. Race is still a big reason why, so while apartheid may have ended, racial justice is still being fought for.

#2 Reforming the criminal justice system

Case study: The United States

The United States criminal justice system is racially biased. According to data from the NAACP , Black Americans make up 22% of fatal police shootings, 47% of wrongful conviction exonerations, and 35% of those who receive the death penalty. Black people make up just 13.4% of the US population. These numbers aren’t disproportionate because Black people are inherently more criminal. In her book The New Jim Crow , legal scholar Michelle Alexander points to projects like the war on drugs, which was part of Ronald Reagan’s “Southern strategy” to appeal to poor and working-class white people resentful of the gains of the Civil Rights movement.

To improve racial justice, the criminal justice system must be reformed. In an overview of criminal justice reform in 2022, the Sentencing Project lists trends like reducing prison admissions, adopting sentencing alternatives for drug offenses, limiting incarceration for parole violations, and ensuring incarcerated voters get access to voting. How police operate in the country must also be challenged. Police violence (which is a global problem ) and the level of protection violent cops receive are two major racial justice issues.

#3 Paying reparations

Case study: Harvard University

The OHCHR defines reparations as “measures to redress violations of human rights by providing a range of material and symbolic benefits to victims or their families as well as affected communities.” In the United States, reparations come up during discussions about the legacy of slavery. Since 1991, NAACP has affirmed reparations such as a national apology, financial payment, social service benefits, and land grants. While there are currently no federal reparations programs, universities have begun adopting them.

Harvard University is one example. In 2022, the school released a report documenting its ties to slavery, which included direct, financial, and intellectual connections. As part of its reckoning, Harvard announced it was setting aside $100 million for an endowment fund and other actions. It does not mention direct reparations to descendants of those impacted by Harvard’s history with slavery. Harvard isn’t the only university to adopt some form of reparations; Georgetown University has the Reconciliation Fund . This fund gives $400,000 annually to projects directly impacting descendents of those enslaved on the Maryland Jesuit plantations. Reparations are controversial. While 77% of Black adults think descendants of enslaved people should receive some kind of reparations, just 18% of white U.S. adults agree.

Where can you find learning opportunities about racial justice?

This article only scratches the surface of racial justice, so here are three courses where you can learn more:

Anti-Racism Specialization (University of Colorado Boulder)

This 3-course specialization is a great choice for students interested in race and racism, especially in the United States. You’ll learn about critical race theory, historical and linguistic constructions of race in the US, and the theory of intersectionality. You’ll also learn to apply what you’ve learned outside the US, develop an interview project, and create a plan for practicing anti-racism.

Shawn O’Neal and Jennifer Ho from the Ethnic Studies department teach the course. If you take all three courses, the specialization takes about 3 months with 6 hours of work per week. No prerequisites are required.

REGISTER HERE

Structural Racism: Causes of Health Inequities in the US (University of Michigan)

Racial health disparities are very common in the US. This course digs into the reasons why and teaches students how to identify solutions. By the course’s end, you’ll be ready to describe the impact of structural racism, identify what causes current racial health inequities, and apply public writing strategies to combat racial health inequities.

Paul Fleming (Assistant Professor of Health Behavior & Health Education) and William D. Lopez (Assistant Professor of Health Behavior & Health Education) teach the course, which is divided into three modules. It takes 17 hours total to finish the course. No prerequisites are required.

Beyond Diversity: Anti-Racism and Equity in the Workplace (Berkeley University of California)

This professional certificate is great for diversity professionals interested in further career growth. Over three courses, you’ll learn how to navigate complicated group dynamics, communicate in challenging situations, and make critical decisions. By the end, you’ll be ready to identify and respond to unconscious and implicit bias, understand the perspectives of minoritized employees, implement equitable hiring practices, and create an equitable, inclusive workplace for everyone.

Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton (Professor of Psychology) leads the course. With 5-8 hours of work per week, you can finish the certificate in about six months. As the courses are intermediate, some background knowledge is valuable, but there are no specific prerequisites.

What racial justice books should you read?

If you’re looking for texts about racial justice, here are five good ones to start with:

The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century (2022)

Peniel E. Joseph

Historian Peniel E. Joseph frames 2020 as the “climax” of a Third Reconstruction and new struggle for Black Americans. With insight into centuries past, Joseph tracks the Third Reconstruction from Barack Obama’s election to the January 6th assault on the capitol. While the first two Reconstructions fell short, can the Third Reconstruction achieve victory?

To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe (2019)

Francesa Sobanade (editor) and Akwugo Emejulu (editor)

In this book, activists, artists, and scholars explore how Black feminism and Afrofeminism are practiced in Europe. Gender, class, sexuality, and legal status are just a few examples of what’s covered in this text. With sharp insight, the authors imagine a future beyond the boundaries of neocolonialism and modern Europe practices.

Caste: The Origins of our Discontents (2020) 

Isabel Wilkerson

Why is America the way it is? In this book, Isabel Wilkerson describes a hidden caste system, which goes beyond race, class, and other factors. She describes the eight pillars that uphold caste systems across time, including stigma, bloodlines, and divine will, and explores how American can move on from artificial divisions toward true equality.

So You Want to Talk About Race (2019)

Ijeoma Oluo

How do you talk about race? In this book, Ijeoma Oluo provides a roadmap for talking about race with the people in your life, including family and coworkers. She covers topics like police brutality, the model minority myth, and cultural appropriation. Written with all races in mind, this book is a valuable tool for anyone interested in tough, honest conversations.

How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (2017)

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (editor)

In the 1960s and ‘70s, a group of radical Black feminists formed the Combahee River Collective. This book collects essays and interviews with the group’s founding members and contemporary activists reflecting on the group’s groundbreaking influence. How We Get Free is a vital read for anyone interested in feminism and racial justice.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

Racial Discrimination and Justice in Education Essay

The impact of racism in schools and on the mental health of students.

Funding is one of the main factors that ensure racial segregation and exacerbation of the plight of the black population. Being initially in a more disastrous economic situation, racial minority populations fall into a vicious circle. Low-funded schools in poor areas have low academic ratings, which further contributes to the reduction of the material base. Due to their poor academic performance and the need to earn a living, many minorities are deprived of the opportunity to receive prestigious higher education. They are left with low-skilled jobs, which makes it impossible for their children to go to private school or move to a prestigious area with well-funded public schools. In institutions with little funding, unfortunately, manifestations of racism still prevail.

