essay on racism in america

Race in America

A Smithsonian magazine special report

History | June 4, 2020

158 Resources to Understand Racism in America

These articles, videos, podcasts and websites from the Smithsonian chronicle the history of anti-black violence and inequality in the United States

Meilan Solly

Senior Associate Digital Editor, History

In a short essay published earlier this week, Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch wrote that the recent killing in Minnesota of George Floyd has forced the country to “confront the reality that, despite gains made in the past 50 years, we are still a nation riven by inequality and racial division.”

Amid escalating clashes between protesters and police, discussing race—from the inequity embedded in American institutions to the United States’ long, painful history of anti-black violence—is an essential step in sparking meaningful societal change. To support those struggling to begin these difficult conversations, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture recently launched a “ Talking About Race ” portal featuring “tools and guidance” for educators, parents, caregivers and other people committed to equity.

“Talking About Race” joins a vast trove of resources from the Smithsonian Institution dedicated to understanding what Bunch describes as America’s “tortured racial past.” From Smithsonian magazine articles on slavery’s Trail of Tears and the disturbing resilience of scientific racism to the National Museum of American History’s collection of Black History Month resources for educators and a Sidedoor podcast on the Tulsa Race Massacre, these 158 resources are designed to foster an equal society, encourage commitment to unbiased choices and promote antiracism in all aspects of life. Listings are bolded and organized by category.

Table of Contents

1. Historical Context

2. Systemic Inequality

3. Anti-Black Violence

5. Intersectionality

6. Allyship and Education

Historical Context

Between 1525 and 1866, 12.5 million people were kidnapped from Africa and sent to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade . Only 10.7 million survived the harrowing two month journey. Comprehending the sheer scale of this forced migration—and slavery’s subsequent spread across the country via interregional trade —can be a daunting task, but as historian Leslie Harris told Smithsonian ’s Amy Crawford earlier this year, framing “these big concepts in terms of individual lives … can [help you] better understand what these things mean.”

Take, for instance, the story of John Casor . Originally an indentured servant of African descent, Casor lost a 1654 or 1655 court case convened to determine whether his contract had lapsed. He became the first individual declared a slave for life in the United States. Manuel Vidau , a Yoruba man who was captured and sold to traders some 200 years after Casor’s enslavement, later shared an account of his life with the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which documented his remarkable story—after a decade of enslavement in Cuba, he purchased a share in a lottery ticket and won enough money to buy his freedom—in records now available on the digital database “ Freedom Narratives .” (A separate, similarly document-based online resource emphasizes individuals described in fugitive slave ads , which historian Joshua Rothman describes as “sort of a little biography” providing insights on their subjects’ appearance and attire.)

Finally, consider the life of Matilda McCrear , the last known survivor of the transatlantic slave trade. Kidnapped from West Africa and brought to the U.S. on the Clotilda , she arrived in Mobile, Alabama, in July 1860—more than 50 years after Congress had outlawed the import of enslaved labor. McCrear, who died in 1940 at the age of 81 or 82, “ displayed a determined, even defiant streak ” in her later life, wrote Brigit Katz earlier this year. She refused to use her former owner’s last name, wore her hair in traditional Yoruba style and had a decades-long relationship with a white German man.

How American society remembers and teaches the horrors of slavery is crucial. But as recent studies have shown, many textbooks offer a sanitized view of this history , focusing solely on “positive” stories about black leaders like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass . Prior to 2018, Texas schools even taught that states’ rights and sectionalism—not slavery—were the main causes of the Civil War . And, in Confederate memorials across the country, writes historian Kevin M. Levin , enslaved individuals are often falsely portrayed as loyal slaves .

Accurately representing slavery might require an updated vocabulary , argued historian Michael Landis in 2015: Outdated “[t]erms like ‘compromise’ or ‘plantation’ served either to reassure worried Americans in a Cold War world, or uphold a white supremacist, sexist interpretation of the past.” Rather than referring to the Compromise of 1850 , call it the Appeasement of 1850—a term that better describes “the uneven nature of the agreement,” according to Landis. Smithsonian scholar Christopher Wilson wrote, too, that widespread framing of the Civil War as a battle between equal entities lends legitimacy to the Confederacy , which was not a nation in its own right, but an “illegitimate rebellion and unrecognized political entity.” A 2018 Smithsonian magazine investigation found that the literal costs of the Confederacy are immense: In the decade prior, American taxpayers contributed $40 million to the maintenance of Confederate monuments and heritage organizations.

To better understand the immense brutality ingrained in enslaved individuals’ everyday lives, read up on Louisiana’s Whitney Plantation Museum , which acts as “part reminder of the scars of institutional bondage, part mausoleum for dozens of enslaved people who worked (and died) in [its] sugar fields, … [and] monument to the terror of slavery,” as Jared Keller observed in 2016. Visitors begin their tour in a historic church populated by clay sculptures of children who died on the plantation’s grounds, then move on to a series of granite slabs engraved with hundreds of enslaved African Americans’ names. Scattered throughout the experience are stories of the violence inflicted by overseers.

The Whitney Plantation Museum is at the forefront of a vanguard of historical sites working to confront their racist pasts. In recent years, exhibitions, oral history projects and other initiatives have highlighted the enslaved people whose labor powered such landmarks as Mount Vernon , the White House and Monticello . At the same time, historians are increasingly calling attention to major historical figures’ own slave-holding legacies : From Thomas Jefferson to George Washington , William Clark of Lewis and Clark , Francis Scott Key , and other Founding Fathers , many American icons were complicit in upholding the institution of slavery. Washington , Jefferson , James Madison and Aaron Burr , among others, sexually abused enslaved females working in their households and had oft-overlooked biracial families.

Though Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, the decree took two-and-a-half years to fully enact. June 19, 1865—the day Union Gen. Gordon Granger informed the enslaved individuals of Galveston, Texas, that they were officially free—is now known as Juneteenth : America’s “second independence day,” according to NMAAHC. Initially celebrated mainly in Texas, Juneteenth spread across the country as African Americans fled the South in what is now called the Great Migration .

At the onset of that mass movement in 1916, 90 percent of African Americans still lived in the South, where they were “held captive by the virtual slavery of sharecropping and debt peonage and isolated from the rest of the country,” as Isabel Wilkerson wrote in 2016. ( Sharecropping , a system in which formerly enslaved people became tenant farmers and lived in “converted” slave cabins , was the impetus for the 1919 Elaine Massacre , which found white soldiers collaborating with local vigilantes to kill at least 200 sharecroppers who dared to criticize their low wages.) By the time the Great Migration—famously chronicled by artist Jacob Lawrence —ended in the 1970s, 47 percent of African Americans called the northern and western United States home.

Listen to Sidedoor: A Smithsonian Podcast

The third season of Sidedoor explored a South Carolina residence’s unique journey from slave cabin to family home and its latest incarnation as a centerpiece at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Conditions outside the Deep South were more favorable than those within the region, but the “hostility and hierarchies that fed the Southern caste system” remained major obstacles for black migrants in all areas of the country, according to Wilkerson. Low-paying jobs, redlining , restrictive housing covenants and rampant discrimination limited opportunities, creating inequality that would eventually give rise to the civil rights movement.

“The Great Migration was the first big step that the nation’s servant class ever took without asking,” Wilkerson explained. “ … It was about agency for a people who had been denied it, who had geography as the only tool at their disposal. It was an expression of faith, despite the terrors they had survived, that the country whose wealth had been created by their ancestors’ unpaid labor might do right by them.”

Systemic Inequality

Racial, economic and educational disparities are deeply entrenched in U.S. institutions. Though the Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal,” American democracy has historically—and often violently —excluded certain groups. “Democracy means everybody can participate, it means you are sharing power with people you don’t know, don’t understand, might not even like,” said National Museum of American History curator Harry Rubenstein in 2017. “That’s the bargain. And some people over time have felt very threatened by that notion.”

Instances of inequality range from the obvious to less overtly discriminatory policies and belief systems. Historical examples of the former include poll taxes that effectively disenfranchised African American voters; the marginalization of African American soldiers who fought in World War I and World War II but were treated like second-class citizens at home; black innovators who were barred from filing patents for their inventions; white medical professionals’ exploitation of black women’s bodies (see Henrietta Lacks and J. Marion Sims ); Richard and Mildred Loving ’s decade-long fight to legalize interracial marriage; the segregated nature of travel in the Jim Crow era; the government-mandated segregation of American cities ; and segregation in schools .

Among the most heartbreaking examples of structural racism’s subtle effects are accounts shared by black children. In the late 1970s, when Lebert F. Lester II was 8 or 9 years old, he started building a sand castle during a trip to the Connecticut shore . A young white girl joined him but was quickly taken away by her father. Lester recalled the girl returning, only to ask him, “Why don’t [you] just go in the water and wash it off?” Lester says., “I was so confused—I only figured out later she meant my complexion .” Two decades earlier, in 1957, 15-year-old Minnijean Brown had arrived at Little Rock Central High School with high hopes of “making friends, going to dances and singing in the chorus.” Instead, she and the rest of the Little Rock Nine —a group of black students selected to attend the formerly all-white academy after Brown v. Board of Education desegregated public schools—were subjected to daily verbal and physical assaults. Around the same time, photographer John G. Zimmerman captured snapshots of racial politics in the South that included comparisons of black families waiting in long lines for polio inoculations as white children received speedy treatment.

In 1968, the Kerner Commission , a group convened by President Lyndon Johnson, found that white racism, not black anger, was the impetus for the widespread civil unrest sweeping the nation. As Alice George wrote in 2018, the commission’s report suggested that “[b]ad policing practices, a flawed justice system, unscrupulous consumer credit practices, poor or inadequate housing, high unemployment, voter suppression and other culturally embedded forms of racial discrimination all converged to propel violent upheaval.” Few listened to the findings, let alone its suggestion of aggressive government spending aimed at leveling the playing field. Instead, the country embraced a different cause: space travel . The day after the 1969 moon landing, the leading black paper the New York Amsterdam News ran a story stating, “Yesterday, the moon. Tomorrow, maybe us.”

