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As educators we (sometimes unknowingly) step into roles of advocate, caretaker, guide, and even mother or father to students. Students pay attention to everything we say and do. They particularly pay attention to our silence.

We may be uncomfortable talking about race, but we can no longer afford to be silent. We have chosen a profession, which-like parenting-requires that our comforts come second to those of children.

Many black and brown students are educated in school systems and classrooms where they, despite making up the racial majority, are taught how to understand a world by a staff comprised of a powerful minority. When their teachers choose to remain silent about moments of racial tension or violence-violence that may well touch students' own communities or families-these children are overtly reminded of their inferior place in society.

Even as a black teacher, I have to set a tone for my students that signals that it's safe to talk about race. Even with me, students of color are afraid to say the word white or to name the blatant racism of slavery and Jim Crow. If that's the case, imagine how much more difficult it is for them to engage in dialogue about mass incarceration rates; the militarism of police; the killing of innocent black men and women; cycles of poverty; the destruction of our bodies, minds and souls; the lack of access to healthy food and quality schools; and gentrification. These are all symptoms of a type of racism that remains deadly to this day because, despite bodies lying in the street, we refuse to talk about it.

White teachers must also broach these topics with white children attending white schools. These students need to learn about the destructive power of racism and brutality that have plagued our country for centuries. They should also understand that Alton Sterling, Philando Castile and Trayvon Martin were preceded in death by Emmett Till, Jimmie Lee Jackson and countless others whose stories and deaths we must also teach. Our lack of instruction becomes deadly when we allow fear and discomfort to indirectly allow white students to labor under false, privileged assumptions.

Moreover, the silence on the part of white teachers who teach black and brown children is insulting. Imagine seeing white people, the perceived dominant race, loving and appreciating black culture when it is pretty-enjoying the music, food, culture and beauty of our people-but remaining silent about our oppression and refusing to see how the beauty of our culture was largely born out of necessity. It hurts students when their teachers only acknowledge what black people have done for this country and not what this country has done to them.

But how encouraging is it to know that we stand in a powerful and political position where we can directly influence and break this silence?

Begin by confronting your own biases-about yourself, your students, your fellow educators, the world. This process is essential; if educators don't do this, think about how much damage we could do to the open, vulnerable minds of our students. In particular, examine your feelings about the police. And, regardless of your personal feelings about law enforcement, it is critical to understand that many black and brown students have incredibly negative perceptions about the police. This difficult understanding on the part of teachers can hopefully lead to dialogue and healing in schools.

Once you've done the inner work of evaluating your own comfort levels and examining your biases, start the conversation. You might begin by admitting to students that-like them-you are scared, frustrated, angry, confused, hurt or uncomfortable. Students at any age understand these feelings and will appreciate your humility, compassion and vulnerability, especially black and brown students. This is how you lay the foundation.

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As educators we (sometimes unknowingly) step into roles of advocate, caretaker, guide, and even mother or father to students. Students pay attention to everything we say and do. They particularly pay attention to our silence. We may be uncomfortable talking about race, but we can no longer afford to be silent.

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Understanding how school discipline policies can contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline is essential for educators and families. Harsh punishments, automatic out-of-class time and police involvement for discipline can push young people out of classrooms and into the criminal legal system. But educators, parents and caregivers can help to change this harmful system by advocating for and implementing practices that prioritize mental health and well-being.

We offer this new resource page that highlights LFJ articles and content to open dialogue, shift practices and foster change to benefit all young people.

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Learning for Justice | Education Resources

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Learning for Justice provides free resources to educators-teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners-who work with children from kindergarten through high school. Educators use our materials to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants.

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Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

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Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

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Countering COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Stigma and Racism: Tips for Parents and Caregivers

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Concerns over COVID-19 can make children and families anxious and may also lead to placing blame on others who are perceived to be associated with the outbreak. Though the initial spread of COVID-19 occurred in China, it is important to inform children in a developmentally appropriate manner that the disease is linked to a geographic location and not to a race or nationality.

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On Monday, May 25, two moments of antiblack racism - the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis and Amy Cooper's call to 911 with the false report that "an African American man is threatening my life" - spurred protests and heated dialogue about white supremacy and white Americans' responsibility in dismantling it. For those who want to take anti-racist action but don't know where to begin, below is a list of books about racism - anti-blackness in particular - and white privilege.

One World; Bold Type Books; Bloomsbury; Random House; Yale University Press; The New Press; Penguin; Beacon Press

The title says it all: Historian Ibram Kendi reorients the discussion of racism to focus on the act of fighting against it; it's not enough to be a passive opponent. Weaving in accounts from his own life, Kendi expounds the consequences of racism and white supremacy in our public and private spheres, exploring the ways racism manifests within and across demographics, and shows the reader what antiracism looks like and can achieve. In praise for the book, author Ijeoma Oluo describes Kendi's work as "vital," adding, "As a society, we need to start treating antiracism as action, not emotion - and Kendi is helping us do that."

If you want to dive deeper with Kendi, there's his National Book Award-winning Stamped From the Beginning, which scrutinizes the history of anti-black racist thought in America from its very beginning to now. By showing how deeply entrenched racist ideas have been - and still are - in America, and thus exposing clearly and discrediting these ideas, Kendi has created not only a great work of scholarship but a much-needed tool.
For younger readers, check out Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You - Kendi's adaptation of both Stamped and How to Be an Antiracist, co-written with Jason Reynolds.
In the aftermath of the Ferguson riots, Anderson wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post arguing the nation's attention should be on the rage that had sparked them - but, she wrote, it wasn't black rage. In her 2016 book, Anderson continues her piercing analysis of white rage, and the ways in which it has fueled, and continues to fuel, political decisions which push back against the advancement of black Americans.

When young public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson opened the Equal Justice Initiative in 1989 - a nonprofit offering legal representation to people who've suffered illegal conviction or excessive punishment - one of his first clients was Walter McMillian, who was sitting on death row for the murder (of a white woman) that he didn't commit. Just Mercy recounts Stevenson's experience working to overturn McMillian's wrongful conviction, and illuminates the institutional racism and corruption that allowed for it. (A film based on the novel was released in 2019.)

In American Lynching, Rushdy gives a comprehensive, eloquently interpreted history of lynching as it has evolved and been redefined over the course of three centuries in American history.

In a 2017 email interview with BuzzFeed News, St. Johns University professor of history Nathan Connolly wrote, "This book offers a critical discussion of the distinctiveness of mob violence in the United States by linking it to the traditions of white popular sovereignty. Historically, Rushdy points out, white people, not the state, have been understood as the highest source of political authority in America. Lynching represented a violent articulation of 'We the People.' And the country's own struggles to realize democracy in the nineteenth and twentieth century can be understood, in part, as a struggle to make the rule of law either sovereign over or in line with perceived white interests."

Professor of psychology at Stanford Jennifer Eberhardt exposes the hidden racial biases that directly affect our lives - biases built into, among others, political, educational, medical, justice, and financial systems in the US. It's a scientific, analytical, and personal examination of these widespread prejudices, as well as an empowering and even hopeful guide for ways to help dismantle them. In praise for the book, Bryan Stevenson said Biased "presents the science of bias with rare insight and accessibility, but it is also a work with the power and craft to make us see why overcoming racial bias is so critical."

Anti-racist educator DiAngelo explores the defensive and aggressive reactions white people have when they're confronted with the reality of racial inequality and the ways they enable it. DiAngelo breaks down the idea of white fragility, identifying its related emotions (anger, fear, guilt) and its counterproductive behaviors (argumentation, silence), explaining how these behaviors allow for white supremacy, and outlining ways to more earnestly and constructively engage in antiracist work. Poet and playwright Claudia Rankine describes it as "a necessary book for all people invested in societal change through productive social and intimate relationships."

Scholar and social justice advocate Dorothy Roberts expounds the ways in which myths about biological concepts of race have had recent revivals with dangerous, and even fatal, repercussions. She explores new areas of medicine and science such as race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases, and disproves their race-based conclusions, revealing instead how they become justification for propagating systemic inequality and undermining nonwhite - and especially black - populations.

Scribner; Princeton University Press; SUNY Press; Vintage; Rowman & Littlefield Publishers; Sourcebooks; Seal Press

Edited by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward, The Fire This Time is a collection of pieces by various authors on race in America, inspired by James Baldwin's 1963 book The Fire Next Time. Where were we then, where are we now, and where are we headed? Through its stunning essays and poems, this collection masterfully explores those questions and more.

Don't miss the original. The Fire Next Time was a national bestseller when it published in 1963 - a revolutionary call to arms for the civil rights movement. In two essays, Baldwin draws from his early life in Harlem and expands from there to illustrate the breadth of American racism and injustice, and unflinchingly describes its harrowing consequences. In a 2015 list of his favorite books, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, "Basically the finest essay I've ever read. [...] Baldwin refused to hold anyone's hand. He was both direct and beautiful all at once. He did not seem to write to convince you. He wrote beyond you."

Oluo's New York Times best-selling debut is a frank, illuminating, and accessible guide to navigating thorny but vital conversations about race and racism - covering topics like intersectionality, representation, privilege, and mass incarceration. In praise for So You Want to Talk About Race, author Robin DiAngelo called Oluo "the smartest, most courageous and electrifying young writer on race relations today - the voice of our times. Let her be your guidepost."

In White Flight, Harvard professor of history Kevin Kruse looks at the transition of Atlanta during and following the civil rights era - shifting from a site of rare racial harmony to one which whites rapidly fled. Reassessing the assumptions around this "white flight" to suburbs, Kruse digs deep into the meaning of white resistance, demonstrating that it's one aspect of a conservatism that transformed during struggles over segregation and gave birth to causes like tuition vouchers and privatization of public services. In his review, NYU professor Thomas Sugrue wrote, "This important book has national implications for our thinking about the links between race, suburbanization, and the rise of the New Right."

Originally published in 1981, This Bridge Called My Back was groundbreaking for its bringing together writings by women of color from diverse backgrounds in one vital collection. In essays, poetry, interviews, and criticism, contributors (including Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Aurora Levins Morales) described the ways in which non-white women are oppressed because of their race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class, spurring the necessary shift in feminism toward intersectionality.

In her review of the third edition, published in 2002, Angela Davis writes, " This Bridge Called My Back ... dispels all doubt about the power of a single text to radically transform the terrain of our theory and practice. [...] It has offered us strategies for transformative political practice that are as valid today as they were two decades ago."

From 1915 to 1970, nearly six million black citizens fled the South for northern and western cities like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. Pulitzer Prize-winning Wilkerson does a deep dive into this migration through the lens of three individuals who made the move, weaving in historical analysis, firsthand reporting, and original demographic data. Former BuzzFeed News employee Saeed Jones named it as one of the best books of the decade, saying Wilkerson "zooms out to contextualize their stories within the broader swell of history. It's also beautifully written with an eye for detail any poet can appreciate."

In 2018, educator and activist Saad began an Instagram challenge asking white people to really confront their racist behaviors and ideas through a 28-day exercise guided by a free workbook. Nearly 100,000 people downloaded the workbook as the #meandwhitesupremacy challenge went viral. This book is an expansion on the original workbook, adding cultural insight and historical context. In praise for the book, scholar and activist Rachel Cargle says, "Layla not only engages readers effectively - she hands them the tools they need to change themselves so that they can better the lives of millions of people worldwide.

In Racism Without Racists, political sociologist Bonilla-Silva illuminates the insidious form of racism that exists among those who insist they don't see race at all. By poking holes in deracialized justifications for things like nonwhite communities' higher rate of imprisonment and poverty and lower levels of education and health care coverage, Bonilla-Silva exposes the weakness of any claims that America is "post-racial." Historian Robin Kelley praises the book for its ability to "make many readers uncomfortable, as it should," adding, "With care and a wicked sense of humor, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva explores the kind of subtle, everyday racism that some of 'our best friends' unconsciously perpetuate."

Temple University Press; Crossing Press; Oxford University Press; W. W. Norton; Routledge; Graywolf; New Press; Indiana University Press

In The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, black studies scholar Lipsitz offers an exhaustive analysis of the many ways in which whiteness is centered and rewarded in housing, education, health care, employment, and culture, as well as an examination of white privilege as it's long been defined and critiqued in radical black culture.

In a 2017 email interview with BuzzFeed News, cultural critic Irene Nexica wrote, "Lipsitz deftly weaves a diverse set of knowledge into social histories of popular culture that simultaneously shapes and is shaped by society with analyses that are both accessible to a general reader and containing sharp cultural critique. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness looks at whiteness in America from many angles, including OJ Simpson ('White Fear: O.J. Simpson and the Greatest Story Ever Sold'), Stephen King's Lean on Me (where Lipsitz complicates things by describing how 'not all white supremacists are white'), and the ways that different nonwhite communities are impacted by whiteness."

This book-length poetic essay might be the most powerful piece of writing of the last 10 years. Maybe more. It's almost downplaying it to call it "relevant" or "timely," because part of Rankine's point is that much of what she talks about with regards to race and racism - and the violence against black people in this country - has been going on for centuries and has not changed significantly in that time. And the toll that it takes on black people is immeasurable.

In Black Feminist Thought, renowned sociology scholar Collins created an undeniable foundational text in black feminism, as well as a framework for reading and understanding black feminist thinkers before her, including Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde. In a 2013 list of must-reads, Ashley Ford called it, "The holy grail of black feminist theory and history. You need this one now. As in, buy it before anything else."

Political scientist and Columbia professor Ira Katznelson's book is a shrewd and revelatory examination of the civil rights programs that came out throughout the 1930s and 1940s, exposing the deep discriminations that allowed the economic gap between blacks and whites to continue to widen after the war. Notable scholar and cultural critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., praises it as an "explosive analysis [which provides us with a new and painful understanding of how politics and race intersect."

López has written extensively on the evolution of racism in the US since the 1960s, and his latest book hones in on the links between racism and the growing wealth gap. In a 2017 email interview with BuzzFeed News, López said the book explores the ways the right has used white anxiety in the past 50 years "in order to (1) stoke fear and resentment toward people of color, (2) foment hatred toward (liberal) government, and (3) build popular support for politicians beholden to the billionaire class."

All of Lorde's books are essential reading, but Sister Outsider presents 15 beautifully written speeches and essays by the black lesbian feminist poet that will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about feminism, race, sex, ageism, homophobia, and power. It will leave you inspired - and ready to take on the hegemony.

MacMullan's book is for white readers who understand whiteness is a problem, but don't know what to do about it. Weaving in the work of thinkers and writers like John Dewey, W.E.B. DuBois, and Gloria Anzaldua, MacMullan urges white Americans - especially those who consider themselves free of prejudice - to recognize the habits that reveal inherited racism, and unlearning them.

In a 2017 email interview with BuzzFeed News, MacMullan reemphasized the need for "white folks to first do the hard work of uprooting habits of white racism and privilege, but then plant the seeds of cultural habits that can be sources of pride for white people that are free of the violence and exclusion of the past." Otherwise, he warned, "we will continue to see young white people fall for the lie of white power."

Alexander's best-selling book dismantles the notion of color-blindness through the lens of the criminal justice system. By targeting black communities through programs like the War on Drugs, stop and frisk, and "broken windows" policing, Alexander argues, the government has enacted a new type of racial control - mass incarceration. Cornel West called it an "instant classic" and "a grand wake-up call in the midst of a long slumber of indifference to the poor and vulnerable."

