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PEACE through PIE is about finding ways to connect with one another, and to the commitment that we are stronger together. Our mission is to cultivate the values, skills, and experiences that our world is hungry for. Our Recipe for Peace is built on firm footing. We go beyond the surface of "kumbaya' and wishful thinking by actively partnering with schools, diverse faith groups, businesses, and community organizations, to create programs and experiences that build and support a peacemaking culture.

We cultivate a way of being by incorporating People, Peace of Mind, and Peace Pie, the 3 pillars (3P's), in our PIE365 year-round approach to peacemaking. This PIE365 approach enables us to broaden our awareness of community, learn to question our preconceptions, and to incorporate the power of food as a connector to achieving a whole-life balance that strengthens our emotional and physical wellbeing.

Discover the three components below, that when integrated or held stand-alone, create the special sauce for your PIE365.
If you have an idea for a PIE365 (social, program, event), and want to discuss click here.
If your PIE365 (social, program, event) is already set and you want to list it on our calendar, click here.

PIE Socials offer creative, year-round ways to reinforce that Peace Includes Everyone. The ideal PIE Social aspires to bring people together and celebrate the value and diversity in our communities.

PIE Connection is an opportunity to listen and learn from each other. The ideal PIE connection focuses on a topic and aspires to build trust and create mutual understanding.

Peace Pie is a celebration of food and its power to bring people together. The ideal Peace Pie conveys the message of support, gratitude, kinship, and love.

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PEACE through PIE is about finding ways to connect with one another, and to the commitment that we are stronger together. Our mission is to cultivate the values, skills, and experiences that our world is hungry for. Our Recipe for Peace is built on firm footing.

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https://www.panhandlepbs.org/livingwhileblack/

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Episode 5

Interracial couple and gold medalists, Lindsey Vonn & P.K Subban, join Rachel Lindsay (the first black bachelorette) & her husband Bryan Abasolo to have an Uncomfortable Conversation about interracial dating and the backlash that has come with it. Lindsey Vonn speaks about fighting for acceptance from black women, as Rachel confesses to formerly being that ignorant judgmental woman.

Watch Episode

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Interracial couple and gold medalists, Lindsey Vonn & P.K Subban, join Rachel Lindsay (the first black bachelorette) & her husband Bryan Abasolo to have an Uncomfortable Conversation about interracial dating and the backlash that has come with it. Lindsey Vonn speaks about fighting for acceptance from black women, as Rachel confesses to formerly being that ignorant judgmental woman.

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Several prominent political and religious leaders challenged the Church to shed its institutional "white privilege" and exercise a "restraint of [white] power" at an influential gathering of 2,500 mostly young Evangelicals in Chicago June 5-6.

The annual Justice Conference is described by organizers as "one of the largest international gatherings on social and biblical justice." Hosted by the humanitarian non-profit World Relief, this year's conference theme included fostering racial justice and furthering the #BlackLivesMatter movement among the Church.

To deliver the opening address, World Relief invited keynote speaker Cornel West, honored member of the Democratic Socialists of America, political activist and Union Theological Seminary professor.

Lacking a common theme, West's opening remarks covered a spectrum of political and religious issues including consumerism, market culture inside the Church, education, piety, subversive prayer, white supremacy, and welfare inequality.

"White supremacy, or male supremacy, or it could even be welfare inequality, or losing sight of our gay brothers and lesbian sisters, or the poor, or the elderly, or the orphaned, or the one fatherless or the motherless," stressed West. "How are you going to confront this darkness?"

Addressing the verses in Scripture that call Christians to demonstrate love, West insisted, "Arrogance and haughtiness can make you feel like you're better than somebody else, rather than putting you on the same human spectrum, on the same continuum, so you just learning how to love." West continued, "That's what you're called to do. And that's it. The rest is not your business."

A standing ovation trailed West's remarks.

West's invite to speak at the Justice Conference was not the only controversial invitation, as Julie Roys reported for the Christian Post. Rev. Otis Moss III, who is Jeremiah Wright's successor to Trinity United Church of Christ where President Obama attended Sunday service in Chicago, led a racial justice panel.

During the panel's discussion of white privilege, Arloa Sutter, the Executive Director of Breakthrough

Urban Ministries, asserted, "I think we do have to have to acknowledge that the color of my skin gives me a lot of advantages, so what do I do with that? It's a dilemma."

Sutter argued that all white Christians need to recognize and shoulder the past sins of others' racial oppression and prejudices. "I think we have this idea of individual sin. And we think, well, I didn't do it," she said. "Instead of looking at [the] corporate story, going back into our history and owning that."

At this point, a woman from the crowd shouted out, "Reparations now!" To which Sutter, nodding from the stage echoed, "Reparations."

When Moss asked the panelists about a statement made by Jim Wallis regarding the need to deny his white privilege in order to be a disciple of Christ, McBride, a pastor and PICO National Network activists offered, "In this country we have used theology, worship, politics...to explain, undergird and make possible the proliferation of racial attitudes, dispositions, and prejudices." He explained, "So the Church has to step up in this moment, not only to acknowledge and take responsibility for it, but move forward and actually create a new theology of what it means to be a follower of Jesus."

For panelist Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, the issue of white privileged is one of deep spiritual "blindness." Salguero asserted, "Many of us are blind to our privilege, white privilege being the dominant privilege in this country and in other parts of the world."

But Salguero urged the young audience not merely to be aware of their white privilege, but to find an anecdote for it. "For me, the anecdote to white privilege is the kenosis, the self-emptying," he said.

Finally, the panel discussion concluded around the restraint of power, specifically white power. For Moss, "The fact that Jesus had power, but chooses not to come down," teaches the Church a valuable lesson in restraining our power. "How is that acted out in the ministry of Christian witness?" Moss asked the racial justice panelists.

"Privilege at the core is an othering of people that is also supported structurally, institutionally in such a way that has become the norm," answered Traci Traci Blackmon, a St. Louis Pastor and member of the Ferguson Commission. "So when I think of myself as a Christian, and I am very much that, I have to acknowledge that for me to operate in privilege is to me to declare that the God in someone else is somehow less than the God that's in me."

Panelist Dr. Soong-Chan Rah, professor of Church Growth and Evangelism at North Park Theological Seminary, asserted that laying down your white power, looks like focusing on the skin color of your chosen Christian mentors.

Dr. Rah asserted, "If you've never had a non-white mentor in your life, you're not a missionary. You're a colonialist."

Reveal Comments Reveal Tags

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Justice Conference Addresses Church's "White Supremacy" Problem - Juicy Ecumenism

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Several prominent political and religious leaders challenged the Church to shed its institutional "white privilege" and exercise a "restraint of [white] power" at an influential gathering of 2,500 mostly young Evangelicals in Chicago June 5-6. The annual Justice Conference is described by organizers as "one of the largest international gatherings on social and biblical justice."

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—Maybe common background for filming to “brand” the read-alouds through St. Andrew’s?

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Lack of property ownership in North Heights

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Lack of property ownership in North Heights

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Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
After more than five hours of public testimony, largely in opposition, a Texas Senate committee on Friday night advanced a wide-ranging elections bill that would further tighten the state's already restrictive voting rules and clamp down on local efforts to make it easier to vote.

Senate Bill 7 - one of Texas Republicans' priority elections bills - would limit extended early voting hours, prohibit drive-thru voting and allow partisan poll watchers to record voters who receive help filling out their ballots. It would also forbid local election officials from encouraging voters to fill out applications to vote by mail, even if they qualify.

They also would not be able to proactively send out applications to voters who do not request them - a practice that is commonly used by political parties. Some Texans would also have to provide proof of disability to qualify for mail-in voting under the bill.

SB 7, which was offered under the banner of "election integrity," sailed out of the Republican-dominated Senate State Affairs Committee on a party-line vote and now heads to the full Senate. The bill is a significant piece in a broader legislative effort by Texas Republicans this year to enact sweeping changes to elections in the state that would scale up already restrictive election rules.

In presenting the bill to the committee on Friday, Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes described the legislation as an effort to strike a balance between "maintaining fair and honest elections with the opportunity to exercise one's right to vote."

But the bill was met with a chorus of opposition. Advocates for people with disabilities and voting rights tagged the proof of disability requirement as harmful and potentially unlawful. The bill was also widely panned as detrimental to local efforts that would widen access to voting, particularly extended early voting hours and drive-thru voting offered in Harris County in November.

In written testimony delivered to the committee, the AARP warned the bill would result in "disproportionate and unnecessary risks of disenfranchising older voters in Texas." The League of Women Voters raised concerns about increased barriers in urban areas home to Black and Hispanic voters and voters with disabilities. And organizations with histories of fighting unlawful voting rules, including the Texas Civil Rights Project, the NAACP and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, raised the prospect of litigation if the legislation became law.

"What this bill does, whether intentionally or not, is in several ways treats voters with disabilities differently than other voters - both in terms of having to prove their disability and not trusting the people that assist them," said Jeff Miller, a policy specialist with Disability Rights Texas. "And that's problematic on lots of levels, but fundamentally it violates the Americans with Disabilities Act."

Texas voters can qualify for mail-in ballots only if they are 65 years or older, have a disability or illness, will be out of the county during the election period, or are confined in jail. The Texas election code defines disability as a "sickness or physical condition" that prevents a voter from appearing in person without the risk of "injuring the voter's health."

But under SB 7, voters wanting to request mail-in ballots annually based on a disability would have to provide proof, including written documentation from the Social Security Administration or a doctor's note, to qualify. Texas allows older voters or those looking to vote by mail based on a disability to request a ballot for an individual election or apply once for every election election in a calendar year.

After a pandemic-era election with increased voting by mail, Republicans have partly focused on limiting a method of voting that until last year was lightly used and largely uncontroversial.

Some Texas counties, including Hidalgo County on the border, sent applications to voters 65 and older who automatically qualify. But Texas Republicans' ire fell on Harris County when it moved to send applications to all 2.4 million registered voters in the county with instructions on how to determine if they were eligible. The Texas Supreme Court ultimately blocked that effort.

On Friday, Hughes also framed the legislation as a response to some local officials who he said went beyond the letter or "the spirit of the law" in 2020.

"We're all big on local control to varying degrees, in different circumstances to let local communities adjust to their own needs," Hughes said. "We like this approach because, again, each community varies. But we also recognize that that power - that local control, that power to decentralize - can be abused."

The bill was originally written to limit early voting hours from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. That would pull back efforts like those recently adopted in Harris and Bexar counties - home to Houston and San Antonio - where voting ran until 10 p.m. for several days to accommodate people like shift workers for whom regular hours don't work. A slightly reworked version adopted by the committee on Friday would allow for voting only between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. - a revision that would still outlaw initiatives like the day of 24-hour voting Harris County offered last November.

During the hearing, state Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, attempted to question Keith Ingram - the chief of elections at the Texas secretary of state's office - about any evidence of increased fraud at night or a rationale for how prohibiting 24-hour voting would enhance the security of Texas elections.

Ingram, who recently told House lawmakers that "Texas had an election that was smooth and secure," replied that the state had "very little experience with voting at night."

"I think after a certain period people get tired and are more likely to have mistakes," Ingram replied. "I don't know if that is necessarily related to security, but I think that if you want to keep people in their best frame of mind for doing the activity, then you need to limit the hours in which it is happening."

But Harris County's election administrator Isabel Longoria defended the efforts before the committee late Friday evening, noting they were particularly successful in reaching Black and Hispanic voters who cast more than half the ballots counted at both drive-thru sites and during extended hours. Longoria also rebutted Ingram's comments, telling lawmakers that the county staffed the 24-hour polling places without issue so voting during extended hours was carried out under the same conditions and strict state rules that exist during daytime hours.

"Voting happened at the 24th hour like it did at the first hour - exactly as the law prescribes," Longoria said.

During her testimony, Nina Perales, MALDEF's vice president for litigation, told lawmakers the bill would violate the federal Voting Rights Act by policing the assistance voters can get to fill out their ballots. She also raised concerns about widening access for partisan poll watchers in a way that could result in increased intimidation of Latino voters "who are the historical targets of vigilante activity at the polls in Texas."

Her concerns focused, in part, on a provision that would allow partisan poll watchers to video record voters if they are receiving assistance the poll watcher "reasonably believes to be unlawful."

"Only voters who receive assistance are singled out in this way by these provisions," Perales said. "Most limited English proficient voters in Texas are Latino; many use assisters to vote and will be intimidated and deterred from voting by having poll watchers record them and stand close to them while they vote."
Disclosure: AARP and Texas Secretary of State have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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Restrictions on Texas voting could tighten under Republican bill advanced by Senate committee

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Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news. After more than five hours of public testimony, largely in opposition, a Texas Senate committee on Friday night advanced a wide-ranging elections bill that would further tighten the state's already restrictive voting rules and clamp down on local efforts to make it easier to vote.

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Combining the gift of a book with Snack Shak food bags

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Combining the gift of a book with Snack Shak food bags

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Lack of removal of trash/refuse in neighborhoods of color.

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https://www.amarillo.com/story/news/2021/03/02/amarillo-isd-presents-data-texas-academic-performance-report/6868037002/

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NAACP
http://amarillonaacp.org/wp/
Barrio
https://www.amarillobarrioneighborhood.com/
LGBTQ
https://panhandleprideinc.org/

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Fundraising for scholarships for people of color

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Fundraising for scholarships for people of color

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Need Asian or East Indian person of contact

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Need Asian or East Indian person of contact

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Maybe Russell Pennington?

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Some time into his new book The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto, Charles Blow recalls hearing Harry Belafonte give a speech.

The subject was Belafonte's bailout of some student members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC.) Belafonte had raised $70,000 in bail money and called up his best friend Sidney Poitier to help him deliver the money. But it was not easy. Belafonte recalled how he and Poitier were chased by the Ku Klux Klan, whose members accosted them at the airport; Belafonte and Poitier had to take off speeding in a race for their lives.

Poitier and Belafonte were, without a doubt, two of the most acclaimed Black stars in America. And this still happened to them. But Belafonte's did not end his story at the recounting of this memory of vile racism and terror. Belafonte turned it into a call for action. Facing the audience that Charles Blow sat in, Belafonte asked a simple question: "Where are the radical thinkers?"