Fifty years after the Kerner Report’s release, a separate study assessed how much had changed ; it concluded that conditions had actually worsened. In 2017, black unemployment was higher than in 1968, as was the rate of incarcerated individuals who were black. The wealth gap had also increased substantially, with the median white family having ten times more wealth than the median black family. “We are resegregating our cities and our schools, condemning millions of kids to inferior education and taking away their real possibility of getting out of poverty,” said Fred Harris, the last surviving member of the Kerner Commission, following the 2018 study’s release.

Today, scientific racism —grounded in such faulty practices as eugenics and the treatment of race “as a crude proxy for myriad social and environmental factors,” writes Ramin Skibba—persists despite overwhelming evidence that race has only social, not biological, meaning. Black scholars including Mamie Phipps Clark , a psychologist whose research on racial identity in children helped end segregation in schools, and Rebecca J. Cole , a 19th-century physician and advocate who challenged the idea that black communities were destined for death and disease, have helped overturn some of these biases. But a 2015 survey found that 48 percent of black and Latina women scientists, respectively, still report being mistaken for custodial or administrative staff . Even artificial intelligence exhibits racial biases , many of which are introduced by lab staff and crowdsourced workers who program their own conscious and unconscious opinions into algorithms.

Anti-Black Violence

In addition to enduring centuries of enslavement, exploitation and inequality, African Americans have long been the targets of racially charged physical violence. Per the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative , more than 4,400 lynchings —mob killings undertaken without legal authority—took place in the U.S. between the end of Reconstruction and World War II.

Incredibly, the Senate only passed legislation declaring lynching a federal crime in 2018 . Between 1918 and the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act’s eventual passage, more than 200 anti-lynching bills failed to make it through Congress. (Earlier this week, Sen. Rand Paul said he would hold up a separate, similarly intentioned bill over fears that its definition of lynching was too broad. The House passed the bill in a 410-to-4 vote this February.) Also in 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative opened the nation’s first monument to African American lynching victims . The six-acre memorial site stands alongside a museum dedicated to tracing the nation’s history of racial bias and persecution from slavery to the present.

One of the earliest instances of Reconstruction-era racial violence took place in Opelousas, Louisiana, in September 1868. Two months ahead of the presidential election, Southern white Democrats started terrorizing Republican opponents who appeared poised to secure victory at the polls. On September 28, a group of men attacked 18-year-old schoolteacher Emerson Bentley, who had already attracted ire for teaching African American students, after he published an account of local Democrats’ intimidation of Republicans. Bentley escaped with his life, but 27 of the 29 African Americans who arrived on the scene to help him were summarily executed. Over the next two weeks, vigilante terror led to the deaths of some 250 people, the majority of whom were black.

In April 1873, another spate of violence rocked Louisiana. The Colfax Massacre , described by historian Eric Foner as the “bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era,” unfolded under similar circumstances as Opelousas, with tensions between Democrats and Republicans culminating in the deaths of between 60 and 150 African Americans, as well as three white men.

Between the turn of the 20th century and the 1920s, multiple massacres broke out in response to false allegations that young black men had raped or otherwise assaulted white women. In August 1908, a mob terrorized African American neighborhoods across Springfield, Illinois, vandalizing black-owned businesses, setting fire to the homes of black residents, beating those unable to flee and lynching at least two people. Local authorities, argues historian Roberta Senechal , were “ineffectual at best, complicit at worst.”

False accusations also sparked a July 1919 race riot in Washington, D.C. and the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 , which was most recently dramatized in the HBO series “ Watchmen .” As African American History Museum curator Paul Gardullo tells Smithsonian , tensions related to Tulsa’s economy underpinned the violence : Forced to settle on what was thought to be worthless land, African Americans and Native Americans struck oil and proceeded to transform the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa into a prosperous community known as “Black Wall Street.” According to Gardullo, “It was the frustration of poor whites not knowing what to do with a successful black community, and in coalition with the city government [they] were given permission to do what they did.”

Over the course of two days in spring 1921, the Tulsa Race Massacre claimed the lives of an estimated 300 black Tulsans and displaced another 10,000. Mobs burned down at least 1,256 residences, churches, schools and businesses and destroyed almost 40 blocks of Greenwood. As the Sidedoor episode “ Confronting the Past ” notes, “No one knows how many people died, no one was ever convicted, and no one really talked about it nearly a century later.”

The second season of Sidedoor told the story of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

Economic injustice also led to the East St. Louis Race War of 1917. This labor dispute-turned-deadly found “people’s houses being set ablaze, … people being shot when they tried to flee, some trying to swim to the other side of the Mississippi while being shot at by white mobs with rifles, others being dragged out of street cars and beaten and hanged from street lamps,” recalled Dhati Kennedy, the son of a survivor who witnessed the devastation firsthand. Official counts place the death toll at 39 black and 9 white individuals, but locals argue that the real toll was closer to 100.

A watershed moment for the burgeoning civil rights movement was the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till . Accused of whistling at a white woman while visiting family members in Mississippi, he was kidnapped, tortured and killed. Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, decided to give her son an open-casket funeral, forcing the world to confront the image of his disfigured, decomposing body . ( Visuals , including photographs, movies, television clips and artwork, played a key role in advancing the movement.) The two white men responsible for Till’s murder were acquitted by an all-white jury. A marker at the site where the teenager’s body was recovered has been vandalized at least three times since its placement in 2007.

The form of anti-black violence with the most striking parallels to contemporary conversations is police brutality . As Katie Nodjimbadem reported in 2017, a regional crime survey of late 1920s Chicago and Cook County, Illinois, found that while African Americans constituted just 5 percent of the area’s population, they made up 30 percent of the victims of police killings. Civil rights protests exacerbated tensions between African Americans and police, with events like the Orangeburg Massacre of 1968, in which law enforcement officers shot and killed three student activists at South Carolina State College, and the Glenville shootout , which left three police officers, three black nationalists and one civilian dead, fostering mistrust between the two groups.

Today, this legacy is exemplified by broken windows policing , a controversial approach that encourages racial profiling and targets African American and Latino communities. “What we see is a continuation of an unequal relationship that has been exacerbated, made worse if you will, by the militarization and the increase in fire power of police forces around the country,” William Pretzer , senior curator at NMAAHC, told Smithsonian in 2017.

The history of protest and revolt in the United States is inextricably linked with the racial violence detailed above.

Prior to the Civil War, enslaved individuals rarely revolted outright. Nat Turner , whose 1831 insurrection ended in his execution, was one of the rare exceptions. A fervent Christian , he drew inspiration from the Bible. His personal copy , now housed in the collections of the African American History Museum, represented the “possibility of something else for himself and for those around him,” curator Mary Ellis told Smithsonian ’s Victoria Dawson in 2016.

Other enslaved African Americans practiced less risky forms of resistance, including working slowly, breaking tools and setting objects on fire. “Slave rebellions, though few and small in size in America, were invariably bloody,” wrote Dawson. “Indeed, death was all but certain.”

One of the few successful uprisings of the period was the Creole Rebellion . In the fall of 1841, 128 enslaved African Americans traveling aboard The Creole mutinied against its crew, forcing their former captors to sail the brig to the British West Indies, where slavery was abolished and they could gain immediate freedom.

An April 1712 revolt found enslaved New Yorkers setting fire to white-owned buildings and firing on slaveholders. Quickly outnumbered, the group fled but was tracked to a nearby swamp; though several members were spared, the majority were publicly executed, and in the years following the uprising, the city enacted laws limiting enslaved individuals’ already scant freedom. In 1811, meanwhile, more than 500 African Americans marched on New Orleans while chanting “Freedom or Death.” Though the German Coast uprising was brutally suppressed, historian Daniel Rasmussen argues that it “had been much larger—and come much closer to succeeding—than the planters and American officials let on.”

Some 150 years after what Rasmussen deems America’s “ largest slave revolt ,” the civil rights movement ushered in a different kind of protest. In 1955, police arrested Rosa Parks for refusing to yield her bus seat to a white passenger (“I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment that I couldn’t take it any more,” she later wrote). The ensuing Montgomery bus boycott , in which black passengers refused to ride public transit until officials met their demands, led the Supreme Court to rule segregated buses unconstitutional. Five years later, the Greensboro Four similarly took a stand, ironically by staging a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter . As Christopher Wilson wrote ahead of the 60th anniversary of the event, “What made Greensboro different [from other sit-ins ] was how it grew from a courageous moment to a revolutionary movement.”

During the 1950s and ’60s, civil rights leaders adopted varying approaches to protest: Malcolm X , a staunch proponent of black nationalism who called for equality by “any means necessary,” “made tangible the anger and frustration of African Americans who were simply catching hell,” according to journalist Allison Keyes. He repeated the same argument “over and over again,” wrote academic and activist Cornel West in 2015: “What do you think you would do after 400 years of slavery and Jim Crow and lynching? Do you think you would respond nonviolently? What’s your history like? Let’s look at how you have responded when you were oppressed. George Washington—revolutionary guerrilla fighter!’”

Martin Luther King Jr . famously advocated for nonviolent protest, albeit not in the form that many think. As biographer Taylor Branch told Smithsonian in 2015, King’s understanding of nonviolence was more complex than is commonly argued. Unlike Mahatma Gandhi’s “passive resistance,” King believed resistance “depended on being active, using demonstrations, direct actions, to ‘amplify the message’ of the protest they were making,” according to Ron Rosenbaum. In the activist’s own words , “[A] riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear?… It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. ”

Another key player in the civil rights movement, the militant Black Panther Party , celebrated black power and operated under a philosophy of “ demands and aspirations .” The group’s Ten-Point Program called for an “immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people,” as well as more controversial measures like freeing all black prisoners and exempting black men from military service. Per NMAAHC , black power “emphasized black self-reliance and self-determination more than integration,” calling for the creation of separate African American political and cultural organizations. In doing so, the movement ensured that its proponents would attract the unwelcome attention of the FBI and other government agencies.