Yale University Press; St. Martin's Press; One World; Abingdon Press

Ta-Nehisi Coates' massive 2015 hit is a heartfelt meditation on the realities of life in the US as a black man, and a damning appraisal of the systems and beliefs that make that reality a dangerous one. Written as a letter to his son, it sees Coates touch on the lived experiences that formed his ideology, weaving in the reporting and analysis that have made him one of the leading voices on race today; Toni Morrison called the book "required reading."

Religious scholar and ordained minister Jennifer Harvey lays out accessible and age-appropriate methods for teaching white children about racism, and tools for answering their questions when they encounter it. Vitally, she also explains the importance of helping them understand their identity as a white person in the US, and the ways in which they can use their privilege to bring about change. It's necessary reading for parents and caregivers.

Cooper, a professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University, draws from her own experience in this hybrid memoir/cultural criticism, rejecting the stereotype of black women's anger as something irrational and easily dismissed, and instead opening up that anger to show its power. In praise for Eloquent Rage, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza said, "Cooper gives us the uncensored truth about how America has become what it is today, and reminds us in no uncertain terms that Black people, and particularly Black women, have the brilliance, foresight, and vision to bring a different America to fruition, should we choose to use our powers for good rather than evil."

Author, professor, and TV personality Harris-Perry's 2011 book is a necessary treatise about the prejudices black women encounter in their daily lives, and how the struggle for self-determination is especially difficult in light of persistently negative imagery and stereotypes about gender and race. Harris-Perry is deliberately not prescriptive; as she writes, "This is less a book about what black women do to become first-class American citizens than one about how they feel while they are in that struggle."

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28 Essential Books About Race and Racism

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On Monday, May 25, two moments of antiblack racism - the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis and Amy Cooper's call to 911 with the false report that "an African American man is threatening my life" - spurred protests and heated dialogue about white supremacy and white Americans' responsibility in dismantling it.

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Understanding how school discipline policies can contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline is essential for educators and families. Harsh punishments, automatic out-of-class time and police involvement for discipline can push young people out of classrooms and into the criminal legal system. But educators, parents and caregivers can help to change this harmful system by advocating for and implementing practices that prioritize mental health and well-being.

We offer this new resource page that highlights LFJ articles and content to open dialogue, shift practices and foster change to benefit all young people.

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Learning for Justice | Education Resources

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Learning for Justice provides free resources to educators-teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners-who work with children from kindergarten through high school. Educators use our materials to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants.

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Framing Brave Conversations about Race and Ethnicity -Coalition.pdf

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Why we need to Talk to Children about Race & Difference | Biz Lindsay-Ryan | TEDxDePaulUniversity

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Even babies notice differences like skin color, eye shape and hair texture. Here's how to handle conversations about race, racism, diversity and inclusion, even with very young children.
A few things to remember:

Don't shush or shut them down if they mention race.

Don't wait for kids to bring it up.

Be proactive, helping them build a positive awareness of diversity.

When a child experiences prejudice, grown-ups need to both address the feelings and fight the prejudices.

You don't have to avoid topics like slavery or the Holocaust. Instead, give the facts and focus on resistance and allies.

In addition to Jeanette Betancourt, senior vice president for Social Impact at Sesame Workshop, we spoke to Beverly Daniel Tatum: We recommend her TEDx talk as well as her book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race.
Additional Resources:

Babies begin to notice race at 6 months old - in fact, according to this pair of studies by Professor Kang Lee at the University of Toronto, they actually show signs of racial bias by this age.

One in 10 children is multiracial - according to Pew Research Center. This includes children with parents of two different races, plus those with at least one multiracial parent.

Watch the whole "I Love My Hair!" video from Sesame Street.

Thanks to Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton. Derrick Gay, and Jinnie Spiegler of the Anti-Defamation League, which has a wide range of resources for anti-bias education.

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Even babies notice differences like skin color, eye shape and hair texture. Here's how to handle conversations about race, racism, diversity and inclusion, even with very young children.

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How To Talk To Kids About Tragedies In The Media

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How To Talk To Kids About Tragedies In The Media

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Young children, teens, and even adults may be disturbed by images and stories of people getting hurt in the media or on TV. Children can become anxious and fearful about the world around them. It is important to keep an eye on your TV guide at the start of each week and be aware of what is scheduled during your children's viewing time.

Try to watch television with your kids (especially during the News), listen to their questions and answer them honestly. Tragedies affect everyone, both children, and adults. Children need to talk about their fears, frustration, and disbelief. It is important that we are watchful for these emotions and encourages open discussions.

Children may be worry:

that the event could happen to themselves or a loved one;

that they could be separated from someone they love or be left alone;
Discussion Techniques:
Be truthful - Children need to understand what is happening around them to feel secure. Provide them with facts about what happened and acknowledge it was a terrible and frightening event. Help them to see that we share their feelings.

Encourage any questions - Ensure your child feels as though they can approach you to ask questions as much as they need. Sometimes a child will process a tragic event much later and come back to you again for more discussion. Remind them that questions are welcome.

Feelings are normal - Some children may take a while to get over tragic events and that is perfectly normal. Allow them to cry if they need to and show their emotions. Share your feelings about what happened to them. Help your kids to verbalize their feelings with you. Secure them with a warm cuddle and remind them that they are safe. Keep things in perspective and remind them that not all people are harmful towards others.

Ensure they feel safe - explain to them that it is a real misfortune what has happened and that we all feel for those people who were there or are experiencing pain.

Stay close by and show affection as they desire - give them a hug and reassure them that their world is safe. Keep them among familiar things until they're feeling more secure, for example, family and friends.

Allow the children to talk about it and how it has made them feel. Honestly answer their questions and try to put their minds at ease. By not talking about it may make them think it is taboo.

Be watchful for behavioral changes - kids who are behaving differently, such as not sleeping at night, feel frightened, don't want mum to go to work, they want to start sleeping in with you may need some more reassurance, time and talking. If it continues it might be time to seek professional help.

For teens - talk with them, listen and ask questions. Stabilise the subject by asking "What are your friends saying about it? How are you feeling?" Make sure they're receiving the true facts. Tell them you're there for them.

about their safety or that of their loved ones.

Depending on their age and level of maturity, children will perceive things differently to adults. Remember with younger children (up to nine years old) to be uncomplicated in your explanations without going into gory details, especially if the tragedy is extremely unpleasant. Be supportive and reassuring during your discussion. Older children will be able to handle more information.

Unfortunately over the past few years, in particular, we have been exposed to numerous mass killings that have been disturbing and heartbreaking for all of us. Images in the media and discussions around the world can be quite alarming for our kids. It is imperative that we recognize these events and explain what has happened.

Sometimes our kids hear stories from others that may not be correct, so it is up to us to ensure they have the right perception.
When talking about tragedy to kids, your choice of words really depends on the age of the children. In any case, though you should:

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How To Talk To Kids About Tragedies In The Media | Parenting Today

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Young children, teens, and even adults may be disturbed by images and stories of people getting hurt in the media or on TV. Children can become anxious and fearful about the world around them. It is important to keep an eye on your TV guide at the start of each week and be aware of what is scheduled during your children's viewing time.

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Resources - Black Lives Matter Week of Action In Schools - D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice

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Links to suggested lessons, films, books, readings, and general teaching guides.

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We all need different spaces and ways to talk about white body supremacy. Engaging in a culturally somatic body focused study will help us begin to co-create a culture free from the rabid structural influence of white body supremacy that collectively binds us.
THE RESOURCES

Our society needs to break down systems and institutions that perpetuate the concept of white body supremacy and recognize how the myth of race and historical trauma is deeply ingrained into our culture.

I've developed somatic-body approaches that negotiate the common historical and perpetual myths that Black bodies, Native bodies, and other bodies of color are inherently deviant and that the white body is the standard of humanness.

I help others build community-oriented understandings of racialized trauma so that we can move from our racialized lens to a cultural lens - and move further to a resourced energy lens of healing.

I help others build a narrative experience that acknowledges how historical, inter-generational, persistent institutional and personal inequities impact us and how that can lead to Decontextualized Internalized White Body Supremacy Trauma carried in the body.

I've translated this narrative into practices that are accessible to many different types of regular people. I want regular people to use these tools to recognize body trauma born out of racism and white body supremacy in their own body, their community and to start to heal. I want to help people understand how these experiences play out in their daily lives and develop accessible practices that help free them.

I train individuals, communities and organizations on how to recognize trauma in the body, how to a cultural container to heal, how to begin practicing resourced resilience and how to operationalize these practices in organizations and larger systems.

Join me to somatically abolish White Body Supremacy in the next 9 generations.

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We all need different spaces and ways to talk about white body supremacy. Engaging in a culturally somatic body focused study will help us begin to co-create a culture free from the rabid structural influence of white body supremacy that collectively binds us.

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Revisionist History Podcast - Malcolm Gladwell Podcast - Pushkin Industries

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Revisionist History is Malcolm Gladwell’s journey through the overlooked and the misunderstood. Click now to listen to the Revisionist History podcast on Pushkin Industries.

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National Black Lives Matter at School is an organization struggling for liberation and racial justice in education for Black youth, educators, and all youth of color. We are a Black-led and multi-ethnoracial collective of educators, parents, organizers, youth, and community folx who are committed to creating a more just world so that all people may be able to access their full humanity. We work to address racial justice in education by promoting restorative justice, advocating for mental health support, increasing Black teaching staff, ending police presence in schools, and mandating Black history and ethnic studies. We encourage all educators, students, parents, unions, and community organizations to join our annual week of action during the first week of February each year.​

Our collective is guided by core principles that are grounded in a Black Feminist framework. Political views that have brought us together in doing this work, deep revolutionary transformational politics, opposition to neoliberalism, corporate reforms in education, defend and transform unions, Black Queer feminist anticapitalist politics, abolitionist politics and approach to restorative and transformative justice.

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National coalition organizing for racial justice in education.

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A guide to Indigenous land acknowledgment

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After hosting an Indigenous land acknowledgment event, we put together this written guide to based on our panelists' responses.

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by Kassandra Minor

As a white educator who works to build inclusive spaces with many teachers, students, parents, and shool leaders, I grapple with the concept of critical humility: the paradox of knowing and not knowing at the same time (European-American Collaborative Challenging Whiteness 2005). I accept that my knowledge is partial but continue moving forward with the body of information and experience around teaching and learning that has carried me where I am today. But it's hard. It's hard to be critical and humble when the kinds of systemic change our students need is urgent. It's hard when the folks I am coaching, teaching, and learning within the realm of equity and inclusion are trusting me, a white woman, to guide them toward affinity, understanding, and actionable steps. I'm supposed to . . . know.

As I move forward and back throughout the Black spaces in various school communities I've worked in, as well as within my own family, and continue to permeate the spaces I work in governed by whiteness, I find myself asking, How much do I know? How much do I not know?

One thing I'm sure of: I have not always questioned my actions as deeply as I should.

Recently, I ran a restorative circle with a group of student teachers who were taking a course on positive behavior management. It was the fifth day of the institute, and I was the guest instructor for the day. They were open and inquisitive and eager to think about how they might shape their future classrooms. Shortly after we began, I spoke about how the power of restoration is rooted in our own mindfulness, and that when it's continuously practiced throughout our own lives and in our classrooms, it is deeply connected to the types of learning our students will experience.

As an introductory concept, we started with a restorative circle. I instructed the student teachers to follow typical restorative circle proceedings: deep breath, relax, talk only when holding the talking piece. I showed the group three prompts I had carefully constructed, hoping to surface the influence of teachers' decisions on students' positive and negative memories of schooling.

What are some of your fondest memories of school?

Name a teacher with whom you associate positive feelings. Why?

Talk about a time you shared with a student or young person you are not proud of.

Five participants shared, and everyone talked about their fondest memories. I leaned in, smiled encouragingly, and took a deep breath; I knew I had to model what it looked like to be vulnerable in front of students. I shared a story that shows all the things my young, white teacher self might have talked a lot about but most certainly did not know.

A few years ago, I taught Rashid (name has been changed) along with two co-teachers and a classroom paraprofessional. Rashid voiced his opinion often, and just like any other fifth grader, he was curious about the topics my co-teachers and I introduced and asked lots of questions. Unlike many other kids in our school, he was the only African American student in the class, alongside our majority Latinx and East Asian student body.

Also unlike most other students in the school, during the first month of the school year, he was called the n-word by a Mexican classmate, resulting in a physical altercation that took place in front of the whole class. I didn't witness the fight, but even now, years later, I think about the racial trauma induced by that incident and how it must have deeply influenced Rashid's ability to be fully present and participate in our community.

There wasn't a lot of "before" in the school year when I think about the incident; what we all experienced was the "after," so that's what I'll describe.

Rashid spent A LOT of time at his desk engaging in a variety of activities, including sitting at it, sleeping on it, standing on top of it, and using it as a percussive tool. Periodically, he threw books across the room, refused to take assessments, shouted at all the grown-ups (and sometimes his peers), and attempted to leave the classroom. Although Rashid and talked often, his peers did not like to spend time with him, and his presence had the ability to send the whole class over the edge. Parents scheduled meetings, requesting their child not be seated next to Rashid.

We tried numerous "interventions" to support and include Rashid, including developing passion projects with him, creating an individualized adaptive schedule, fostering peer supports, and providing a school aide who worked with him 1:1. We even tried in-school therapy for Rashid and implemented whole-class group therapy with our team of guidance counselors. We were in constant contact with his family. Even so, nothing seemed to make a difference in how Rashid felt, performed, or participated, and by the end of the year, everyone involved was frustrated.

Like so many other young Black boys, Rashid was recommended by the team of adults who worked with him, including myself, to be evaluated for special education services. I remember one of our school leaders scheduling a meeting with me and my co-teacher, imploring us to reconsider the recommendation, saying that Rashid would be at great risk for being pummeled into the school-to-prison pipeline if he was given an IEP. Yet we insisted that he would not survive his sixth-grade year if he did not receive special education supports.

We ultimately fought for the evaluation, and it happened. He was classified with the "emotionally disturbed" disability label shortly after his psychological evaluation, a label that he will carry with him throughout his life in school, a label wherein Black students are more heavily represented than any other category. A label that will inform how much time he will spend in general education classes and that will inform the likelihood that he will be both victim and perpetrator of bullying (Samuels 2018). A disability label that in and of itself is not a condition but rather a federal manifestation of IDEA to describe a number of specific and general behaviors students demonstrate, including anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, and eating disorders, in addition to showing learning difficulties, hyperactivity, and aggression (Council for Exceptional Children 2018).

That was just one of the times with a student I am not proud of.

As I looked upon the very still and very quiet student teachers who sat around me in our restorative circle - many of whom were white like myself, most of whom will inevitably teach students similar to Rashid - in the spirit of restoration and mindfulness, I thought about what I could tell them that would have the most positive impact on their future students.