In the years that passed, Blow found himself haunted by Belafonte's question. In time, Belafonte's questions spurred the writing of The Devil You Know, Charles Blow's own declaration of radical thought - for Black Americans to reconsider their Great Migration North and imagine new possibilities of Black political might.

Writes Blow: "The proposition is simple. As many Black descendants of the Great Migration as possible should return to the South from which their ancestors fled." By concentrating their political power in key Southern cities, Blow posits, Black Americans will be able to effect actual social change. "The mission begins with the states, which are the true centers of power in this country, and as such control the lion's share of the issues that bedevil Black lives: criminal justice, judicial processes, education, health care, economic opportunity and assistance."

Blow, the author of the memoir Fire Shut Up In My Bones and a New York Times columnist, is himself a child of the South who migrated North for employment opportunities, and thus is aptly situation to discuss these ideas. "I was born in 1970 in Louisiana at the end of the Great Migration into a world shaped by vacancy," Blow writes. "The landscape was specked by empty houses; there was more work than could be done, more jobs than could be filled."

So why, remembering the economic blight of his childhood, does Blow advocate a return to the South?

Firstly, Blow argues, the South is no longer an economically depressed region, but an economically thriving part of the country, especially in its major cities. Writes Blow: "In 2018 Forbes compiled a list of 'The Cities Where African Americans Are Doing the Best Economically" and found many of those cities were in the South. The 15 worst cities for Black Americans were all the destination cities from the Great Migration."

Secondly, the South is home to more than 1,000 of the nation's 1,200 majority Black cities, home to most of the nation's Black-owned businesses, has more Black folks in local government than northern cities, and carries an intergenerational Black history, memory and culture that must be honored.

But Blow's main point is this: Racism is everywhere - it's just about what kind of racism you can live with. And for Blow, Southern racism is preferable to its Northern cousin. He writes:

"I often think of racism as having developmental cycles. In the South, it's an old man. There racism hasn't vanished (far from it), but it has come to terms with itself. In the North, particularly in destination cities, racism is a teenage boy, acting out as the old man did years ago."

In cogent arguments bound together by his customary incandescent prose, Blow explores how the white backlash towards the Great Migration that never really ended has created a situation where racism in these Northern "destination cities" of the Great Migration makes life untenable for Black Americans. Through research undertaken by Project Implicit, Blow found there is no difference between anti-Black bias in the North and the South. There are only the ideas that people will admit to out loud. In other words, writes Blow, "white people outside the South say the right words but many possess the same bigotry."

Consider this: Of the violent deaths of unarmed Black folks at the hands of policemen and white vigilantes, a great many now occur in the North, rather than the South. Eric Garner was killed in New York City. George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Philando Castile was killed outside St. Paul, Minnesota. Mike Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri. Tamir Rice was gunned down in Cleveland, Ohio. Stephon Clark was killed in Sacramento, California. Freddy Gray was killed in Baltimore, Maryland.

The most segregated school systems are no longer in the South - instead, the most segregated school system in the United States is in a city many have long held up as a beacon of diversity and liberalism: New York City.

And while the American public imagination remembers the murders of Emmett Till and George Stinney by white supremacy in the South, the North was also an extremely unsafe place for Black Americans of that time as well. The post-World War I migration of Black folks North was followed by violence levied at the new Black arrivals by white Northerners. "So much blood flowed in America's streets that year that James Weldon Johnson, field secretary of the NAACP dubbed it the 'Red Summer' writes Blow of the 1919 Chicago white uprising against the Black citizens of the region. "In ten months, an estimated 250 people were killed - including nearly 100 who were lynched."

Weaving together deeply thought out analysis and in-depth sociological and historical research, Blow details how, as Black folks migrated North, "white people in Chicago found a way to formalize and ensure segregation: restrictive covenants" that made Black people unable to lease, buy, or even use property in certain areas of the city. The result? "By 1939, an estimated 80 percent of all Chicago's land area was covered by these covenants," Blow writes. Black Americans in the North suffered racial violence and reductions of rights codified by law - just like Black Americans in the South, but often without the support of extended family and community back home.

Blow connects the dots between moments of social advancement for Black Americans through and the accompanying white backlash:

"Whenever Black people make progress, white people feel threatened and respond forcefully. Emancipation and the Civil War gave rise to the KKK, which formed just months after the war ended. The Supreme Court's decision in Brown vs. Board of Education striking down racial segregation in schools gave rise to the white supremacist Citizen's Councils. The election of the first Black president gave rise to the Tea Party, which was formed soon after Barack Obama was sworn in."

As he discusses the rise of anti-Black violence and the need for safe spaces for Black folks, Blow draws from personal experience, detailing the moment his college student son was held at gunpoint on his Yale campus; how that moment echoed his own experience of being unjustly held at gunpoint by white police officers while in college himself. "He said he could make us lie down in the middle of the road and shoot us in the back of the head, and no one would say anything about it," Blow writes.

But throughout the book, Blow grounds his ideas in this central question: "What could and should Black people do to acquire and maintain the economic and political power - for the many, not just for the few - that the Great Migration failed to secure?"

Blow pays special attention to the role of elders in the community as he discusses how the original Great Migration caused a "loss of generational connectedness as an entire young generation left and the South became more of aged society," adversely affecting both young people and the elders. Here, Blow crafts an homage to the of elders in the Black community - from the great-uncle who babysat him to the importance of the example of elders like the 100 year-old Tim Black of Chicago who mentored a young Barack Obama newly arrived to Chicago.

It is also important to note the space Blow gives here to Black women social justice leaders who are often ignored, spending time with the mothers of the murdered black children - Samaria Rice, Sybrina Fulton; honoring the work of the great Shirley Chisolm; honoring the work Stacey Abrams. Indeed Abrams' work, like Belafonte's call to action, is an impetus of sorts for Blow's book. "Georgia became the model for how Black people can potentially experience true power in this country and alter the political landscape," writes Blow in his introduction.

Consider this: Just after the Civil War, Blacks were the majority in three Southern states and within inches of the majority in three more. "If the Great Migration hadn't happened, and those Black people had remained in the South until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it is possible that African Americans would dominate the politics of the Deep South." They could have controlled as many as 12 seats in the U.S Senate.

Blow does not call himself an activist and does not admit to any political aspiration; since starting his first newspaper in high school he has thought of himself as a newspaperman through and through. His job, writes Blow, is this: "I bear witness. I interpret the world. I record history in real time."

But for Blow, Belafonte's call still comes through loud and clear. Imagining free Black futures requires radical thought. "In a society and system in which white supremacy is ubiquitous and inveterate, Black people need fierce advocates to help restore the balance in the first instance," writes Blow. Throughout his legendary career in journalism, Charles Blow has long been that voice. The question is now: Will you join him?
Hope Wabuke is a poet, writer and assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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Charles Blow's 'The Devil You Know' Is A Black Power Manifesto For Our Time

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Some time into his new book The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto, Charles Blow recalls hearing Harry Belafonte give a speech. The subject was Belafonte's bailout of some student members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC.) Belafonte had raised $70,000 in bail money and called up his best friend Sidney Poitier to help him deliver the money.

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The Difference Between Us

Everyone can tell a Nubian from a Norwegian, so why not divide people into different races? That's the question explored in "The Difference Between Us," the first hour of the series. This episode shows that despite what we've always believed, the world's peoples simply don't come bundled into distinct biological groups. We begin by following a dozen students, including Black athletes and Asian string players, who sequence and compare their own DNA to see who is more genetically similar. The results surprise the students and the viewer, when they discover their closest genetic matches are as likely to be with people from other "races" as their own.

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The Difference Between Us Everyone can tell a Nubian from a Norwegian, so why not divide people into different races? That's the question explored in "The Difference Between Us," the first hour of the series. This episode shows that despite what we've always believed, the world's peoples simply don't come bundled into distinct biological groups.

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Conservatives mocked Pete Buttigieg for saying racism is "built into" America's highways.

Experts say highways and infrastructure were built at the expense of BIPOC neighborhoods by design.

Those neighborhoods still suffer the economic and health consequences today.

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Ora Lee Patterson grew up in the Rondo, a St. Paul, Minnesota, neighborhood where the city's Black community were based. It was akin to Harlem, with vibrant social life and thriving small businesses.

But then, the Federal Highway Act of 1956 allowed the state to claim large swathes of homes and businesses using eminent domain.

The state razed the neighborhood's main street to make way for Interstate 94, a 1,500-mile-long highway connecting the Great Lakes region to the west.

Patterson's home was seized, and she and her family were forced out of the Rondo along with other Black residents. Some homes were bulldozed, while others were moved and resold. The once-prosperous community withered.

Sadly, the Rondo was just one of many majority-Black neighborhoods across the US that was carved in two in the name of urban renewal in the mid-20th century. Highway construction destroyed vibrant neighborhoods across the country, including the Overtown in Miami, West Baltimore, Milwaukee's North Side, and many, many more.

Highways constructed throughout Black and low-income neighborhoods suffocated once-thriving communities, putting residents through the trauma of losing their homes and communities. It's what Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg spoke to when he told the Grio in an interview in early April, "there is racism physically built into some of our highways."

Conservatives were quick to mock Sec. Buttigieg for his comments. History, however, agrees with him - and so do urban planners. Dr. Robert Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University, told Insider there's a reason "highways do not go in straight lines."

"Highways have destroyed so many viable business corridors in people of color communities," he said. "If you look at how highways were built, they avoided affluent white neighborhoods and went through poor neighborhoods and people of color neighborhoods."

Bullard, who is often considered the "father" of the environmental justice movement, encourages anyone mocking Buttigieg's quote "to go and read."

He now serves on the White House's advisory council for environmental justice, where he's helping shape President Joe Biden's transportation and environmental policy. He says it feels bittersweet for the White House to finally acknowledge that environmental justice is a problem after Bullard's 40 years of work on the subject.

"These are exciting times," Bullard told Insider. "But we can't wait another 40 years because we don't have another 40 years. We have to approach these issues with the urgency that's required, because all communities should have the right to live and prosper."

Low-income Black communities often fell victim to redlining

Bullard says the racism built into American infrastructure doesn't stop at highways.

Carlos Chavez/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Many issues can be traced back to the practice known as "redlining" in the mid-20th century, when the US government assigned neighborhoods different levels of investment risk based on residents' race and income. Federal regulators would only back mortgages and subsidize housing in neighborhoods designated low-risk - usually affluent white neighborhoods.

Low-income, Black, and immigrant neighborhoods were usually designated high-risk, often explicitly for racial reasons. Mapping Inequality's interactive redlining map reveals common terms federal regulators used to justify blacklisting certain neighborhoods from government funding opportunities: "colored people," "negroes," "foreigners," "infiltration of lower-grade population."

Redlining was a financial death sentence for people of color, especially Black Americans. It prevented them from receiving government-backed mortgages and outside investments. That led to lower property values, fewer homeowners, and less representation for residents in local government which meant infrastructure was neglected. They also often became " sacrifice zones" - designated sites for polluting industrial buildings or dumping sites for refuse or toxic waste.

White urban planners and government officials often saw redlined neighborhoods as the path of least resistance for ambitious infrastructure projects, with little thought to their impact. Building highways and public structures through redlined neighborhoods displaced homeowners and decimated local businesses.

"If housing is demolished for an expressway or government buildings, businesses don't have a clientele anymore and churches lose congregates," Mary Pattillo, Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University, told Insider.

Low-income white communities also suffered the effects of redlining, but residents were often able to move to nearby suburbs. Meanwhile, Pattillo said, displaced Black families were often forced into other crowded urban neighborhoods or underfunded public housing.

"Racial inequity is a defining feature of American culture"

Alisha Volante, a former history researcher at the University of Minnesota, compiled the stories of former residents of the Rondo and released them in a 2015 report, The Rondo Neighborhood & African American History in St. Paul, MN: 1900s to Current.

The Twin Cities Black community never fully bounced back after the destruction of Rondo. But Volante is hopeful current conversations around racial justice will finally force Minnesota - and the rest of the country - to confront its checkered racist past.

"Right now, it's becoming less and less fashionable to be overtly racist. And I think that's a start," Volante said.

Across the country, decades of racist infrastructure policies have had lasting consequences that are increasingly relevant today, especially in communities grappling with public health and climate disparities.

As the planet heats up, formerly redlined neighborhoods are on average 4.5 degrees hotter than typically white, affluent, greenlined neighborhoods. Fewer trees, the heat, and increased air pollution contribute to heart disease , pulmonary issues, and respiratory issues. Many communities are still home to toxic "brownfields," abandoned former industrial sites that continue to pollute a neighborhood's water and air.

Cate Mingoya grew up in a yellowlined neighborhood that had a single tree and was situated near a major boulevard, The air pollution and extreme heat in her neighborhood worsened her asthma, causing "substantial stress" for her low-income family.

"Each time I had to go to the hospital uninsured for an asthma attack, medical bills piled up," Mingoya, who serves as the director of capacity building at Groundwork USA, told Insider.

Now, Mingoya works to empower residents of neighborhoods like the one she grew up in to advocate for a healthy environment for their communities. Mingoya agrees with Sec. Buttigieg: racism is built into our roads. And though the people who designed the last century's racist infrastructure are long gone, that infrastructure still exists today, Mingoya said.

The government finally has an opportunity to update the country's transportation infrastructure to serve all communities, Mingoya said. To do that, it needs to address historical racial inequities.

"People get really touchy when we talk about race because it's personal. How can it not be? Racial inequity is a defining feature of American culture," she said.

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There's a reason 'highways do not go in straight lines.' How racism is built into American infrastructure.

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Conservatives mocked Pete Buttigieg for saying racism is "built into" America's highways. Experts say highways and infrastructure were built at the expense of BIPOC neighborhoods by design. Those neighborhoods still suffer the economic and health consequences today. Visit Insider's homepage for more stories. Ora Lee Patterson grew up in the Rondo, a St.