A significant factor in systemic racism in modern schools is the theory of colorblindness as the prevailing ideology in schools and pedagogical universities. The total avoidance of racial topics in schools has led to a complete absence of material related to the culture of racial minorities in the curricula. An example is the complaint of the parents of one of the black students that, during the passage of civilizations, the Greeks, Romans, and Incas were discussed in the lessons, but nothing was said about Africa. However, there were a few African American students in the class (Yi et al., 2022). The white director justified herself by saying that this was the curriculum and that it was not customary at school to divide people by skin color. In response, the student’s mother stated that children have eyes, and they see everything. And she would like them to see that we had a strong and fruitful culture. This state of affairs is justified by the proponents of assimilationism and American patriotism, built mainly around the honoring of the merits of white settlers and the founding fathers.

Meanwhile, the works of many researchers provide evidence that a high level of colorblindness among students correlates with greater racial intolerance. One study on race relations was conducted among young “millennials”. As a result, thousands of reports were recorded of openly racist statements and actions of white people from the field of view of these students (Plaut, et al., 2018). Another study on colorblindness found that white students who avoid mentioning racial issues were less friendly on assignments with black partners. This could be because they have less eye contact.

The shortcomings of the described situation affect not only black students but also white teachers who have not received proper training in their time on how best to take into account the characteristics of students from racial minorities. One researcher writes that in his entire experience in multicultural education, he faced the almost universal embarrassment that racial issues caused to white teachers. A common complaint is: I feel helpless. What am I, as a white teacher, to do? One educator remarked that he had never seen African-American teachers say that they did not distinguish between races (Mekawi et al., 2017). This is further proof that racism and the factors leading to it contribute only to the split of social ties at school. Students from racial minorities feel this burden the most, which leads to their feeling of constant alienation. During the school years, conflicts with children “not like the rest” are especially aggravated – the state of affairs described above provides the basis for constant skirmishes, fights, and tension in institutions.

Suggestions for Creating an Inclusive School Environment

Among the educational factors supporting the status quo of widespread structural racism are the following. This is the system of financing public schools and the dominance of the ideology of colorblindness in schools and pedagogical universities. In the opposite direction, there is such a factor as the peculiarity of keeping educational statistics (Welton, et al., 2018). By providing up-to-date information on the state of affairs of students of various racial and ethnic groups, statistics give rise to the search for optimal solutions in the field of school policy.

The inclusion of racial and ethnic dimensions in educational statistics is intended to provide an objective assessment of the current situation regarding racial differences in American society in order to develop and improve racially relevant policies. In recent years, the ideas of culturally relevant pedagogy have been actively promoted in the US educational sphere. American citizens are becoming more interested and enlightened in the field of racial issues, which can be seen in activist speeches and anti-racist public actions.

It is crucial to teach racism in schools so that all pupils may understand what it is, how it affects, and how to stop tolerating it. There are many publications and learning experience plans that address racism. It is essential to ask teachers and principals to integrate lessons on racism into the syllabus. One can also request that your teachers incorporate novels with a variety of subjects (Welton, et al., 2018). Then, it is important to request that the school draft an inclusion and zero-tolerance statement. Counselors can encourage the instructors and administration to implement these policies at the school if they do not already exist in the code of conduct or other policies (Pizarro & Kohli, 2020). It is critical that schools have clear policies about race and how individuals are treated on campus.

Resources for the School Counselor to Deal With Prejudice and Its Impact at the School

Mekawi, Y., Bresin, K. & Hunter, C.D. (2017). Who is more likely to “not see race”? individual differences in racial colorblindness. Race and Social Problems, 9 (1), 207–217. Web.

The authors claim that many Americans support a colorblind racial philosophy, which emphasizes sameness and the equitable allocation of resources without regard to race. The current study looked at the relationships between aggressiveness, and empathy in white undergraduates and three distinct types of racial colorblindness, including ignorance of racial privilege, ignorance of institutional discrimination, and ignorance of overt racism. The findings showed two distinct trends. In contrast to ignorance of overt racism and institutional discrimination, which were linked to poorer cooperativeness, cognitive flexibility, and empathic concern, ignorance of racial privilege was associated with lower openness and viewpoint-taking. These findings are addressed in light of a larger body of research on bias and personality.

Pizarro, M., & Kohli, R. (2020). “I stopped sleeping”: Teachers of color and the impact of racial Battle Fatigue. Urban Education, 55 (7), 967–991. Web.

According to the authors, an operational definition of racial battle fatigue (RBF) is the mental, emotional, and physical costs of fighting racism. RBF is employed in this article to examine the effects of racism on educators of color who work in a predominately “White profession.” The scholars share counterstories of urban academics of color who confront racism on a regular basis in their workplaces. This has a negative effect on their well-being and ability to stay in the profession. The authors also discuss their resiliency and resistance tactics since they depend on a supportive community to persevere and change their schools.

Plaut, V. C., Thomas, K. M., Hurd, K., & Romano, C. A. (2018). Do Color blindness and multiculturalism remedy or foster discrimination and racism? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27 (3), 200–206. Web.

This article gives psychology science’s perspective on the question of whether multiculturalism and colorblindness are more likely to prevent prejudice and racism than they are to promote it. The authors first concentrate on the results of a color-blind model. The study in this area reveals that while colorblindness may be appealing to certain people, it can also make people less sensitive to racism and prejudice. Additionally, according to the literature, color blindness generally has detrimental effects on intergroup relationships, minorities’ perceptions and results, and the promotion of diversity and inclusion in organizational settings. In the second section, the scholars look at the situations in which a multicultural perspective has beneficial or bad effects on intergroup relations, organizational diversity initiatives, and discrimination.

Welton, A. D., Owens, D. R., & Zamani-Gallaher, E. M. (2018). Anti-racist change: A conceptual framework for educational institutions to take systemic action. Teachers College Record, 120 (14), 1–22. Web.

In order to attain racial justice in education, people’s mindsets must also be changed to embrace a more anti-racist worldview. In order to investigate whether behaviors and leadership qualities could really encourage institutional change for racial justice, the authors review two sets of literature: studies on anti-racism and institutional transformation. However, they admit the constraints of each set of studies. The organizational transformation research often ignores equity concerns, notably racial conversations, while anti-racism research is more ideological and theoretical. The scholars combine essential ideas from the literature on organizational change and anti-racism to propose a conceptual framework that may be utilized to create a systematic anti-racist change at a wide level.

Yi, J., Neville, H. A., Todd, N. R., & Mekawi, Y. (2022). Ignoring race and denying racism: A meta-analysis of the associations between colorblind racial ideology, anti-Blackness, and other variables antithetical to racial justice . Journal of Counseling Psychology . Web.

The authors sought to comprehend how colorblind racial ideology (CBRI), or the rejection and minimizing of race and racism, can act as an obstacle to engaging in antiracist practice by relying on antiracism research. To find out if color evasion (ignorance of race) and power evasion (defiance of structural racism) CBRI were differently connected with anti-Blackness and mechanisms related to antiracism, the scholars specifically performed a meta-analysis. Results from 83 research with more than 25,000 participants and 375 effects reveal that varied effects depend on the kind of CBRI. The area of counseling psychology may be pushed by this meta-analysis to construct a bridge between different ideologies and the development of systemic reform.