1. All behavior is a form of communication, and everything a child shows us in a classroom, whether it be reading quietly for forty-five minutes or jumping on top of a desk, can tell us what's going on in a child's body and mind and inform the decisions we make for them and with them. In retrospect, I think about how Rashid's behavior was indicative of a forcefield he had to create when everyone around him treated him like a challenge rather than a full human being who had a range of smartness and emotions. The racial trauma induced by one of his peers calling him the n-word at the beginning of the year created an unsafe space in his own classroom, where he was forced to spend most of his time. Even when adults try to help students, the protective layers created by a child to bar further hurt and pain are immense. Reducing the cognitive load and lots of patience can do wonders for sensitive student-teacher relationships.

2. If you are white, and your students identify as persons of color, be aware of that dynamic. I am white, and this is a thing, and it affects the interactions I have with all types of people, both positively and negatively. For white educators, this can especially affect the interactions we have with our young Black boys who come to school to learn and are instead treated as a "challenge" or a "problem" when they do not follow directions and color within the lines. When Black boys are responding to white educators in ways that schools have perceived as negative, know that those responses are typically symptomatic of how whiteness has responded to Black boys' general presence in society.

3. Restorative circles, other mindfulness work, and many other positive behavior management practices we create won't always go well at first. One general rule of thumb when thinking about teaching and learning is that for something to become a habit, it takes practice. Lots and lots of practice. Additionally, restorative work is more impactful when done proactively as opposed to reactively. I remember starting circles after Rashid's class was feeling super frustrated midyear. They were mildly effective, but I can only imagine how they might have gone if they were a practice we had initiated at the beginning of the year, how Rashid might have felt if we had honored his feelings in a better way.

Many of the students I support are children of color. Many of the teachers I support are white. Most of the students of color have ability labels defined as "emotionally disturbed" or "learning disabled" on their IEPs. The teachers and I work to create a number of positive behavior management practices in their classrooms, including restorative practices and other relational kinds of work to support their learners. I exclaim a number of times and in many different ways how we can think about a child's behavior as a form of communication, how we can examine the behaviors to inform our next steps. The teachers respond to me with simultaneous doubt and enthusiasm and agree to reflect on how it all went during my next visit.

I will tell educators all those things. We will have a vibrant discussion. And maybe something changes. Maybe there are some things we all know.

As a self-described critically conscious, inclusive educator who examines everything in the context of race, equity, and inclusion, I do know some things. I won't deny myself the body of knowledge I've built. But I continue to ask myself the questions that hover around critical humility: How much do I know? How much do I not know? and How can we break this loop of white educator, good intentions, Black child, IEP?

Perhaps the most salient piece of advice I could have given those young educators sitting in the restorative circle around me is this: You can read and research race, equity, and inclusion, and talk and recommend and try, but no matter how much one reads, experiences, participates in, and explores with, the mishaps made will be immeasurable unless we accept what we do know, and more importantly, what we do not.

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As a white educator who works to build inclusive spaces with many teachers, students, parents, and shool leaders, I grapple with the concept of critical humility: the paradox of knowing and not knowing at the same time (European-American Collaborative Challenging Whiteness 2005).

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A look back in history at a time of great promise and great disappointment for Black Americans who dreamed of and struggled for the promise of community and full citizenship.

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"As the public education wars rage on, few warriors show up to fight for the students and families who have waited too long for justice delayed and denied. Yet, there is one small band of freedom fighters bringing sanity to the village. Anyone who threatens the education of our 8 million Black children is likely to catch these eight Black hands."

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"As the public education wars rage on, few warriors show up to fight for the students and families who have waited too long for justice delayed and denied. Yet, there is one small band of freedom fighters bringing sanity to the village.

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Goals & Strategies for White Educators Working Toward Antiracism and Social Justice

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Welcome to the Leading Equity Podcast

The Leading Equity Podcast focuses on supporting educators with the tools and resources necessary to ensure equity at their school. On this podcast, listeners can expect to hear interviews and stories from voices of equity in education today. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and Spotify!

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The Leading Equity Podcast focuses on supporting educators with the tools and resources necessary to ensure equity at their school. On this podcast, listeners can expect to hear interviews and stories from voices of equity in education today. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and Spotify!

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How White Parents can use Media to Raise Anto-Racist Kids

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How White Parents can use Media to Raise Anto-Racist Kids

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Parents of Black and brown kids know that instilling their kids with a sense of racial identity and talking about how racism will inevitably affect their lives -- and possibly even their safety -- are essential life lessons. Parents of White kids, on the other hand, often don't feel the same pressure. But as racist violence continues to erupt, discussing race, racism, and the history of racial oppression in the United States and the world is just as essential for White families. These are not easy conversations to have, but movies, TV, and books -- as well as other media and tech -- can be powerful tools to help you get started. Remember, media makes a big impression on kids. But the messages you send -- from the media you choose, to the conversations you initiate -- are what kids will hold in their hearts and minds long after the final credits.

Here are 10 ideas for how to use media to start and continue conversations about race and racism with your kids. This list is not exhaustive, so if you have other ideas, please add them to the comments.

Diversify your bookshelf

If you grew up reading Anne of Green Gables and Little House on the Prairie, you can still share these classics with your kids. But don't stop there: Look for stories featuring and written by people of color. Here are some places to start:

It can be easy to let stereotypes fly by when watching the minstrel-show crows in or exaggerated accents in The Goonies. But by pointing out when something is racist, you're helping your kid develop critical-thinking skills. These skills will allow conversations about race and stereotypes to deepen as kids get older.

Watch hard stuff

As kids get older, expose them to the harsh realities of racism throughout history and through the current day. That doesn't mean nonstop cable news replaying gruesome details of violence but carefully chosen films like or McFarland, USA. You can also watch footage of protests to kick off conversations about anger, fear, oppression, and power. Be explicit about racism and discrimination being hurtful, damaging, and wrong.

Seek out media created by people of color

As you choose your family movie night pick or browse online for books, specifically look for authors and directors of color. Aim for stories that include people of color in lead roles and as fully developed characters. With older kids, take an audit of how many movies or books you've recently watched or read that were created by people of color. Discuss the reasons for any imbalance and the importance of a variety of perspectives.

Broaden your own perspectives

Follow and read Black and brown voices and media outlets. Use what you learn to inform conversations with your kids. Some places to start (and by no means a complete list):

Discuss hate speech and harassment online

Ask kids if they've seen racist language in YouTube videos or comments. For social media-using kids, talk about racist memes. Ask them to show you examples and aim to develop empathy without shaming them. Help them understand how following or sharing racist accounts helps spread hate. Brainstorm ways they can safely and responsibly speak out against racist imagery and messages online. Adapt this lesson on countering hate speech for your conversations.

Understand the online landscape

Read this account of a White mom parenting through her son's exposure to online white supremacy. And read the son's perspective. Learn more about places where White racist groups congregate and how they recruit, and keep discussions open and honest with kids who socialize on sites like Discord and Reddit.

Explore the power of tech tools

Use recent examples of how phones, video recordings, and editing tools affect our understanding of race and racism. Discuss how the release of video evidence can spur action, like in the case of Ahmaud Arbery. Explore together how photos and videos can both reveal truth and hide it -- especially when context is edited out.

Build news literacy

Besides sharing news articles from different perspectives with your kids, use opportunities like protests in Minneapolis to discuss how news is presented. What kinds of stories get the most attention? How are language and images used differently to depict people and incidents depending on the news outlet, the people involved, and the topic? Look at news coverage of incidents where White people commit acts of violence and compare to when people of color do.

Teach your kid to be an ally

Learn about how White people can support people of color by being allies and then integrate these ideas into your conversations and actions with your kids. Talk through scenarios your kid might encounter online and discuss (and model) when it might be best to just listen, to call someone out, to amplify someone's voice, to share resources, etc. Share mistakes you've made around talking about race and racism -- in person or online -- with your kids so they know it's OK to not be perfect or have all the answers.

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How White Parents Can Use Media to Raise Anti-Racist Kids

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Parents of Black and brown kids know that instilling their kids with a sense of racial identity and talking about how racism will inevitably affect their lives -- and possibly even their safety -- are essential life lessons. Parents of White kids, on the other hand, often don't feel the same pressure.

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Join us on June 20th to discuss Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo. This option means that you will purchase your book. However, you will receive book club materials for use with your students.

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Virtual Book Club: Clap When You Land BYOB - READ TECH WRITE

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Join us on June 20th to discuss Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo. This option means that you will purchase your book. However, you will receive book club materials for use with your students.

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The Education for Liberation Network is a national coalition of teachers, community activists, researchers, youth, and parents who believe a good education should teach people-particularly low-income youth and youth of color-how to understand and challenge the injustices their communities face.

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WhiteAccomplices, Curated by Jonathan Osler: “Opportunities for White People in the Fight for Racial Justice: Moving from Actor to Ally to Accomplice.”

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Why are Black Women at such a high risk of dying from pregnancy complications?

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Why are Black Women at such a high risk of dying from pregnancy complications?

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Something good is happening! Black History Bootcamp, a 21-day walking meditation (for daily resistance!) that celebrates one Black woman each day. Here is the direct link to receive the daily emails: https://bit.ly/3dmxcMH. It's amazing!

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Grief is a direct impact of racism: Eight ways to support yourself

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Grief is a direct impact of racism: Eight ways to support yourself

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The cyclical realities of the impact of racism, anti-Black racism and other forms of intersectional violence on our health make breathing seem like a luxury at times. The full blunt impact of racism and other forms of violence echoes heavily in our hearts, our minds, bodies and actions.

Grief is a direct result of racism and intersectional violence and it affects us physically, emotionally, financially, spiritually, transnationally and transgenerationally. More importantly, not being able to fully engage in our grief is a direct outcome of chronic experiences of racist violence.

This winter, the grandmother of the deceased Colten Boushie told the New York Times: " Even to this day...I hold back on crying."

Insoluble grief, anti-Black racism and other forms of violence that Black, Indigenous and racialized people deal with can result in chronic prolonged traumatic health issues. These issues can include diabetes, high blood pressure, heart attack, cancer and low birth rates.

Due to anti-Black racism, Black communities' health issues are often not taken seriously. As a result we are not given adequate and equitable health care services. Often Black community members are re-traumatized as they seek help and support for their health issues.

Read more: Racism impacts your health

Our illnesses are under-researched and under-served. In order to deal with this stress, some opt out of the system entirely, only re-entering during an emergency situation.

Impacts of daily experiences of racism also include depression, anxiety, addictions and post-traumatic stress. But racism is often not discussed in mainstream health circles.

Anti-oppression psychotherapy: A trauma informed model

As an African/Black woman, anti-violence activist, health researcher, and mental health practitioner, living with a visual disability for over 20 years, I have worked with many community members dealing with health struggles directly related to anti-Black racism and other forms of intersectional violence.

I have discovered that discussions of the daily impact of racism are happening with friends, families, trusted coworkers, in our journals and sometimes in isolation.

To try and help my clients deal with this, I worked with a colleague to develop and practice an innovative model we call anti-oppression psychotherapy (AOP).

AOP addresses the delusion and confusion of trauma in the bodies and minds of the oppressed. It is a resistance and a revolutionary model that grows out of Black feminist and intersectional theories and practices.

Bruce Mars/Unsplash

AOP examines the impacts and intersections of oppressions as they interact together. It interprets issues of racism as acts of trauma and violence to our health and it incorporates resistance strategies and healthy coping mechanisms - to help community members and clients through grief, loss and identity formation.

This model exists because the erasure of our grief, our loss, needs to be known, attended to, cared for and supported - to survive continuous violence, battled daily from generation to generation.

Self and community care is critical to combating the effects of racism and intersectional violence. AOP addresses racism as a health determinant and gives the power to heal back to the communities who are suffering.

How to support your own healing

Below are eight self-care tips to support you and your loved ones on this cyclical healing journey:

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Grief is a direct impact of racism: Eight ways to support yourself

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The cyclical realities of the impact of racism, anti-Black racism and other forms of intersectional violence on our health make breathing seem like a luxury at times. The full blunt impact of racism and other forms of violence echoes heavily in our hearts, our minds, bodies and actions.

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Anti-racist work isn't easy, and amid the COVID-19 crisis, things look a bit different than they used to. But there are still powerful ways to show up.

Educate yourself!

Reading the work of Black scholars who break down issues of the justice system, policing, and prison abolition are great places to start. Some of my personal recommendations include works by Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, Michelle Alexander, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Ida B. Wells, and The 1619 Project, edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones.

Resources like the Abolitionist Futures conference, the Prison Culture blog, and the African American Intellectual History Society have compiled extensive reading lists on policing, incarceration, and the racism baked into both systems. Other groups, including Critical Resistance, have published documents like an " Abolition Organizing Toolkit." And in Minneapolis, MPD150 is a group of local grassroots organizers pushing for the abolition of the city's police department, and it also has a handy zine for frequently asked questions about abolition.

Invest time and resources in on-the-ground community abolitionist efforts.

In the current situation in Minneapolis, these efforts can include Freedom Funds like the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which directly supports activists and organizers who are doing work on the ground. The Minnesota Freedom Fund is "supporting a movement constellation of formations," according to its Twitter, where they also advise donating to the Black Visions Collective, Reclaim the Block, and Unicorn Riot. Respect the leaders on the ground who have been doing the work and leading the way. As documented by the National Bail Fund Network, freedom and bond funds exist all over the country, and they need support even when police brutality isn't in the headlines.

Get involved locally.

This is an important national conversation that gets renewed every time another city is seized by racist horror, but good politics start locally. Sign yourself up for a local listserv or organization that is working to create a lasting organizing infrastructure in your community. If you need help getting started, look for local news reports of anti-racist protest actions, find out who is organizing them, and if you can support their ongoing work.

Uplift and center the voices of the most marginalized people.

In all conversations, it is crucial that we uplift and center the voices and experiences of the people who are most impacted by these issues. Lift up and listen to people like Tami Sawyer, Da'Shaun Harrison, Delaney Vandergrift, Clarissa Brooks, Bree Newsome Bass, and many others. Say the names of Black women who often go unheard of and unseen on major news and media platforms, and make room for Black women to speak for themselves.

Take action in your own life.

Name and call out racism, misogynoir, transphobia, homophobia, queerphobia, fatphobia, and white supremacy in all its forms. It may be uncomfortable to confront your parents, your boss, your teacher, or your peers, but that's no excuse not to do it. Fighting oppression is uncomfortable work by its nature, and working to make change in the systems you're already a part of is as important as plugging into conversations about systems you don't interact with regularly.

Why does it matter?

It is important to be part of building the organizing infrastructure in our communities so that the next time there's another hashtag mourning another death, we already have the playbook to act. We have the leaders and gatekeepers (who do the work) positioned to continue to lead in a sustained way, but they need the support of everyone who wants to see an end to these racist systems.

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Activist and organizer Zyahna Bryant offers advice on anti-racist activism in the wake of George Floyd's death.

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(Nam Y. Huh / Associated Press)

What was your first reaction when you saw the video of the white cop kneeling on George Floyd's neck while Floyd croaked, "I can't breathe"?

If you're white, you probably muttered a horrified, "Oh, my God" while shaking your head at the cruel injustice. If you're black, you probably leapt to your feet, cursed, maybe threw something (certainly wanted to throw something), while shouting, "Not @#$%! again!" Then you remember the two white vigilantes accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery as he jogged through their neighborhood in February, and how if it wasn't for that video emerging a few weeks ago, they would have gotten away with it. And how those Minneapolis cops claimed Floyd was resisting arrest but a store's video showed he wasn't. And how the cop on Floyd's neck wasn't an enraged redneck stereotype, but a sworn officer who looked calm and entitled and devoid of pity: the banality of evil incarnate.