Many of the protests now viewed as emblematic of the fight for racial justice took place in the 1960s. On August 28, 1963, more than 250,000 people gathered in D.C. for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom . Ahead of the 50th anniversary of the march, activists who attended the event detailed the experience for a Smithsonian oral history : Entertainer Harry Belafonte observed, “We had to seize the opportunity and make our voices heard. Make those who are comfortable with our oppression—make them uncomfortable—Dr. King said that was the purpose of this mission,” while Representative John Lewis recalled, “Looking toward Union Station, we saw a sea of humanity; hundreds, thousands of people. … People literally pushed us, carried us all the way, until we reached the Washington Monument and then we walked on to the Lincoln Memorial..”

Two years after the March on Washington, King and other activists organized a march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery. Later called the Selma March , the protest was dramatized in a 2014 film starring David Oyelowo as MLK. ( Reflecting on Selma , Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch, then-director of NMAAHC, deemed it a “remarkable film” that “does not privilege the white perspective … [or] use the movement as a convenient backdrop for a conventional story.”)

Organized in response to the manifest obstacles black individuals faced when attempting to vote, the Selma March actually consisted of three separate protests. The first of these, held on March 7, 1965, ended in a tragedy now known as Bloody Sunday . As peaceful protesters gathered on the Edmund Pettus Bridge —named for a Confederate general and local Ku Klux Klan leader—law enforcement officers attacked them with tear gas and clubs. One week later, President Lyndon B. Johnson offered the Selma protesters his support and introduced legislation aimed at expanding voting rights. During the third and final march, organized in the aftermath of Johnson’s announcement, tens of thousands of protesters (protected by the National Guard and personally led by King) converged on Montgomery. Along the way, interior designer Carl Benkert used a hidden reel-to-reel tape recorder to document the sounds—and specifically songs—of the event .

The protests of the early and mid-1960s culminated in the widespread unrest of 1967 and 1968. For five days in July 1967, riots on a scale unseen since 1863 rocked the city of Detroit : As Lorraine Boissoneault writes, “Looters prowled the streets, arsonists set buildings on fire, civilian snipers took position from rooftops and police shot and arrested citizens indiscriminately.” Systemic injustice in such areas as housing, jobs and education contributed to the uprising, but police brutality was the driving factor behind the violence. By the end of the riots, 43 people were dead. Hundreds sustained injuries, and more than 7,000 were arrested.

The Detroit riots of 1967 prefaced the seismic changes of 1968 . As Matthew Twombly wrote in 2018, movements including the Vietnam War, the Cold War, civil rights, human rights and youth culture “exploded with force in 1968,” triggering aftershocks that would resonate both in America and abroad for decades to come.

On February 1, black sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker died in a gruesome accident involving a malfunctioning garbage truck. Their deaths, compounded by Mayor Henry Loeb’s refusal to negotiate with labor representatives, led to the outbreak of the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike —an event remembered both “as an example of powerless African Americans standing up for themselves” and as the backdrop to King’s April 4 assassination .

Though King is lionized today, he was highly unpopular at the time of his death. According to a Harris Poll conducted in early 1968, nearly 75 percent of Americans disapproved of the civil rights leader , who had become increasingly vocal in his criticism of the Vietnam War and economic inequity. Despite the public’s seeming ambivalence toward King—and his family’s calls for nonviolence— his murder sparked violent protests across the country . In all, the Holy Week Uprisings spread to nearly 200 cities, leaving 3,500 people injured and 43 dead. Roughly 27,000 protesters were arrested, and 54 of the cities involved sustained more than $100,000 in property damage.

In May, thousands flocked to Washington, D.C. for a protest King had planned prior to his death. Called the Poor People’s Campaign , the event united racial groups from all quarters of America in a call for economic justice. Attendees constructed “ Resurrection City ,” a temporary settlement made up of 3,000 wooden tents, and camped out on the National Mall for 42 days.

“While we were all in a kind of depressed state about the assassinations of King and RFK, we were trying to keep our spirits up, and keep focused on King’s ideals of humanitarian issues, the elimination of poverty and freedom,” protester Lenneal Henderson told Smithsonian in 2018. “It was exciting to be part of something that potentially, at least, could make a difference in the lives of so many people who were in poverty around the country.”

Racial unrest persisted throughout the year, with uprisings on the Fourth of July , a protest at the Summer Olympic Games , and massacres at Orangeburg and Glenville testifying to the tumultuous state of the nation.

The Black Lives Matter marches organized in response to the killings of George Floyd, Philando Castile, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and other victims of anti-black violence share many parallels with protests of the past .

Football player Colin Kaepernick ’s decision to kneel during the national anthem—and the unmitigated outrage it sparked —bears similarities to the story of boxer Muhammad Ali , historian Jonathan Eig told Smithsonian in 2017: “It’s been eerie to watch it, that we’re still having these debates that black athletes should be expected to shut their mouths and perform for us,” he said. “That’s what people told Ali 50 years ago.”

Other aspects of modern protest draw directly on uprisings of earlier eras. In 2016, for instance, artist Dread Scott updated an anti-lynching poster used by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1920s and ’30s to read “ A Black Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday .” (Scott added the words “by police.”)

Though the civil rights movement is often viewed as the result of a cohesive “grand plan” or “manifestation of the vision of the few leaders whose names we know,” the American History Museum’s Christopher Wilson argues that “the truth is there wasn’t one, there were many and they were often competitive .”

Meaningful change required a whirlwind of revolution, adds Wilson, “but also the slow legal march. It took boycotts, petitions, news coverage, civil disobedience, marches, lawsuits, shrewd political maneuvering, fundraising, and even the violent terror campaign of the movement’s opponents—all going on [at] the same time.”

Intersectionality

In layman’s terms, intersectionality refers to the multifaceted discrimination experienced by individuals who belong to multiple minority groups. As theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw explains in a video published by NMAAHC , these classifications run the gamut from race to gender, gender identity, class, sexuality and disability. A black woman who identifies as a lesbian, for instance, may face prejudice based on her race, gender or sexuality.

Crenshaw, who coined the term intersectionality in 1989, explains the concept best: “Consider an intersection made up of many roads,” she says in the video. “The roads are the structures of race, gender, gender identity, class, sexuality, disability. And the traffic running through those roads are the practices and policies that discriminate against people. Now if an accident happens, it can be caused by cars traveling in any number of directions, and sometimes, from all of them. So if a black woman is harmed because she is in an intersection, her injury could result from discrimination from any or all directions.”

Understanding intersectionality is essential for teasing out the relationships between movements including civil rights, LGBTQ rights , suffrage and feminism. Consider the contributions of black transgender activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera , who played pivotal roles in the Stonewall Uprising ; gay civil rights leader Bayard Rustin , who was only posthumously pardoned this year for having consensual sex with men; the “rank and file” women of the Black Panther Party ; and African American suffragists such as Mary Church Terrell and Nannie Helen Burroughs .

All of these individuals fought discrimination on multiple levels: As noted in “ Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence ,” a 2019 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, leading suffrage organizations initially excluded black suffragists from their ranks , driving the emergence of separate suffrage movements and, eventually, black feminists grounded in the inseparable experiences of racism, sexism and classism.

Allyship and Education

Individuals striving to become better allies by educating themselves and taking decisive action have an array of options for getting started. Begin with NMAAHC’s “ Talking About Race ” portal, which features sections on being antiracist , whiteness , bias , social identities and systems of oppression , self-care , race and racial identity , the historical foundations of race , and community building . An additional 139 items —from a lecture on the history of racism in America to a handout on white supremacy culture and an article on the school-to-prison pipeline —are available to explore via the portal’s resources page .

In collaboration with the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, the National Museum of the American Indian has created a toolkit that aims to “help people facilitate new conversations with and among students about the power of images and words, the challenges of memory, and the relationship between personal and national value,” says museum director Kevin Gover in a statement . The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center offers a similarly focused resource called “ Standing Together Against Xenophobia .” As the site’s description notes, “This includes addressing not only the hatred and violence that has recently targeted people of Asian descent, but also the xenophobia that plagues our society during times of national crisis.”

Ahead of NMAAHC’s official opening in 2016, the museum hosted a series of public programs titled “ History, Rebellion, and Reconciliation .” Panels included “Ferguson: What Does This Moment Mean for America?” and “#Words Matter: Making Revolution Irresistible.” As Smithsonian reported at the time, “It was somewhat of a refrain at the symposium that museums can provide ‘safe,’ or even ‘sacred’ spaces , within which visitors [can] wrestle with difficult and complex topics.” Then-director Lonnie Bunch expanded on this mindset in an interview, telling Smithsonian , “Our job is to be an educational institution that uses history and culture not only to look back, not only to help us understand today, but to point us towards what we can become.” For more context on the museum’s collections, mission and place in American history, visit Smithsonian ’s “ Breaking Ground ” hub and NMAAHC’s digital resources guide .

Historical examples of allyship offer both inspiration and cautionary tales for the present. Take, for example, Albert Einstein , who famously criticized segregation as a “disease of white people” and continually used his platform to denounce racism. (The scientist’s advocacy is admittedly complicated by travel diaries that reveal his deeply troubling views on race .)

Einstein’s near-contemporary, a white novelist named John Howard Griffin, took his supposed allyship one step further, darkening his skin and embarking on a “human odyssey through the South,” as Bruce Watson wrote in 2011. Griffin’s chronicle of his experience, a volume titled Black Like Me , became a surprise bestseller, refuting “the idea that minorities were acting out of paranoia,” according to scholar Gerald Early, and testifying to the veracity of black people’s accounts of racism.

“The only way I could see to bridge the gap between us,” wrote Griffin in Black Like Me , “was to become a Negro.”

Griffin, however, had the privilege of being able to shed his blackness at will—which he did after just one month of donning his makeup. By that point, Watson observed, Griffin could simply “stand no more.”

Sixty years later, what is perhaps most striking is just how little has changed. As Bunch reflected earlier this week, “The state of our democracy feels fragile and precarious.”