Plaut, V. C., Thomas, K. M., Hurd, K., & Romano, C. A. (2018). Do color blindness and multiculturalism remedy or foster discrimination and racism? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27 (3), 200–206. Web.

Yi, J., Neville, H. A., Todd, N. R., & Mekawi, Y. (2022). Ignoring race and denying racism: A meta-analysis of the associations between colorblind racial ideology, anti-Blackness, and other variables antithetical to racial justice. Journal of Counseling Psychology . Web.

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• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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"Nonviolence and Racial Justice"

Author:  King, Martin Luther, Jr.

Date:  February 6, 1957

Location:  Chicago, Ill.

Genre:  Published Article

Topic:  Nonviolence

On 26 November 1956 King submitted an article on nonviolence to  Christian Century , a liberal weekly religious magazine. In his cover letter to editor Harold Fey, King noted that “it has just been within the last few days that I have been able to take a little time off to do some much needed writing. If you find it possible to publish this article, please feel free to make any suggestions concerning the content.” He added that the journal’s “sympathetic treatment” of the bus boycott had been of “inestimable value.” 1  On 31 January Fey thanked King for the “excellent” article, and he featured it as the main essay in an issue devoted to race relations. 2  Drawing from his many speeches on the topic, King provides here a concise summary of his views regarding nonviolent resistance to segregation. 3

It is commonly observed that the crisis in race relations dominates the arena of American life. This crisis has been precipitated by two factors: the determined resistance of reactionary elements in the south to the Supreme Court’s momentous decision outlawing segregation in the public schools, and the radical change in the Negro’s evaluation of himself. While southern legislative halls ring with open defiance through “interposition” and “nullification,” while a modern version of the Ku Klux KIan has arisen in the form of “respectable” white citizens’ councils, a revolutionary change has taken place in the Negro’s conception of his own nature and destiny. Once he thought of himself as an inferior and patiently accepted injustice and exploitation. Those days are gone.

The first Negroes landed on the shores of this nation in 1619, one year ahead of the Pilgrim Fathers. They were brought here from Africa and, unlike the Pilgrims, they were brought against their will, as slaves. Throughout the era of slavery the Negro was treated in inhuman fashion. He was considered a thing to be used, not a person to be respected. He was merely a depersonalized cog in a vast plantation machine. The famous Dred Scott decision of 1857 well illustrates his status during slavery. In this decision the Supreme Court of the United States said, in substance, that the Negro is not a citizen of the United States; he is merely property subject to the dictates of his owner.

After his emancipation in 1863, the Negro still confronted oppression and inequality. It is true that for a time, while the army of occupation remained in the south and Reconstruction ruled, he had a brief period of eminence and political power. But he was quickly overwhelmed by the white majority. Then in 1896, through the Plessy  v.  Ferguson decision, a new kind of slavery came into being. In this decision the Supreme Court of the nation established the doctrine of “separate but equal” as the law of the land. Very soon it was discovered that the concrete result of this doctrine was strict enforcement of the “separate,” without the slightest intention to abide by the “equal.” So the Plessy doctrine ended up plunging the Negro into the abyss of exploitation where he experienced the bleakness of nagging injustice.

A Peace That Was No Peace

Living under these conditions, many Negroes lost faith in themselves. They came to feel that perhaps they were less than human. So long as the Negro maintained this subservient attitude and accepted the “place” assigned him, a sort of racial peace existed. But it was an uneasy peace in which the Negro was forced patiently to submit to insult, injustice and exploitation. It was a negative peace. True peace is not merely the absence of some negative force—tension, confusion or war; it is the presence of some positive force—justice, good will and brotherhood.

Then circumstances made it necessary for the Negro to travel more. From the rural plantation he migrated to the urban industrial community. His economic life began gradually to rise, his crippling illiteracy gradually to decline. A myriad of factors came together to cause the Negro to take a new look at himself. Individually and as a group, he began to re-evaluate himself. And so he came to feel that he was somebody. His religion revealed to him that God loves all his children and that the important thing about a man is “not his specificity but his fundamentum,” not the texture of his hair or the color of his skin but the quality of his soul.

This new self-respect and sense of dignity on the part of the Negro undermined the south’s negative peace, since the white man refused to accept the change. The tension we are witnessing in race relations today can be explained in part by this revolutionary change in the Negro’s evaluation of himself and his determination to struggle and sacrifice until the walls of segregation have been finally crushed by the battering rams of justice.

Quest for Freedom Everywhere

The determination of Negro Americans to win freedom from every form of oppression springs from the same profound longing for freedom that motivates oppressed peoples all over the world. The rhythmic beat of deep discontent in Africa and Asia is at bottom a quest for freedom and human dignity on the part of people who have long been victims of colonialism. The struggle for freedom on the part of oppressed people in general and of the American Negro in particular has developed slowly and is not going to end suddenly. Privileged groups rarely give up their privileges without strong resistance. But when oppressed people rise up against oppression there is no stopping point short of full freedom. Realism compels us to admit that the struggle will continue until freedom is a reality for all the oppressed peoples of the world.

Hence the basic question which confronts the world’s oppressed is: How is the struggle against the forces of injustice to be waged? There are two possible answers. One is resort to the all too prevalent method of physical violence and corroding hatred. The danger of this method is its futility. Violence solves no social problems; it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Through the vistas of time a voice still cries to every potential Peter, “Put up your sword!" 4  The shores of history are white with the bleached bones of nations and communities that failed to follow this command. If the American Negro and other victims of oppression succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle for justice, unborn generations will live in a desolate night of bitterness, and their chief legacy will be an endless reign of chaos.

Alternative to Violence

The alternative to violence is nonviolent resistance. This method was made famous in our generation by Mohandas K. Gandhi, who used it to free India from the domination of the British empire. Five points can be made concerning nonviolence as a method in bringing about better racial conditions.

First, this is not a method for cowards; it  does  resist. The nonviolent resister is just as strongly opposed to the evil against which he protests as is the person who uses violence. His method is passive or nonaggressive in the sense that he is not physically aggressive toward his opponent. But his mind and emotions are always active, constantly seeking to persuade the opponent that he is mistaken. This method is passive physically but strongly active spiritually; it is nonaggressive physically but dynamically aggressive spiritually.

A second point is that nonviolent resistance does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding. The nonviolent resister must often express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that noncooperation and boycotts are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. The end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.

A third characteristic of this method is that the attack is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who are caught in those forces. It is evil we are seeking to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil. Those of us who struggle against racial injustice must come to see that the basic tension is not between races. As I like to say to the people in Montgomery, Alabama: “The tension in this city is not between white people and Negro people. The tension is at bottom between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. And if there is a victory it will be a victory not merely for 50,000 Negroes, but a victory for justice and the forces of light. We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may happen to be injust.”