Maybe you also are thinking about the Karen in Central Park who called 911 claiming the black man who asked her to put a leash on her dog was threatening her. Or the black Yale University grad student napping in the common room of her dorm who was reported by a white student. Because you realize it's not just a supposed "black criminal" who is targeted, it's the whole spectrum of black faces from Yonkers to Yale.

You start to wonder if it should be all black people who wear body cams, not the cops.

What do you see when you see angry black protesters amassing outside police stations with raised fists? If you're white, you may be thinking, "They certainly aren't social distancing." Then you notice the black faces looting Target and you think, "Well, that just hurts their cause." Then you see the police station on fire and you wag a finger saying, "That's putting the cause backward."

You're not wrong - but you're not right, either. The black community is used to the institutional racism inherent in education, the justice system and jobs. And even though we do all the conventional things to raise public and political awareness - write articulate and insightful pieces in the Atlantic, explain the continued devastation on CNN, support candidates who promise change - the needle hardly budges.

But COVID-19 has been slamming the consequences of all that home as we die at a significantly higher rate than whites, are the first to lose our jobs, and watch helplessly as Republicans try to keep us from voting. Just as the slimy underbelly of institutional racism is being exposed, it feels like hunting season is open on blacks. If there was any doubt, President Trump's recent tweets confirm the national zeitgeist as he calls protesters "thugs" and looters fair game to be shot.

Yes, protests often are used as an excuse for some to take advantage, just as when fans celebrating a hometown sports team championship burn cars and destroy storefronts. I don't want to see stores looted or even buildings burn. But African Americans have been living in a burning building for many years, choking on the smoke as the flames burn closer and closer. Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible - even if you're choking on it - until you let the sun in. Then you see it's everywhere. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands. But we have to stay vigilant, because it's always still in the air.

So, maybe the black community's main concern right now isn't whether protesters are standing three or six feet apart or whether a few desperate souls steal some T-shirts or even set a police station on fire, but whether their sons, husbands, brothers and fathers will be murdered by cops or wannabe cops just for going on a walk, a jog, a drive. Or whether being black means sheltering at home for the rest of their lives because the racism virus infecting the country is more deadly than COVID-19.

What you should see when you see black protesters in the age of Trump and coronavirus is people pushed to the edge, not because they want bars and nail salons open, but because they want to live. To breathe.

Worst of all, is that we are expected to justify our outraged behavior every time the cauldron bubbles over. Almost 70 years ago, Langston Hughes asked in his poem "Harlem": "What happens to a dream deferred? /... Maybe it sags / like a heavy load. / Or does it explode?"

Fifty years ago, Marvin Gaye sang in "Inner City Blues": "Make me wanna holler / The way they do my life." And today, despite the impassioned speeches of well-meaning leaders, white and black, they want to silence our voice, steal our breath.

So what you see when you see black protesters depends on whether you're living in that burning building or watching it on TV with a bowl of corn chips in your lap waiting for "NCIS" to start.

What I want to see is not a rush to judgment, but a rush to justice.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the N.B.A.'s all-time leading scorer, is the author of 16 books, including, most recently, "Mycroft & Sherlock -The Empty Birdcage" www.kareemabduljabbar.com

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Op-Ed: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Don't understand the protests? What you're seeing is people pushed to the edge

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The main concern of black people right now isn't whether they're standing three or six feet apart, but whether their sons, husbands, brothers and fathers will be murdered by cops.

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Historian Ed Baptist provides context on the creation and enforcement of a U.S. racial binary that endures today, as well as Black resistance as a force for political change. And Aisha White urges educators to ask themselves, "What did you learn about race when you were younger?" before they engage with children. She argues that self-reflection and ongoing education are vital tools to combat the fallacy of ignoring students' racialized experiences.

People from all corners of public life are telling teachers to stop discussions about race and racism in the classroom, but keeping the truth of the world from students simply doesn't work. English teacher Matthew Kay urges educators to create brave spaces instead. He provides examples of classroom strategies for engaging with students at the intersections of race, literature and lived experience. Hint: it involves vulnerability, accountability and quality affirmations.

This season, we're examining the century between the Civil War and the modern civil rights movement to understand how systemic racism and slavery persisted and evolved after emancipation-and how Black Americans still developed strong institutions during this time. Co-hosts Hasan Kwame Jeffries and Bethany Jay discuss how students need to grasp this history to understand injustices many of them face today, from voter suppression to mass incarceration.

In 2015, Coach Steve Bandura loaded the Anderson Monarchs, a Little League baseball team from Philadelphia, onto a 1947 Flxible Clipper Bus for a barnstorming tour back in time. Bandura and the players recount lessons learned while visiting historic civil rights sites, meeting veteran activists and playing baseball along the way. And historian Derrick E. White, co-host of The Black Athlete podcast, explores the intersection of sports and civil rights history.

The civil rights movement offers critical context for understanding the systemic police violence, voter suppression efforts, 'law and order' rhetoric and criminalization of activism we see today. It also helps us understand the strategies activists use to fight these injustices. Historians Shannon King and Nishani Frazier explain how they use 21st-century Black activism to teach the movement's history-and how they use the movement to help students better understand the contemporary Black freedom struggle.

The history of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense can help us understand the transition from civil rights to Black Power and contemporary issues like mass incarceration. From the Ten-Point Platform to survival programs, historian Robyn C. Spencer outlines key aspects of the party's revolutionary ideology, grassroots activism and community service. And historian Jakobi Williams joins to share valuable classroom insights.

Historian Clarence Lang joins us for a conversation about Malcolm X. We discuss his commitment to Black pride and self-determination and his rejection of the white gaze and the myth of American exceptionalism. Learn how teaching about the life and works of Malcolm X can illuminate the universe of possibilities of the civil rights movement-and the diversity of ideology, strategy and political thought within the Black freedom struggle.

In this episode, we talk with movement veteran Courtland Cox about lessons from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and his own development as a young organizer of the Emmett Till generation. We join Karlyn Forner and John B. Gartrell to tour the resources available through SNCC Digital Gateway. And we hear from student organizer Kaia Woodford about the lessons from the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements that inform her activism today.

Oral histories, historic sites, archives and museums expand students' understanding of the past. They fill in gaps in our textbooks-complementing what's included and capturing what's not. This episode highlights online oral history collections including the Civil Rights History Project. It offers recommendations for students conducting their own oral histories. And it explores resources from the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

Teaching civil rights history to young learners creates both opportunities and challenges. The 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project and the subsequent Freedom Schools offer important lessons for helping elementary students to understand the civil rights movement. In this episode, we explore community-based strategies and activities for bringing the Black freedom struggle into your classroom.

If you're finding this podcast useful, please support us by taking our 10 question Listener Survey. And stay tuned! More episodes are on the way. In the meantime, if you're looking for ways to talk with students about the relationship between the hard history of white supremacy and the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Learning for Justice resources can help you lead student-responsive, historically grounded discussions about the recent violence.

From the hard work of organizing to the reality of everyday life under Jim Crow, films and literature can bring historical context to life for students. In this episode, we recommend several "must use" films, books, poems and plays for teaching the civil rights movement. We also discuss strategies for incorporating these works across the curricula and for turning even problematic texts into grist for meaningful critical discussions.

Everyone thinks they know the story, but the real history of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott is even better. This episode details the events that set the stage for Ms. Parks' civil disobedience. You'll meet the leaders and organizations who transformed a moment of activism into a 13-month campaign. And you'll learn about the community that held fast in the face of legal and political attacks, economic coercion, intimidation and violence.

To fully understand the United States today, we have to comprehend the central role that slavery played in our nation's past. That legacy is also the foundation for understanding the civil rights movement and its place within the history of the Black freedom struggle. This episode is a special look back at our first season. It explores and expands on the 10 Key Concepts that ground Learning for Justice's K-12 frameworks for teaching the hard history of American slavery.

You cannot teach the civil rights movement without talking about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But it's critical that students deconstruct the mythology surrounding the movement's most iconic figure to learn about the man, not just the hero. The real Dr. King held beliefs that evolved over time. A complex man, he was part of a much larger movement-one that shaped him as much as he shaped it.

The civil rights movement was never strictly a Southern phenomenon. To better understand the Jim Crow North, we explore discrimination and Black protest in places like Milwaukee, Omaha, Cleveland and New York. To examine the Black Freedom Movement beyond the South, we examine the Black-led fights to gain access to decent housing, secure quality education and end police brutality in these cities.

Armed resistance and nonviolent direct action co-existed throughout the civil rights era. In this episode, three historians confront some comfortable assumptions about nonviolence and self-defense. Wesley Hogan examines the evolution, value and limitations of nonviolence in the movement. Christopher Strain offers a three-part strategy for rethinking this false dichotomy in the classroom. And Akinyele Umoja offers insights about armed resistance from his research in Mississippi.

Alice Qannik Glenn is the host of Coffee and Quaq and assistant producer of The Forgotten Slavery of our Ancestors. This short, classroom-ready film offers an introduction to the history of Indigenous enslavement on land that is currently the United States. This new resource from Learning for Justice features an extensive group of experts, many of whom will be familiar to listeners from Season 2.

Jim Crow was more than signs and separation. It was a system of terror and violence created to control the labor and regulate the behavior of Black people. In this episode, historian Stephen Berrey unpacks the mechanics of racial oppression, the actions white people took-in and beyond the South-to maintain white supremacy, and the everyday ways Black people fought back. And the directors of the film An Outrage join ELA-teacher Ahmariah Jackson to discuss teaching the racial terror of lynching.

Music chronicles the history of the civil rights struggle: The events, tactics and emotions of the movement are documented in songs of the era. From The Freedom Singers to Sam Cooke, historian Charles L. Hughes explains how your students can use music for both historical insight and evidence in the classroom.

Students don't enter our classrooms as blank slates. When it comes to the civil rights movement, we often have to help our students unlearn what they think they know while we're teaching them what actually happened. The people were more complex, the strategies more complicated and the stakes more dangerous than we like to remember. In this episode, historian Nishani Frazier and social studies teacher Adam Sanchez demonstrate the value of teaching the movement from the grassroots up.

Teaching the civil rights movement accurately and effectively requires deconstructing the myths and misconceptions around it. Most people are familiar with a very specific version of the movement that exaggerates government support and denies the existence and persistence of racism outside the South. Julian Bond called this the "Master Narrative." It celebrates sanitized icons and downplays grassroots organizing. And it overhypes nonviolence while disparaging self-defense and Black Power. In this episode, we talk with historian Nishani Frazier and social studies teacher Adam Sanchez about how to separate fact from fiction in your civil rights teaching.

The systems that enabled and perpetuated African and Indigenous enslavement in what is now the U.S. have much in common, and their histories tell us a great deal about the present. Professors Bethany Jay and Steven Oliver join us to talk about connections between the first two seasons and how to teach them, and we preview what's to come in season three.

In this special call-in episode, listeners share their stories and questions from throughout season 2-including teaching remotely, working with families and stakeholders, and incorporating social justice into subjects like math and science. As educators, we're strongest when we support each other. And you'll hear great suggestions from fellow teachers, like these resources we discuss from Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia.

It's time for our first call-in show! We know things are chaotic for you and every other educator right now. We feel it too, so this seems like the perfect time to talk. Pick up the phone and dial 888-59-STORY (888-597-8679). Our lines are open until Sunday night, April 19. Teaching hard history is even harder right now, so let's talk about resources you can use if you're teaching virtually. Ask us your questions; tell us your stories. And let us know how you're doing.

Indian Removal was a brutal and complicated effort that textbooks often simplify. It is also inseparably related to slavery. Enslavers seeking profit drove demand for Indigenous lands, displacing hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people. Some of these Indigenous people participated in chattel slavery. Focusing on the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations, this episode pulls the lens back to show how Removal and enslavement must be taught together. This story must be told if we're going to understand the full hard history of American enslavement.

The Americas were built on the lands, labor and lives of Indigenous peoples. Despite being erased from history textbooks after the so-called first Thanksgiving, Indigenous peoples did not disappear. Colonial settlers relied on the cooperation, exploitation and forced labor of their Native neighbors to survive and thrive in what became North America. Focusing on New England, historian Margaret Newell introduces us to the Charter Generation of systematically enslaved people across this continent.

From 1936 to 1938, the Federal Writers' Project collected stories from people who had been enslaved. The WPA Slave Narrative Collection at the Library of Congress is a valuable resource; these oral histories are also problematic. Interpreting these narratives within literary and historical context, students can develop primary source literacy. Historian Cynthia Lynn Lyerly outlines unique insights these texts can add to your curriculum.

To better understand the United States' past and present, we need to better understand Indigenous identities-and classrooms play a huge role. This starts with examining what's missing from our social studies, history, civics and government curricula. Throughout this episode, we reference the K-5 Framework for Teaching Hard History as we shed light on key topics like sovereignty, land and erasure.

Educators can no longer ignore our country's history of Indigenous enslavement. Our students need a fuller understanding of the pivotal history of slavery to comprehend the present and develop a vision for our nation's future. In this mid-season recap, we highlight key lessons about this consequential part of American history-along with teaching strategies and resources-through the voices of leading scholars and educators featured so far.

Throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, the forced labor and bondage of Indigenous peoples was integral to the economic and political history of what became the Southwestern United States. Historian and author Andrés Reséndez outlines the significance of silver mining, Indigenous enslavement and resistance in the history of New Mexico and Latin America. We examine how, as white settlers moved west, so-called "free soil" states like California continued to institutionalize coerced labor.
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A hundred years before the first ship carrying enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, Europeans introduced the commercial practice of enslavement in "The New World." And for the next 400 years, millions of Indigenous people throughout the Americas were enslaved through several forms of forced labor and bondage. Historian and author Andrés Reséndez calls this "The Other Slavery," and his work is changing our understanding of the transatlantic slave trade.
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Andrés Reséndez is the author of The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. His work has changed conventional wisdom about the institution of slavery in the Atlantic world. Over the next two episodes, host Hasan Kwame Jeffries and Reséndez will discuss key turning points in this history-exploring how it expands our understanding of the transatlantic slave trade and the lasting legacy of colonialism, which continues to reverberate in our communities. Be sure to join us.
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Each autumn, Thanksgiving brings a disturbing amount of inaccurate information and troubling myths into classrooms across the United States. Most students don't learn much about the history of Native nations-and even less about Indigenous peoples today. Dr. Debbie Reese explains what to look for and what to avoid (or teach with a critical lens) when selecting children's books by and about Indigenous people. She also recommends specific books to counter common misconceptions in your classroom.
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Children's books are often the primary way young students are exposed to the history of American slavery. But many books about slavery sugarcoat oppression. Professor Ebony Elizabeth Thomas examines what we should consider when it comes to how children's books portray African Americans and Indigenous people, their cultures and the effects of enslavement. She also explains why it's crucial to create "a balance of narratives" when selecting books about marginalized and underrepresented communities.
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For elementary teachers approaching the topic of slavery, it can be tempting to focus only on heroes and avoid explaining oppression. But teachers' omissions speak as loudly as what they choose to include. And what children learn in the early grades has broad consequences for the rest of their education. Dr. Kate Shuster guides us through the new Teaching Hard History K-5 framework from Learning for Justice. We also learn how four elementary teachers are beginning to use it in their classrooms.
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Understanding Indigenous enslavement expands our conception of slavery in what is now the United States. It spread across the entire continent and affected millions of people of different backgrounds. If we define slavery too narrowly, we can fail to see its persistence over time and even its modern-day permutations. Historian Christina Snyder examines the Civil War, Lincoln and emancipation with Indigenous people in mind.
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Millions of Indigenous people lived in North America before European colonial powers invaded. Along with an insatiable desire for free labor, Europeans brought a system of slavery that significantly differed from the historical practices of enslavement among Native nations. Historian Christina Snyder tells the story of what happened when these worlds collided. European concepts of bondage transformed the way Native nations interacted with each other, resulted in the enslavement and death of millions of Indigenous people, and sparked widespread resistance by Native nations.
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The Smithsonian's Eduardo Díaz and Renée Gokey discuss the importance of learning about Indigenous enslavement. And former Teaching Tolerance Director Maureen Costello explains all of the program's classroom resources available for teaching this history, including a first-of-its-kind K-5 framework.
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We're turning our attention to the enslavement of Indigenous people, spending more time with teachers in the classroom and adding support for K-5 educators. Tune in next week for more advice about teaching the history and long legacy of American slavery.
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Download the transcript for all of season 1 here.