Addressing the racism and social inequity embedded in American society will be a “monumental task,” the secretary added. But “the past is replete with examples of ordinary people working together to overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges. History is a guide to a better future and demonstrates that we can become a better society—but only if we collectively demand it from each other and from the institutions responsible for administering justice.”

Editor ’s Note, July 24, 2020: This article previously stated that some 3.9 million of the 10.7 million people who survived the harrowing two-month journey across the Middle Passage between 1525 and 1866 were ultimately enslaved in the United States. In fact, the 3.9 million figure refers to the number of enslaved individuals in the U.S. just before the Civil War. We regret the error.

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Meilan Solly is Smithsonian magazine's senior associate digital editor, history.

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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.

Black Progress: How far we’ve come, and how far we have to go

Subscribe to governance weekly, abigail thernstrom and at abigail thernstrom senior fellow, manhattan institute stephan thernstrom st stephan thernstrom.

March 1, 1998

• 16 min read

Let’s start with a few contrasting numbers.

60 and 2.2. In 1940, 60 percent of employed black women worked as domestic servants; today the number is down to 2.2 percent, while 60 percent hold white- collar jobs.

44 and 1. In 1958, 44 percent of whites said they would move if a black family became their next door neighbor; today the figure is 1 percent.

18 and 86. In 1964, the year the great Civil Rights Act was passed, only 18 percent of whites claimed to have a friend who was black; today 86 percent say they do, while 87 percent of blacks assert they have white friends.

Progress is the largely suppressed story of race and race relations over the past half-century. And thus it’s news that more than 40 percent of African Americans now consider themselves members of the middle class. Forty-two percent own their own homes, a figure that rises to 75 percent if we look just at black married couples. Black two-parent families earn only 13 percent less than those who are white. Almost a third of the black population lives in suburbia.

Because these are facts the media seldom report, the black underclass continues to define black America in the view of much of the public. Many assume blacks live in ghettos, often in high-rise public housing projects. Crime and the welfare check are seen as their main source of income. The stereotype crosses racial lines. Blacks are even more prone than whites to exaggerate the extent to which African Americans are trapped in inner-city poverty. In a 1991 Gallup poll, about one-fifth of all whites, but almost half of black respondents, said that at least three out of four African Americans were impoverished urban residents. And yet, in reality, blacks who consider themselves to be middle class outnumber those with incomes below the poverty line by a wide margin.

A Fifty-Year March out of Poverty

Fifty years ago most blacks were indeed trapped in poverty, although they did not reside in inner cities. When Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma in 1944, most blacks lived in the South and on the land as laborers and sharecroppers. (Only one in eight owned the land on which he worked.) A trivial 5 percent of black men nationally were engaged in nonmanual, white-collar work of any kind; the vast majority held ill-paid, insecure, manual jobs—jobs that few whites would take. As already noted, six out of ten African-American women were household servants who, driven by economic desperation, often worked 12-hour days for pathetically low wages. Segregation in the South and discrimination in the North did create a sheltered market for some black businesses (funeral homes, beauty parlors, and the like) that served a black community barred from patronizing “white” establishments. But the number was minuscule.

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Beginning in the 1940s, however, deep demographic and economic change, accompanied by a marked shift in white racial attitudes, started blacks down the road to much greater equality. New Deal legislation, which set minimum wages and hours and eliminated the incentive of southern employers to hire low-wage black workers, put a damper on further industrial development in the region. In addition, the trend toward mechanized agriculture and a diminished demand for American cotton in the face of international competition combined to displace blacks from the land.

As a consequence, with the shortage of workers in northern manufacturing plants following the outbreak of World War II, southern blacks in search of jobs boarded trains and buses in a Great Migration that lasted through the mid-1960s. They found what they were looking for: wages so strikingly high that in 1953 the average income for a black family in the North was almost twice that of those who remained in the South. And through much of the 1950s wages rose steadily and unemployment was low.

Thus by 1960 only one out of seven black men still labored on the land, and almost a quarter were in white-collar or skilled manual occupations. Another 24 percent had semiskilled factory jobs that meant membership in the stable working class, while the proportion of black women working as servants had been cut in half. Even those who did not move up into higher-ranking jobs were doing much better.

A decade later, the gains were even more striking. From 1940 to 1970, black men cut the income gap by about a third, and by 1970 they were earning (on average) roughly 60 percent of what white men took in. The advancement of black women was even more impressive. Black life expectancy went up dramatically, as did black homeownership rates. Black college enrollment also rose—by 1970 to about 10 percent of the total, three times the prewar figure.

In subsequent years these trends continued, although at a more leisurely pace. For instance, today more than 30 percent of black men and nearly 60 percent of black women hold white-collar jobs. Whereas in 1970 only 2.2 percent of American physicians were black, the figure is now 4.5 percent. But while the fraction of black families with middle-class incomes rose almost 40 percentage points between 1940 and 1970, it has inched up only another 10 points since then.

Affirmative Action Doesn’t Work

Rapid change in the status of blacks for several decades followed by a definite slowdown that begins just when affirmative action policies get their start: that story certainly seems to suggest that racial preferences have enjoyed an inflated reputation. “There’s one simple reason to support affirmative action,” an op-ed writer in the New York Times argued in 1995. “It works.” That is the voice of conventional wisdom.

In fact, not only did significant advances pre-date the affirmative action era, but the benefits of race-conscious politics are not clear. Important differences (a slower overall rate of economic growth, most notably) separate the pre-1970 and post-1970 periods, making comparison difficult.

We know only this: some gains are probably attributable to race-conscious educational and employment policies. The number of black college and university professors more than doubled between 1970 and 1990; the number of physicians tripled; the number of engineers almost quadrupled; and the number of attorneys increased more than sixfold. Those numbers undoubtedly do reflect the fact that the nation’s professional schools changed their admissions criteria for black applicants, accepting and often providing financial aid to African-American students whose academic records were much weaker than those of many white and Asian-American applicants whom these schools were turning down. Preferences “worked” for these beneficiaries, in that they were given seats in the classroom that they would not have won in the absence of racial double standards.

On the other hand, these professionals make up a small fraction of the total black middle class. And their numbers would have grown without preferences, the historical record strongly suggests. In addition, the greatest economic gains for African Americans since the early 1960s were in the years 1965 to 1975 and occurred mainly in the South, as economists John J. Donahue III and James Heckman have found. In fact, Donahue and Heckman discovered “virtually no improvement” in the wages of black men relative to those of white men outside of the South over the entire period from 1963 to 1987, and southern gains, they concluded, were mainly due to the powerful antidiscrimination provisions in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

With respect to federal, state, and municipal set-asides, as well, the jury is still out. In 1994 the state of Maryland decided that at least 10 percent of the contracts it awarded would go to minority- and female-owned firms. It more than met its goal. The program therefore “worked” if the goal was merely the narrow one of dispensing cash to a particular, designated group. But how well do these sheltered businesses survive long-term without extraordinary protection from free-market competition? And with almost 30 percent of black families still living in poverty, what is their trickle-down effect? On neither score is the picture reassuring. Programs are often fraudulent, with white contractors offering minority firms 15 percent of the profit with no obligation to do any of the work. Alternatively, set-asides enrich those with the right connections. In Richmond, Virginia, for instance, the main effect of the ordinance was a marriage of political convenience—a working alliance between the economically privileged of both races. The white business elite signed on to a piece-of-the-pie for blacks in order to polish its image as socially conscious and secure support for the downtown revitalization it wanted. Black politicians used the bargain to suggest their own importance to low-income constituents for whom the set-asides actually did little. Neither cared whether the policy in fact provided real economic benefits—which it didn’t.

Why Has the Engine of Progress Stalled?

In the decades since affirmative action policies were first instituted, the poverty rate has remained basically unchanged. Despite black gains by numerous other measures, close to 30 percent of black families still live below the poverty line. “There are those who say, my fellow Americans, that even good affirmative action programs are no longer needed,” President Clinton said in July 1995. But “let us consider,” he went on, that “the unemployment rate for African Americans remains about twice that of whites.” Racial preferences are the president’s answer to persistent inequality, although a quarter-century of affirmative action has done nothing whatever to close the unemployment gap.

Persistent inequality is obviously serious, and if discrimination were the primary problem, then race-conscious remedies might be appropriate. But while white racism was central to the story in 1964, today the picture is much more complicated. Thus while blacks and whites now graduate at the same rate from high school today and are almost equally likely to attend college, on average they are not equally educated. That is, looking at years of schooling in assessing the racial gap in family income tells us little about the cognitive skills whites and blacks bring to the job market. And cognitive skills obviously affect earnings.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the nation’s report card on what American students attending elementary and secondary schools know. Those tests show that African-American students, on average, are alarmingly far behind whites in math, science, reading, and writing. For instance, black students at the end of their high school career are almost four years behind white students in reading; the gap is comparable in other subjects. A study of 26- to 33-year-old men who held full-time jobs in 1991 thus found that when education was measured by years of school completed, blacks earned 19 percent less than comparably educated whites. But when word knowledge, paragraph comprehension, arithmetical reasoning, and mathematical knowledge became the yardstick, the results were reversed. Black men earned 9 percent more than white men with the same education—that is, the same performance on basic tests.

Other research suggests much the same point. For instance, the work of economists Richard J. Murnane and Frank Levy has demonstrated the increasing importance of cognitive skills in our changing economy. Employers in firms like Honda now require employees who can read and do math problems at the ninth-grade level at a minimum. And yet the 1992 NAEP math tests, for example, revealed that only 22 percent of African-American high school seniors but 58 percent of their white classmates were numerate enough for such firms to consider hiring them. And in reading, 47 percent of whites in 1992 but just 18 percent of African Americans could handle the printed word well enough to be employable in a modern automobile plant. Murnane and Levy found a clear impact on income. Not years spent in school but strong skills made for high long-term earnings.

The Widening Skills Gap

Why is there such a glaring racial gap in levels of educational attainment? It is not easy to say. The gap, in itself, is very bad news, but even more alarming is the fact that it has been widening in recent years. In 1971, the average African-American 17-year-old could read no better than the typical white child who was six years younger. The racial gap in math in 1973 was 4.3 years; in science it was 4.7 years in 1970. By the late 1980s, however, the picture was notably brighter. Black students in their final year of high school were only 2.5 years behind whites in both reading and math and 2.1 years behind on tests of writing skills.