A fourth point that must be brought out concerning nonviolent resistance is that it avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love. In struggling for human dignity the oppressed people of the world must not allow themselves to become bitter or indulge in hate campaigns. To retaliate with hate and bitterness would do nothing but intensify the hate in the world. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can be done only by projecting the ethics of love to the center of our lives.

The Meaning of ‘Love’

In speaking of love at this point, we are not referring to some sentimental emotion. It would be nonsense to urge men to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense. “Love” in this connection means understanding good will. There are three words for love in the Greek New Testament. 5  First, there is  eros . In Platonic philosophy  eros  meant the yearning of the soul for the realm of the divine. It has come now to mean a sort of aesthetic or romantic love. Second, there is  philia . It meant intimate affectionateness between friends.  Philia  denotes a sort of reciprocal love: the person loves because he is loved. When we speak of loving those who oppose us we refer to neither  eros  nor  philia ; we speak of a love which is expressed in the Greek word  agape .  Agape  means nothing sentimental or basically affectionate; it means understanding, redeeming good will for all men, an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. It is the love of God working in the lives of men. When we love on the  agape  level we love men not because we like them, not because their attitudes and ways appeal to us, but because God loves them. Here we rise to the position of loving the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed he does. 6

Finally, the method of nonviolence is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice. It is this deep faith in the future that causes the nonviolent resister to accept suffering without retaliation. He knows that in his struggle for justice he has cosmic companionship. This belief that God is on the side of truth and justice comes down to us from the long tradition of our Christian faith. There is something at the very center of our faith which reminds us that Good Friday may reign for a day, but ultimately it must give way to the triumphant beat of the Easter drums. Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but one day that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. So in Montgomery we can walk and never get weary, because we know that there will be a great camp meeting in the promised land of freedom and justice. 7

This, in brief, is the method of nonviolent resistance. It is a method that challenges all people struggling for justice and freedom. God grant that we wage the struggle with dignity and discipline. May all who suffer oppression in this world reject the self-defeating method of retaliatory violence and choose the method that seeks to redeem. Through using this method wisely and courageously we will emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into the bright daybreak of freedom and justice.

1.  For  Christian Century  articles supportive of the boycott see Harold Fey, “Negro Ministers Arrested,” 7 March 1956, pp. 294-295; “National Council Commends Montgomery Ministers,” 14 March 1956, p. 325; and “Segregation on Intrastate Buses Ruled Illegal,” 28 November 1956, p. 1379.

2.  King’s draft of the article has not been located; the extent of Fey’s editing of it is therefore unknown. The previous September, Bayard Rustin had sent King a memorandum on the Christian duty to oppose segregation and urged him to send “something similar” to  Christian Century  (Rustin to King, 26 September 1956, in  Papers  3:381-382).

3.  In a 26 November 1957 letter to Dolores Gentile of King’s literary agency, Fey agreed to reassign the article’s copyright to allow King use of the material for his book on the bus boycott,  Stride Toward Freedom . Much of the article’s substance, especially King’s discussion of the “Alternative to Violence” appeared in the book (see  Stride , pp. 102-107). Note also the parallels between this article and King’s 27 June 1958 speech, “Nonviolence and Racial Justice,” delivered at the AFSC general conference in Cape May, New Jersey; it was published in the 26 July 1958 issue of  Friends Journal .

4. John 18:11.

5.   While the Greek language has three words for love,  eros  does not appear in the Greek New Testament.

6. Cf. Fosdick,  On Being Fit to Live With: Sermons on Post-war Christianity (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946), pp. 16-17.

7.  In a similar discussion in  Stride Toward Freedom , King included an additional element of nonviolence: “The nonviolent resister is willing to accept violence if necessary, but never to inflict it. He does not seek to dodge jail. . . . Suffering, the nonviolent resister realizes, has tremendous educational and transforming possibilities” (p. 103).

Source:  Christian Century  74 (6 February 1957): 165-167.

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We are haunted by our history of racial injustice in america because we don't talk about it. ending mass incarceration and achieving equality, justice, and fairness for all americans starts with learning and sharing the truth about our past..

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For more than 30 years, EJI lawyers have been winning relief for clients by telling their stories. We’ve overturned wrongful convictions and unfair sentences by exposing official misconduct and racial bias. W e’ve had tremendous success in courtrooms across the country. But America needs a deeper and broader narrative shift to move from mass incarceration into an era of truth and justice: we need to honestly confront our history.

To help people learn, share, talk, and teach about America’s history of racial injustice and its legacy, we built a powerful tool kit that includes groundbreaking reports and interactive websites, lesson plans, and powerful films like Just Mercy and the HBO documentary True Justice that underscore the urgency of reform.

We’re also harnessing the power of place to change a physical landscape littered with t housands of Confederate monuments but next to none about slavery or lynching. We’re working with communities to install historical markers and collect soil from lynching sites, and more than a million people have come to our Legacy Sites in Montgomery to learn, remember, and commit to truth telling about our history.

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A powerful true story about EJI, the people we represent, and the importance of confronting injustice, Just Mercy is a bestselling book by Bryan Stevenson that has been adapted into a feature film.

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An HBO documentary film, True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality follows EJI’s struggle to create greater fairness in the criminal justice system and shows how racial injustice emerged, evolved, and continues to threaten the country.

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Meaningful scholarship opportunity for 9th-12th grade students in Auburn, Opelika, and Lee County public high schools as well as 2022 graduates of public schools. 

All 9th-12th grade students of Auburn, Opelika, and Lee County public high schools in addition to 2022 graduates are eligible to submit an essay. Students are asked to examine the history of a specific racial injustice topic as well as its legacy today. Examples of topics include the creation of Lee County, racial terror lynchings in Lee County, the desegregation of Lee County City Schools, and more. Cash prizes will be awarded to all winners thanks to our partnership with NAACP Lee County AL Branch #5038.

Winners will be announced at the Day of Remembrance Ceremony on Saturday Nov. 5th 2022, 10a, on the Lee County Courthouse Square.

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Ms. Selena Daniels, Mr. Wilbert Payne, Jr., Ms. Jean Madden and Mr. John Harris ​

To assist students research and understanding of local Lee County (and American) history, four Lee County residents shared their stories and experiences while growing up during integration in Lee County and advice they have for students today.