Historian Bethany Jay returns - answering questions from educators across the country. Host Hasan Kwame Jeffries and the co-editor of Understanding and Teaching American Slavery confront teacher anxieties and counter misconceptions in our season finale.
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From elementary to high school, YA literature can introduce fundamental themes and information about slavery, especially when paired with primary sources. John H. Bickford shows how to capitalize on the strengths and weaknesses of trade books about slavery.
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Using the present to explore the past. Tamara Spears and Jordan Lanfair suggest a Social Studies unit about Resistance & Kanye West, and a set of English Language Arts lessons examining holidays to understand the legacy of American slavery.
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How it's done. Tamara Spears teaches middle school Social Studies in New York and Jordan Lanfair is a high school English Language Arts teacher in Chicago. Each has been developing additional lessons about slavery for years. They share their experiences.
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Over the next few episodes, we're bringing Season One to a close. Tune in for stories from the classroom, guidance for elementary teachers and language arts classes. And answers to questions from listeners like you.
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Enslavement didn't end with Emancipation. Historian James Brewer Stewart discusses modern-day slavery happening across the world-and right here in the U.S.-showing educators how to connect the past with the present.
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A listener's question leads to a meaningful moment. And now we want more! Take a listen, then email us to tell us your story about teaching hard history for an upcoming, special episode.
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At James Madison's Montpelier, the legacy of enslaved people isn't silenced-and their descendants have a voice. Christian Cotz, Price Thomas and Dr. Patrice Preston Grimes explain how that happened, and why it's important.
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In the United States, justice was never blind. Historian Paul Finkelman goes beyond legal jargon to illustrate how slavery was entangled with the opinions of the Court-and encoded into the Constitution itself.
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Constitutional historian Paul Finkelman explains the deeply racist bargains the founding fathers struck in order to unify the country under one document and discusses what students need to know about how slavery defined America after the Revolution.
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Film historian Ron Briley returns with more documentary, feature film and miniseries suggestions for history and English instructors. From Ken Burns to Black Panther, this episode offers background and strategies for incorporating pop culture into classroom lessons.
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Film has long shaped our nation's historical memory, for good and bad. Film historian Ron Briley offers ways to responsibly use films in the classroom to reframe the typical narrative of American slavery and Reconstruction.
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Most students leave school thinking enslaved people lived like characters in Gone With the Wind. Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens reveals the remarkable diversity of lived experiences within slavery and explains the gap between what scholars and students know.
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To see a more complete picture of the experience of enslaved people, you have to redefine resistance. Dr. Kenneth S. Greenberg offers teachers a lens to help students see the ways in which enslaved people fought back against the brutality of slavery.
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Students learning about slavery often ask, "Why didn't enslaved people just run away or revolt?" Lindsay Anne Randall offers a lesson in "Process Drama"-a method teachers can use to answer this question, build empathy and offer perspective.
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In many ways, the U.S. has fallen short of its ideals. How can we explain this to students-particularly in the context of discussing slavery? Professor Steven Thurston Oliver has this advice for teachers: Face your fears.
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Follow the money. Dr. Christy Clark-Pujara explains why American slavery couldn't have existed without a national commercial infrastructure that supported and benefited from the labor of enslaved people.
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Dr. Bethany Jay is back to talk about teaching the end of the Civil War, and how enslaved people's participation in the war helped subvert the institution of slavery.
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What really caused the Civil War? In this episode, Salem State University Professor Bethany Jay offers tips for teaching lesser-known history that clarifies this question and cuts through our cloudy national understanding of the Confederacy.
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What we don't know about American history hurts us all. Teaching Hard History begins with the long and brutal legacy of chattel slavery and reaches through the victories of and violent responses to the civil rights movement to the present day.

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[Theme tune]

Reni narration: Welcome to About Race with Reni Eddo-Lodge

I'm fascinated by the nineties. Now, these years covered my childhood decade, which means they have a bit of a rose tinted slant for me.I remember the word 'multiculturalism' used often, with cause for celebration. It gripped both politics and culture. Looking back I now understand that decade to be a crucial time for Britain's race conversation. There was talk of a forward thinking, modern Britain that had ample space for people like me. There was a feeling of real change in the air.

In my book, Why I'm no Longer Talking to White People About Race, I wrote a history of Britain and race from slavery onwards - but I stopped my research at the recent past.

But we can't understand now without understanding then. It's time to look back.

Simon: At the time there was this Saatchi & Saatchi campaign against Tony Blair and they called him snake eyes. And so Jon Daniel and his partner Trevor Robinson came to Operation Black Vote and said we want to work for you for nothing. In essence of the campaign was the black vote is a sleeping giant. How do we prod this potentially powerful sleeping giant to make an impact in British politics. This is what the poster reads 'imagine the impact of one million black people calling Tony this morning.'

Reni: That's Tony Blair.

Simon: That's Tony Blair. And you know this is where the genius about this campaign. He put their telephone numbers on the billboard posters.

Reni: So was this the Labour Party's telephone number.

Simon: This was his constituency number.

Reni: So this is an image of a very young looking Tony Blair and his eyes are sort of covered with a telephone number

Simon: play on the Snake Eyes Right.

Reni: Right right

Simon: And we give out his number. And in the bottom we say 'he says he claims he fought for us all his life imagine how pleased he will be to chat to us all.'

Reni Then it says 'if we all vote we could decide who wins the next general election.' And then the operation black vote is at the bottom

Simon: correct.

Reni: It's a very striking poster.

Simon: And we had that for all three leaders for John Major. In fact John Major's number they had to change their number because there was a deluge of black people telling John Major what they thought. And it was our first big big big bold statement about the black vote has arrived.

Reni narration: I'm in the east London offices of Operation Black Vote, talking to Simon Woolley about his organisation's role in the 1997 general election. He was in the midst of it all.

Simon: For over 20 years I've headed Operation Black Vote. I'm its director, one of the founders. Primarily we try to tackle persistent deep rooted institutional race inequality. Nothing changes unless we act, and we act as a caucus, as a powerful group. Politically, economically, socially, culturally and so our activities in terms of our communities is 1, voter registration, citizenship, political understanding; how the system works how we can effectively access it and the third element is nurturing talent to become leaders. MPs, councillors, school governors. 10 percent of all BME MPs are from Operation Black Vote. They include the first Muslim female cabinet member Sayeeda Warsi. She was with us in the 90s, late 90s, the first directly elected mayor of African and Caribbean descent in Europe, by the way, in Marvin Rees the Bristol mayor...

Reni: Mayor of Bristol, yeah

Simon: You know here you have a descendant of an African slave now running a former slave city.

Reni: So OBV, which is what I'm going to call it. What year in the 90s was it set up?

Simon: 96 but there was preparatory work before that. So you know in the middle 90s. And you know you have to bear in mind now this was still Thatcher's the era of Margaret Thatcher and then John Major, that the country had been convulsed into challenges of racism challenges of poverty challenges of inequality and you know we emerged from that as in particular from the rise in numbers of black people dying in police custody. And that's how we actually, that we emerged after civil disturbances in 1995 I think it was in Brixton the death of a black man in custody. And I remember an activist Derrick Hines, he quoted Malcolm X we should use the ballot not the bullet. And then afterwards I was charged with doing the research about just how powerful the black vote could be. And after a years research I came back to the group of activists and said I've got it, we've got it. They said What's that? And I said we're far from being powerless, we could be extremely powerful. We are concentrated in those urban areas which are marginal seats. And I suggested that we could influence 70 to 100. Any group that could do that could be a big player and when we burst on the stage in 96 97 during that election. The black vote became significant, the black vote became an entity.

Reni narration: It sounds like the political conditions Operation Black Vote were responding to were bleak. In particular, Simon pointed to the racist murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993, and 1999 Macpherson report on the murder that exposed failures of the police, giving an assessment of 'institutional racism'.

Simon: You know you had the deaths in police custody, so many of them, and then you had this murder that almost crystallised what was wrong about Great Britain in terms of race. What was significant about it of course is that many of us have known for a very long time, in fact we articulated it for a very long time that we lived in a society that was institutionally racist, that it was systemic within the DNA of our institutions. And Macpherson's report legitimised that.

Reni: I think back to my childhood and I remember a celebratory, multicultural, progressive Britain and I remember when Tony Blair was elected. Everyone was celebrating and you know it was also the same the I think that Arsenal won the Double double, so like you know there was just a lot of happiness in north London at the time and I suppose my question to you is, are you saying that the Britain I remember was not as progressive as I thought?

Simon: Well it was potentially progressive You're right about that. I mean you know that anthem Things Can Only Get Better. The end of Thatcherism, the end of that era had gone and what might precede it was full of hope. A lot of activists, Bernie Grant and others that lobbied Jack Straw to have this public inquiry. Jack Straw was the shadow home secretary but he promised in 1997 if black people vote for Labour then he will afford our community a public inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence.

So there was this great hope that the institutions would be challenged that things would get better and to some extent they did Tony Blair's first speech after that victory in 97 in the September of that same year he said Britain cannot be a beacon of hope whilst we have no black judges no black army officers, he made this big speech, joint party conference setting out the challenge of tackling racism we thought YES here we are we're there, we're going to get there now.

Reni narration: Labour won the election. And at the dawn of the millennium, some of those political promises were kept. Change happened.

Simon: You have to bear in mind the Stephen Lawrence inquiry produced The Race Relations Amendment Act in the year 2000. This was absolutely fundamental. The amendment act was probably the high point, margin if you like of where we'd come. We were the clear leaders in Europe in regards to tackling race inequality. Every public body in the country had a mandate to promote race inequality to have a strategy to tackle inequality which came from the report. So we thought Here we go we're on the right road here.

Reni narration: These political tremors were extending into wider culture. The longstanding anti-racist activist Farrukh Dhondy was hired as Channel 4 's Multicultural Commissioning Editor in the early 1980s, and left in 97.

Farrukh: I get the job and I think to myself the mission to complain is over. We have to integrate into British society at all creative levels. And here I've got the fantastic opportunity to so do.

Reni: W ere you thinking like an activist? Were you saying this is on television screens of every family in Britain, white, Black, Asian,this will change things for us.

Farrukh: Absolutely. It won't change things. You know, you're not suddenly going to get employment, schooling, housing this that and the other but it will demonstrate a maturity. You can laugh at yourselves. You can laugh at other people. You can actually show the interstices of what works in the family then not only Desmond's, the Bandung File, Darcus and the first thing I did I got hold of Darcus, got hold of Tariq Ali, one Asian one West Indian, do a third world program right, which would show us not only the makeup of our communities in here and news from them but Haiti Trinidad Jamaica Guyana Tanzania Pakistan Bangladesh whatever do it and the Bandung File ran for several years.

Reni narration: Desmond's, the show he's talking about -- it's a classic. Farrukh commissioned the show about an hardworking, aspirational Black British family, set in Peckham, South London, with an almost all black cast. The final episode aired in December 1994 and it ended up being the channel's longest running sitcom.

The Bandung File was a current affairs programme edited by the now public intellectual Tariq Ali and the late, great Darcus Howe. Named after a postcolonial conference held in 1955, it was hard hitting and investigative.

Farrukh: I think that it altered the cultural face of Britain I mean I would say that wouldn't I. But I think that it had never been done before. Nothing that I did was old. It was all innovation with my background my political background you know Black Panther movement, Race Today with that animus it was saying that we need to move into a positive forceful integrative movement. Instead of just saying, Oh I'm a poor bastard, you are victimising me. Saying that all the time just bores people. You've got to say look I can laugh, I can create, I can do drama, I can do news this is just as important as what you're saying on the news right. Whether Theresa May is undermined is just as important as the elections in Trinidad is what we were trying to say.
[EXTRACT OF GOODNESS GRACIOUS ME GOING FOR AN ENGLISH SKETCH]
Reni narration: This comedy sketch, Going for an English, first aired on the BBC's Goodness Gracious Me in 1998. It wasn't just hilarious, it was symbolic of the time. The Telegraph reports that in 1997, Chicken Tikka Masala was ordered by 11 million Brits -- about 22% of the population.

By 2001, the late Labour MP Robin Cook had declared the meal 'a true national dish, not only because it is the most popular, but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences.'

Meera: Going for an English, which is the sketch you're talking about is probably our flagship sketch and I think Channel 4 recently did a public poll on the, could have been the 50 best sketches, or the hundred sketches ever and Going for an English was number five, which when you consider the canon of comedy sketches and that does include Monty Python and all the greats there we are at number five, that's pretty extraordinary. And I also found it really heartening because it said to me that that actually the host population wanted that wake up call wanted to laugh, wanted to let out the pain and the confusion and the anxiety that exists about talking about race

Reni narration: Meera Syal is one part of the four British Indian comedy writers who masterminded Goodness Gracious Me. Decades later, she has an OBE, a CBE, and a long and illustrious writing, acting and comedy career. But back then, all this was up for grabs.

Meera: This was a mid to late 90s when there was a really big sweeping movement which he embraced types of comedy and a whole Cool Britannia thing and a lot of the old dinosaurs were being turfed out in comedy. And we were on the wave of that. The was a real readiness to have the establishment shook up and to not be lazy about laughs. It wasn't just about you know what minority group or woman or disabled person can we pick on for a cheap laugh, we're not doing that anymore, we've got to be smarter than that.

Reni narration: The best thing about the show, in my opinion, was it's simplicity.

Meera: So it was the first sketch of the first series, it's a bunch of Indian people in the workplace and the new white member has joined and they can't pronounce his name which is Jonathan. There are several versions of ... You English and your funny names. It was the whole tenet of the sketch, really simple role reversal sketch in fact a lot of our best sketches were simple role reversal, simply holding up a mirror to the kind of behaviour we've been at the end of and yeah it got quite a big reaction. For us it was a really simple sketch. It was stating the bleeding obvious because how many times had we been there, Oh I can't say Bulvinder I'll call you Bob. Is that alright. Fair enough.