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Caste (Oprah's Book Club): The Origins of Our Discontents

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Caste (Oprah's Book Club): The Origins of Our Discontents [Wilkerson, Isabel] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Caste (Oprah's Book Club): The Origins of Our Discontents

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To read Isabel Wilkerson is to revel in the pleasure of reading - to relax into the virtuosic performance of thought and form one is about to encounter, safe and secure that the structures will not collapse beneath you.

In the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist's first book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, Wilkerson evinced a rare ability to craft deeply insightful analysis of deeply researched evidence - both historical and contemporary - in harmonious structures of language and form.

Now, in her sophomore effort, the former New York Times Chicago bureau chief does not disappoint. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is a masterwork of writing - a profound achievement of scholarship and research that stands also as a triumph of both visceral storytelling and cogent analysis.

What is caste? According to Wilkerson, "caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy." Racism and casteism do overlap, she writes, noting that "what some people call racism could be seen as merely one manifestation of the degree to which we have internalized the larger American caste system."

Wilkerson's central thesis is that caste, while a global occurrence, achieves its most violent manifestation in the treatment of American Blacks, set at the lowest level in society through historical and contemporary oppression, marginalization and violence - all legally maintained through systems of law and order. "The English in North America developed the most rigid and exclusionist from of race ideology," Wilkerson writes, quoting the anthropologists Audrey and Brian Smedley.

Wilkerson establishes a correlation between American Blacks, whom she names the "American untouchables" and the Indian "untouchables," or Dalits, as the lowest caste; while whites in America are the dominant, highest caste equivalent to the Indian Brahmins. Describing the treatment of Blacks in America, Wilkerson writes:

"The institution of slavery was, for a quarter millennium, the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners, to be worked as long as the owners desired, who had no rights over their bodies or loved ones, who could be mortgaged, bred, won in a bet, given as wedding presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to convene an owner's debts or to spite a rival or to settle an estate. They were regularly whipped, raped, and branded, subjected to any whim or distemper of the people who owned them. Some were castrated or endured other tortures too grisly for these pages, tortures that the Geneva Conventions would have banned as war crimes had the conventions applied to people of African descent on this soil."

Wilkerson's argument is based on an exploration of what she names the three resonant caste systems in history: the Indian caste system, the Nazi caste system and the American caste system - which the Nazis researched when creating their own. "There were no other models for miscegenation law that the Nazis could find in the world," Wilkerson writes, citing Yale legal historian James Q. Whitman as evidence: "'Their overwhelming interest was in the 'classic example,' the United States of America."

Wilkerson supports her analysis with an immense compendium of documented research that spans centuries. Through her detailed historical research, she unearths evidence that the violence toward Blacks that the American caste system espoused was too much even for the Nazis; they balked at replicating some of the more horrific acts of American racism toward Blacks. "[Herbert] Kier was just one of several Nazi researchers who thought American law went overboard," Wilkerson writes, while others, like Hans F. K. Günter, thought the American laws so outrageous as to be untrue.

Caste, Wilkerson posits, is dependent upon the dehumanization of the other, most powerfully seen in the use of Jews and Blacks as the subject of horrific experiments by the respective dominant caste systems of Germany and America. "German scientists and SS doctors conducted more than two dozen types of experiments on Jews and others they held captive," while "in the United States, from slavery well into the twentieth century, doctors used African-Americans as a supply chain for experimentation, as subjects deprived of either consent or anesthesia," Wilkerson writes.

One of the most poignant examples Wilkerson describes is the violence done by Dr. J. Marion Sims, lauded as the founder of American gynecology, on the bodies of Black women:

"He came to his discoveries by acquiring enslaved women in Alabama and conducting savage surgeries that often ended in disfigurement or death. He refused to administer anesthesia, saying vaginal surgery on them was not painful enough to justify the trouble. ..."

Wilkerson says Sims would "invite leading men in town and apprentices in to see for themselves. He later wrote, 'I saw everything as no man had seen before.' "

Medical experiments were also carried out on Black men and Black children: Wilkerson notes Harriet Washington's research in Medical Apartheid in which a plantation doctor "made incisions into a black baby's head to test a theory for curing seizures" with "cobbler's tools" and "the point of a crooked awl." The horror is legion.

Wilkerson documents the pogroms of violence against the caste of American untouchables as waves throughout history - whether the violence of slavery or the waves of vigilante violence that that rose during Reconstruction and have continued since; incidents such the Ocoee, Fla., massacre in 1920 or the 1921 destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Okla., are set in a continuum that meets with the attacks on Black Americans in Birmingham, Ala., 40 years later in the 1960s, and then again in Charleston, S.C., by Dylann Roof on a Black church five years ago. This violent terror is a marker of the caste system, Wilkerson writes. The descriptions are vivid in their horror; the connections travel across history and time to resonate in the mind.

This structural move is a classic trademark of Wilkerson's style, and one of the attributes of her unique voice that imbues her writing with such textured depth. Wilkerson's use of a poetic focus on imagery and detailed characterization allows us an intimate and personal relationship with the lives of those she chronicles; when this empathic closeness is juxtaposed with the harsh brutality of the historical record the contrast is resonant and haunting, becoming a towering memorial to those violated by the violence of caste.

Caste is divided into six sections exploring the various aspects of caste: its origins, its sustainment and far-reaching "tentacles," and its effects - whether detrimental health for the givers and receivers of racism or the expected white supremacist backlash to the election of the first president of recognizable Black heritage: "The ability of a black person to supplant the racial caste system," Wilkerson writes, quoting the political scientist Andra Gillespie of Emory University, was "the manifestation of a nightmare which would need to be resisted."

Although a claim can be made that the opening chapter or two on the fallout of the 2016 election appear dated, this to be fair, is only because of what has happened to America in the interim since Wilkerson penned those words.

What is problematic is the glaring absence of Africa in a book that aims to position itself as a seminal text on the concept of a global caste system and the positioning of Blackness within that global caste system. Wilkerson glances at this briefly with a scant mention of South Africa in a couple of paragraphs and by quoting a woman identified only as a Nigerian playwright saying that "there are no Black people in Africa" - and then keeps it moving. Both are moments that do need to be unpacked. It is understandable why Wilkerson does not walk through this door to explore caste in Africa - Caste is 400 pages before adding the impressive list of research sources. But if Wilkerson is not opening that door, there does need to be an acknowledgement of why not, an acknowledgement of that absence.

Simply put: With colonization, European colonizers brought their caste system to Africa and implemented it over the already existing caste systems among many African ethnic groups.

Perhaps the absence of Africa is because of the caste system Wilkerson speaks of itself - to get people in the dominant caste to care about a narrative about Blackness and Brownness, about the lower castes, there must be a strong presence of whiteness in the conversation because it is the dominant caste system within the narrative.

And thus the caste system rears its head to affect a work about the caste system in real time.

This points, ultimately, to the role of personal accountability within a caste system. What does one do with this knowledge of the violence of caste? Does one perpetuate it? Eradicate it?

Interestingly, Wilkerson at times seems to argue not for an eradication of caste, but to create space for her, and others she meets, who have been miscast in their "caste" - regulated to the lowest caste when by intelligence or other attribute they should be in the higher caste, or vice versa. "We had defied our caste assignments: He was not a warrior or ruler. He was a geologist. I was not a domestic. I was an author," Wilkerson writes. Even the ending "Awakening" section, couched as a look forward, is depicted less of an articulation of the possibilities of a world without caste, and more of her desire simply to be seen as equal to those of the dominant caste.

In this, Wilkerson leans to biology. She offers the example of wolves as her support for the necessity of this hierarchal structure - the necessity not just of the alpha, but of the omega, or the underdog, beaten and abused by the others, the "untouchable." When the underdog dies, she writes, the whole pack is destabilized. No one wants to be the lowest of the low, "the scapegoat," but the pack needs one to survive.

Without the untouchable, Wilkerson argues here, society collapses. The untouchable is needed. Wilkerson just does not want to be one.

Writes Wilkerson:

"The great tragedy among humans is that people have often been assigned to or seen as qualified for alpha positions - as CEOs, quarterbacks, coaches, directors of film, presidents of colleges or countries - not necessarily on the basis of innate leadership traits but, historically on the basis of having been born to the dominant caste or the dominant gender or to the right family within the dominant caste."

I would argue that the tragedy, rather, is the need for these positions such as "omega" to still exist, which then justifies the need for this caste structure and its continued existence - even if it exists with Wilkerson's proffered edit that would allow an individual, no matter "background or caste," to hop into their desired caste and profit from the continued oppression of others the caste system welds.

If we are to look at biology as evidence, let us consider the research of Eli D. Strauss and Kay E. Holekamp on hyenas in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences, which offers another model for social positioning. Within the hyena community, as with wolves, there is a strict hierarchy of dominant caste and lower castes. But, if a female understands the hierarchy as unjust and challenges a more dominant member of the higher caste and her female peer group agrees with her, they will rise up across caste and challenge the dominant caste; if this female cross-caste coalition wins, the hierarchy is destabilized, and this radical feminist hyena and her cross-caste pack become the new dominant caste.

It is not enough, but it is a start.

Let us think not just about our own individual desires to be seen as a member of the dominant caste and benefit accordingly, but about the necessity to challenge this entire system of oppression radically. Let us think not just about replicating oppressive patriarchal systems but about alternative models such as matrilineal cross-cultural communication and connection.

Let us look not to the wolves, but to the hyenas.
Hope Wabuke is a poet, writer and assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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'Caste' Argues Its Most Violent Manifestation Is In Treatment Of Black Americans

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To read Isabel Wilkerson is to revel in the pleasure of reading - to relax into the virtuosic performance of thought and form one is about to encounter, safe and secure that the structures will not collapse beneath you.

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Isabel Wilkerson’s ‘Caste’ Is an ‘Instant American Classic’ About Our Abiding Sin (Published 2020)

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Wilkerson’s new book makes unsettling comparisons between India’s treatment of its untouchables, Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews and America’s treatment of African-Americans.

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The jewels of America's landscape should belong to America's original peoples.

Photographs by Katy Grannan
Editor's note: This article is part of a new series called "Who Owns America's Wilderness?" Image above: Glacier National Park, in Montana, as seen from the Blackfeet Reservation, near Duck Lake. This article was published online on April 12, 2021.
In 1851, members of a California state militia called the Mariposa Battalion became the first white men to lay eyes on Yosemite Valley. The group was largely made up of miners. They had been scouring the western slopes of the Sierra when they happened upon the granite valley that Native peoples had long referred to as "the place of a gaping mouth." Lafayette Bunnell, a physician attached to the militia, found himself awestruck. "None but those who have visited this most wonderful valley, can even imagine the feelings with which I looked upon the view," he later wrote. "A peculiar exalted sensation seemed to fill my whole being, and I found my eyes in tears." Many of those who have followed in Bunnell's footsteps over the past 170 years, walking alongside the Merced River or gazing upon the god-rock of El Capitan, have been similarly struck by the sense that they were in the presence of the divine.

The Mariposa Battalion had come to Yosemite to kill Indians. Yosemite's Miwok tribes, like many of California's Native peoples, were obstructing a frenzy of extraction brought on by the Gold Rush. And whatever Bunnell's fine sentiments about nature, he made his contempt for these "overgrown, vicious children" plain:

Any attempt to govern or civilize them without the power to compel obedience, will be looked upon by barbarians with derision ... The savage is naturally vain, cruel and arrogant. He boasts of his murders and robberies, and the tortures of his victims very much in the same manner that he recounts his deeds of valor in battle.

When the roughly 200 men of the Mariposa Battalion marched into Yosemite, armed with rifles, they did not find the Miwok eager for battle. While the Miwok hid, the militiamen sought to starve them into submission by burning their food stores, souring the valley's air with the smell of scorched acorns. On one particularly bloody day, some of the men came upon an inhabited village outside the valley, surprising the Miwok there. They used embers from the tribe's own campfires to set the wigwams aflame and shot at the villagers indiscriminately as they fled, murdering 23 of them. By the time the militia's campaign ended, many of the Miwok who survived had been driven from Yosemite, their homeland for millennia, and forced onto reservations.

Thirty-nine years later, Yosemite became the fifth national park. (Yellowstone, which was granted that status in 1872, was the first.) The parks were intended to be natural cathedrals: protected landscapes where people could worship the sublime. They offer Americans the thrill of looking back over their shoulder at a world without humans or technology. Many visit them to find something that exists outside or beyond us, to experience an awesome sense of scale, to contemplate our smallness and our ephemerality. It was for this reason that John Muir, the father of modern conservationism, advocated for the parks' creation.
From the August 1897 issue: John Muir's "The American Forests"
More than a century ago, in the pages of this magazine, Muir described the entire American continent as a wild garden "favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe." But in truth, the North American continent has not been a wilderness for at least 15,000 years: Many of the landscapes that became national parks had been shaped by Native peoples for millennia. Forests on the Eastern Seaboard looked plentiful to white settlers because American Indians had strategically burned them to increase the amount of forage for moose and deer and woodland caribou. Yosemite Valley's sublime landscape was likewise tended by Native peoples; the acorns that fed the Miwok came from black oaks long cultivated by the tribe. The idea of a virgin American wilderness-an Eden untouched by humans and devoid of sin-is an illusion.

The national parks are sometimes called "America's best idea," and there is much to recommend them. They are indeed awesome places, worthy of reverence and preservation, as Native Americans like me would be the first to tell you. But all of them were founded on land that was once ours, and many were created only after we were removed, forcibly, sometimes by an invading army and other times following a treaty we'd signed under duress. When describing the simultaneous creation of the parks and Native American reservations, the Oglala Lakota spiritual leader Black Elk noted darkly that the United States "made little islands for us and other little islands for the four-leggeds, and always these islands are becoming smaller."

Many of the negotiations that enabled the creation of these islands took place in English (to the disadvantage of the tribes), when the tribes faced annihilation or had been weakened by disease or starvation (to the disadvantage of the tribes), or with bad faith on the part of the government (to the disadvantage of the tribes). The treaties that resulted, according to the U.S. Constitution, are the "supreme Law of the Land." Yet even despite their cruel terms, few were honored. Native American claims and rights were ignored or chipped away.