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2021 AWARD WINNERS

Our inaugural racial justice essay contest drew many inspiring submissions! We are grateful for every student who invested their time to research and more fully understand vitally important issues of racial justice. 8 essays were chosen as our 2021 award winners:

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Caderria Thomas

Braxton Harris

Jahunna Neston

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A Federal Judge Delivers Another Urgent, Scathing Warning About the Supreme Court

It takes a lot of courage for a lower court judge to criticize the Supreme Court, but Judge Carlton Reeves has long felt a responsibility to speak candidly to the public about threats to their civil rights. In an opinion on Monday, he calls for the abolition of qualified immunity—a noxious legal doctrine that insulates violent and corrupt government officials, especially law enforcement, from accountability. He embedded this call to action in a broader critique of the Supreme Court’s selective application of precedent—with a focus on the cavalier reversal of Roe v. Wade —as well as its pernicious distrust of democracy. Reeves’ opinion warns all who wish to listen that a broad array of our constitutional liberties are in serious and imminent jeopardy.

A Barack Obama appointee, Reeves sits on a U.S. District Court in Mississippi. His latest opinion was sparked by facts that he sees all too often and has written about before : the egregious violation of a criminal suspect’s constitutional rights as an innocent person wrongly charged with a crime. It began when detective Jacquelyn Thomas of Jackson, Mississippi, accused Desmond Green of murder. The detective’s only evidence was a statement made by Green’s acquaintance, Samuel Jennings—after Jennings was arrested for burglary and grand larceny, and while he was under the influence of meth. Thomas allegedly encouraged Jennings to select Green’s picture out of a photo lineup after he identified someone else as the killer. Allegedly, she also misled the grand jury to secure an indictment, concealing Jennings’ drug abuse as well as the many inconsistencies and inaccuracies in his statement.

Jennings later recanted, admitting that, in his meth-addled state, he’d provided a bogus tip. A judge finally dismissed the charges. By that point, Green had spent 22 months in jail, serving pretrial detention. The facility was violent. The food was moldy. He slept on the floor. His cell was infested with snakes and vermin.

Green then sued Thomas, accusing her of malicious prosecution in violation of the Constitution . Thomas promptly asserted qualified immunity to defeat the lawsuit. This doctrine protects government officials from liability unless they run afoul of “clearly established” law. In other words, there must be an earlier case on the books with similar, “particularized” facts that explicitly bars the official’s actions. If there is no near-identical precedent that unambiguously prohibits those acts, qualified immunity kicks in, the lawsuit is tossed out, and the case never even reaches a jury.

This shield has allowed a repulsive amount of wrongdoing by police and prosecutors to go totally unpunished. Cops are permitted to brutally beat, murder , steal from , and conspire against innocent people because the rights they violate are, ostensibly, not “clearly established.” Courts regularly apply the doctrine when there is a tiny discrepancy between a previous case and the facts at hand as an excuse to let the officer off scot-free. And over the past few decades, SCOTUS itself has expanded qualified immunity to new extremes . The result, as Reeves wrote, is “a perpetuation of racial inequality”: Black Americans experience more violations of their civil rights than any other class, yet qualified immunity denies them a remedy in even the most appalling circumstances.

Here, though, Reeves refused to let the doctrine devour the Constitution. He concluded that there is sufficient on-point precedent to show that Thomas’ malicious prosecution, if proved, violated Green’s “clearly established” rights. So the case may go to trial. That, however, was not the end of his analysis—because, as he pointed out, the concept of qualified immunity is unlawful, unworkable, and indefensible.

The first problem is that judges made up the doctrine as a special favor to other employees of the government. Congress, as Reeves explained, gave individuals the power to sue state officials in federal court through the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, enacted after the Civil War so newly freed Black Americans could sue racist and abusive local police. Congress did not establish anything like “qualified immunity” in the statute. Rather, the Supreme Court invented the doctrine in 1967 , purporting to protect cops who commit illegal arrests in “good faith,” and imposed it unilaterally on the nation. It then crept, kudzu-like , into other areas of law.

“The People never enshrined qualified immunity in the Constitution,” Reeves wrote. “Our representatives in Congress never put it into the statute or voted for it. No President signed it into law. If anything, it represents a kind of ‘trickle-down’ democratic legitimacy.” In recent years, the Supreme Court has not bothered to account for qualified immunity’s origins, but rather maintains it on the basis of respect for precedent: It exists already, so it might as well keep existing.

And here is where Reeves goes for the jugular: The Supreme Court has tossed out far more defensible and entrenched precedent on the basis of far feebler excuses. How can it justify keeping qualified immunity around while recklessly destabilizing vast areas of settled law it doesn’t like?

SCOTUS has suggested that law enforcement officers have come to rely on qualified immunity, creating a “reliance interest” that counsels keeping the doctrine. But when the court overruled Roe in 2022’s Dobbs decision, Reeves wrote, the majority rejected that “kind of vague, ‘generalized assertion about the national psyche.’ ” Instead, Reeves wrote, the justices “thought voters should resolve reliance interests, not judges.” He then repurposed Dobbs ’ most notorious lines : “After all, just like women, law enforcement officers and their unions ‘are not without electoral or political power.’ ” Law enforcement officers, like women, can “affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office.” If courts can’t protect women’s bodily autonomy, he asked, why should they do the bidding of police unions?

Dobbs , Reeves went on, “also reflects the Supreme Court’s desire to remove itself from the center of a hot-button issue and return it to the electoral process.” Police reform, like abortion, is undoubtedly a “controversy on issues of life and death, where passions run high.” Yet even after Dobbs , SCOTUS “has not yet seen fit to return this contested issue to the democratic process,” Reeves opined. “It is not clear why.” After all, “the current court is certainly not shy about overturning precedent.” And the list of cases on the chopping block “seems to grow every year.” Teachers’ unions and racial minorities have watched the court gut precedent that shielded them for decades. Why should cops get favored treatment? Merely because of SCOTUS’ “policy-based choice” to “privilege government officials over all others.”

Reeves has a complex history with reproductive rights. He was the district court judge who struck down the Mississippi law that the Supreme Court later upheld in Dobbs when overruling Roe . His emphatic opinion famously accused the Mississippi Legislature of misogynistic “gaslighting,” analogizing the state’s defiance of Roe to its earlier defiance of Brown v. Board of Education . It’s evident that, to Reeves, the Supreme Court’s embrace of democracy in Dobbs rings hollow alongside its rejection of democracy in so many other areas, including the Second Amendment. (In a pointed footnote, he called out the court for treating the right to bear arms as a uniquely absolute, unlimited freedom —while greenlighting the erosion of other liberties that it values less.)

The judge folds together these rather scathing observations by reminding us that the Supreme Court’s creation and expansion of qualified immunity is, itself, a rejection of democracy. The Framers, after all, envisioned jury trials as a bulwark of democratic power, a check by “We the People” on government abuse. It was, Reeves wrote, designed to be exercised “one dispute at a time, day after day, rather than on fixed election days.” Unfortunately, an arrogant “judicial supremacy has too-often deprived the people of their proper role” in deciding whether public officials should be liable for their unconstitutional acts. Qualified immunity “reflects a deep distrust of ordinary people” in direct conflict with the Constitution. “In the same way we trust the collective judgment of voters in elections, we must trust the judgment of jurors in deciding cases,” Reeves wrote. They can resolve “tensions and contradictions case by case, as the evidence dictates.” All judges must do “is tell jurors the truth.”