Had the trends of those years continued, by today black pupils would be performing about as well as their white classmates. Instead, black progress came to a halt, and serious backsliding began. Between 1988 and 1994, the racial gap in reading grew from 2.5 to 3.9 years; between 1990 and 1994, the racial gap in math increased from 2.5 to 3.4 years. In both science and writing, the racial gap has widened by a full year.

There is no obvious explanation for this alarming turnaround. The early gains doubtless had much to do with the growth of the black middle class, but the black middle class did not suddenly begin to shrink in the late 1980s. The poverty rate was not dropping significantly when educational progress was occurring, nor was it on the increase when the racial gap began once again to widen. The huge rise in out-of-wedlock births and the steep and steady decline in the proportion of black children growing up with two parents do not explain the fluctuating educational performance of African-American children. It is well established that children raised in single-parent families do less well in school than others, even when all other variables, including income, are controlled. But the disintegration of the black nuclear family—presciently noted by Daniel Patrick Moynihan as early as 1965—was occurring rapidly in the period in which black scores were rising, so it cannot be invoked as the main explanation as to why scores began to fall many years later.

Some would argue that the initial educational gains were the result of increased racial integration and the growth of such federal compensatory education programs as Head Start. But neither desegregation nor compensatory education seems to have increased the cognitive skills of the black children exposed to them. In any case, the racial mix in the typical school has not changed in recent years, and the number of students in compensatory programs and the dollars spent on them have kept going up.

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What about changes in the curriculum and patterns of course selection by students? The educational reform movement that began in the late 1970s did succeed in pushing students into a “New Basics” core curriculum that included more English, science, math, and social studies courses. And there is good reason to believe that taking tougher courses contributed to the temporary rise in black test scores. But this explanation, too, nicely fits the facts for the period before the late 1980s but not the very different picture thereafter. The number of black students going through “New Basics” courses did not decline after 1988, pulling down their NAEP scores.

We are left with three tentative suggestions. First, the increased violence and disorder of inner-city lives that came with the introduction of crack cocaine and the drug-related gang wars in the mid-1980s most likely had something to do with the reversal of black educational progress. Chaos in the streets and within schools affects learning inside and outside the classroom.

In addition, an educational culture that has increasingly turned teachers into guides who help children explore whatever interests them may have affected black academic performance as well. As educational critic E. D. Hirsch, Jr., has pointed out, the “deep aversion to and contempt for factual knowledge that pervade the thinking of American educators” means that students fail to build the “intellectual capital” that is the foundation of all further learning. That will be particularly true of those students who come to school most academically disadvantaged—those whose homes are not, in effect, an additional school. The deficiencies of American education hit hardest those most in need of education.

And yet in the name of racial sensitivity, advocates for minority students too often dismiss both common academic standards and standardized tests as culturally biased and judgmental. Such advocates have plenty of company. Christopher Edley, Jr., professor of law at Harvard and President Clinton’s point man on affirmative action, for instance, has allied himself with testing critics, labeling preferences the tool colleges are forced to use “to correct the problems we’ve inflicted on ourselves with our testing standards.” Such tests can be abolished—or standards lowered—but once the disparity in cognitive skills becomes less evident, it is harder to correct.

Closing that skills gap is obviously the first task if black advancement is to continue at its once-fast pace. On the map of racial progress, education is the name of almost every road. Raise the level of black educational performance, and the gap in college graduation rates, in attendance at selective professional schools, and in earnings is likely to close as well. Moreover, with educational parity, the whole issue of racial preferences disappears.

The Road to True Equality

Black progress over the past half-century has been impressive, conventional wisdom to the contrary notwithstanding. And yet the nation has many miles to go on the road to true racial equality. “I wish I could say that racism and prejudice were only distant memories, but as I look around I see that even educated whites and African American…have lost hope in equality,” Thurgood Marshall said in 1992. A year earlier The Economist magazine had reported the problem of race as one of “shattered dreams.” In fact, all hope has not been “lost,” and “shattered” was much too strong a word, but certainly in the 1960s the civil rights community failed to anticipate just how tough the voyage would be. (Thurgood Marshall had envisioned an end to all school segregation within five years of the Supreme Court s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.) Many blacks, particularly, are now discouraged. A 1997 Gallup poll found a sharp decline in optimism since 1980; only 33 percent of blacks (versus 58 percent of whites) thought both the quality of life for blacks and race relations had gotten better.

Thus, progress—by many measures seemingly so clear—is viewed as an illusion, the sort of fantasy to which intellectuals are particularly prone. But the ahistorical sense of nothing gained is in itself bad news. Pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If all our efforts as a nation to resolve the “American dilemma” have been in vain—if we’ve been spinning our wheels in the rut of ubiquitous and permanent racism, as Derrick Bell, Andrew Hacker, and others argue—then racial equality is a hopeless task, an unattainable ideal. If both blacks and whites understand and celebrate the gains of the past, however, we will move forward with the optimism, insight, and energy that further progress surely demands.

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Civil CONVERSATION CHALLENGE

What Students Are Saying About Race and Racism in America

We invited teenagers to join a moderated discussion about racial equity and justice. Here is a summary of the 2,000-plus thoughtful, passionate comments.

By Nicole Daniels

Note: We have a lesson plan for teaching with this collection of student comments.

This past fall, we held a Civil Conversation Challenge for students, inviting young people to engage in respectful, productive discussions about some of the most divisive issues of the 2020 presidential election. In a series of online forums hosted by The Learning Network, they reflected on their experiences of the coronavirus pandemic and debated education, voting and other issues they cared about. Across forums, they told us that “ 2020 has been a wake-up call .”

But the discussion that perhaps challenged students the most was our forum on the fight for racial justice , in which we asked them to share their opinions on protests, policing, systemic racism and more.

By the end, the conversation had generated over 2,000 comments, and if you read even a few of the highlights we feature below, we think you’ll see why we thought it merited its own roundup. Though we were impressed by student posts on all of the topics in our challenge, this forum was special.

Some students shared heartbreaking stories of discrimination. Several told us what it’s like to have a family member who is a police officer. And many wrote about becoming deeply aware of racism for the first time after the death of George Floyd and the protests that followed. Throughout, the teenage participants showed a willingness to write candidly about their own experiences as well as to stretch to understand the experiences of others.

But this discussion is also a microcosm of a conversation happening across American society, and it mirrored its sharp divisions, too. Students engaged passionately on core issues like the existence of white privilege, the extent of systemic racism, the legacy of slavery, the effectiveness of protests and the role of the police.

Though the roundup below doesn’t feature conversations so much as individual posts, it is still easy to see how students handled these difficult topics thoughtfully and respectfully. We have published responses in thematic groups so that you can easily navigate the various points of view, but clicking on each student’s name will take you back to the original conversation so you can read it in that context if you like.

Thank you to all who participated and to the teachers who brought their classes to the discussion. As always, but especially for a forum as important as this one, we are grateful to be a place students can share their voices.

Please note: All student comments have been lightly edited for length and clarity, but we did not change individual words. Therefore, while it is Times style to capitalize “Black” when describing people and cultures of African origin , student uses of the word remain rendered the way they were originally submitted.

“As a black girl, I have experienced a lot of pain because of my skin color.”

As a black girl, I have dealt with a lot of comments from others over the years pertaining my skin color and other features that make me a person of color. I still remember girls telling me my hair looked “normal” after straightening it, or girls petting my curly hair calling it “different,” treating me not like a person, but an exotic object. During the summer, when moments like the Black Lives Matter protests took place, I realized how many of my “friends” weren’t willing to say anything. It made me feel sad knowing they decided to stay silent. I also couldn’t believe the city I was born in would later be known as the city where the life of Floyd was taken.

— Naomi, Georgia

As a black young man in America, I feel every day is a new worry. I’d like to be able to go out and not be afraid of something happening to me, my friends, my family or other people of color. When the death of George Floyd occurred, something definitely changed. People became more aware of the fear that people of color go through in everyday life situations. I’d love to one day see a country where skin color doesn’t contribute to how a human being is treated.

— Q, New York

As a young black girl, I’ve experienced racism numerous times. I’ve been called the N-word, been told that it should’ve been you instead of Breonna, etc. All things that hurt me. People wonder why these protests get so violent and so intense. It’s because racial inequality and all these problems aren’t being addressed.

— Camryn, New York

As a black girl, I have experienced a lot of pain because of my skin color. A lot of my childhood friends were nonblack, and I often was made to feel like an outsider with them. Once I was told by a white classmate, “Wow, your hair is finally normal!” upon having my hair straightened for picture day. Suddenly, I felt as though my natural curls were abnormal, and I never wanted to be abnormal again. So, the internalized racism began to grow and flourish within me. I was so ashamed to be black, so desperate to not be seen as “hood” or “ghetto” that I demeaned my own people in order to raise myself up …

Today, I am very pro-black; I love my hair, and I love my skin. But it’s still hard to find beauty in the mirror when I go to look. Sometimes it hurts knowing that lighter girls will always be seen as being prettier than me, that I don’t fit most people’s idea of being the “acceptable version” of blackness. But I have to remind myself that it’s OK, things will change. I’m still young enough to help create a future where no other black girl will suffer like I did, or how I sometimes still do.

— KJ, Texas

“This summer was really the first time that I was actually aware of the impact racism had.”

I am white, and I live in a predominately white suburban town. I have never been treated differently for the color of my skin because I am a product of white privilege. I was not very politically active until George Floyd was murdered and the Black Lives Matter protests began in May. Since then, I’ve tried to better understand the hardships that people of color endure as a result of racism. I think it is of the utmost importance to speak out against corrupt systems, especially if you are not affected by these systems. Because in my opinion, choosing not to speak up against something because it does not involve you is proof that the system is working. Turning a blind eye with the thinly veiled excuse “politics isn’t for me” can no longer mask selfish ignorance. This is not the time to be anti-political because silence is contributing to the blatant discrimination of black Americans. Hiding behind privilege instead of utilizing that very privilege to initiate change can no longer be justified.