The American story of "the Indian" is one of staggering loss. Some estimates put the original Indigenous population of what would become the contiguous United States between 5 million and 15 million at the time of first contact. By 1890, around the time America began creating national parks in earnest, roughly 250,000 Native people were still alive. In 1491, Native people controlled all of the 2.4 billion acres that would become the United States. Now we control about 56 million acres, or roughly 2 percent.
Read: The Blackfeet brain drain
And yet we remain, and some of us have stayed stubbornly near the parks, preserving our attachment to them. Grand Canyon National Park encloses much of the Havasupai Tribe and its reservation. Pipe Spring National Monument sits entirely inside the 120,000-acre Kaibab Paiute Indian Reservation, in northern Arizona. Many other parks neighbor Native communities. But while the parks may be near us, and of us, they are not ours.

We live in a time of historical reconsideration, as more and more people recognize that the sins of the past still haunt the present. For Native Americans, there can be no better remedy for the theft of land than land. And for us, no lands are as spiritually significant as the national parks. They should be returned to us. Indians should tend-and protect and preserve-these favored gardens again.

Related Podcast: The Experiment
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In July 2020, I conducted something of a barnstorming tour. I wanted to look with fresh eyes at the park system, to imagine a new future for it. I had planned on visiting all sorts of places-the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Great Smoky Mountains National Park-but the coronavirus pandemic intervened.

Some parks closed completely, while others (like Yellowstone) closed campgrounds, cultural centers, and museums. In the end I drove from Minnesota through North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon and down the spine of California. Then I turned around and drove back. I visited Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Little Bighorn Battlefield, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Mount Hood National Forest, Kings Canyon, Death Valley, and Joshua Tree.

The roads were quieter than usual, though the skies were sometimes hazy as the West Coast burst into flames. I slept in campgrounds, in my tent in the backyards of friends, and, rarely, in a hotel or motor lodge. I cooked on the trunk of my car and on picnic tables, under the blazing sun and in torrential rain. I fought off raccoons and squirrels.

More than any other place I visited, Yellowstone seemed to contain the multitudes of America. There, I saw elk and bison. I saw enough recreational vehicles to house a good portion of this country's homeless. I saw lake water, river water, black water, swamp water, and frothy waterfall water. I saw Tony Hawk being stopped by two park rangers after longboarding down the switchbacks above Mammoth Hot Springs while an actual hawk circled above him. I saw Instagram models in tiny bikinis posing in front of indifferent bison. I saw biker gangs (who seem to really enjoy parks) and gangs of toddlers (who don't seem to enjoy anything). I saw tourists, masked and unmasked. I saw placards and displays. I discovered that you can learn a lot about nature at Yellowstone, and perhaps even more about American culture. But the park's official captions give you at best a limited sense of its human history.

Yellowstone National Park was created about 100 years after the country was born. An 1806 expedition, part of Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery, passed just north of where the park is today. Later, John Colter, one of the Corps members, joined the fur trade and purportedly became the first non-Native to see its vistas. Of course, Native people had lived there for thousands of years, and at the time Colter was setting traps in the area, they still claimed Yellowstone as their home.

Colter traveled through the Yellowstone area and the Teton Range in the early 19th century, looking for fur. Wherever he went, he ended up in mortal conflict with Native Americans, culminating in his wounding at the hands of the Blackfeet. He hid from the tribe under a pile of driftwood and then walked for a week to safety. Over the next 60 years, trappers like him described the landscape that would become Yellowstone as an area of mud geysers, acid pools, and petrified trees.

Not until 1869 did the first official expedition explore the region and confirm the mountain men's accounts. Things moved quickly after that. In 1871, Ferdinand V. Hayden led a government-sponsored survey of Yellowstone that produced reports complete with professional sketches and photographs. Based on that report, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law the Yellowstone Act of 1872, which created America's first landscape to be "reserved and withdrawn from settlement, occupancy, or sale ... and dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people."

Grant's declaration made trespassers of the Shoshone, Bannock, and other peoples who had called the parkland home for centuries. The tribes left with the understanding that they would retain hunting rights in the park, as guaranteed by an 1868 treaty. Before the century was out, however, the government had reneged on that promise. This tactic of theft by broken treaty would become a pattern where parks were concerned.

When Yellowstone was established, the Plains Wars were raging all around the park's borders. It was as though the government paused mid-murder to plant a tree in the victims' backyard. The Dakota War had erupted 10 years earlier, just east of the Great Plains. By the time it was over, dozens of Dakota had been hanged, and more than 1,600 women, children, and elders had been sent to a concentration camp at Fort Snelling. Eventually, all of the treaties between the Eastern Dakota and the U.S. government were "abrogated and annulled."
Read: 'Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone'
In 1864, on the Plains' opposite edge, at Sand Creek in Colorado Territory, Colonel John Chivington massacred and mutilated as many as 500 Native Americans. In 1868, just four years before the creation of Yellowstone, Native Americans, led by Red Cloud, fought the U.S. government to a standstill, then forced concessions from the Americans at the treaty table, though these, too, were eventually unmade.

War came to Yellowstone itself in 1877. Chief Joseph's band of Nez Perce had been shut out of their homeland in the Wallowa Valley and embarked on a 1,500-mile journey that would end just south of the Canadian border, where they would surrender to the U.S. Army. The Nez Perce did their best to avoid white people on their way. But they were attacked on the banks of the Big Hole River, in August 1877, by soldiers in Colonel John Gibbon's command. Gibbon's men approached the camp on foot at dawn, killing a man during their advance. Then they began firing into the tepees of the sleeping Nez Perce, killing men, women, and children. The Nez Perce counterattacked. Their warriors kept Gibbon's soldiers pinned down while the others escaped. Although they defended themselves well, they lost at least 60 people.

Reeling from these deaths, the Nez Perce passed into Yellowstone, where they ran into tourists from Radersburg, Montana, enjoying the "pleasuring-ground" created at the expense of Indians. The Nez Perce briefly held the tourists hostage, and then released them, but went on to kill two tourists in the park later in the month.

Moving east through the park, the tribe forded the Yellowstone River at a place still known as the Nez Perce Ford. Around the time they crossed the river, an elderly woman peeled away from the main column and stayed at an area known as Mud Volcano. She sat on a bison robe near a geyser and sang. When a U.S. scout approached her, she closed her eyes. "She seemed rather disappointed," John W. Redington, the scout, wrote, "when instead of shooting her I refilled her water bottle. She made signs that she had been forsaken by her people, and wanted to die." Ten minutes later, a Bannock scout for the Army obliged by striking her down and scalping her. One hundred and forty-three years later, my sons and daughter and I would stand on the same spot, wondering why there are so few places in the park where you can learn about its bloody past. Viewed from the perspective of history, Yellowstone is a crime scene.

America's national parks comprise only a small fraction of the land stolen from Native Americans, but they loom large in the broader story of our dispossession. Most of the major national parks are in the western United States. So, too, are most Native American tribes, owing to the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which attempted to eject all tribes east of the Mississippi to what was then Indian Territory. The reservation period likewise began, for the most part, in the West, in the mid-19th century.

From the May 2020 issue: The people who profited off the Trail of Tears
Even after we were relegated to reservations, the betrayals continued. Beginning in 1887, the Dawes Act (also known as the General Allotment Act) split much of the reservations up into small parcels of land to be granted to individual Indians, while the "surplus" communal land was opened for white settlement. In blunt terms, Thomas Morgan, the commissioner of Indian affairs, said in 1890 that the goal of federal policy at the time was "to break up reservations, destroy tribal relations, settle Indians upon their own homesteads, incorporate them into the national life, and deal with them not as nations or tribes or bands, but as individual citizens." This land grab bled at least another 90 million acres away from the tribes-roughly equivalent to the 85 million acres that comprise America's 423 national-park sites.

After Yellowstone was established and Indians were removed and in some cases excluded from its spaces, the same-and worse-happened elsewhere. The Blackfeet, living in three bands in northwestern Montana and southern Alberta, had long thought of the Rockies as their spiritual and physical homeland. They wouldn't have dreamt of ceding it at the treaty table, but in the 1880s and '90s, they were forced to negotiate with the U.S. government. Weakened by a string of epidemics, seasons of starvation, and insatiable Americans bent on opening up their homelands to timber and mineral extraction, the Blackfeet had to make concession after concession. Some years, they had to give up land just to secure enough resources to last through the next winter.

Not long after a harsh winter that killed as many as 600 Blackfeet, the tribe signed away land that would become Glacier National Park. The deal was brokered by George Bird Grinnell, the naturalist founder of the Audubon Society of New York. Grinnell had joined George Armstrong Custer on his expedition into the Black Hills in 1874 in search of gold. The trip was in direct violation of the treaty guaranteeing that the Black Hills would remain in Native control. Grinnell was often called a "friend of the Indian," but he once wrote that Natives have "the mind of a child in the body of an adult." In 1911, a year after Congress approved the creation of Glacier, Montana ceded jurisdiction of the park to the U.S. government.
Read: How much are America's national parks worth?
So many of the parks owe their existence to heists like these. Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, in Wisconsin, was created out of Ojibwe homelands; the Havasupai lost much of their land when Grand Canyon National Park was established; the creation of Olympic National Park, in Washington, prevented Quinault tribal members from exercising their treaty rights within its boundaries; and Everglades National Park was created on Seminole land that the tribe depended on for food. The list goes on.

I set out on my trip through America's national parks from my home, at Leech Lake Reservation, in Minnesota, on the southern fringe of the North American boreal forest. This forest is one of the largest stretches of woodland in the world: It spreads from the Aleutian Islands all the way to Newfoundland and from near the southern edge of Hudson Bay to northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. As I headed west for Theodore Roosevelt National Park, in North Dakota, the taiga gave way to grasslands and oak savanna near Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. By the time I crossed the Red River, I'd left the forest behind altogether. I felt the land dip, and looking west, I thought I could make out the horizon where the Great Plains begin.

As a boy, I would accompany my father on business trips through some of these same landscapes. In the car, he would narrate the history of our region, mostly without much emotional inflection: "Chief Little Crow fled this way to escape the military after the Dakota War in 1862." We would pass many small towns-Hawley, Valley City, Medina, Steele-that seemed pleasant enough, until my father ruined them for me. The calm and order of them, their small houses and neatly kept yards, the Protestant ethic reflected in their organization-all of it infuriates me, because every single one of those towns exists at our expense.

Medora, North Dakota, is the southern gateway to Theodore Roosevelt National Park. (The Marquis de Morès named the town after his wife, Medora von Hoffman, though the romance of the gesture suffers when you consider that he established the town as a place to slaughter cattle to be sold at eastern markets.) Medora today is a fantasy of a time that never was. There is a statue of Roosevelt and a Rough Riders Hotel and, during the summer months, the Medora Musical. The show's website really says it best when it promises "the rootin'-tootinest, boot-scootinest show in all the Midwest. There's no other show quite like it. It's an ode to patriotism, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Great American West!" When I was there it was an ode to COVID‑19: According to a clerk at the convenience store, one of the cast members was spreading the virus from the stage.

I wanted to begin my journey at Theodore Roosevelt because no one embodies the tensions of the park system as it is currently constituted like the 26th president. Contained in the person of Roosevelt was a wild love for natural vistas and a propensity for violent imperialism; an overwhelming desire for freedom and a readiness to take it away from other people. Much of the park named after him exists on top of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) land. The MHA lost that land in 1851, with the signing of the first Treaty of Fort Laramie. Executive orders in 1870 and 1880 seized still more of the tribes' homeland.

Roosevelt went to hunt bison in Dakota Territory in 1883. In 1884, when he was back home in New York, his wife gave birth to their daughter, Alice, but unbeknownst to her doctors, his wife had a kidney ailment, and died on Valentine's Day that year. Teddy's mother died the same day in the same house. After drawing a large X in his diary, Roosevelt wrote, " The light has gone out of my life. " He returned to the West and built a ranch outside Medora, intent on letting nature soothe him. He didn't last long out there, and the West never became his permanent home, but it left a mark on him-and he, in turn, left his mark on it.
From the May 1906 issue: Camping with President Theodore Roosevelt
Roosevelt was familiar with Native Americans, having interacted with them when he was in Dakota Territory. "The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian," he would say in an 1886 speech, during which he also famously declared: "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth."

Roosevelt's attitude toward Indians is manifest in his treatment of the Apache leader Geronimo. Born in 1829, Geronimo lived the first three decades of his life in the peace and security of his Apache homelands, in what is now New Mexico and Arizona. In the second half of the 19th century, he rose to international fame for fighting the American and Mexican governments in an attempt to preserve his tribe's piece of the Southwest.

In 1858-the year of Roosevelt's birth-Geronimo joined a large trading party that left the Mogollon Mountains and entered Mexico. While he was in town conducting business, his band was attacked and slaughtered at camp. Among the dead were Geronimo's wife, mother, and three small children. He later recalled, "I did not pray, nor did I resolve to do anything in particular, for I had no purpose left." Life, for him, as recounted by Gilbert King in Smithsonian magazine, shaded from peace into a state of perpetual warfare, ending only with his capture by U.S. forces in 1886, around the time Roosevelt was mourning in Dakota Territory.

Geronimo was shipped east and spent the rest of his life in captivity, and his tribe's land was whittled away. Around the same time, Native children were also being shipped away from their homelands, to government-sponsored boarding schools -removed from their families and their culture so as to mainstream them. Attendance was sometimes mandated by law and sometimes coerced, but it was rarely strictly voluntary. For speaking in their own language, the children were sometimes beaten or had soap put in their mouths. Of the 112 Apache children from Geronimo's band sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in Pennsylvania, 36 died-most of them likely from tuberculosis-and were buried there.

From the October 2020 issue: "My Industrial Work," a poem written in 1914 by an anonymous student at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School
For his part, Geronimo did get out (under guard) once in a while, including a stint in 1904 as part of the "Apache Village" at the St. Louis World's Fair, where he was made to play the role of the savage. In 1905, he and other Native leaders were asked to be part of Roosevelt's inaugural parade. It was a who's who of tribal leadership, including Quanah Parker (Comanche), Buckskin Charlie (Ute), Hollow Horn Bear (Brulé Lakota), American Horse (Oglala Lakota), and Little Plume (Piegan Blackfeet). They rode horses down Pennsylvania Avenue in regalia not entirely in step with their individual tribal traditions. America liked and still likes its Indians to function much like its nature: frozen in time; outside history; the antithesis, or at best the outer limit, of humanity and civilization.