Will the Supreme Court listen? The conservative justices seem disinclined to reevaluate their cynical, selective concerns about precedent and democracy. But with this opinion, Reeves has given the public yet another reason to question these justices’ increasingly dubious wisdom and integrity. Just as importantly, other judges may take note of Monday’s critique and follow Reeves’ suggestion of narrowing qualified immunity wherever possible. They might even join him in calling for its eradication, forcing SCOTUS to either stand by its handiwork or reevaluate it. The judge’s simple suggestion boils down to this: If we’re going to do democracy, let’s actually do democracy—not whatever partisan, half-baked substitute this Supreme Court is trying to pass off to the people.

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Justice Sotomayor describes frustration being a liberal on Supreme Court

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Some days, after Justice Sonia Sotomayor listens to the Supreme Court announce its decisions, she goes into her chambers, shuts the door and weeps.

“There are days that I’ve come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried,” Sotomayor told a crowd Friday at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, where she was being honored. “There have been those days. And there are likely to be more.”

The comments about the challenges of being a liberal on a court dominated by conservatives came at the tail end of a public conversation with her friend and law school classmate, Martha Minow, a former dean of Harvard Law School and human rights scholar.

The justice set a tone of optimism even as she voiced frustration with some of the court’s rulings, a possible signal that the end of the term, when the most high-profile decisions typically land, could bring more conservative victories.

She urged a long-term view of pushing for the values she views as guiding principles – equality, diversity and justice.

“There are moments when I’m deeply, deeply sad,” she said, without citing any specific cases. “There are moments when, yes, even I feel desperation. We all do. But you have to own it, you have to accept it, you have to shed the tears, and then you have to wipe them and get up.”

Decisions in dozens of cases are still pending, including on abortion, guns, the free speech rights of social media companies, the regulatory power of government agencies and whether former President Donald Trump is immune from prosecution on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

On a sunny spring day, hundreds gathered under an outdoor tent to hear Sotomayor, including young children carrying Puerto Rican flags, a nod to her roots.

The justice, whose parents are Puerto Rican, is the first Latina to serve on the Supreme Court.

The justice said that she had first planned on a career as a detective, prompted not by her interactions with law enforcement in the public housing that formed her world as a child in the Bronx but because of fictional girl detective Nancy Drew.

“I think Nancy Drew became sort of a role model,” Sotomayor said.

That led to a fascination with helping others, seeking justice and, eventually, a more sophisticated understanding of the legal system and the power of judges. That came into sharper focus as she watched Southern lower-court judges defy cultural norms to uphold the landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools violated the Constitution.

“They were brave men who believed in the power of law to form that more perfect union, and I believe it,” she said.

She spoke with great warmth about her mother, who raised her as a single parent after Sotomayor’s father died when she was 9. She said her mother initially wanted her to become a journalist, to travel and interview people. As a young girl, the justice recalled, her mother was unable to afford books or newspapers, leaving her to pluck papers from trash cans, eager to understand more of the world.

As a high school student, Sotomayor said, she watched her mother return to school to become a registered nurse, a move that showed great determination.

“If I’m half the woman my mother was, then I’m satisfied, because she was amazing,” Sotomayor said.

She also credited a series of mentors with helping her find her way as she rose from a young lawyer to a district judge, moving to the appeals court and finally the Supreme Court.

When she was asked to join the Supreme Court, she said, she hesitated because her mother had been diagnosed with memory loss, and she worried about whether she would have enough time to spend with her.

Her mother’s reaction was swift and clear: “She stopped me, and she said, ‘Don’t you dare not do this because of me. You would take away the dream I spent my life building for you. I wanted you to be the very best you can.’ ”

In her years on the court, she said, she has focused on trying to mentor, encourage and inspire young people, from small children in Head Start programs on up.

“If I say one thing to any child in this room, and I consider you a child if you’re younger than 20, by the way,” she said. “But if one of you remembers something I said that inspired you to do something different or inspires you to become more active in making the world a better place, then my legacy will last much longer than I will, because I will have departed this world and really left an important legacy.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .

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Justices’ ‘Disturbing’ Ruling in South Carolina Gerrymandering Case

More from our inbox:, questions for republicans, the case against the purebred, chatbot therapy, criticism of israel.

To the Editor:

Re “ In Top Court, G.O.P. Prevails on Voting Map ” (front page, May 24):

The action of the conservative wing of the Supreme Court, anchoring the 6-to-3 decision to allow the South Carolina Legislature to go forward with redistricting plans that clearly marginalize African American representation in the state — and after a meticulous review by an appellate court to preclude the plan — is disturbing.

The persistent erosion of voting rights and apparent denial that racism is still part of the fabric of American society are troubling.

Surely there can be deference to decisions made by states; concocting “intent” to deny true representative justice in an apparent quest to return to the “Ozzie and Harriet” days of the 1950s seems too transparent an attempt to “keep America white again” — as they may perceive the challenge of changing demographics.

This particular ruling cries out for the need to expand court membership.

Raymond Coleman Potomac, Md.

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito presumes the South Carolina lawmakers acted “in good faith” in gerrymandering the voting district map for the purpose of favoring the Republicans, and not for racial reasons, an improbable rationale on its face.

Astoundingly, he further reasons that the gerrymander is acceptable because it was for partisan rather than race-based reasons (acknowledging that redistricting based on race “may be held unconstitutional.”)

Even though the gerrymander clearly moved a bloc of Black voters so as to deny them representation, Justice Alito accepted the G.O.P. claim that it was done for allowable partisan reasons and was not race-based. This was an obvious subterfuge because a person can vote Republican today and Democratic tomorrow, whereas one’s skin color is immutable.

Carl Mezoff Stamford, Conn.

Predictably, in writing for the Supreme Court, Justice Samuel Alito resorted to his accustomed verbal contortions. You can of course draw a neat distinction between the terms race and politics in the abstract, using a dictionary’s definition.

But given the history of South Carolina’s electoral politics, where the terms have been, practically speaking, interchangeable, surely the last thing to rely upon is a “presumption that the legislature acted in good faith.”

A presumption, implying a distinction already satisfactorily made, contradicts his call for the difficult task of disentangling the two terms, a burden apparently that, in this case, falls only on the plaintiffs.

If this is the voice of the U.S. Supreme Court, it is not the voice of justices but the voice of sophists.

T. Patrick Hill Winchester, Va. The writer is emeritus associate professor of ethics and law at Rutgers University and the author of “No Place for Ethics: Judicial Review, Legal Positivism and the Supreme Court of the United States.”