— Annie, New Jersey

I think that this summer was really the first time that I was actually aware of the impact racism had. My parents have taught me, from a young age, that racism and injustice exist but I guess I did not understand to what extent. As a person who benefits from white privilege, I feel kind of guilty that I had not realized how it affected me before. Also, as a person who cannot yet vote, I am struggling to find ways that I can help make change. Do you have any suggestions?

— L, Pennsylvania

In ninth grade, before the pandemic and killing of George Floyd, I used to be thankful to the police officers who stood at our doors to prevent any school shooting. After hearing of the George Floyd incident, I remember suddenly feeling like the police hadn’t made our school safer at all.

To be honest, it infuriated me. I was raised in a bubble that taught me to think racism was extinct. To think that the police protected all of us as equals … George Floyd was a father, a son and a brother. Imagine seeing your son get murdered by the people that are supposed to protect you.

As a white person, I will never truly understand the horrors of being discriminated against for my skin color. I am privileged, not because of what I am, but because of what I’m not. The best thing I and other white people can do is listen and share. We will never completely know what racism will feel like, but we can listen and try to understand the pain of being harassed or attacked by the people who are supposed to protect you.

— Lindsay, North Carolina

As a kid with divorced parents, I have two sides of my family: My mom’s house, where we can have talks about racism and go to protests together; and my dad’s house, where the existence of white privilege is denied completely and even joked about. I’ve seen news, real and fake, about the police cases and the protests, and I’ve come to a few conclusions. The first is that people with privilege and power will do or deny anything to stay in that place, even when they have proof it’s hurting others. The second is that if it were only a few bad apples, those “bad apples” would be fired and arrested — but they’re not. The police system protects racists and always has, as a system born out of catching runaway slaves. Until we dismantle and rebuild every racist system in our country, racism will be a problem, and everyone will have the choice to educate themselves or stay ignorant

— Claire Elise, North Carolina

I am from France and I can tell that the death of George Floyd has touched everyone in the world and his death has awakened the spirits. Some demonstrations have been organized, and even though I couldn’t go, I have followed this history on the internet, on TV news and in magazines.

I believe that we can change the mentality at the moment. The new generation is respectful of each other and is able to change things. We are strong and determined to put an end to racism!

— Julie, Paris

“I never once thought in my life that the hatred for law enforcement would EVER go this far.”

As a daughter of a police officer and a granddaughter of a retired police chief, I never once thought in my life that the hatred for law enforcement would EVER go this far. I was raised to treat everyone equally no matter what. With that being said, I cannot speak for people of color. What I can say is that police officers are trained on how to handle situations like the one with George Floyd. Like both President Trump and Joe Biden said last night [at the debate], there are bad apples in every profession and more could be done to weed out the bad cops. The officer that killed George Floyd deserved to be put away. Did his actions deserve a protest? Maybe. Should the protest still be happening? Definitely not. Police officers provide safety in a community and have been a staple for ages. Law enforcement should never make you feel threatened unless you are doing the wrong thing. We should support everyone no matter their color or occupation. So I agree that all lives do matter and that we should not only back the blue but back all other first responders and essential workers.

— Kylie, California

In the case of George Floyd, I believe that what happened was a terrible tragedy and should forever be talked about when racism in this country is brought up. However, the cop that murdered George Floyd killed him on his own accord, showing an example of individual racism instead of systemic … How the murderers of George Floyd are tried will change my opinion of systemic racism and other cases the organization Black Lives Matter has brought to attention.

— Jason, New York

Systemically, the United States does not discriminate racially. Unfortunately, there are and always will be racist individuals in any and all countries. People of color disproportionately attend poorer schools because residents of a county must go to a school in that district, which is why many people generally leave poorer counties and move to richer ones …

I believe racism is a horrible issue at any given time, and legitimately racist individuals should be shamed. However, the word racism has lost meaning nowadays because of how commonly it’s thrown around. America is not a racist nation: it’s the world’s largest immigrant destination, but there certainly are racist individuals who need to change. So many people think that racism means stereotypes and saying “offensive” words, when legitimate racism (hate crimes and actual discrimination) is actually quite rare.

— Kai, California

I am a white male and am right leaning. I feel that there should be a change in our police forces and our opinions toward other people. At the same time there is different way to go about the situations than what the people of the Black Lives Matter movement are trying to accomplish. The Black Lives Matter movement is trying to defund the police, which is the opposite of what you want do. With less money, the less officers we can have to keep us as a people safe. I believe that we should fund the police forces more so the police can get more training, have therapists they can go to, and so we can keep the police in the correct state of mind. In turn there will be change and less police brutality. I also feel that it’s not just black lives that matter, it should be all lives matter. Having this mind-set you are able to bring everyone up to be equal, not just one race, so there is no “white privilege” or any other race getting more than another.

— Spencer, Utah

“The first time I began thinking about my racial identity was when my family and I moved into a predominantly white town.”

Being a Latina makes my perspective on the topic of racial inequalities quite sensitive. The first time I began thinking about my racial identity was when my family and I moved into a predominantly white town. I truly wish my parents had prepared me more for the environment that we were moving into, yet I believe that deep down they did not expect to encounter racism.

Witnessing and sometimes even experiencing all the issues and injustices around me has propelled my interest in history, in hopes of simply understanding and helping to educate others. As a little girl, I would witness racism against indigenous people in my home country, Ecuador. I began noticing it at about the age of 12. It was only after studying the age of exploration, the Incan empire and colonization that I began to make sense of such horrible actions.

With the death of George Floyd, I began wondering how racial injustices are manifesting during the Covid-19 pandemic. I began thinking about access to health care and unemployment benefits. According to The New York Times, 40 million people have lost their jobs since the start of the pandemic. How many of these people were minorities? How many of these minorities were able to receive relief from the government? Do all students have equal access to technology to facilitate their online learning?

After witnessing so many acts of racial injustice, I worry that little by little, humans are losing their empathy and love for one another.

— Paula, New Jersey

“Why are your eyes so small? Can you even see?” was my first experience with racial remarks. It was no big deal to me, thinking it was only fun teasing. I can vividly remember my first day of 6th grade, walking to my assigned seat and a girl laughs at me, pulling her eyes back to make them small. I didn’t know what to say and I thought I was being judged.

“So how does dog taste?” “Say hi to Uncle Kim Jong-un for me.” “Go back to North Korea.” When this was said, it created an image in my head that I wasn’t like anyone else, I didn’t fit into society …

While all my experiences were in the past, I considered the fact that society was changing and I wouldn’t receive any more racist comments but then Covid-19 hit. I no longer felt safe sneezing or coughing in public. Passing down aisles and places were frightening and my heart would race hoping I wouldn’t cough or sneeze. I would hold back the itch in my throat and the sniffle under my mask. People would back up against walls, trying their best not to touch me. This was my first experience with nonverbal racism. One step we can take to get closer to achieving racial justice is by starting in the household.

— Lauren, California

My race has been classified as the “model minority,” resulting in negative effects on the fight for equality.

The term model minority is based on the stereotype that Asian-American children are born “gifted.” It characterizes Asian-Americans as a “docile racial group that has achieved financial and educational success in the United States” …

It was only this year after discussing the protests occurring for George Floyd with other Asians that I had come to the realization that the ideas my family had perpetrated on me were the epitome of the “model minority.”

Putting Asian-Americans on a pedestal is destructive toward African Americans and the racial inequalities they face. It dismisses their struggles by using the Asian-American stories as testimonial representation to back up false claims against African Americans that classify them as “lazy” and “hostile.”

It is important to discuss these matters as the only true way to create change is through an open mind-set and discussion.

— Jay, New York

“The point of privilege is that you don’t feel that.”

So, I’m white, and I grew up in a town that I think is about 75 to 80 percent white. I grew up in an immense place of privilege — I never had to worry about being racially profiled, I’ve never experienced racial discrimination, and I don’t have relatives who have been unjustly shot or killed by police. And my guess is most white people, specifically white people in my community, haven’t. That’s why it was so frustrating over the summer, and especially after the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor to hear many of my peers try to justify their deaths. I think, especially when it comes to the topic of racial justice, we need to amplify the voices of black people and people of color, instead of silencing them because we, as white people haven’t experienced the same. I find it completely ironic when kids in my grade talk about not experiencing harassment or discrimination by the police or our security officers while being white. Like, of course we haven’t. The point of privilege is that you don’t feel that.

— Eleanor, Illinois

I grew up with white privilege in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Racism was not evident in my everyday life, and even in school I was not exposed enough to what happened and was happening in the United States. Yes, we learned about slavery and racism in the United States, especially racism during the time of Martin Luther King Jr., but we kind of just stopped there. We learned nothing of police brutality, white privilege, systematic racism, generational wealth, etc. Last year I was a part of a club called Community-Wide Dialogue that discussed racism issues that I had never heard of before. It was eye-opening. Every school should incorporate those extremely important topics into their curriculum, to help promote change, understanding and empathy.

— Sarah, New York

4.9 million fathers, daughters, sons, mothers; humans were brought to Brazil to suffer a fate worse than death: slavery. 4.9 million lives were ended because of the color of their skin. And still, after centuries of pain and fighting to make their voices heard, black lives do not matter for some. Being a child from an upper-middle class white family, I never experienced prejudice in my own skin. I grew accustomed to the bubble in which I was raised, and it wasn’t until I reached a considerably advanced age that I started to look at my surroundings and realize how messed up our society is. Why I am privileged because my skin is lighter than someone else’s? It doesn’t make ANY sense … Even though the fight to end racism has followed us until this very date, the need to make even more civil rights movements makes me think that we did not advance as a society. We will remain frozen in time until equality is reached.

— Maria, Recife, Brazil

“Racism does exist in people … but America and the system as a whole is not racist in any way.”