Geronimo met with Roosevelt afterward. "Take the ropes from our hands," he begged, in a desperate appeal to be allowed to return, along with other Apache prisoners, to his homeland. Roosevelt declined, telling him, "You killed many of my people; you burned villages." Geronimo began to gesture and yell but was cut off. Four years later, he died in captivity at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

In 1903, Roosevelt had let himself be drawn back west. In April of that year he embarked on a 14,000-mile train journey that took him through 24 states and territories in nine weeks. He traveled to Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and California, where he enjoyed a three-night camping trip with John Muir.

Along the way, Roosevelt gave speeches-at the Grand Canyon; at Yellowstone, where he laid the cornerstone for the Roosevelt Arch; near some redwoods in Santa Cruz. He said much about the majesty of nature. Regarding the Grand Canyon: "I want to ask you to do one thing in connection with it in your own interest and in the interest of the country-to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is ... I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon." And Yellowstone: "The Yellowstone Park is something absolutely unique in the world, so far as I know ... The scheme of its preservation is noteworthy in its essential democracy ... This Park was created, and is now administered, for the benefit and enjoyment of the people."

Roosevelt translated his passions into policy. During his time in office, he created 150 national forests, 18 national monuments, five national parks, four national game preserves, and 51 bird "reservations."

Like Geronimo, Roosevelt came of age during a pivotal 50-year stretch when the contiguous United States assumed its final dimensions. The last major armed conflict between a Native tribe and the U.S. government ended at Wounded Knee Creek with the massacre of as many as 300 men, women, and children of Spotted Elk's band of Miniconjou. The frontier was pushed all the way to the Pacific and then was no more, and America's truly wild space-land outside the embrace of "civilization"-was subsumed.

The American West began with war but concluded with parks.

The MHA Nation lives just north and a little east of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, but under drastically different circumstances than the people in and around Medora. Time and again, the MHA reservation was reduced by federal fiat and exploitative deals-from more than 12 million acres to less than 1 million. The dispossessions continued well into the 20th century: During construction of the Garrison Dam and Reservoir on the Missouri River in the 1940s and '50s, up to 80 percent of the reservation population was forced to relocate away from the fertile river bottoms that had given them life and defined them as a people for centuries.

In the 1860s, long before the dam was built, the MHA had lived mostly at a place called Like-a-Fishhook Village, Royce Young Wolf, the collections manager at a new cultural center the MHA are building, told me. "It's all under the lake now, flooded out," she said. We were standing at Oxbow Overlook inside the park, looking down at the Little Missouri River as it wound lazily through acres of cottonwood and grassy clearings. "They were self-sufficient," she said. "Each village had its own garden. Many families had sacred bundle-keepers." The dam was planned without any meaningful consultation of the MHA Nation; after the Army Corps of Engineers threatened to confiscate the land it needed, citing eminent domain, the tribes had little choice but to come to the negotiating table and eventually cede territory. By 1949, they had received settlements totaling only $12.6 million for the more than 150,000 acres that were taken.

"They moved us from where water was plentiful to where there wasn't any," Young Wolf said. "Our river bottoms were the most fertile in the whole state ... But when we were flooded, we were moved to areas where there's poor soil and no water and we couldn't sustain large gardens." The tribes' rights to use the land on the reservoir's shoreline-for hunting or fishing or plant-gathering-were denied.

In recent years, the MHA have been in the grip of rapid, violent, and remunerative fracking enterprises. As I drove north from the park, I saw land bearing scars-pipes, gas vents, and fracking pads dotting the hills. In 2014, the former tribal chair Tex Hall promised the tribes "sovereignty by the barrel," and he wasn't wrong: The tribes are wealthier than they have been since before the first Treaty of Fort Laramie. But by encouraging and facilitating oil extraction, they put themselves at odds with their own cultural legacy and connection to the land.

Native American nations such as the MHA are in a difficult position. They have endured state-sponsored assaults on their families, communities, land, and ways of life. Their traditional political structures and institutions have suffered under the paternalism of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which controls Native land by holding it in trust.

On one hand, we are sovereign nations with our own laws and law enforcement, courts, and municipal infrastructures, all derived from those rights that we have managed to retain. Contrary to popular myth, neither casinos nor the right to gamble were "given" to tribes as a kind of pity payment or as the recognition of a debt owed us. The casino industry is the modern expression of a civil right to gamble that we had before white people came along, a right we have retained and that was affirmed by the Supreme Court.

Read: One way to help Native Americans: Property rights
On the other hand, without a strong tax base or much commerce-extractive industries, casino gambling, and tax-free cigarette sales are notable exceptions-we are dependent on federal support for education, health care, infrastructure, and our continued survival. We are, in the words of Chief Justice John Marshall, "domestic dependent nations," and thus live in constant tension.

The MHA have had their struggles-with unemployment, substance abuse, a destructive marriage to the oil-and-gas industry, and intergenerational trauma inflicted by the U.S. government. But tribes are much more than the sum of their troubles. The MHA are also keenly protective of their heritage and culture. The cultural center they are constructing is a state-of-the-art facility in service to these ideals.

The MHA Interpretive Center is on Army Corps of Engineers land because that land is near the river, which is so essential to MHA history, Delphine Baker, the director of the Interpretive Center, told me. She was instantly recognizable to me as a kind of fierce, no-nonsense Native auntie. Government officials didn't want the tribes to own that land, she said matter-of-factly-the tribes now hold a lease instead-out of a concern that the tribes would take control of recreation rights and not allow nontribal members to have access. "The tribe never is interested in blocking access. But, you know, that's a fear."

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The facility is gorgeous-swooping embankments and curving walks mirror the rolling hills and grasslands of the MHA tribal area. Inside is a partial replica of an earth lodge, the traditional dwelling of the three tribes, and gallery space that tells the story of the MHA. The Interpretive Center will be the home for hundreds, if not thousands, of artifacts taken from the tribes over the years. And it will not be merely a show-and-tell kind of endeavor. The center will cultivate traditional plants on a rooftop garden. A café will serve traditional foods. There is a recording studio for preserving tribal languages, and a research space where tribal members will be able to trace their lineage. For so many Native people who have been separated from their tribes because of federal meddling, reconnecting is an important service the center can provide. To call this an Interpretive Center isn't quite right. It is more like a cultural mothership.

"If you lose your culture, you lose your sovereignty and your tribe," Baker told me. "And that's what we're fighting against."

It is not the first such fight. During the early reservation period, a difficult and fractious time when the people at Like-a-Fishhook Village were trying to figure out a new way of living, a splinter group wanted to hunt and garden in the old communal ways. So they left, relocating outside the reservation, about 120 miles upriver. "That group became known as the Xoshga, and they were led by Crow Flies High and Bobtail Bull," Young Wolf told me. "When they separated, they were taking a stand against assimilation and Christianity. They stayed away for over 20 years." They revived ceremonies and songs and dances. They preserved knowledge of local plants. While they were gone, Young Wolf said, the community at Like-a-Fishhook Village suffered from being split apart into small plots of land. But the Xoshga "kept our traditions safe while they were away. And it's because of them we have many of our traditions today."

In 1894, the government forced the Xoshga back to the reservation. They were treated badly at first by many of the MHA members who had stayed behind, Young Wolf told me. They were looked at as backward and savage. But now, to be Xoshga is to be connected to the land, to tradition, and to a spirit of resistance. The Xoshga were saved by the land, and their return to it saved their tribe.

The first "park person" I met on my trip was Grant Geis, then the chief ranger at Theodore Roosevelt National Park (he has since retired). Geis is tall and broad-shouldered, with a rugged face and large, strong hands. He'd been at the park since 1998, when he started as a seasonal employee. "As soon as I hit Painted Canyon ... I fell in love with it," he told me, "and [I've] kind of been here ever since."

Pretty much every person I talked with in the Park Service used the word love to describe the parks, the vistas, and their own roles as protectors of the land and its visitors. In my experience, that's not a word most government employees use when talking about their job. I asked Geis about Teddy Roosevelt and his legacy. "He was a firm believer in the land of many uses, but at the same time trying to save something for future generations," Geis replied. "It says something about his character when he was forward-thinking to that degree." He also acknowledged Roosevelt's imperfections and expressed support for cooperative relationships between parks and adjacent tribes.

The personal failings of people like Roosevelt are still codified in American policy. A lack of access to land-and the lack of power that such access would confer-undergirds the social ills that affect many Native peoples. But, at least in some places, American attitudes are changing. And in the parks, policies are changing too, albeit slowly, and in piecemeal fashion.

When I was a kid and my parents took my two siblings and me on our first trip out West, in the early '80s, we stopped at Theodore Roosevelt, Custer Battlefield (now Little Bighorn), Yellowstone, and Grand Teton. Indians were barely mentioned on the signage, and I don't remember meeting any Native rangers or even sensing that we existed as anything other than America's past tense. But since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, in 1990, tribes and parks (not to mention museums, galleries, and private collections) have drawn closer together in their efforts to preserve Native spaces and objects. Many tribes now have historic-preservation officers, who work with the parks.

Land use itself is also changing within the parks, to some degree. For instance, the Park Service has made it easier for Native people to harvest plants for traditional purposes, though typically they first have to submit a written request. And some parks allow us to hunt or trap within their borders.

In some respects, ours is an era of Native resurgence. For all we have suffered, there remain 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States. When the first national parks were created at the end of the 19th century, only about 250,000 Native people were left in the U.S. Now there are more than 5 million Native Americans throughout the country, roughly equal to the number of Jewish Americans and millions more than the number of Muslim Americans.

Our survival hasn't mattered only to us: As the efforts to assimilate us largely failed and we remained, mostly, in our homelands, Americans have gradually assimilated to our cultures, our worldview, and our modes of connecting to nature. The parks enshrine places, but they also emphasize and prioritize a particular way of interacting with the land. In the nation's mythic past, the wilderness may have been a dangerous environment, something to be tamed, plowed under, cut down. But that way of relating to the land is no longer in vogue. For many Americans, our wild spaces are a solace, a refuge-cathedrals indeed. America has succeeded in becoming more Indian over the past 245 years rather than the other way around.

It took me a few days to hike the South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt. Unlike more congested parks such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, Roosevelt is quiet, so much so that it feels like a secret. I started in high, red, dusty hills, and descended through a series of washes and dry river bottoms. I keenly felt how far back in time I was traveling with each step. The trail rose past the petrified tree stumps of a swamp millions of years old and out onto a grassy plain, where the wind screamed through the grass, echinacea, aster, and goldenrod. I passed near cliffs where the tribes might once have funneled stampeding bison, causing them to fall to the hard earth below.

The day after I finished my hike, I had breakfast with Wendy Ross, the park superintendent, in Theodore's Dining Room at the Rough Riders Hotel. I asked her whether Native people should be able to use the park differently than non-Natives, considering our longer tenure on the land, which had originally been part of the MHA's tribal homeland. Why, I asked, couldn't the MHA hunt the bison in the park? Ross said it was something of a slippery slope. If the park allowed Native people to hunt bison, the rest of the residents of North Dakota would throw a fit and, more troubling, the efforts of hunting groups to open up parks across the country to sport hunting would be greatly encouraged.

"The problem," Ross said, is that "there are no protocols" nationally, and hence there's much confusion. "Here at Roosevelt, I've told all of my staff: We let anybody in who says they're coming in for ceremonial or spiritual purposes." I have no doubt this is true. Ross seems to be a good leader and an ally to the tribes who live near Roosevelt. She spoke of reparations, of "providing what you can to people who used to use that area all the time, and then expanding that to other Native peoples." She has been attending tribal meetings. Superintendents like Ross are changing the parks to better meet the needs of Native nations, but they can do only so much. So far, reparations are partial, ad hoc, and tenuous-always subject to reversal.

Native people need permanent, unencumbered access to our homelands-in order to strengthen us and our communities, and to undo some of the damage of the preceding centuries. Being Native is not so much a disposition or having a certain amount of blood running through one's veins as it is a practice around which families and tribes are built. For a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, buying a bison burger at Whole Foods might satisfy their caloric needs, but being able to hunt and harvest bison, in keeping with their spiritual and cultural practices, feeds their culture and community. Native life was diminished when our land disappeared beneath our feet, and it is further diminished when the manner in which we access "public" lands is scripted by the government.

The preservation of these sublime places for future generations is of course crucially important, something Native Americans understand as deeply as anyone. But putting aside for a moment the interests of Native Americans-and notwithstanding the hard work and goodwill of many park employees-the parks show worrying signs of mismanagement. Myopic decisions have seemed to proliferate, and some protected natural spaces have become political footballs. Bears Ears National Monument, in southeastern Utah, was signed into being by President Barack Obama before he left office. One year later, President Donald Trump reduced Bears Ears by 85 percent, from 1.4 million acres to just over 200,000. This move left archaeological and sacred sites at the mercy of mining operations and motor vehicles. And while it is likely to be reversed by the Biden administration, possibly quite soon, it augurs poorly for the future.

Although the Department of the Interior will soon benefit from the leadership of Deb Haaland, who recently became the first Native American Cabinet secretary, it has typically lacked for innovation in recent years. As Jeff Ruch, a director of the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, has written, " most parks merely 'Xerox forward' old plans, adjusting as they go. " Most of this is done without fresh thinking on conservation, development, and access.

National parks are withering as a result of overcrowding, habitat loss, and what Ruch calls a "science deficit." Even as attendance has increased, park staff has been shrinking, as has the influence of scientists within the Park Service. Ruch's assessment doesn't make the Park Service sound like the protective arm of a powerful government safeguarding its "best idea."

Parks, as they've existed for 149 years, have done a decent job of preserving the past. But it's not clear that today's model of care and custodianship best meets the needs of the land, Native people, or the general public. Nor is it clear that the current system will adequately ensure the parks' future. That's something Indians are good at: pushing ahead while bringing the past along with us. We may be able to chart a better way forward.