Reni: What did you feel the cultural context of race being discussed in culture and entertainment was prior to you getting that series?

Meera: It was fairly dismal. You know I'm a kid that grew up when the Black and White Minstrel Show was still top of the BBC schedules on a Saturday night. Where the, probably the only Asians who certainly in comedy were [inaudible] where programmes like the comedians were on where a lot of the gags were about your fat in Mother-In-Law, your fat wife and ethnic minorities. This was mainstream television.

Reni: Was social impact something that you were considering when you were going into creating Goodness Gracious Me?

Meera: I suppose the big umbrella was the fact that we got onto BBC2 prime time was a big thing and we didn't want to screw it up. So we worked really really hard. But you know the good thing was that there was too much material. Because we've been such a long silent, we for so long had nobody to tell this material to that it was pouring out of us.

Reni: Absolutely

Meera: And the heartening thing for us is that it did crossover and it certainly proved to me that you know there is no such thing as a, an Asian or a black character that is inexplicable or unexplained to a white audience. We consistently underestimate the intelligence of audiences. A good joke is a good joke, a good story is a good story. Actually most audiences don't give a toss about who's telling it what they're going to relate to is the true the emotion or the truth of the humour because our humour was so truthful and it came from a really real place. People got that and if they didn't know what chuddies meant they could ask their Asian friends. In fact that's what happened and we got so many young Asians saying I used to be the butt of the joke. Now we're making the jokes now my white friends are asking me what the jokes mean. You don't know what that means to us.

Reni narration: Fiction, television, comedy -- culture can tell hard truths our society and foster empathy in people. But twenty years later, Britain is not the political post racial utopia that the Labour party promised. Culture took a nosedive too. So, what happened?

Reni: Multiculturalism was the buzzword of the time.

Simon: It was and in part promoted positively. You know this is what makes us great all this teaming talent and even that in the early part of the 2000s was challenged some by our own people and then that was on a downward spiral too.

Reni: Let's elaborate multiculturalism being challenged because I do remember that as well. And it was like the mood changed.

Simon: Yes, well I think the mood changed after 9/11. Before 9/11 there was riots in Bradford because far right groups were attacking Muslims and Muslims started to fight back. Surprise surprise. And then there was this narrative that we have an enemy within and crudely put people blame multiculturalism

Reni: Who's people?

Simon: One of them was Trevor Phillips actually, Ted Cantle, Cantle report. And I think because both were really prominent individuals and particularly when Trevor said it.

Reni: You know we got the ex president of the NUS.

Simon: That's right

Reni: Hanging around political circles for a very long time.

Simon: Mayoral candidate

Reni: high profile black face

Simon: head of the CRE, Commission for Racial Equality the predecessor for the Equality and Human Rights Commission and basically what he articulated for others to kind of poison was that multiculturalism had caused separatism caused terrorism. How you get there, God only knows, but it was an easy narrative for people to say these people are speaking their own language they're not integrating. Not that you have a society that doesn't allow people to fully integrate that it was our fault that we were living in these ghettos nothing to do with white flight by the way. Nothing to do with poor housing, no. We were led down a cul-de-sac to defend the notion of a multicultural society and that in essence multiculturalism was about delivering race equality.

Reni narration: The Cantle report of 2001 was commissioned by the Labour government after the riots in Bradford, which erupted against a backdrop of deprivation and poverty, and were exacerbated by far-right activity in the area. The report was lead by Ted Cantle, who was the head of the Government's community cohesion review team. It identified drastic segregation between white and asian communities in the city of Bradford, and said that this segregation was rooted in 'fear and ignorance'. One of the recommendations of the report suggested that immigrants should take a pledge of allegiance to the country.

While he was the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips became very concerned with ideas of britishness and integration. In 2005 after terrorist attacks on the tube, he gave speech about the mission of his organisation. In it, he said: 'the aftermath of 7/7 forces us to assess where we are. And here is where I think we are: we are sleepwalking our way to segregation. We are becoming strangers to each other, and we are leaving communities to be marooned outside the mainstream.'

And 14 years later, In a review of my book, he wrote " The disappointment is that a writer of this generation has so little to offer beyond the multiculturalist clichés some of us invented three decades ago and abandoned after 9/11 and 7/7."

The turn of the century changed things. Terrorism and atrocities committed by people of colour soured any sympathy broader society had with the anti-racist cause. We were again seen as a homogenous group, all judged by the actions of the worst members. I don't think white people ever have to take responsibility for the actions of their worst.

Simon: So the government was slightly duplicitous on one side they were saying look we haven't got the answers to tackle race inequality we need black groups like Operation Black Vote and the Runnymede Trust and BTEC and we'll support them. But on the other side they were pandering to the white working class, the BNP you know have a right to be heard too.

Reni: So people claiming to speak on behalf of the white working class.

Simon: That's right.

Reni: Absolutely because I think we got be careful there, not all, but the loudest voices claiming to speak on behalf of white working class people were bigoted.

Simon: Were shockingly bigoted and they were gaining traction. I mean of course you know this was the era of Nick Griffin. They won council seats they won seats in Europe. On his first day in the European Parliament he said the way to tackle Africans coming to Europe is to sink their boats.

Reni: Ala Katie Hopkins

Simon: Ala , there you go. That's right. And so there's a trajectory of how this bigotry became legitimised from the far right to mainstream. And of course David Cameron's government stopped aiding Africans dying in the seas. And so it did have an impact. That language just leave them to die. And they'll stop coming.

Reni narration: A decade after Goodness Gracious Me debuted on BBC one, BBC two aired it's White Season. Here's a description from their website. 'As "white trash" and "chav" become commonplace insults, the films explore the complex mix of feelings that lead some people to feel under siege and that their very sense of self is being brought into question.'

The films aired included 'White Girl', described as 'Abi Morgan's compelling film about an inspirational 11-year-old girl, Leah, and her family's relocation to an entirely Muslim community in Bradford.' Other films included 'All White in Barking', 'The Poles are coming', described as an 'entertainingly subversive look at the reality of immigration in Middle England', and entire programme dedicated to Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood Speech.

And the trailer for the season -- well, it looked like recruitment propaganda for the British National Party. I'll describe for you.
[AUDIO FROM VIDEO (BILLY BRAGG'S JERUSALEM) AS RENI DESCRIBES WHAT IS ON SCREEN]

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1. Things Can Only Get Better - About Race with Reni Eddo-Lodge

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Theme tune] Reni narration: Welcome to About Race with Reni Eddo-Lodge I'm fascinated by the nineties. Now, these years covered my childhood decade, which means they have a bit of a rose tinted slant for me.I remember the word 'multiculturalism' used often, with cause for celebration. It gripped both politics and culture.

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America Is Raging. Listen to What's Being Said.

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As cities boil over, pleas from sports figures to hear the voices in the streets.

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Early in the twentieth century, the black community in Tulsa- the "Greenwood District"- became a nationally renowned entrepreneurial center. Frequently referred to as "The Black Wall Street of America," the Greenwood District attracted pioneers from all over America who sought new opportunities and fresh challenges. Legal segregation forced blacks to do business among themselves. The Greenwood district prospered as dollars circulated within the black community. But fear and jealousy swelled in the greater Tulsa community. The alleged assault of a white woman by a black man triggered unprecedented civil unrest. The worst riot in American history, the Tulsa Race Riot pf 1921 destroyed people, property, hopes, and dreams. Hundreds of people died or were injured. Property damage ran into the millions. The Greenwood District burned to the ground. Ever courageous, the Greenwood District pioneers rebuilt and better than ever. By 1942, some 242 businesses called the Greenwood district home. Having experienced decline in the '60s, '70s, and early '80s, the area is now poised for yet another renaissance. Black Wall Street speaks to the triumph of the human spirit.

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black wall street - by  hannibal b johnson (paperback)

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Black Wall Street - by Hannibal B Johnson (Paperback)

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Early in the twentieth century, the black community in Tulsa- the "Greenwood District"- became a nationally renowned entrepreneurial center. Frequently referred to as "The Black Wall Street of America," the Greenwood District attracted pioneers from all over America who sought new opportunities and fresh challenges. Legal segregation forced blacks to do business among themselves.

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Ameer Baraka is an actor, author and tireless dyslexia advocate. He is co-founder of the Dyslexia Awareness Foundation, launched Dyslexia Diagnosis Day in 2017 and continues to advocate for better screening to help dyslexic children and, in partnership with Dr. David Hurford and Pittsburg State University, is reaching out to state corrections systems to offer dyslexia screening for inmates. He earned a 2019 Daytime Emmy nomination for his role as a detective in the Amazon Prime/UMC police drama, "Bronx SIU." Full profile →

As a young boy, I wasn't a bad person. I feared going into the classroom because I couldn't read. Had someone intervened in third or fourth grade, I would never have gone to prison.

Today, by the grace of God, I'm proud to be an Emmy-nominated actor and outspoken advocate for dyslexics like me. But as a child, in New Orleans' toughest housing project, my reality was very different.

My older brother and sister excelled in school. They would tease me because I couldn't read. My mother scolded me, calling me "dumb" and "stupid" when I was unable to read well and succeed in school like them.

Perhaps my mother thought she was helping me by practicing "tough love," but she wasn't. She was shattering what little self-esteem I had. She was driving me to seek refuge in the streets from peers who were, more often than not, up to no good.

Teachers knew I struggled with reading and spelling, and yet they were completely oblivious to the idea I might have a problem like dyslexia. They seemed to think I was a class clown. I was never pulled aside and asked any questions about why I wasn't reading.

I think a great, exceptional teacher can really understand which kids are hiding, which kids are ashamed. They can spot them and address them in a way that is pleasant.

I never received that until ninth grade. An English teacher pulled me aside and tried to teach me phonics. But it had just been too long. I was frustrated and bored with school. I was enthralled with the drug life. I had lost hope. I was a teen who became part of the streets-to-prison pipeline.

Dyslexia Sounded Dangerous, But It Meant I Wasn't Stupid

It wasn't until I was 23 and behind bars that my dyslexia was diagnosed. When you come into the prison system, you're screened to find out your reading level. Mine was third grade.

I come from the projects. There is a mentality there that White people are out to get us. Much of this is true, but not all of it. When I share my story, I try to dispel this notion that all White people are bad people.

In prison, I had a White teacher who enjoyed his job. He enjoyed teaching. He told me, "I need you to sit in the front of the class." I made up my mind I was going to attack this literacy issue.

I wanted to write letters back home. I started writing third-grade, fourth-grade letters, with very small words.

One day, my teacher said, "Ameer, I want you to read something." I just floundered through it. He said, "I'm going to have someone come in and help you." A White lady came in and screened me. I didn't know what screening was. I didn't know my sounds.

Dyslexia. It sounds terrible, dangerous. It sounded dangerous to me as a young man. Then I found out it meant a reading disability. It's not me. I'm not "crazy." I'm not "retarded." That made me feel good about myself.

I called my mother up and we talked about it. She apologized to me.

In four years in prison, I did not waste time. I studied, read. I went through an online course for 15 months, and it changed my life. I was able to break a word down, spell. It gave me confidence.

Reading liberates you. I don't care if they have you in prison. I was able to read cowboy books in prison and it freed me. I stayed in the books to escape my reality. Reading afforded me that.

There are so many men in prison who can't read. They keep going back. They come out, commit crimes and go back again. When you can't read, you have a distorted view of yourself. That's why those crimes happen.

Parents and Teachers Can Shatter the Streets-to-Prison Pipeline
But I can't break dyslexia's streets-to-prison pipeline.

Ameer Baraka counseling a boy who plays soccer
at Decoding Dyslexia Maryland.

I'm grateful that today I have a second chance at life and the opportunity to help others through the Dyslexia Awareness Foundation. Thanks to our partnership with Kansas' Pittsburg University and Dr. David Hurford, we are launching the world's largest dyslexia screening and intervention initiative to date.

Are you wondering how parents and teachers can prevent the creation of more young people like the juvenile version of me, Ameer Baraka? Are you wanting to identify, nurture and create more young people who can grow into adults like me, someone who is contributing to society and dedicating his life to helping others?

The solution for every parent and every teacher begins with one of the world's simplest words, a common element of all languages: love.

Parents and teachers can shatter the streets-to-prison pipeline by showing love to struggling readers. They can look for the telltale signs in a young person who demonstrates difficulty in sounding out words, is embarrassed to read aloud in class, hesitates to raise their hand or shows disinterest in reading. Teachers can use new tools like the Shaywitz DyslexiaScreen to identify children at risk.

Today, parents are fighting to ensure their children get the teaching they need to become great readers. Teachers are learning more about the science of reading and how to help all students learn to crack the code of written English.

Most important of all, parents can simply hug a kid and say, "It's OK, baby. We're going to work together to make you the best reader you can possibly be." Teachers can encourage their struggling students privately, saying, "Come see me after class. I'll help you."

It all starts with love and encouragement.

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Black Boys With Dyslexia Need Love and Learning, Not Shame and Prison

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Ameer Baraka is an actor, author and tireless dyslexia advocate. He is co-founder of the Dyslexia Awareness Foundation, launched Dyslexia Diagnosis Day in 2017 and continues to advocate for better screening to help dyslexic children and, in partnership with Dr. David Hurford and Pittsburg State University, is reaching out to state corrections systems to offer dyslexia screening for inmates.

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The Root's Social Studies is a daily, curated, one-stop shop for all the funny, relevant and important content that should be trending on social media.

My grandmother had a "pork pan."

In 1954, my grandfather built the house I lived in for most of my life. And for all of my life, there was a single cast iron skillet that was dedicated to frying bacon, bologna with the red plastic ring, or any part of a pig. Everyone in my family knew this rule-even my aunts and cousins who came to visit. While this revelation may seem funny to you, there is a good reason why it was always so weird to me:

No one in my family eats pork.

For religious reasons, my grandparents didn't eat pork, nor did any of my aunts, uncles or cousins. They were so strict about it, they wouldn't even eat out of pots that pork had been in unless they inspected it first. And, because I was raised by them, I didn't eat pork either. Because of this, all of my aunts, uncles and cousins have a "pork pan" at their house, which is weird for people who don't eat pork. I guess it's just a thing we passed down.

I also can't eat milk or cheese. I'm not lactose-intolerant; my stomach can't even digest it. For lack of a better way to describe it, if I swallow even a smidgen of cheese, it comes right back up.

Here's the thing: For most of my life, I was ashamed to tell people about it because, like most kids, I just wanted to blend in and go unnoticed. Whenever my vacation Bible school camps served those shitty ham and cheese sandwiches or my friends went out for pizza, I'd just wait to eat until I got home. Only my closest friends knew, and only because they realized I wasn't thrilled when it was pizza day at school and they could always get my carton of milk.

So instead of hanging out at pizza places, my closest friends would go get wings. Still, to this day, I'll go to a cookout with someone who knows me well and they'll tell the cook: "Do you have something that Mike can eat? He doesn't eat pork." Once, during a crowded late-night excursion to Waffle House, one of my more intimidating pharmaceutical entrepreneurial friends gave a short-order $40 cook to clean the bacon grease off of the grill before he made my hash browns.