I think the term racism is thrown around a lot in today’s society. America, as a country, is not racist. Go to almost any other country in the world and you will have it significantly worse. Today, there is not a single law that gives opportunity or rights to one race that is not given to another. In other words, everyone in America is treated equally. That doesn’t mean there aren’t racist people, because there always will be. There are racist white, black and Asian people, etc., but the system, as a whole, is not racist. My overall point is that racism does exist in people, and it always will, but America and the system as a whole is not racist in any way.

— Nate, Ohio

First of all, I do not believe racism and systemic racism is a very big threat in America as compared to many other problems or even to other countries. As a Chinese immigrant minority, I have not experienced nor heard of any racism in my life in the United States. Instead, I think America is truly one of the most diverse nations made up of people of all different races, cultures and religions. The people here are all-encompassing, and the police are human too. As many police officers say, “No one hates a bad cop more than a good cop.”

— Jiayi, New York

Racism is a very strong topic and if I’m being completely honest, I hate talking about it. Me, personally, I think America is one of the most racially equal countries. A white man and a black man have the same opportunities to succeed and thrive. There has become a common stereotype that black people don’t have equal opportunity as white people. I love when I see black doctors, businessmen and other workers because I know how hard they have worked. Just as hard as a white man would have.

— Nicholas, North Carolina

Everybody knows America has had a troubled past with slavery, civil rights, racial discrimination, the whole nine yards. So in response to all that, “Does the United States owe the descendants of enslaved people an apology — or, as some argue, financial reparations?” No. Most, if not everyone, in the United States right now didn’t own slaves nor were they slaves. If somebody owed them an apology, it was owed a long time ago. It is irrelevant now. The United States especially does not owe them financial reparations. Why should today’s leaders pay back on something they never did, to people that were never slaves anyway? If the problem is trying to help people who came from a slavery background and has a poor family, well there are plenty of financial aid programs for them. They want equality, yet also wish to get special things because of actions our ancestors made, not us.

— Bella, Mississippi

“Police reform should most definitely be a priority.”

Police reform should most definitely be a priority. Personally, I think it should take a back seat to other issues such as equal opportunities and fixing our justice system, but it is still a top priority behind those issues. Although no one in my family is an officer, we know people that are officers. I do think that the police are necessary in our country, and without them our country could and would become a very dangerous place. However, there are still steps to be taken that would make our policing better.

For example, police need to be better trained in de-escalation techniques rather than resorting too quickly to force. Another important reform would be bringing a psychiatrist on 911 calls. There are times when tragedies could be avoided if a person was calmed down by a trained professional, rather than enraged by police threatening them. Police should also be more involved and engaged in their communities. In many places, police are simply there as law enforcement, and nothing else. However, if police were to get to know their community and be able to bond with them in certain ways, there would be much more trust on both sides. In my town, although I haven’t interacted with many officers in my life, I see things that the police do to support and engage with the community, and I think that’s one important reason why no one in my town really has an issue with our police force. With all these reforms, I think policing could be greatly improved.

— Jacob, Illinois

I personally don’t believe police reform should be a priority, police abolition should. There have been countless policies with the goal of reforming police departments and, clearly, reform movements have not stopped police brutality. This can especially be seen in the city of Minneapolis which had implemented many of the common reform policies before George Floyd’s murder. The first step to abolition would be defunding the police. A world without police or a defunded police department may be hard to imagine, but if you are like me and live in a predominantly white, wealthy suburban community, this is what that world would look like. The majority of resources are not going to criminalize members of the community, they are going to education and other ways of supporting the community.

— Mira, Illinois

I disagree with the idea that the police should be abolished. Unfortunately, humans are inherently selfish, and in a world without police or law enforcement to stop them, people of all races would steal things for their own gain and society would be a mess. I believe instead, that the police system should be completely redone from square one. This way, it actually has a good foundation to build upon, instead of it being a lost cause to try and fix.

— Devon, California

I feel that if law enforcement were defunded and there were a lot fewer cops, chaos would occur and nobody would be there to stop it. Don’t get me wrong, there are definitely bad cops out there, but I feel as if the majority of cops are there to do good in the world, and to prevent chaos, not cause it … I do feel that cops are necessary and very important figures in everyday society because they keep order and try to make it fair for everyone. Although this isn’t always the case, most try the best that they can.

— Andrew, New Jersey

You have to keep in mind police budgets can be very large. For example, the Los Angeles Police Department has a budget of around $2 billion. Say you take only five percent of their budget and redirect it into funding schools, housing, health care, etc. That is $100 million, which barely affects their budget, yet it can make a large impact on the community. By creating a higher standard of living, in theory, the crime rate would drop. Now, there is no way to stop all crime, and yes, I believe police are important to stop the violence. However, another small fraction of their budget can go toward better training. Ultimately, the goal is to decrease the crime rate by putting more money into communities and having better trained police to handle issues in an appropriate manner.

— Lauren, Massachusetts

“I think systemic racism today is absolutely tied to slavery, Jim Crow and discrimination of the past.”

Related Article: What Is Owed

Racism is still widely present in the United States in 2020, and it is straight up deplorable. It is even worse that schools for the most part are not teaching about racism in their curriculum … Redlining is the practice of outlining areas where communities of people of color lived and refusing those people mortgages on homes. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 may have made redlining illegal, but that has not stopped race-based economic discrimination. According to statistics from 2017, African Americans get denied more than twice the percent of white people on mortgage applicants, with Hispanics being around twice the percent of white people, at 10.9%. There should not be a reason for those differences.

— Jordan, Arizona

Practices such as redlining, blockbusting, and higher mortgage and interest rates were used years after Jim Crow was made illegal, leading to incredibly segregated neighborhoods with less funding for education and infrastructure and more aggressive policing. This aggressive policing has led to police brutality toward Black Americans … Based on the continued dehumanization, criminalization, and discrimination Black people have continued to face, protests are more than reasonable responses. Even if property damage occurs, it does not carry the same weight as human lives.

— Aspen, New York

Racism is very much alive today. Even if you forget about racial prejudice within the justice system or the hiring process or policing, minorities are still at a disadvantage. Slavery, Jim Crow and redlining completely ruined black peoples’ chances of building generational wealth. Even when they were able to start businesses or own homes, they got that stripped away from them. Just look at the Tulsa Massacre (or Black Wall Street). This accounts for the racial wealth gap where white families have about 10 times the wealth of black ones. The neighborhoods that were redlined are still impoverished to this day, and when you’re born poor, there’s a 66% chance you’ll stay poor in America. Black people shouldn’t have to be truly exceptional or truly lucky just so they can be afforded the same chance at a good life as white people.

— Abraham, California

I think systemic racism today is absolutely tied to slavery, Jim Crow and discrimination of the past. Some people think slavery ended with the 13th Amendment, and while it may have ended in name, slavery-like practices and many discriminatory laws continued. The police system is built on a system of catching fugitive slaves. Many suburban neighborhoods, like the one I live in, are predominantly white because of redlining and racist practices that kept black families out of suburbs and restricted them to certain neighborhoods. Though racism and segregation may not be de jure anymore, it is certainly de facto and built into education, health care, policing, etc.

— Stefanie, Illinois

“I feel that there is no real definite solution to racism, but there are steps that can be taken to get closer to equality.”

As a young person, I have never really talked about racism due to the fact that many adults play it off or act as if there is no such thing. I am more privileged to be able not to hear about it. However, I really do disagree with the fact that adults and older figures try to avoid the topic. As a kid, I was taught to admire police forces as they protect me. But during times such as this, I have started to realize how unfair the police officers treat people due to race. So many kids are not taught such things because adults believe that kids should live a blissful life. I believe that the system should change as soon as possible, as informing others of racial injustice is so important … To be honest, I do not think racism will come to a complete end, unless humanity is gone. Yet, I still believe that there would be much less racism if people were educated and accepting of others.

— Natalie, California

I feel that there is no real definite solution to racism, but there are steps that can be taken to get closer to equality. Step 1 would be to teach your kids how to show compassion and how not to judge someone by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. By doing this, the next generation will grow up knowing how to not judge others by the way that they look but by the way they act and the decisions they make. Step 2 would be to educate this generation and the next about racism and the correct history behind it. It is mostly ignorance that causes people to make poor judgment on others and treat others unfairly and that is what I believe is one of the main causes of racism. Step 3 would be to enforce the change of history books and to encourage communities to work for each other not against each other.

— Aidan, Illinois

One of the relics of the racism that has been gaining more coverage recently is the lack of diverse narratives in our history curriculums. I am lucky enough to be a part of a new class in my district called Unites States History Perspectives, a class that focuses on the untold histories of oppressed peoples. I have already learned more about the culture of Indigenous people and the struggles of African Americans this year than I have in the other 11 years of my education combined.

— Isabela, Washington

I live in a mostly white town and before these seven months I knew about white privilege and police brutality, however I was ignorant to how large and deeply rooted the problem is. I think literature and stories are a great way of educating and learning about racism in our country. For example, during quarantine I got to read one of my new favorite books, “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas. I really like how it made me sympathize with the main character and helped me understand a little better how unfairly people like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were treated. I wish people in this country who still believe America is handling racism would educate themselves about the oppression of African Americans. If everyone worked toward understanding American flaws then we might be able to make progress toward a country with true equality.

— Zoe, New Jersey

Nicole Daniels joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2019 after working in museum education, curriculum writing and bilingual education. More about Nicole Daniels

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A scholar of slavery and issues of race, Orlando Patterson, the John Cowles Professor of Sociology, talks about the killing of George Floyd.

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Why America can’t escape its racist roots

Harvard Staff Writer

Orlando Patterson says there’s been progress, but the nation needs to reject white supremacist ideology, bigotry in policing, and segregation

The killing of George Floyd, who died after a white Minneapolis police officer kneeled into his neck for nearly nine minutes during an arrest, has spurred a wave of rage, anguish, and protests across the country. To better understand what is happening and what the future may hold, the Gazette talked with Orlando Patterson, the John Cowles Professor of Sociology. A scholar of slavery and issues of race, Patterson talked about the legacy of white supremacist ideology, racism in policing, and the ongoing, widespread discrimination and segregation in American life. He also explained why he hopes that the country can yet heal its racial divide, and sees particular promise in the young.