All 85 million acres of national-park sites should be turned over to a consortium of federally recognized tribes in the United States. (A few areas run by the National Park Service, such as the National Mall, would be excepted.) The total acreage would not quite make up for the General Allotment Act, which robbed us of 90 million acres, but it would ensure that we have unfettered access to our tribal homelands. And it would restore dignity that was rightfully ours. To be entrusted with the stewardship of America's most precious landscapes would be a deeply meaningful form of restitution. Alongside the feelings of awe that Americans experience while contemplating the god-rock of Yosemite and other places like it, we could take inspiration in having done right by one another.

Placing these lands under collective Native control would be good not just for Natives, but for the parks as well. In addition to our deep and abiding reverence for wild spaces, tribes have a long history of administering to widely dispersed holdings and dealing with layers of bureaucracy. Many reservations are checkerboarded: Large parcels of reservation land are scattered and separated from one another. And much of the land within reservation boundaries is owned by a number of different interests-private, nontribal citizens; corporations; states; the federal government-that tribal leadership balances and accommodates. Through hard practice-and in the face of centuries of legal, political, and physical struggle-Indian communities have become adept at the art of governance. And tribes have a hard-earned understanding of the ways in which land empowers the people it sustains.

Transferring the parks to the tribes would protect them from partisan back-and-forth in Washington. And the transfer should be subject to binding covenants guaranteeing a standard of conservation that is at least as stringent as what the park system enforces today, so that the parks' ecological health would be preserved-and improved-long into the future. The federal government should continue to offer some financial support for park maintenance, in order to keep fees low for visitors, and the tribes would continue to allow universal access to the parks in perpetuity. Bikers and toddlers, Instagram models and Tony Hawk-all would be welcome. We would govern these beautiful places for ourselves, but also for all Americans.

There is precedent for this kind of transfer. The indigenous peoples of Australia and New Zealand now control some of those countries' most significant natural landmarks. For instance: Uluru, previously called Ayers Rock, was transferred to the Anangu decades ago. Thanks to legislation passed in 1976, nearly half of the Northern Territory of Australia has been returned to Aboriginal peoples. In 2017, New Zealand's Māori were granted a greater role in the conservation of the Whanganui River, on New Zealand's North Island. The public is still free to visit as before, but the Māori now have more oversight of the use of the river.

There is a precedent for this kind of transfer in America, too. In 1880, France began work on the Panama Canal, which the United States took over in 1904. Theodore Roosevelt (he keeps coming up) wanted to see it through, and so he worked out a deal with Panamanian nationalists, whereby the U.S. would receive the canal in exchange for help overthrowing the Colombian government. But in 1977, President Jimmy Carter and General Omar Torrijos of Panama signed an agreement that outlined the transfer of control of the canal to Panama. The canal was jointly managed by the two countries until 1999, when control reverted fully and finally to Panama. It doesn't happen often, but the United States has given things back.

In 1914, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that American democracy was forged on the frontier. It was there that the uniquely American mixture of egalitarianism, self-reliance, and individualism commingled to form the nation and its character. "American democracy," he said, "was born of no theorist's dream ... It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier."

Turner was almost right. It wasn't the frontier that made us as much as the land itself, land that has always been Native land but that has also come to be American. The national parks are the closest thing America has to sacred lands, and like the frontier of old, they can help forge our democracy anew. More than just America's "best idea," the parks are the best of America, the jewels of its landscape. It's time they were returned to America's original peoples.

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The jewels of America's landscape should belong to America's original peoples. Photographs by Katy Grannan Editor's note: This article is part of a new series called "Who Owns America's Wilderness?" Image above: Glacier National Park, in Montana, as seen from the Blackfeet Reservation, near Duck Lake.

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Mr. Wegert and Mr. Landmesser People, Numbers and the Tipping Point  by Predrag Brajovic  Medium

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according to a new study.

In 1900, 1.3% of physicians were Black. In 1940, 2.8% of physicians were Black, and by 2018 - when almost 13% of the population was Black - 5.4% of doctors were Black, reports Dan Ly, MD, PhD, MPP, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, in a study published online April 19, 2021, in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

The proportion of male Black physicians was 2.7% in 1940 and 2.6% in 2018.

Dr. Ly also found a significant wage gap. The median income earned by White doctors was $50,000 more than the median income of Black physicians in 2018. Dr. Ly based his findings on the U.S. Census Decennial Census long form, accessed via , a free database funded by the National Institutes of Health and other organizations.

"If we care about the health of the population, particularly the health of Black patients, we should care about how small the proportion of our physicians who are Black is and the extremely slow progress we have made as a medical system in increasing that proportion," Dr. Ly said in an interview.

Dr. Ly said he took on this research in part because previous studies have shown that Black patients are more likely to seek preventive care from Black doctors. Thus, increasing the numbers of Black physicians could narrow gaps in life expectancy between Whites and Blacks.

He also wanted to see whether progress had been made as a result of various medical organizations and the Association of American Medical Colleges undertaking initiatives to increase workforce diversity. There has been "very, very little" progress, he said.

Norma Poll-Hunter, PhD, the AAMC's senior director of workforce diversity, said Dr. Ly's report "was not surprising at all."

The AAMC in 2014 that the number of Black men who apply to and matriculate into medical schools has been declining since 1978. That year, there were 1,410 Black male applicants and 542 Black enrollees. In 2014, there were 1,337 applicants and 515 enrollees.

Since 2014, Black male enrollment has increased slightly, rising from 2.4% in the 2014-2015 school year to 2.9% in the 2019-2020 year, the AAMC last year.

In addition, among other historically underrepresented minorities, "we really have seen very small progress" despite the increase in the number of medical schools, Dr. Poll-Hunter said in an interview.

The AAMC and the National Medical Association consider the lack of Black male applicants and matriculants to be a national crisis. The two groups started an alliance in 2020 aimed at finding ways to amplify and support Black men's interest in medicine and the biomedical sciences and to "develop systems-based solutions to address exclusionary practices that create barriers for Black men and prevent them from having equitable opportunities to successfully enroll in medical school."

Solutions include requiring medical school admissions committees and application screeners to undergo implicit bias awareness and mitigation training, adopting holistic admissions reviews, and incentivizing institutions of higher learning to partner with Black communities in urban and rural school systems to establish K-12 health sciences academies, said NMA President Leon McDougle, MD, MPH.

"There are the systems factors, and racism is a big one that we have to tackle," said Dr. Poll-Hunter.

Diversity isn't just about numbers, said Dr. McDougle, a professor of family medicine and associate dean for diversity and inclusion at Ohio State University, Columbus. "We know that medical school graduates who are African American or Black, Hispanic or Latinx, or American Indian or Alaskan Native are more likely to serve those communities as practicing physicians.

"The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the urgent need for more African American or Black, Hispanic or Latinx, or American Indian or Alaskan Native physicians," he said. "Inadequate access to culturally competent care has exacerbated existing health disparities, resulting in death and hospitalization rates up to three to four times the rates of European American or White people."

Dr. Poll-Hunter also said that studies have shown that diversity in the classroom creates a more enriched learning environment and increases civic mindedness and cognitive complexity, "as well as helps us understand people who are different than ourselves."

The diversity goal "is not about quotas, it's about excellence," she said. "We know that there's talent that exists, and we want to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to be successful."

Dr. Ly has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.

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Percentage of doctors who are Black barely changed in 120 years

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according to a new study. In 1900, 1.3% of physicians were Black. In 1940, 2.8% of physicians were Black, and by 2018 - when almost 13% of the population was Black - 5.4% of doctors were Black, reports Dan Ly, MD, PhD, MPP, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, in a study published online April 19, 2021, in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

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Dr. Danielle Hairston, president of the American Psychiatric Association's Black caucus. "They're taking these tiny, superficial, palatable steps," she said, "but as far as real work, the A.P.A. has a long way to go." Credit... Cheriss May for The New York Times

But there is a lot to apologize for - from Reconstruction to today.

Dr. Danielle Hairston, president of the American Psychiatric Association's Black caucus. "They're taking these tiny, superficial, palatable steps," she said, "but as far as real work, the A.P.A. has a long way to go." Credit... Cheriss May for The New York Times

Dr. Benjamin Rush, the 18th-century doctor who is often called the "father" of American psychiatry, held the racist belief that Black skin was the result of a mild form of leprosy. He called the condition "negritude."

His onetime apprentice, Dr. Samuel Cartwright, spread the falsehood throughout the antebellum South that enslaved people who experienced an unyielding desire to be free were in the grip of a mental illness he called " drapetomania," or "the disease causing Negroes to run away."

In the late 20th century, psychiatry's rank and file became a receptive audience for drug makers who were willing to tap into racist fears about urban crime and social unrest. ("Assaultive and belligerent?" read an ad that featured a Black man with a raised fist that appeared in the "Archives of General Psychiatry" in 1974. "Cooperation often begins with Haldol.")

Now the American Psychiatric Association, which featured Rush's image on its logo until 2015, is confronting that painful history and trying to make amends.

In January, the 176-year-old group issued its first-ever apology for its racist past. Acknowledging "appalling past actions" on the part of the profession, its governing board committed the association to "identifying, understanding, and rectifying our past injustices," and pledged to institute "anti-racist practices" aimed at ending the inequities of the past in care, research, education and leadership.

This weekend, the A.P.A. is devoting its annual meeting to the theme of equity. Over the course of the three-day virtual gathering of as many as 10,000 participants, the group will present the results of its yearlong effort to educate its 37,000 mostly white members about the psychologically toxic effects of racism, both in their profession and in the lives of their patients.

Dr. Jeffrey Geller, the A.P.A.'s outgoing president, made that effort the signature project of his one-year term of office.

"This is really historic," he said in a recent interview. "We've laid a foundation for what should be long-term efforts and long-term change."

Dr. Cheryl Wills, a psychiatrist who chaired a task force exploring structural racism in psychiatry, said the group's work could prove life-changing for a new generation of Black psychiatrists who will enter the profession with a much greater chance of knowing that they are valued and seen. She recalled the isolation she experienced in her own early years in medicine, and the difficulty she has had in finding other Black psychiatrists to whom she can refer patients.

"It's an opportunity of a lifetime," she said. "In psychiatry, just like any other profession, it needs to start at the top," she said of her hope for change. "Looking at our own backyard before we can look elsewhere."

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Dr. Cheryl Wills chaired a yearlong task force exploring structural racism in psychiatry. "In psychiatry, just like any other profession, it needs to start at the top," she said. Credit... Amber Ford for The New York Times

For critics, however, the A.P.A.'s apology and task force amount to a long-overdue, but still insufficient, attempt at playing catch-up. They point out that the American Medical Association issued an apology in 2008 for its more than 100-year history of having "actively reinforced or passively accepted racial inequalities and the exclusion of African-American physicians."

"They're taking these tiny, superficial, palatable steps," said Dr. Danielle Hairston, a task force member who is also president of the A.P.A.'s Black caucus and the psychiatry residency training director at Howard University College of Medicine.

"People will be OK with saying that we need more mentors; people will be OK with saying that we're going to do these town halls," she continued. "That's an initial step, but as far as real work, the A.P.A. has a long way to go."

The question for the organization - with its layers of bureaucracy, widely varied constituencies and heavy institutional tradition - is how to get there.

Critics operating both inside and outside the A.P.A. say that it still must overcome high hurdles to truly address its issues around racial equity - including its diagnostic biases, the enduring lack of Black psychiatrists and a payment structure that tends to exclude people who can't afford to pay out of pocket for services.

"All these procedural structures that are in place are helping to perpetuate the system and keep the system functioning the way it was designed to function," said Dr. Ruth Shim, the director of cultural psychiatry and professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of California, Davis, who left the A.P.A. in frustration last summer.

They all add up, she said, to "an existential crisis in psychiatry."

White psychiatrists have pathologized Black behavior for hundreds of years, wrapping up racist beliefs in the mantle of scientific certainty and even big data. The A.P.A. was first called the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane, according to Dr. Geller, who last summer published an account of psychiatry's history of structural racism. The group came into being in the wake of the 1840 federal census, which included a new demographic category, "insane and idiotic."

The results were interpreted by pro-slavery politicians and sympathetic social scientists to find a considerably higher rate of mental illness among Black people in the Northern states than among those in the South.

In the decades following Reconstruction, prominent psychiatrists used words like "primitive" and "savage" to make the cruelly racist claim that Black Americans were unfit for the challenges of life as independent, fully enfranchised citizens.

T.O. Powell, superintendent of the infamous State Lunatic Asylum in Milledgeville, Ga., and president of the American Medico-Psychological Association (the precursor to the A.P.A.), went so far as to outrageously state in 1897 that before the Civil War, "there were comparatively speaking, few Negro lunatics. Following their sudden emancipation their number of insane began to multiply."

Dr. Ruth Shim, director of cultural psychiatry and professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of California, Davis, left the A.P.A. last summer. Structural racism, she said, presents "an existential crisis in psychiatry." Credit... Salgu Wissmath for The New York Times

Psychiatry continued to pathologize - and sometimes demonize - African-Americans, with the result that, by the 1970s, the diagnosis of psychosis was handed out so often that the profession was essentially "turning schizophrenia into a Black man's disorder of aggression and agitation," said Dr. Hairston, a contributor to the 2019 book, "Racism and Psychiatry."

Since then, numerous studies have shown that an almost all-white profession's lack of attunement to Black expressions of emotion - and its frequent conflation of distress with anger - has led to an under-diagnosis of major depression, particularly in Black men, and an overreliance upon the use of antipsychotic medications. Black patients are less likely than white patients to receive appropriate medication for their depression, according to a 2008 report published in "Psychiatric Services."

To change course, and serve Black patients better, organized psychiatry is going to need to make a higher priority of training doctors to really listen, said Dr. Dionne Hart, a Minneapolis psychiatrist and addiction medicine specialist and an adjunct assistant professor of psychiatry at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science.

"We checked a lot of boxes publicly," she said in an interview. "Now we have to do the work. We have to show we're committed to undoing the harm and working with all of our colleagues from all over the country to recognize trauma and acknowledge trauma where it exists and get people appropriate treatment."