Re “ Accept Election Results? Republicans Won’t Say ” (news article, May 12):

People need to stop asking Republicans simply if they will accept the election results. The question that really needs to be asked is, “Will you accept the election results only if your candidate wins?”

And the follow-up question should be, “If Joe Biden wins in a state that you contest, are you also surrendering the wins your other candidates gain because you believe that the election was fraudulent?”

Elaine Edelman East Brunswick, N.J.

Re “ Has Dog Breeding Gone Too Far? ,” by Alexandra Horowitz (Opinion guest essay, May 19):

Ms. Horowitz’s takedown of grotesque dog breeding practices is spot on. As People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has long said, “purebred” means “inbred.” Breeders not only exacerbate the animal overpopulation and homelessness crisis but — for profit and perceived “prestige” — also cost “purebred” dogs their health, happiness and even their lives.

Our nation’s shelters are overflowing with dogs in need of homes — purebreds and mutts alike. No one should be breeding more dogs of any type.

If you care about dogs, skip Westminster, breeders and pet stores and — when you are ready to welcome a dog to your family — adopt!

Daphna Nachminovitch Norfolk, Va. The writer is a senior vice president of the cruelty investigations department for PETA.

Kudos to Alexandra Horowitz for shining a light on inbreeding among purebred dogs. With limited exceptions, most families don’t need a purebred canine companion. There are over three million dogs entering U.S. animal shelters each year.

With the lives of so many shelter dogs on the line, purchasing a purebred indicates an unnerving level of vanity and discrimination. Here’s to those who make adoption their first option and give a second chance to homeless dogs (and cats).

Evan Goldman Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Re “ Loneliness Is a Problem That A.I. Won’t Solve, ” by Jessica Grose (Opinion, nytimes.com, May 18):

Ms. Grose’s recent piece on loneliness and A.I. raises crucial concerns about A.I.’s potential to replace human connection. As a law professor who has researched the intersection of mental health, technology and the law, I agree that we must be cautious about overrelying on A.I. for emotional support. However, I believe that the conversation needs to expand beyond loneliness to encompass the broader mental health crisis facing our country.

Anxiety and depression, not just loneliness, are widespread problems that the pandemic has exacerbated. My research has reported on how chatbots have demonstrated promise in delivering cognitive behavioral therapy to individuals struggling with these conditions. This is particularly significant given the shortage of mental health professionals and the barriers many people face in accessing traditional therapy, such as cost and stigma.

In fact, some individuals may feel more comfortable discussing sensitive issues with a chatbot because of the technology’s perceived anonymity and lack of judgment. While A.I. is not a panacea for mental health, it’s essential to recognize its potential to complement existing treatments and reach those who might otherwise go untreated.

We must remain of two minds about A.I. — acknowledging its potential to help us, while also remaining vigilant about its limitations and the importance of preserving genuine human connection.

Michael Mattioli Bloomington, Ind. The writer is a professor of law at Indiana University.

Re “ School Leaders Struggle With Antisemitism Issues ” (news article, May 16):

It is disturbing to read that expressing criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza in a classroom is automatically described as antisemitic. Israel is a political entity like any other. It should be acceptable to criticize its actions publicly, as one might criticize any other country for attacking civilians for months on end.

No one would deny a country the right to respond to a horrific attack on its people, as occurred on Oct. 7. Israel’s response, however, has been disproportionate, and teachers and students have a right to say so.

Linda Nathanson Brookline, Mass.

Nearly four years after protests took a violent turn in La Mesa, the healing continues

Many structures damaged during the 2020 civil unrest have been rebuilt, but for some people, the pain lingers in this East County community

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From his home near the corner of Finley Avenue and Fourth Street, Leroy Johnson could see the flames at Union Bank and Chase Bank.

The 71-year-old retired U.S. Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer and community college counselor wondered whether he should hop in his car and drive to safety.

“I said, ‘Boy, if the wind changes, and the (flames) start coming, I’m only like four blocks away,’ ” said Johnson, recalling that night four years ago when the social justice movement swept across the nation into La Mesa.

But as a Black man, there were other concerns running through his mind:

The incident in 2018 when a Black teenage girl was body-slammed at her high school by a White La Mesa Police officer.

The murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a White police officer in Minneapolis five days earlier.

And the arrest two days after that of 21-year-old Amaurie Johnson, a Black man, by a White La Mesa police officer who falsely accused him of smoking near the Grossmont Transit Center and threatening him, then lying to cover it.

All of this was festering when the demonstration for police reform and racial justice began on May 30, 2020. It started peacefully, with hundreds gathering at the La Mesa Police Department, others marching onto the Interstate 8 freeway, briefly halting traffic. Slowly, the mood shifted and by nightfall, the demonstration turned to civil unrest.

Shop windows were broken, cars were burned, stores were looted and fires were set, including at City Hall. Police in riot gear struggled to contain the violence. By morning, this community in eastern San Diego County resembled a war zone.

In the days and weeks that followed, the community came together to clean up the broken glass and scrub the graffiti spray-painted on storefronts.

“The very next morning, hundreds of people just showed up here, all with brooms, buckets and work gloves, and they just got to work,” Councilmember Colin Parent said.

Since then, the banks have been rebuilt, the broken windows have been replaced and a new police chief, Ray Sweeney, leads the La Mesa Police Department. And the city finally has a long-sought Community Police Oversight Board, led by Leroy Johnson.

“‘La Mesa Strong’ came out of it, but people are still mad that it happened and relieved that it hasn’t happened again,” Vice Mayor Laura Lothian said.

Lasting impact

But could it? The trauma of that night still sits with many La Mesa residents, including members of the business community.

A married couple who own a shop on La Mesa Boulevard said the broken windows and looting pushed back their retirement by at least five years as their insurance doesn’t cover civil unrest. The couple asked that their names and the name of their store be omitted out of fear that speaking up about the night would prompt vandalism at their business.

The couple said they tried to grab as much paperwork and valuables as they could fit in their car. They pleaded with people outside to leave their store alone. But when they returned the next day, the windows to their store had been smashed and most of the items within looted.

“We never talk about it at all because it’s such a hurtful thing that happened,” the wife said.

Down the street, Elizabeth García said the riot was devastating. The 35-year-old owns LE Athleisure, an athletic wear fashion business within her aunt’s shop, Sara’s Selections Boutique, which had its windows covered in graffiti by protesters.

“It was impactful to the business owners here because everybody is a mom and pop shop,” García said.

While some longtime businesses have since shuttered their doors, new restaurants, cafes and shops continue to open along La Mesa Boulevard.