That's all.

Where did all these anti-racist white people come from?

Since the beginning of the George Floyd protests, white people have come out of the woodwork with statements declaring their disdain for inequality and their willingness to stand against racism.

G/O Media may get a commission

But this meaningless, performative show of solidarity is not just limited to companies and brands. All of a sudden, white people are ready to take a stand against racism after saying nothing about it for years.

I'm torn about this.

Part of the reason that racism persists is that white people don't do anything about it. They don't challenge their friends, challenge their family members, or reprimand their coworkers when they see racism. They might hate inequality but do nothing to fight it.

Racism is a fire and the only difference between an arsonist and a pyromaniac is the act of igniting the flame. If you stand idly by and watch flames consume a house, you're still part of the problem. It is not enough to not be racist if you don't do anything about it.

On the other hand, white people are fragile.

When white people engage in performative protest, should they be reprimanded? For instance, if a certain writer at The Root drags Taylor Swift for not speaking up about her white supremacist supporters because she didn't " have the internet on her phone," will calling out her newfound wokeness make her more reluctant to call out racism?

If we want white people on our side, do we get to be the arbiters of their intent? Is using their platform to speak out against racism enough, or should we chastise them for not doing more?

If someone who knew about my aversion to pork invites me to dinner, I wouldn't be upset if they didn't inform the cook about my eating habits. It happens all the time. I don't think anyone has a responsibility to think about my dietary restrictions, even if they are aware of them. I grew up in a place where everyone eats chitlins and barbecue, so I'm used to it.

I'm also used to racism.

I don't think most white people are racists. I think most white people don't think about race because they don't have to. For them, privilege is a delicious dish they get to enjoy whenever they want it and even though they know some people can't stomach racism, they don't think about it when it is served up on a platter to their coworkers and associates.

Being white in America is like being at a 24-hour, 400-year company dinner party where everything that comes out of the kitchen is delicious, at best, and- at the very least-personally edible.

Like privilege.

Like whiteness.

It's not that white people don't care about their friends. It's that they don't think about racism. White people are immune to white supremacy so they don't even consider that some of us are racism-intolerant.

To be black in America is a neverending task of considering all the ways we might be forced to consume racism when it's served to us. When you're hungry, you nibble around the edges like a vacation bible school sandwich. Sometimes you just swallow it and smile, knowing it's gonna make you sick. The most intolerant among us just try not to vomit.

My family loves to cook for people.

I suspect part of the reason why they love it is that they don't have to think about what they have to avoid eating. We look for any reason to host large dinners and invite over the entire neighborhood.

A few years ago, when my kids were kids, they spent half the summer with their cousins in Virginia and their cousins spent half the summer with them. When I picked up the kids and the cousins and their grandmother for the 9-hour trip, I called my aunt, who hadn't seen them in years, and told her we'd stop by. Because she lived basically at the halfway point of the trip, I figured we could eat, rest, and she'd get to see them. She told me she would prepare some food.

By the time I got to her house, she had essentially prepared an entire buffet of every southern delicacy you can imagine. She had called every relative, church member and family friend and there were no less than two dozen people eating.

She was still cooking when I arrived, preparing to fry some pork chops, so of course, I helped out in the kitchen. As she prepared to fry some pork chops, she told me to get the pork pan:

"Marvell, none of us even eat pork," I said. "Why does everyone in the family keep a pork pan?"

"Mr. Elmore bought that pork pan for Daddy," she replied, speaking of my grandfather who died before I was born. "That's what we made the sandwiches in...for the protests."

I knew part of this story because everyone loved Mr. Elmore.

During the sit-ins and protests during the 1950s and '60s, one of the ways my town tried to kill the protests was to literally ban people from the entire business district in our small town during protests. So when local churches organized sit-ins or a protest, once a demonstration started, they couldn't leave the downtown area for food or water. They couldn't even walk down a nearby street.

But my grandfather owned the only little black cab company in town and was permitted to go anywhere. And, because he was permitted to travel anywhere in town, whenever there was a protest, he would just fill his trunk with sandwiches, go downtown, leave his trunk ajar during the stop, and one of the protesters would sneak into his trunk and get jugs of water and grocery bags filled with sandwiches.

The interesting thing about this was that all the food was supplied by a local grocer, Mr. Elmore. I'm not quite sure if Mr. Elmore owned the Piggly Wiggly or just managed it, but he always hired black workers and would always give food to anyone who needed it. To this day, I still can recite the number to the Piggly Wiggly.

My aunts, uncles and the entire household would be in charge of assembling these sandwiches made from whatever meat Mr. Elmore donated. Sometimes it was bologna. Sometimes it was beef. And the best day to protest was when Mr. Elmore gave away pork chops. And because he knew of my family's diet (we shopped at his store all my life), Mr. Elmore even gave my grandfather a cast iron pan to fry the swine.

It is also not clear if Mr. Elmore kept this quiet so he wouldn't upset his white customers or because he didn't need people to know he was helping desegregation efforts, but two things were well known among my town's black community.

1. Mr. Elmore was an ally.

2. My grandmama could fry the hell out of some pork chops.

My aunt didn't tell me this story in the kitchen that day. I had always known most of it (even that he was the originator of the pork pan). The reason I knew this story was because of one reason:

I used to hate Mr. Elmore.

On the first of the month, when my grandmother got her pension and her Social Security check, my grandmother would fry two pork chop and send me to the Piggly Wiggly with a greasy Piggly Wiggly bag. (My family still calls any grocery bag a "Piggly Wiggly bag.") I would cash her check, buy her a pair of stockings for church and hand Mr. Elmore two pork chop sandwiches.

I never knew why it was our responsibility to feed this white man. He wasn't doing us any favors. He still charged us full price! I couldn't understand why every black person in town shopped at the Piggly Wiggly when there were stores closer to our neighborhood. Plus, he knew we didn't eat pork so why was he getting negroes to bring him food like he was a slavemaster?

When Mr. Elmore died, there were probably more black people at his funeral than white people. My entire family attended, even my aunts and uncles from out of town. It was weird because it was a very white funeral and only white people spoke but it was held in the biggest black church in town.

After the funeral, all the white people left but, of course, the black people convened in the church cafeteria and the black attendees actually gave speeches at the repast as if they were revealing a secret that everyone knew but found it unnecessary to say out loud. Almost everyone referred to him as a "friend of the black community."

My grandmother ambled out of the church kitchen at some point and told the story of Mr. Elmore's pork chop protests. The old people nodded in agreement as she recounted his quiet activism. They smiled when she recounted how she would lie to everyone when they called and asked what Mr. Elmore had brought for the protests. They laughed when she recounted how she always lied and told people she was frying pork chops because more people would come out. She even used a word that wasn't en vogue back then (the early '90s) but is ubiquitous on social media these days.

She called him an "ally."

By the time it was over, I was starving because I didn't even get any of the usual repast food. None of my family members had a chance to eat that day because we were helping my elderly grandmother in the kitchen for the wokest white man no one ever knew.

She served pork chops.

She used the pork pan.

That's all.

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Where'd All These Woke White People Come From?

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The Root's Social Studies is a daily, curated, one-stop shop for all the funny, relevant and important content that should be trending on social media. My grandmother had a "pork pan." In 1954, my grandfather built the house I lived in for most of my life.

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The correlation between dehumanization and use of force becomes more significant when you consider that black boys are routinely estimated to be older than they are. The two graphs show the age estimates for the college students, left, and police participants in the study.

The general population respondents overestimated the boys' ages in felony situations by 4.53 years, meaning that "boys would be misperceived as legal adults at roughly the age of 13 and a half." The police had a slightly wider spread: 4.59 years. The college students were also less likely to judge black boys innocent in the presented scenarios once they were 10 years of age of older. At every age level after 10, black boys were considered less innocent than either white or unspecified children.

Priming the officers with different associations produced different results in their age guesses. The researchers used the apes / great cats priming before running one set of experiments. When police officers were primed with either cats or apes, the graph at right resulted. When the officers were primed with names of apes, the officers were even more likely to overestimate the age of the black boys involved in the situation. But when the situation involved a white boy, the ape priming lowered the age estimate in the case of felonies.

The less the black kids were seen as human, the less they were granted "the assumption that children are essentially innocent." And those officers who were more likely to dehumanize black suspects overlapped with those who used more force against them.

In 2012, data from the Department of Education revealed that black students were far more likely than white students to face harsh discipline following infractions at school than student of other races. That sort of uneven system of discipline prompted the Obama administration to call for zero-tolerance policies to be dropped. If this study is any guide - and it's only one study, of course - the tendency to give white kids the presumption of innocence and youth that isn't afforded to black students might be one of the reasons for that discrepancy.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Philip Bump is a former politics writer for The Atlantic Wire.

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Cops Tend to See Black Kids as Less Innocent Than White Kids

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The correlation between dehumanization and use of force becomes more significant when you consider that black boys are routinely estimated to be older than they are. The two graphs show the age estimates for the college students, left, and police participants in the study.

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WASHINGTON - Black boys as young as 10 may not be viewed in the same light of childhood innocence as their white peers, but are instead more likely to be mistaken as older, be perceived as guilty and face police violence if accused of a crime, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

"Children in most societies are considered to be in a distinct group with characteristics such as innocence and the need for protection. Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent," said author Phillip Atiba Goff, PhD, of the University of California, Los Angeles. The study was published online in APA's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology®.

Researchers tested 176 police officers, mostly white males, average age 37, in large urban areas, to determine their levels of two distinct types of bias - prejudice and unconscious dehumanization of black people by comparing them to apes. To test for prejudice, researchers had officers complete a widely used psychological questionnaire with statements such as "It is likely that blacks will bring violence to neighborhoods when they move in." To determine officers' dehumanization of blacks, the researchers gave them a psychological task in which they paired blacks and whites with large cats, such as lions, or with apes. Researchers reviewed police officers' personnel records to determine use of force while on duty and found that those who dehumanized blacks were more likely to have used force against a black child in custody than officers who did not dehumanize blacks. The study described use of force as takedown or wrist lock; kicking or punching; striking with a blunt object; using a police dog, restraints or hobbling; or using tear gas, electric shock or killing. Only dehumanization and not police officers' prejudice against blacks - conscious or not - was linked to violent encounters with black children in custody, according to the study.

The authors noted that police officers' unconscious dehumanization of blacks could have been the result of negative interactions with black children, rather than the cause of using force with black children. "We found evidence that overestimating age and culpability based on racial differences was linked to dehumanizing stereotypes, but future research should try to clarify the relationship between dehumanization and racial disparities in police use of force," Goff said.

The study also involved 264 mostly white, female undergraduate students from large public U.S. universities. In one experiment, students rated the innocence of people ranging from infants to 25-year-olds who were black, white or an unidentified race. The students judged children up to 9 years old as equally innocent regardless of race, but considered black children significantly less innocent than other children in every age group beginning at age 10, the researchers found.

The students were also shown photographs alongside descriptions of various crimes and asked to assess the age and innocence of white, black or Latino boys ages 10 to 17. The students overestimated the age of blacks by an average of 4.5 years and found them more culpable than whites or Latinos, particularly when the boys were matched with serious crimes, the study found. Researchers used questionnaires to assess the participants' prejudice and dehumanization of blacks. They found that participants who implicitly associated blacks with apes thought the black children were older and less innocent.

In another experiment, students first viewed either a photo of an ape or a large cat and then rated black and white youngsters in terms of perceived innocence and need for protection as children. Those who looked at the ape photo gave black children lower ratings and estimated that black children were significantly older than their actual ages, particularly if the child had been accused of a felony rather than a misdemeanor.

"The evidence shows that perceptions of the essential nature of children can be affected by race, and for black children, this can mean they lose the protection afforded by assumed childhood innocence well before they become adults," said co-author Matthew Jackson, PhD, also of UCLA. "With the average age overestimation for black boys exceeding four-and-a-half years, in some cases, black children may be viewed as adults when they are just 13 years old."

Article: "The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published online Feb. 24, 2014; Phillip Atiba Goff, PhD, and Matthew Christian Jackson, PhD; University of California, Los Angeles; Brooke Allison, PhD, and Lewis Di Leone, PhD, National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Boston; Carmen Marie Culotta, PhD, Pennsylvania State University; and Natalie Ann DiTomasso, JD, University of Pennsylvania.

Phillip Atiba Goff, PhD, can be contacted by phone at (310) 206-8614 (preferred) or by email. If Goff is unavailable, contact Matthew Christian Jackson, PhD, by phone at (814) 574-9781 or by email.

The American Psychological Association, in Washington, D.C., is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States. APA's membership includes more than 134,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 54 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance the creation, communication and application of psychological knowledge to benefit society and improve people's lives.

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Black boys viewed as older, less innocent than Whites, research finds

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Black boys as young as 10 may not be viewed in the same light of childhood innocence as their white peers, but are instead more likely to be mistaken as older, be perceived as guilty and face police violence if accused of a crime.

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A working document for scaffolding anti-racism resources

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A working document for scaffolding anti-racism resources

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Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

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Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

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You value and rely on the work of the APM Research Lab. And we rely on you, especially
during this difficult time. If you can, please support our work with a donation today.

Our ongoing Color of Coronavirus project monitors how and where COVID-19 mortality is inequitably impacting certain communities-to guide policy and community responses to these disproportionate deaths. The coronavirus has claimed more than 240,000 American lives through Nov. 10, 2020-nearly 25,000 more than our last update four weeks ago. We have documented the race and ethnicity for 96% of the cumulative deaths in the United States.

Our latest update reveals that Black and Indigenous Americans continue to suffer the greatest loss of life-with both groups now experiencing a COVID-19 death toll exceeding 1 in 1,000 nationally.

We also adjust these mortality rates for differences in the age distribution of populations, a common and important tool that health researchers use to compare diseases that affect age groups differently. At the national level, this results in even larger documented mortality disparities- Black, Indigenous and Latino Americans all have a COVID-19 death rate of triple or more White Americans, who experience the lowest age-adjusted rates.

The APM Research Lab has independently compiled these death statistics. ( Learn more about how.) The result is the most robust and up-to-date portrait of COVID-19 mortality by race available anywhere, with a lens on inequitable deaths. We are now presenting mortality data over time for all states -not just cumulatively-to help us monitor the virus' changing impacts throughout fall and winter. We have been tracking these deaths for seven months now, revealing COVID-19's growing toll on all Americans, but with the heaviest losses among Black, Indigenous and Latino Americans.

KEY FINDINGS (from data through Nov. 10):

Of the more than 240,000 U.S. deaths catalogued in this Color of Coronavirus update, this is the number of deaths documented by group through Nov. 10, 2020: Asian (8,687), Black (46,211), Indigenous (2,251), Latino (46,912), Pacific Islander (334) and White (123,429). Additionally, 5,373 deaths are recorded only as "other" race (and likely include more Indigenous people and Pacific Islanders), while another 8,510 had an unknown race.

In the past four weeks, the death rate among Indigenous people has accelerated the fastest (shown by a steeper slope in the graph above).