Psychiatrists lean liberal, and many say that people with mental illness are a marginalized and underserved group. In 1973, the A.P.A. made history by removing "homosexuality" as a psychiatric diagnosis from the second edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But the kind of soul searching that occurred around that decision has taken much longer with race.

Psychiatry today remains a strikingly white field where only 10.4 percent of practitioners come from historically underrepresented minority groups,who now make up nearly 33 percent of the U.S. population, according to a 2020 study published in "Academic Psychiatry." That study found that in 2013, Black Americans wereonly 4.4 percent of practicing psychiatrists.

Dr. Jeffrey Geller, the outgoing president of the A.P.A. "We've laid a foundation for what should be long-term efforts and long-term change," he said. Credit... Maddie Malhotra for The New York Times

The discipline's history of pathologizing Black people - to "regard Black communities as seething cauldrons of psychopathology," as three reform-minded authors put it in 1970 in the American Journal of Psychiatry - has deterred some Black medical students from entering the profession.

"Some people in my family, even now won't say that I'm a psychiatrist," Dr. Hairston noted. "A family member told me on my match day that she was disappointed that I had matched to psychiatry and not another specialty - it seemed like I was letting the family down."

The difficulty in finding a Black psychiatrist can put a damper on the willingness of Black patients to seek treatment. And psychiatric help is also strikingly inaccessible for patients without money.

Psychiatry isan outlier among other medical specialties for the extent to which its practitioners choose not to participate in public or private health insurance programs.

In 2019, a study by the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission found that psychiatrists were the least likely medical providers to accept any type of health insurance: Just 62 percent were accepting new patients with either commercial plans or Medicare, while an even more anemic 36 percent were accepting new patients using Medicaid. In contrast, across all providers, 90 percent reported accepting new patients with private insurance, 85 percent said they accepted those with Medicare and 71 percent were willing to see Medicaid patients.

Many psychiatrists say they do not participate in health insurance because the reimbursement rates are too low. A 2019 study showed that, nationwide, reimbursement rates for primary care physicians were almost 24 percent higher than for mental health practitioners - including psychiatrists. In 11 states, that gap widened to more than 50 percent.

The A.P.A.'s advocacy in this particular area of equity has focused on pushing for full insurer compliance with the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, a 2008 law that requires health insurance plans that provide mental health care coverage to do so at a level comparable to what they provide for physical health care.

While the profession hopes for higher reimbursement rates, the gap that affects patients, in the short term, is inequitable access to treatment. "The thing that's always bothered me the most in the practice of psychiatry is, you can talk about your commitment to things like equity, but if you have a system where a lot of people can't get access, so many patients are cut off from access to quality care," said Dr. Damon Tweedy, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University and the author of "Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine."

"What are our values?" said Dr. Tweedy, who sees patients at the Durham Veterans Affairs Health Care System. "We might say one thing, but our actions suggest another."

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Psychiatry Confronts Its Racist Past, and Tries to Make Amends

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But there is a lot to apologize for - from Reconstruction to today. Dr. Danielle Hairston, president of the American Psychiatric Association's Black caucus. "They're taking these tiny, superficial, palatable steps," she said, "but as far as real work, the A.P.A. has a long way to go." Credit...

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Fresh Air For May 10, 2021: Filmmaker Barry Jenkins

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Hear the Fresh Air program for May 10, 2021

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Jerome Dixon, who always maintained his innocence during his 21 years in prison, met Raha Dixon two years ago at a talk about racism and social change.

Raha Lewis and Jerome Dixon were married April 3 at their Los Angeles home. Credit... Maggie Shannon for The New York Times

Jerome Dixon spent 21 years in prison for a murder he maintains he did not commit. Raha Lewis is a red carpet writer whose mother is a designer to the stars. A scholarly talk on racism brought them together, and a Hot Wheels racetrack for her son sealed their union.

On July 25, 1990, Mr. Dixon, then 17, was taken into custody by Oakland, Calif., police on suspicion of murder. He was interrogated by police investigators for 25 hours with neither a parent nor a lawyer present. He doesn't recall if he waived his Miranda rights that night, and even if he did waive them, he has said he is sure his teenage self did not understand what those constitutional rights meant or what it meant to give them up.

He was exhausted and felt the only way out of the room was to tell the investigators what they wanted to hear. It wasn't until he signed a confession, that he was allowed to make his first phone call. He called his mother.

Not knowing that they were going to retry him as an adult after serving seven years as a juvenile at the California Youth Authority, now known as the California Division of Juvenile Justice, he accepted a plea deal (for first degree murder and three counts of robbery and assault with a deadly weapon). After seven years, he was subjected to a second trial and transferred to the adult system.

"They brought him back and retried him as an adult and used the false confession plus the juvenile plea deal to convince him to take an adult deal of 18 years to life," Ms. Lewis said. "They told him if he goes to trial he will lose due to the false confession and the first plea deal."

Throughout his years in prison, he maintained his innocence, and, finally, on Oct. 17, 2011, at 11:45 a.m., Mr. Dixon was released from the California Men's Colony facility in San Luis Obispo, Calif., through California's parole system.

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"Had I known my rights, I would not have served 21 years for a crime I did not commit," Mr. Dixon said.

Despite everything, he is surprisingly positive. "I don't harbor any animosity toward the legal system or the police," said Mr. Dixon, 48. "It was a small group of people who were responsible for what happened to me. I still believe in protecting and serving."

On July 21, 2019, Mr. Dixon attended a talk being presented by Ruha Benjamin, a professor in the Department of African-American Studies at Princeton, titled "Everyday Racism and Social Change." The event was at the Santa Monica Baha'i Center. That night he met Ms. Lewis.

During the event, Ms. Lewis asked a question, "Why is it that some of my girlfriends have met lovely Black men but their parents won't let them marry them?" You could have heard a pin drop, Ms. Lewis said.

After the session, Mr. Dixon approached her saying he was interested in hearing more about her comment and asked her out to coffee the following week. "It wasn't a date, except it was," Ms. Lewis said. "We started talking and never stopped. I was all in from the start. Our conversations were extremely deep, and I was so taken by his story."

Ms. Lewis, 43, has a degree in political science and performing arts, as well as a bachelor of laws from the University of Sydney Australia. She is a freelance writer for People Magazine and a founder and chief executive of Tailor Here, an agency for tailors for celebrities and photo shoots in New York, Los Angeles and Washington.

Mr. Dixon is a project manager at Raw Development, a construction company based in Los Angeles. He graduated from Stockton Unified School District while in prison. Originally from Alameda County, Mr. Dixon now lives in Los Angeles. He continues to fight for his exoneration.

"His hope is to once again become whole," Ms. Lewis said. He also serves on the board of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, a nonprofit group focused on ending mass incarceration in California.

After their official first date on Aug. 2, 2019, Mr. Dixon told Ms. Lewis that he wanted to meet her son, Cy, who was 7 at the time. Mr. Dixon told her if Cy didn't approve, there wouldn't be a second date. "I had never had a man tell me that my son was his first priority," Ms. Lewis said.

Three days later, he went to Ms. Lewis's home and built a Hot Wheels track to surprise Cy. A few days later, the two met. "After that, I asked Cy, 'Do you like this guy? Do you need more info? Because we don't have to keep him,'" Ms. Lewis said. Cy approved from the start. "Then I knew we would be able to be a family," Mr. Dixon said.

Mr. Dixon proposed to Ms. Lewis at their home Jan. 28, 2021, planning it with Cy. Rose petals were strewn across the room, and Mr. Dixon stood beside a heart-shaped cake holding an open ring box. "He even incorporated my son into his proposal," Ms. Lewis said, "saying that it's because of Cy that he is able to ask this question: Will you marry me?"

The couple were married April 3 at their home in Los Angeles with 10 people attending in person and another 126 on Zoom from all over the world, including England, Israel, Japan, Malawi, Costa Rica, Mexico and Australia. Ms. Lewis's brother, Ryan Hatami, hosted the Zoom celebration from Sydney.

"They have such a heartfelt and genuine relationship," Mr. Hatami said. "Marriage is about the union of families rather than the union of individuals. He actually asked my permission before he proposed. Just so many amazing qualities in this guy."

The couple decided to have a Baha'i wedding, which requires only three things: two approved witnesses, the consent of all living parents, and a single verse that both bride and groom recite. "We will all verily abide by the will of God." There is no officiant required. The two witnesses signed the documents, which were then returned to the Los Angeles Baha'i Center and then sent to the city clerk. "The idea being to create a union between the two families," Ms. Lewis said.

Pachelbel's "Canon" played as Ms. Lewis walked down the aisle created by the chairs set up for the in-person guests. Ms. Lewis wore a short, white Miu Miu dress, which had a subtle blush tint and to which her mother, Nanaz Hatami, a founder and principal designer at Tailor Here, added a skirt. Her mother also made Ms. Lewis's veil. (Ms. Hatami's celebrity client list has included Kim Kardashian, Janelle Monáe, Susan Kelechi Watson, Lindsey Vonn, Common and Catherine O'Hara.)

Cy began the ceremony with a prayer in Persian, which Ms. Hatami had taught him. The singer-songwriters Yosi and Meredith LaMarche performed over Zoom.

Because of the pandemic, Ms. Lewis's father, who lives in Atlanta, and Mr. Dixon's mother, who lives in Northern California, attended online rather than in person. "This was the hardest part of the whole thing. Having a Zoom wedding had a lot of benefits, and it reminded you of what's really important. But there was still a part of me that woke up the day of and thought, 'I wish some more of my peeps could be here,'" Ms. Lewis said.

During the ceremony, Ms. Lewis dedicated their marriage to justice.

"This means a lot to us," she said. "First of all because we are working hard to reopen Jerome's case and seek justice for what happened to him. We also want justice to be the bedrock of our own lives. We want to live it, breathe it and own it, meaning the little things we do at home, the way we move in the world, we want all of that to be fueled by that sentiment."

While still on the approximately hourlong Zoom call, the couple cut the cake and had their first dance and kiss before signing off.

"I want my life to be an example to others," Mr. Dixon said. "Even when a narrative is thrust on you, you still have the choice of whether or not you will live up to that narrative or change it. I chose to change it."

When April 3, 2021

Where The couple's home in Los Angeles

Something to Say Ms. Lewis said that her son asked her why she didn't let him say something nice about Mr. Dixon during the ceremony. "I was so sad because I had asked him if he wanted to give a speech and like a true kid he said, 'No.'" She reminded him of that and Cy replied by saying, "I didn't want to give a speech. I just wanted to say something nice about Jerome." When she asked what he would have said, Cy replied, "I love Jerome because he taught me how to clean my room thoroughly."

Star Power Kim Kardashian, who Ms. Lewis met through Tailor Here, delivered well wishes during the ceremony via video. "We service all her brands," Ms. Lewis said. "But it's so much more than that. Kim's devotion to justice reform is truly a gift at a time when there is a desperate need for change. She said she will help Jerome any way she can. There are very few people like that in Hollywood and she is one of them. The fact that she's helping people like Jerome and so many others with stories like his, brings me to tears when I think about it too much."
Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram.

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A Marriage That Started With a Search for Justice

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Jerome Dixon, who always maintained his innocence during his 21 years in prison, met Raha Dixon two years ago at a talk about racism and social change. Jerome Dixon spent 21 years in prison for a murder he maintains he did not commit.

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https://bmcpsychology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40359-019-0299-7
https://bmcpsychology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40359-019-0299-7

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Audrey Hamilton: Understanding our own racial biases is something we all struggle with, even when we aren't aware of those struggles. We speak with one psychologist who has been studying a more modern form of prejudice and says ridding ourselves of those biases is practically impossible. But being aware of them is the first step toward improving relations among different racial groups. I'm Audrey Hamilton and this is "Speaking of Psychology."

John Dovidio is a psychology professor at Yale University and one of the leading researchers on racism, particularly subtle or unconscious racism. He has studied issues of social power and social relations, both between groups and between individuals. His work explores techniques for reducing these conscious and unconscious biases.

Welcome, Dr. Dovidio.

John Dovidio: Thank you for having me.

Audrey Hamilton: Your work focuses on what you call "aversive racism." Can you explain what that means and how it differs from just racism?

John Dovidio: We used to think about racism in a very simple way - that people had negative thoughts, negative feelings, hatred toward a group. But since the 1960s when there was civil rights legislation, it changed the way we thought about race because it was not only immoral to think that way, but it was illegal to discriminate. And what we think is that racism has become more subtle since then. That people still have negative feelings, but they may not be aware of those negative feelings. Instead of feelings of hatred, it's more like feelings of avoidance and discomfort. That's where the name aversive racism comes from.

Audrey Hamilton: Would you say most people have some biases against people from different racial or ethnic groups? You know, what are the consequences of those types of implicit, what we would say, unconscious biases?

John Dovidio: Yeah, there's research that shows that only a small proportion of Americans today have old-fashioned kind of racism, explicit kind of racism. But the majority of white Americans, because they've grown up in a culture that has been historically racist in many ways, because they're exposed to the media that associates violence, drugs and poverty with certain groups.

Most white Americans, the majority of white Americans, about two-thirds to three-quarters, have the unconscious, implicit, racial biases.

Audrey Hamilton: How do people work on getting rid of these biases if they don't know they're biased?

John Dovidio: That's the biggest challenge because most of us are really well practiced at convincing ourselves that we're not prejudiced. So, most of us want to be good people. Prejudice is bad and when we think about it, we always do the right thing.

One of the consequences of aversive racism or unconscious bias is that you don't discriminate in a situation where what's right and wrong are clearly defined because you know what you're supposed to do when you do it. But it usually happens when you can justify a response on the basis of some factor other than race. So, there may be like two people that you are interviewing - one white and one black - and you shift your criteria for the job in a way that actually favors the white person without actually directly discriminating against it.

So the problem is every time we look at our behavior and monitor our behavior, we behave in an egalitarian way. And it's only when we're not paying attention that we discriminate. So to your question, what we have to do is probably - if something's unconscious, you don't know you have it. It's that simple. So you can't think about what you're really feeling. What you have to do is assume you probably have these biases if you're an average American.