“I think it’s a big moment in the city’s history, a real black eye on a lot of levels,” Parent said. “But it’s also true that we, I think, responded well to a lot of the (problems) over time, and I don’t think that it has in any way really derailed the forward progress of the city.”

Five months after the protests, Mayor Mark Arapostathis shared with The San Diego Union-Tribune how the protests had deeply impacted him. He said that as a lifelong La Mesa resident , “My heart was absolutely crushed because this is the city that I grew up in, that I feel is part of me. It was as if a part of my body was being burned and being damaged, and it was something I knew would never fully grow back.”

While Dr. A — as he is fondly referred to around town — declined to be interviewed, he wrote in an email that “the events of 2020 left a lasting impact on our community, shaping our commitment to unite and move forward.”

What also left a lasting impact was one of the events that sparked the protests — the arrest of Amaurie Johnson on May 27, 2020.

Then-La Mesa police Officer Matthew Dages arrested Johnson on suspicion of assaulting a police officer and resisting, delaying or obstructing a police officer. The department decided not to pursue those charges. Later, a third-party investigation found that Dages lied about the encounter in a police report and falsely said Amaurie Johnson had been illegally smoking.

In 2022, La Mesa agreed to pay Amaurie Johnson $125,000 to settle a lawsuit in which he alleged Dages had used excessive force and wrongly arrested him. Also in 2022, Dages — who was fired in the summer of 2020 — lost his fight to get his job back when a San Diego Superior Court judge ruled that his firing was “supported by the weight of the evidence.”

Amaurie Johnson — no relation to Leroy Johnson — has spent much of the time since his arrest trying to make positive changes in the community. He is working with a group to film a documentary, and will soon launch a series of interviews with police officers and people who have had their own encounters with the police on his YouTube channel.

“I already lost something that day — I couldn’t tell you necessarily what it was,” Amaurie Johnson said, “but I’ll be damned if I let it take anything else from me.”

Working toward a better future

One of the biggest changes in the city has been the creation of the 11-member Police Oversight Board, approved by the La Mesa City Council in October 2020. The board has its own lawyers and an auditor to review complaints and works independently of the city and the police department.

The journey to create the board dates back to 2016, when the San Diego County Grand Jury recommended that La Mesa and other cities in the county create citizen review boards .

Two years later, in response to the incident where a White officer threw a 17-year-old Black girl to the ground at Helix Charter High School, the City Council directed the police department to study civilian oversight boards.

The council rejected a 2019 proposal from former Police Chief Walt Vasquez, which would have created an advisory board that lacked the authority to investigate, review or audit police.

“It was really not much different than ‘Coffee with a Cop,’ so not really true oversight,” said Councilmember Jack Shu, who served on the citizen’s task force to create the board.

Sweeney, a longtime La Mesa officer who was a captain during the social justice demonstrations, said the department has worked to better its relationship with the community and more effectively manage any potential protests.

The handling of the civil unrest in 2020 was evaluated in a 2021 report commissioned by the city that found police were ill-prepared to respond to the riot and lacked the leadership, communication skills, training and policies that likely could have quelled the civil unrest, preventing community members and officers from getting hurt.

Sweeney said that many of the issues cited in that report had been addressed by the time a subsequent protest occurred on Aug. 1, 2020.

During the May protest, a lack of coordination prevented officers from different agencies from being able to connect on a single radio. By the time of the protest two months later, consultants found that the respective agencies’ radios were re-programmed, allowing for more reliable communication.

The consultants also found that compared to the earlier protest, the department had improved its intelligence gathering and communications with protest organizers. The department also held three pre-event planning meetings in preparation to respond to the August protest.

“We learned some major lessons on May 30, and we approached Aug. 1 very differently, and we had a very different result,” Sweeney said. “It was a peaceful protest where there were some fights — some counter protesters and protesters kind of going at each other — but in the end, everybody walked away unharmed, and our city was intact.”

In the years since 2020, Sweeney said the department has continued to rebuild its relationship with the community through various outreach programs and events, adding that, “It is something that demands constant attention.”

When he took over as chief, Sweeney held four community listening sessions to hear from community members about what they’d like to see change in La Mesa. Even though he said some of those conversations were uncomfortable, they were necessary.

“You have to continually put deposits in the ‘bank of trust’ to show people who we are, and then for those times that you have to make a withdrawal from the ‘bank of trust,’ you have that support,” he said.

What has also helped, Sweeney said, is shifting some responsibilities out of police officers’ hands, one of the biggest asks by Black Lives Matter protesters out of the social justice movement of that summer.

That has meant developing separate programs to handle calls for mental health and homelessness in cases unrelated to crimes and where there is no immediate danger.

Sweeney said the department also has taken steps to retain a more diverse pool of sworn officers.

Data shows that as of April 1, La Mesa sworn officers are 67.6 percent White, 25 percent Hispanic, 5.9 percent Black and 1.5 percent Asian. In 2020, the department was 75 percent White , 15 percent Hispanic, 5 percent Black and 5 percent Asian. In the city of La Mesa, 62 percent of residents are White, 20 percent are Hispanic, 7 percent are Black and 6 percent are Asian.

The department also reports that women make up 23.5 percent of officers. U.S. Census data shows that as of 2021, 14.2 percent of police officers in the country were women.

“Female police officers bring a different dynamic to policing in general, and I’m extremely proud of everybody that we have here,” Sweeney said. “That’s just one of the things that I guess was an unexpected outcome from looking at our recruiting tactics and the things that we’re doing and who you’re reaching out to.”

‘Moving in a good direction’

The Community Police Oversight Board continues to meet monthly, reviewing independent audits of complaints brought against the police department.

This year, the board is developing a mediation program to make the complaint process more accessible.

“We’re moving in a good direction,” said, Leroy Johnson, the current board chair. “We’re getting a lot of cooperation from the Police Department and from the Police Officers Association.”

The board also now has a Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory subcommittee to look deeper into the racial data related to police stops and arrests.

“I think when people start to look at the data and it gets a public airing, I think the data is still real that a lot of what happens is racially motivated,” Leroy Johnson said.

Leroy Johnson said Chief Sweeney has done a great job since stepping into the role nearly three years ago, but he still feels the department should have hired one of the candidates from outside the department. Doing so, he thinks, may have led to more rapid evolution of policing in La Mesa.

“It’s always the case that if you’re willing to take a chance and hire somebody from the outside, you’re more likely to have more change,” Johnson said.

Although Councilmember Shu said changes have improved race relations in La Mesa, he worries that not enough change has happened quickly enough.

“Institutional racism exists in many of our communities, we know that and we don’t really address it,” Shu said. “It’s still a hornet’s nest.”

Leroy Johnson, however, remains optimistic.

“Racism exists, whether people want to admit it or not, and it touches on every part of society,” Leroy Johnson said. “I think that this is one of the venues where some movement can be made for people to recognize that and to make some changes.”

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