Orlando Patterson

GAZETTE:   Two years ago, you spoke to the Gazette on the 50th anniversary of the Kerner Report , which blamed white society’s racism as the underlying cause of the race riots of 1967. You said then that maybe we needed another report that looks at the roots of the racial inequities in the country. What is your take now?

PATTERSON:   Reports are always useful if well done. There are now many studies of race and inequality, in fact it’s a virtual industry. There’s no shortage of thorough and well-informed research. But it would do no harm to have a group of people bring together the main results of the findings of recent studies, as well, including the views of influential people, not just academics, but also community, political, and religious leaders, who can say where they think we are and where we are going in terms of race relations in America. That’d be important especially now, after the killing of George Floyd. Many people must be asking themselves what has happened over the past half a century or more, since those first set of defining riots of the ’60s, not to mention the Rodney King riots in 1992. Is the element of white supremacy and chronic racism so deeply rooted that no amount of not just protests, but reform and institutional change is going to make a difference? That’s a depressing view. My sense is that there’s something new in these demonstrations.

GAZETTE:   What is new about these protests, compared to the protests of 1967, 1968, or 1992, or the more recent ones organized by the Black Lives Matter movement?

PATTERSON:   For one thing, and this is even true of the Rodney King demonstrations in 1992, the difference is the composition of the demonstrators. One cannot help but be struck by the significant proportion of the protesters who are white, Hispanic, and Asian. It was interesting, for example, that when the police brutally broke up a demonstration near the White House and trapped protesters on a road, a South Asian man took 70 of them in his house. My sentiment is that this is a more diverse, although still predominantly Black, expression of outrage. I think it has to do with the moment we’re living right now. People seemed horrified that we’re seeing this sort of thing after all these years, but they also sense that something is profoundly wrong. What’s terrifying about this moment is that the foundational institutions of our democracy are under assault, that the fundamental norms upon which our Constitution and our system of government rests are being threatened.

GAZETTE:   What similarities do you find between previous protests, including the ones that followed the Rodney King beating, and the ones led by the Black Lives Matter movement, and the current protests?

PATTERSON:   The common denominator is police violence and brutality. We have these brutal acts and killings, and we have outrage, protests, commissions, recommendations, and again and again, the police still continue in their old ways. They don’t seek to respect life and are prepared to brutalize someone for something as minor as passing a counterfeit $20 bill or jaywalking. The police are also very much part of one of the worst recent developments in American life: mass incarceration. It’s historically unprecedented, and it’s shameful that the country that claims to be the leader of the free world, although most of the rest of the world will consider that a joke, has the world’s highest number of people in prison: 2.3 million. And over 40 percent of those in prison are Black. This is really just astonishing, and the police have a lot to do with it, as well as prosecutors.

GAZETTE:   There have been other cases of police brutality in the past few years, but why do you think the killing of George Floyd has led to this wave of protests even beyond the United States? Why did it happen now and not before?

PATTERSON:   First, the whole thing was captured on video. And it was especially chilling because of the nonchalance, the sense of complete indifference, the disdain for someone’s life that the police officer showed as he killed Floyd. We have seen videos of brutality in the past, but this one came right after a series of police killings, and it simply reached the breaking point. When I saw the expression in that officer’s face and that three other officers were around him standing by as if this was just business as usual, I thought of Hannah Arendt and her phrase “the banality of evil.” What Arendt found most horrific was that ordinary people were able to commit horrible killings, and at the end of the day, they went back home to their nice homes and their nice families, and the next day they went back and killed again. I also think that the video came up in the midst of a pandemic, when people were feeling appalled at the incompetence and absence of leadership.

GAZETTE:   What role might the pandemic have played in this wave of unrest?

PATTERSON:   When we passed that critical milestone of 100,000 deaths, that called for a leader to express our collective fear and anxiety. We didn’t get that. People were really aghast at what was happening and at the reports that say that thousands of lives could have been spared if our leadership would have been more competent and less self-absorbed and concerned solely with the problem of reelection. The nation saw two big failures coming together: on the one hand, the absence of a proper health system and, on the other hand, the incompetent leadership. When the issue of police brutality came up with this video, people saw a link between the incompetent leadership, the failure of the American welfare state, and the resurgence of one of the worst aspects of American society: its white supremacist and racist ideology.

GAZETTE:   How does white supremacy fit into this?

PATTERSON:   What the killing has done is to show us that there still persists a hardcore white supremacy racist ideology, which rejects outsiders, anyone who is not white. That ideology is now ascendant as a result of the leadership in the White House. What I see is two great traditions in America that are competing. There is the liberal tradition, and there’s the equally dominant tradition of white supremacy, which comes out of the South but traveled northward. There is real tension between them.

I’ve argued in my writings that there has been extraordinary progress in the changing attitudes of white Americans toward Blacks and other minorities. As late as the early ’60s, a majority of whites openly said they saw Blacks as inferior, and now there is an acceptance of equality, at least in their views. I’ve always said that this may be the great majority, but there’s still 20, 25 percent of whites who still embrace white supremacist views. This hard core of white supremacists is still there and have been encouraged and are leading a revanchist sort of movement. And that’s quite frightening.

Protesters in front of a mural of George Floyd at the scene where he was pinned down by a police officer kneeling on his neck in Minneapolis.

Stringer/Sputnik via AP

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The fire this time

GAZETTE:   To those who are not white supremacists but may be just be awakening to racial disparities in the nation, what would you like them to know about issues of race in the United States?

PATTERSON:   I don’t want to use the term “white people” in general terms because as I said before, what is special about these recent protests is the participation of whites in it, many of them young. But I also see middle-aged and some people my age. I want to emphasize that I think white Americans have gone through quite radical changes in their attitudes, and that we’re talking about a more likely 25 percent of Americans who are hardcore racist, but I think most Americans have quite decent views about race.

But sociologists have argued that while some whites may have liberal views, a lot of them are not prepared to make the concessions that are important for the improvement of Black lives. For example, one of the reasons why people have been crowded in ghettos is the fact that housing is so expensive in the suburbs, and one reason for that is that bylaws restrict the building of multi-occupancy housing. These bylaws have been very effective in keeping out moderate-income housing from the suburbs, and that has kept out working people, among whom Blacks are disproportionate, from moving there and having access to good schools. Sociologists have claimed that while we do have genuine improvement in racial attitudes, what we don’t have is the willingness for white liberals to put their money where their mouth is.

One of the fundamental aspects of the American race problem is segregation. The Black population is almost as segregated now as it was in the ’60s. That is the foundation of a lot of problems that Blacks face, but it also explains and perpetuates the isolation of whites who grow up in neighborhoods where they don’t see Blacks or interact with them. That reinforces the idea that Blacks are outsiders and don’t belong.

GAZETTE:   What don’t many white people understand about the life and experiences of people of color in this country?

PATTERSON:   Some do; some don’t. I see definitely a change in the younger generation. It’s not just a matter of attitudes. In many ways, young white people are probably the least racist among whites. They are more racially tolerant.

I’ve seen encouraging signs of this. I used to live on Trowbridge Street in Cambridge, and I enjoyed walking through the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. I was always struck by the easy interaction between white kids and Black kids, which was very different from the 1960s or the 1970s. It shows you what’s possible with a more integrated setting. Now you do have that in many areas, but not enough. In most cases, what you have is largely segregated schools. It’s obvious that if you don’t grow up with Black or white people, you don’t know how to interact with them or how to establish friendships with them. A lot of Black people complain about the awkwardness of interacting with whites who grew up with little contact with Blacks. That’s why I strongly emphasize the need to get rid of ghettos and segregation. It’s beneficial for everybody to have a diverse community in which people are still engaged primarily with their own community, but at least they interact with others.

GAZETTE:   How can the country move forward in overcoming the racial divide?

PATTERSON:   The immediate issue we’re dealing with right now is police brutality. There will have to be profound rethinking about the organization of police departments around the country. It’s not just a matter of appointing Black police chiefs, because there’s no evidence that that makes a damn difference. Because usually what happens is that they bend over backwards to prove to the majority of the white policemen that they’re being good cops, and the last thing they want is to open themselves up to the charge of reverse racism. What’s needed is a complete rethinking of police culture and the tendency to see the communities they are serving as the enemy. That’s the most immediate thing because police brutality is becoming epidemic. If something isn’t done, as soon as the demonstrations are over, they will quietly go back to doing what they always do.

We also need to address the incarceration rates. I strongly supported [President Barack] Obama, but I don’t think he did enough on that issue. We need to continue reducing the size of the prison population. And we need to take a radical attitude towards de-ghettoization. I prefer to say de-ghettoization rather than integration because we have to get people out of the ghettos, or the inner cities — because not only do the ghettos segregate Blacks from the social and cultural capital of middle-class America, they also make residents easy targets for the police who see the ghettos as the enemy. De-ghettoization is different from integration, although I am in favor of integration, but it does mean Blacks need to get out from these concentrated areas of poverty and move into the broader community.

And lastly, there needs to be a reckoning with the nation’s legacy of slavery and white supremacy, which is grounded in slavery. I spent my whole life studying slavery.

I don’t think slavery was strictly abolished in 1865. What was abolished in 1865 was the personal individual enslavement of one person by another, but what persisted was the culture of slavery, and central to this culture was the sense that the white population felt it was their duty to control and suppress Black freedom. They did this in various ways, through the lynch mob, but also by the use of incarceration, during the neo-slavery system of Jim Crow.

During Jim Crow, what persisted was the attitude to see Blacks as outsiders, as people to be punished, to be held in control, to be denied basic privileges of citizenship or ownership of land and to be recklessly imprisoned. In that sense, slavery was not really abolished in America until the 1960s, when the Jim Crow system was finally and fundamentally dismantled. So of course we need a lot of education in our schools about that and what the consequences were for Blacks, as well as for whites. It’s important that people learn that.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

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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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Resources to understand America’s long history of injustice and inequality

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Source: U.S. Department of Justice

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