And then what you have to do is try to control those biases in the way you behave towards people. You often have to acknowledge you may have these biases. So, it's an ongoing battle because you can't really get rid of these. They're like having habits of mind that you've grown up with. And so you just have to work at being always alert, always conscious and always receptive to the possibility that we might be biased.

Audrey Hamilton: I hear a lot about when you're eliminating these biases, a lot of it is just about having conversations about race in general. Maybe with people who are not your racial or ethnic background. Do you think that helps sort of uncover these biases that you don't know you have?

John Dovidio: Yeah, one of the problems with aversive racism that I mentioned before is that you actually avoid the group and you avoid the group because they make you uncomfortable and you can, therefore, maintain the stereotypes of the group. If you have a lot of interaction with members of the group, then you no longer think about people as being a member of that group, primarily. You think about them as individuals. And so, you haven't really gotten rid of the implicit bias, but you've been able to fine tune the way you interact with many people. You just dial up a broader array of repertoire of being able to interact with people and understand them.

Audrey Hamilton: What do psychologists like you who study this think about the election and re-election of President Obama? Have race relations and attitudes changed in this country since he became president?

John Dovidio: There's been some amazing changes in terms of attitudes since he's become president, but there's also been a real persistence of racism. In terms of changing of attitudes, it probably has happened among the black community because they're new role models. Blacks can envision a new future. Blacks can be at the center rather than a periphery. Many of the issues that you saw with Obama in terms of objections to him, questions about where he was born, is a reflection of aversive racism, where a black person in that position of power can't be legitimate in that position of power. And so you look for reasons to try to devalue or get rid of that person.

The other thing is that many of his policies have been opposed in ways that are much more virulent than many other presidents. And I think it's in part because those negative racial attitudes get expressed, get channeled in a way that has a higher intensity.

Audrey Hamilton: Have psychologists been studying this? I mean, I guess it sort of has been an ongoing experiment of the last eight years of his presidency.

John Dovidio: Over the last eight years, there have been some changes in implicit racial bias but not widespread. So a study too will find a difference, particularly soon after the election because it was so revolutionary, the time in terms of thinking. And we adjust our thinking to revolutionary things. But when you go back to business as usual, we still grow up in a society that makes these associations. And he's seen really as an exception rather than what the average black person is.

Audrey Hamilton: Let's move onto the topic of law enforcement. What can law enforcement officers and leaders learn from your research when it comes to training and interacting with their communities, specifically minority communities?

John Dovidio: The research on police officers - in general, they started doing some research with different computer simulation games where you would shoot or not shoot somebody that appeared on a screen. And that person either had a gun or had an object like a wallet. And then you would have to make a decision do you shoot or not shoot that person. And what that research found was two things. One was that people were much more likely to shoot an unarmed black person than an unarmed white person. And second of all, implicit bias predicted that result. On average, there's shooter bias, and the shooter bias is related to implicit attitudes. And work with police officers show the same bias and that it is related to their implicit attitudes as well. And the more they are exposed in their daily activity to black violence, the police officers, the more likely they are to show this kind of bias. So, what it talks about is nobody wants to shoot an unarmed person. That's not our intentions. But what it shows is if you have these very quick associations of blacks with crime and violence, even if you're well trained in your profession, it makes you susceptible to making a split-second decision that you can never take back.

Audrey Hamilton: How do they go about eliminating those biases - or is that even possible?

John Dovidio: I'm not a big fan of trying to eliminate biases. Biases that are 50 years in the making you don't unmake in a very short period of time. But one example - I do some work with police forces indirectly through an organization I'm part of. But, one of the things that they said was police officers today aren't like the image we had of police officers in the past walking the beat. Police officers today are in a car that has so much electronics, that they don't have to get out of their cars. Someone even told me - I don't even know whether this is actually true, but I bet it is - that there's more electronics, high-powered electronics in the average police car today than there was in our first space [ships]. So what that means is the police officers are in the car and don't interact with the community and the community sees the police officers as distant and powerful over them. And you can't be an effective police officer unless you have the trust and cooperation of the community. So what they've tried to do now, and we've recommended this in several places, was to get the police officer out of the car, just as you said before, to meet people as individuals. To be able to distinguish one from another and therefore not overreact.

Audrey Hamilton: OK, Dr. Dovidio, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure.

John Dovidio: It's been a pleasure for me too. Thank you.

Audrey Hamilton: For more information on Dr. Dovidio's work and to hear more episodes, please go to our website. With the American Psychological Association's "Speaking of Psychology," I'm Audrey Hamilton.

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Speaking of Psychology: Understanding your racial biases

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Audrey Hamilton: Understanding our own racial biases is something we all struggle with, even when we aren't aware of those struggles. We speak with one psychologist who has been studying a more modern form of prejudice and says ridding ourselves of those biases is practically impossible.

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This article is part of a special section on George Floyd
and America, a year after his death. Read more about this project
in a note from deputy Opinion editor Patrick Healy in our Opinion Today newsletter.

On a humid, windless night several years ago, I was driving my parents' S.U.V. through the oak-covered back streets of my hometown with four teenage friends. At an empty intersection, I reflexively began turning left before spotting the no-left-turn sign on the traffic light above. I jerked the wheel right, crossed the intersection and headed for the U-turn lane.

Before my friend riding shotgun could even finish joking about my driving, we were surrounded by two blaring cop cars that had been waiting in the shadows nearby. Two officers, their hands placed near the weapons on their right hips, ordered me to lower my window. I did so in a numb state of shock, knowing I was Black, we were underage and there were unopened beers and a bud or two of leftover marijuana in the vehicle.

But within moments the officers noticed the back seat passengers, my good friends, two young, well-dressed blonde girls. The officers lowered their hands and furrowed their brows. "Who's your daddy?" the lead officer asked me with a grimace. "What's he do?"

I nervously told him: a lawyer. Then, he asked us where we went to school. We told him: Ben Franklin, a "good" magnet school. With that, he asked me and my guy friend to step out of the car. He cuffed us, patted us down, then shrugged: "You're not worth the paperwork."

They took the weed morsels, the Budweiser, released us, gave us a ticket and told us to go home.

Last month, a police officer shot and killed a 20-year-old Black man, Daunte Wright, during a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, Minn. - not far from where George Floyd was killed by police 11 months earlier, after being arrested on suspicion of using a counterfeit $20 bill.

The fatal shooting of Mr. Wright was a personal reminder of how my own traffic stop by the police might have gone much differently, but for those seconds when my friends' whiteness and then my own class privilege were revealed; how unfairness is both arbitrary and tiered.

His death was also a harsh reminder for millions of people of how police violence persists unabated, despite the supposed " summer of racial reckoning" last year following Mr. Floyd's death. There are so many people who now question whether there was a true reckoning that, in certain circles, the term itself is used with half-joking disdain.

Thousands of large multiracial protests led to relatively modest changes compared to the lofty, paradigm shifting possibilities originally floated. Support for Black Lives Matter waxed only to wane months later. Confederate monuments were removed, but a new racialized Lost Cause took hold: the attempts to subvert the 2020 presidential election, which countless prominent Republicans falsely claim was stolen by a "woke mob" cabal, their elected allies and a diverse electorate.

All in all, it seems there was a racial reckoning - it was just disproportionately experienced by privileged Americans. Talk of social justice efforts and antiracism reached new levels of influence in the Zoom-layered corridors of the intelligentsia, corporate America and other upper-middle-class or elite-controlled institutions. Yet this reckoning often didn't have ambitions for systemic change as much as it concerned itself with matters like representation, diversity, promotion and renegotiating the terms of corporate social responsibility. (And instead of uplifting, say, Black women's voices it continued to elevate those of men and other women of color.)

It's been an amorphous project, sometimes laudable and, at other times, awkwardly disconnected from the original, grass-roots critiques focused on policing, criminal law and how injustice is highly concentrated in financially divested communities.

Protest leaders didn't march last summer to widen the trend of Black Lives Matter signs in tree-lined progressive neighborhoods, where Black neighbors are often conspicuously absent because of classist zoning laws. While many cultural shifts have been welcome, it's not clear that people were protesting for things like greater demographic variety in the ads, magazine covers or entertainment that we consume.

And the cause of the marches certainly wasn't to win vague news releases from corporations about solidarity and commitments to fight for equity, which in hundreds of cases failed to include robust follow-up. But that's, largely, what America got.

Less than a month after testimony began in the trial of Derek Chauvin for George Floyd's death, at least 64 other people were killed by American law enforcement, with Black and Latino people making up more than half of the dead.

"This past year wasn't a win," said DeRay Mckesson, an activist, podcaster and co-founder of Campaign Zero, which pushes for policies intended to reduce police brutality. "There were important narrative shifts and symbolic shifts. The police also killed more people in 2020 than in every year we have data except for 2018."

He paused to praise some "nice" changes, including the rollback of racially insensitive products and how Band-Aid is diversifying the skin tones of its bandages, but added, "All these things are overdue and none of them is structural change."

In 2019, a Human Rights Watch report found strong evidence of racial bias in policing. Yet it also revealed that a significant share of the disparities are explained by "concentrated policing in high poverty neighborhoods, which are more frequently communities of color." Its authors gently ask if policing is "a proper response" as opposed to "addressing the problems" in those places with greater resources.

Mr. Mckesson was one of several people I spoke to this week who are close to a fractious class tension that has heightened over the last year: the divide between the slow, hard struggle against poor policing and social injustice in the communities most afflicted by those troubles, and the dizzyingly quick pivot toward antiracism vocabulary and posture in certain white-collar workplaces and industries. ( Even the C.I.A.)

Arisha Hatch, the vice president and chief of campaigns at the nonprofit Color Of Change, which consults directly with large private and public institutions about social justice initiatives, called it "the tension between some of the very performative and visible things that happened in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder versus how, or whether, folks have continued to show up and actually make real changes."

According to the philanthropy-tracking organization Candid, the majority of dollars contributed to racial equity causes in America since 2008 were given within several weeks of Mr. Floyd's death. That includes Apple, which announced a $100 million "Racial Equity and Justice Initiative" in 2020. But as the Verge has reported, that's just 0.18 percent of the company's 2019 profits - or put another way, theoretically, Apple "could have made its entire $100 million back the same day it announced the initiative."

Color of Change is currently pushing big name companies to take up "racial equity audits, sort of in the same way that companies do environmental impact audits," Ms. Hatch explained. Publicly disclosing them, she said, could "compromise" the effort as talks are continuing.

Many powerful companies that view themselves as progressive continue to actively lobby against the sort of federal tax increases that are needed, under current budgetary norms, if greater physical and social infrastructure investments are going to be made in underserved communities of color. And those communities are aggressively policed, in part, because many residents are stuck with the stresses and social disorder that scarcity creates and some have to turn to "informal economies" to get by, according to journalists and researchers like Dr. Steven Thrasher, author of "The Viral Underclass: How Racism, Ableism and Capitalism Plague Humans on The Margins."

The Fortune 500 tier of Corporate America - which recently earned mainstream plaudits when more than 100 chief executives took the step of speaking out against assaults on voting rights - still continues to suppress the wages of their working class employees, who are disproportionately Black, in service of consistently boosting revenues.

All of this invites the question of why this reckoning seems so wound up about, and somewhat dependent upon, the social whims of private companies, which almost by definition will only accomplish so much. Influential nonprofit employees will say, mostly off-record, that it's because these firms have gobs of money and power - and because governments at all levels have been too gridlocked to do much of anything.

When asked why social justice discourse in America has drifted into a scattered set of culture wars and inclusion debates, Ms. Hatch told me that in addition to such outgrowths (positive or negative) being natural, "diversity is often an easy place to start for people," as it's less likely to induce political backlash. For many executive managers, it feels more directly within their power.

Another potential reason is disagreement among activists over which specific goals any reckoning should aim to achieve, such as how, in practice, to redesign policing. "In my 10 years or so reporting on this, the technical solutions are not working," Dr. Thrasher said, referencing the addition of more body cameras, the push for more Taser use instead of guns, the bans on maneuvers like chokeholds and more.

Some think decreasing the use of and funding for policing is an overall solution, if not a terribly popular one. Others, including Mr. Mckesson, think that defunding is well-intentioned yet vulnerable to reversion the moment there is a panic about spikes in crime. Regardless, fully weeding out officers prone to prejudice and brutality may prove unachievable.

The public discourse about where to go to next is just as fraught in academic and media spheres where, for some thinkers, the project is tinged with existential discomfort.

Because news cycles about racial upheaval can bring notoriety, "There are some ways for people in our class that - there are professional benefits," Dr. Thrasher said. "I sold my books during this time, and we are often paid to share our opinions about things and to fund our research, which is good, but things aren't changing a lot for people economically down the ladder."

After George Floyd's death, Robin DiAngelo's antiracism training book, "White Fragility," published in 2018, became Amazon's No. 1 selling book. She was called upon to give lectures and lead workshops at powerful universities, public agencies and corporations such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Nike, Under Armour, Goldman Sachs, Facebook, CVS, American Express and Netflix.

While being interviewed last summer, Ms. DiAngelo opened up in a telling way: "Capitalism is so bound up with racism. I avoid critiquing capitalism - I don't need to give people reasons to dismiss me. But capitalism is dependent on inequality, on an underclass. If the model is profit over everything else, you're not going to look at your policies to see what is most racially equitable."

It's a model that, whatever her misgivings, currently works for antiracism celebrities like Ms. DiAngelo and the businesses she gives cover. Frankly, it may benefit the multiracial set of white-collar Gen Z and millennial employees like me, entering workplaces more woke and attentive to our feelings than ever. But that model, without reform, doesn't work for most working people of any color - or the more than 1,000 people killed each year by police since 2013.

Talmon Joseph Smith is an Opinion staff editor.

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Opinion | How Privilege and Capital Warped a Movement

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This article is part of a special section on George Floyd and America, a year after his death. Read more about this project in a note from deputy Opinion editor Patrick Healy in our Opinion Today newsletter. On a humid, windless night several years ago, I was driving my parents' S.U.V.

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