These are the documented, nationwide actual mortality impacts from COVID-19 data (aggregated from all U.S. states and the District of Columbia) for all race groups:

1 in 875 Black Americans has died (or 114.3 deaths per 100,000)

1 in 925 Indigenous Americans has died (or 108.3 deaths per 100,000)

1 in 1,275 Latino Americans has died (or 78.5 deaths per 100,000)

1 in 1,325 Pacific Islander Americans has died (or 75.5 deaths per 100,000)

1 in 1,625 White Americans has died (or 61.7 deaths per 100,000)

1 in 2,100 Asian Americans has died (or 47.6 deaths per 100,000)

Black Americans continue to experience the highest actual COVID-19 mortality rates nationwide-about two or more times as high as the rate for Whites and Asians, who have the lowest actual rates. Indigenous Americans' death rate is just slightly lower than Blacks.

If they had died of COVID-19 at the same actual
rate as White Americans, about 21,200 Black,
10,000 Latino, 1,000 Indigenous and 70 Pacific Islander Americans would still be alive.

Adjusting the data for age differences in race groups widens the gap in the overall mortality rates between all other groups and Whites, who have the lowest rate. It also reveals that Indigenous people have suffered the greatest losses, accounting for age differences, followed closely by Blacks and Latinos. Compared to Whites, the latest U.S. age-adjusted COVID-19 mortality rate for:

Indigenous people is 3.2 times as high

Blacks is 3.0 times as high

Latinos is 3.0 times as high

Pacific Islanders is 2.3 times as high, and

Asians is 1.1 times as high.

(A fuller discussion of our indirectly age-adjusted rates follows.)

HOW TO EXAMINE THE DATA:

1. EXPLORE CUMULATIVE MORTALITY RATES BY GEOGRAPHY, COMPARING GROUPS

We've presented the data we've collected for the nation overall and each state as:

2. EXPLORE NUMBER OF DEATHS OR RATES OVER TIME, COMPARING GROUPS

Explore actual mortality rates and total deaths by race and ethnicity for any state or Washington, D.C., beginning in early June 2020.

3. EXPLORE CUMULATIVE FINDINGS BY GROUP, COMPARING GEOGRAPHIES

Examine the differences for one group at a time across all states with available data. For each group, we provide contextual data and a visual comparison against White Americans' rates using the age-adjusted data, to examine where disparities relative to Whites are the greatest.
For more context about the shortcomings of some of the data, please read our note about Indigenous, Pacific Islander, Multiracial and Other Race Americans. If you'd like to examine the percentage of deaths compared to the percentage of population by racial group for each state (which previously appeared on this site), you can find this data in our complete data file.

&plus; Understanding Age-Adjusted Mortality Rates

Click to read more

While there are many features of the novel coronavirus that are still unclear, this we know with certainty: The risk of dying from COVID-19 rises sharply with advanced age. Fewer than 4 in 100,000 Americans under age 45 have died from the virus, according to data submitted to the CDC through Oct. 31. The COVID-19 death rate for Americans age 45-54 rises to 28 per 100,000; more than doubles for those age 55-64 (65 per 100,000); and more than doubles again among those age 65-74 (154 per 100,000). Among Americans age 75 and older, the death toll is exceedingly high: 571 people per 100,000, as shown below.

Due to this steep age gradient to COVID-19 mortality, it is important to consider the varying age distributions of America's racial and ethnic groups. A higher share of White Americans are in the older age brackets than any other group. To illustrate this, consider that the median age of non-Hispanic White Americans is 44 years, according to the latest Census Bureau data. The comparable figure for all populations of color is considerably lower-for Asians (37), Blacks (34), Pacific Islanders (33), Indigenous (32) and especially Latinos (30), half of whom have not yet reached their 30th birthday.

Even within the same race groups, the age distribution varies-with retirement destination states such as Florida having a much higher share of older adults within their White population, for example.

Black, Indigenous and Latino Americans all have a COVID-19 death rate of triple or more the rate of White Americans (age-adjusted).

So, to remove the role of age differences from COVID-19 mortality rates, we have also produced age-adjusted rates. Because mortality data is not available for all states by race and age jointly (which is preferred), we have used indirect standardization to calculate these rates. See our NOTES section for details and cautions about our method.

Adjusting the racial data we've collected for age differences increases the COVID-19 mortality rate for all racial and ethnic groups except for Whites, who experience a decrease, as shown below. Latinos' rate rises the most following age-adjustment, revealing that the virus is impacting Latinos far more than would be expected based on their youhtful age profile.

After age-adjusting, the gap between Black and White mortality widens-from 1.9 to 3.0 times as high. Relative to Whites, mortality rates for Indigenous people also rise to 3.2 times as high (the highest rate) and Latinos to 3.0 times as high. Rates for Pacific Islanders also grow, to 2.3 times as high as Whites. Finally, the Asian mortality rate-which was slightly below the White rate-rises slightly above the White death rate (1.1 times as high), when age is taken into account. Put another way, Indigenous, Black and Latino Americans all have COVID-19 death rates of triple or more the rate of White Americans (age-adjusted).

What does this mean? It indicates that many younger Americans who are Black, Latino, Indigenous or Pacific Islanders are dying of COVID-19-driving their mortality rates far above White Americans'. Despite their relative youthfulness (a protective factor against COVID), their death rates are elevated. As Brookings Institution has reported, "In every age category, Black people are dying from COVID at roughly the same rate as White people more than a decade older."

It is important to note that, while age-adjusted mortality rates help us remove the influence of age differences in racial groups to examine disparities in outcomes, they are not the actual mortality rates experienced by these groups.

CUMULATIVE MORTALITY RATES

Review cumulative mortality rates-both actual and age-adjusted-for the District of Columbia or any state by changing the dropdown menu below. Rates were not calculated when there were fewer than 15 deaths for a particular group (resulting in a "0" value in the graph below). Rates for Indigenous and Pacific Islander residents could only be calculated for some states. Additionally, rates were not calculated for multiracial people, nor those identified as "Other" race.

ACTUAL MORTALITY RATES OVER TIME

REPORTED DEATHS BY RACE & ETHNICITY OVER TIME

Explore how the distribution of American lives lost varies by race and ethnicity for all states, beginning with totals in early June. Select a state to see the cumulative trend graphed similarly.

Users can examine the cumulative death totals, grouped by racial and ethnic group, for their state(s) of interest below. Depending on the geography, the "Other" group in this graph may include Indigenous people, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islanders, Multiracial people, those identified as "Other" race, and in a few cases, Asians. (This is due to uneven reporting by states.) Please see the notes below the graph, or request our complete data file for additional information.

Search by state

(Use Shift + Ctrl to select more than one state)

COVID-19 deaths by race and ethnicity, through Nov. 10, 2020

FOCUS ON BLACK AMERICANS

Lives lost to date

Actual mortality rate

Age-adjusted mortality rate

NOTE ABOUT INDIGENOUS, PACIFIC ISLANDER, MULTIRACIAL & OTHER RACE AMERICANS

COVID-19 mortality data for Americans who are Indigenous, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islanders, Some Other race, or Multiracial is inconsistently reported by many states. Users may request our complete data file to better understand the loss of life in these groups as well. Users are cautioned that Indigenous and Pacific Islander people appear in the "Other" group in many states, along with Multiracial Americans and in a few cases, Asian Americans. We continue to advocate for complete, consistent reporting for all racial and ethnic groups.

HOW DID THE APM RESEARCH LAB OBTAIN THE DATA?

The APM Research Lab has independently compiled and analyzed these mortality data for Washington, D.C. and all states. At the time of this writing, only North Dakota and West Virginia did not yet publicly release COVID-19 mortality data by race and ethnicity on their state health department websites. For these two states, we have supplemented our data file using data reported to the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the CDC. Note that these data have some time lag and often suppress data (i.e., hide for privacy's sake), especially for groups other than Whites. Nonetheless, their inclusion improves the picture of COVID-19 mortality for the entire United States.

In the case where a state is publicly releasing its mortality data, but the CDC data was found to be more robust, we have also opted to use the CDC data. This is the case for the following states: Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Texas, as well as the balance of New York outside of New York City (which is reported separately). The result is the most comprehensive and up-to-date portrait of COVID-19 mortality by race and ethnicity for the U.S.

Racial detail on Americans who have died of COVID-19 was available for 96% of all deaths to date-a vast improvement from the 38% that were known when our Color of Coronavirus project began tracking these data in early April.

As of Tuesday, Nov. 10, more than 240,000 Americans had died of COVID-19. Data about race and ethnicity is available for 96% of these deaths.

However, it should be noted that even among states releasing COVID-19 data by the race of the deceased, the data is often incomplete or nonuniform. Numerous states release only percentages, not counts of deaths, requiring us to estimate the data rather than know precisely how communities have been affected. Many states also fail to report smaller populations uniquely, obscuring the picture for Indigenous Americans, Pacific Islanders and other groups. All of these reporting shortcomings render our picture of the virus' toll incomplete and make it more difficult to assess the disproportionate impacts on communities.
We call on state and local health departments to release timely data about COVID-19 deaths with as complete racial and ethnic detail as is possible. As the data reporting improves, so too will our understanding of the devastating impact of this disease. This will inform states and communities about how to direct resources more equitably as well.

SOURCES

State and local health department or other governmental reporting bodies, and the National Center for Health Statistics. In a few cases, we have upwardly revised total counts of deaths (not by race) to conform with the New York Times' latest database. Estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2018 American Community Survey were used for calculations regarding population by race/ethnicity and age. Importantly, we have aligned population data with each geography's method of collecting and reporting data (i.e., if Latino ethnicity is overlapping with race groups or discrete, and whether race groups are reported "alone" or "alone or in combination"). All calculations and subsequent analysis by APM Research Lab.

NOTES

Deaths of unknown race are excluded prior to calculating percentages and rates. Presumed or probable deaths due to COVID-19 are included here in our death counts. Many of the data sources have labeled their data preliminary. In some cases, percentages will differ from those given by health departments due to our method of excluding deaths with an unknown race from the denominator before calculating percentages. Additionally states employ varying collection methods regarding ethnicity data, which results in percentages summing to more than 100%. Where states have reported only percentages, we have estimated deaths by racial subgroups; these deaths may differ by small amounts from actual due to rounding errors. States can improve this reporting by releasing complete data.
Data for Indigenous, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders, and other races are tallied separately in some states, but exist in "other" in other states, due to inconsistent reporting among states.

Mortality rates are presented in two ways on this page: 1) As "crude" rates, meaning no adjustment has been made to standardize varying age distributions in the populations. These are labeled "actual mortality rates," as they reflect the actual death rates experienced in the population groups. 2) As indirectly age-adjusted mortality rates. Because the White population is older on balance in nearly all locations, age-adjusting generally widens disparities between Whites and other populations.
To create our age-adjusted death rates by race and ethnicity, we first calculated an "expected" death rate for each race group by state and the nation overall. We did so by multiplying the latest national age-specific death rates from COVID-19 by age-specific population shares for each race group within each of the geographies (sourced from the 2018 American Community Survey). We then divided the crude death rates for each race and geography by the expected race-based death rate we calculated (resulting in Standard Mortality Ratios), and finally multiplied by the nationwide overall crude death rate. The result is an Indirect Adjusted Death Rate (IADR) of COVID-19 by race.

We indirectly adjusted these data for age because direct age-adjustment was not possible; timely and complete COVID-19 mortality data by race and age group is not being released for all or even most states. However, users are cautioned that indirect standardization is done to approximate the impact resulting from varying age distributions in cases because age-specific death rates are not available. Indirect standardization may deviate more from directly age-adjusted rates when comparing two populations that differ significantly in their age distribution, as race groups may. For this reason, data from individual states that are directly age-adjusted should be considered superior. For more on direct and indirect methods of standardization see this CDC publication.

Thoughts? Questions?

We want to hear from you! Leave us a message below.

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COVID-19 deaths analyzed by race and ethnicity - APM Research Lab

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COVID-19 has claimed more than 240,000 lives in the U.S. This page documents and analyzes all racial and ethnic background data for COVID-19 deaths by state and the nation-especially to track the disproportionate mortality impacts of the coronavirus for Black, Latino, Indigenous and other Americans

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A podcast on criminal justice reform featuring some of the nation's most prominent thought leaders. Hosted by progressive prosecutors San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and Rachel Marshall.

A podcast on criminal justice reform featuring some of the nation's most prominent thought leaders. Hosted by progressive prosecutors San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and Rachel Marshall.

Teaser for Chasing Justice

Teaser for Chasing Justice

This sneak preview of Chasing Justice introduces the new, exciting podcast on criminal justice reform with some of the nation's most prominent thought leaders. Hosted by progressive prosecutors San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and Rachel Marshall.

CMatthiessen

The trailer sounds wonderful- can't wait for the first episode!

Can't wait!

Super excited for this!

Can't wait!

Can't wait for this to come out. Seems like a very important podcast, especially now! Go Chesa!

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A podcast on criminal justice reform featuring some of the nation's most prominent thought leaders. Hosted by progressive prosecutors San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and Rachel Marshall. A podcast on criminal justice reform featuring some of the nation's most prominent thought leaders. Hosted by progressive prosecutors San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and Rachel Marshall.

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Ibram X. Kendi on books to help America transcend its racist heritage.

Credit... Joan Wong

No one becomes "not racist," despite a tendency by Americans to identify themselves that way. We can only strive to be "antiracist" on a daily basis, to continually rededicate ourselves to the lifelong task of overcoming our country's racist heritage.

We learn early the racist notion that white people have more because they are more; that people of color have less because they are less. I had internalized this worldview by my high school graduation, seeing myself and my race as less than other people and blaming other blacks for racial inequities.

To build a nation of equal opportunity for everyone, we need to dismantle this spurious legacy of our common upbringing. One of the best ways to do this is by reading books. Not books that reinforce old ideas about who we think we are, what we think America is, what we think racism is. Instead, we need to read books that are difficult or unorthodox, that don't go down easily. Books that force us to confront our self-serving beliefs and make us aware that "I'm not racist" is a slogan of denial.

The reading list below is composed of just such books - a combination of classics, relatively obscure works and a few of recent vintage. Think of it as a stepladder to antiracism, each step addressing a different stage of the journey toward destroying racism's insidious hold on all of us.

Biology

No book destabilized my fraught notions of racial distinction and hierarchy - the belief that each race had different genes, diseases and natural abilities - more than this vigorous critique of the "biopolitics of race." Roberts, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, shows unequivocally that all people are indeed created equal, despite political and economic special interests that keep trying to persuade us otherwise.

New Press, 2011

Ethnicity

Some of the same forces have led Americans to believe that the recent success of black immigrants from the Caribbean proves either that racism does not exist or that the gap between African-Americans and other groups in income and wealth is their own fault. But Model's meticulous study, emphasizing the self-selecting nature of the West Indians who emigrate to the United States, argues otherwise, showing me, a native of racially diverse New York City, how such notions - the foundation of ethnic racism - are unsupported by the facts.

Russell Sage Foundation, 2008

Body

"Black" and "criminal" are as wedded in America as "star" and "spangled." Muhammad's book traces these ideas to the late 19th century, when racist policies led to the disproportionate arrest and incarceration of blacks, igniting urban whites' fears and bequeathing tenaciously racist stereotypes.

Harvard University, 2010

Culture

Of course, the black body exists within a wider black culture - one Hurston portrayed with grace and insight in this seminal novel. She defies racist Americans who would standardize the cultures of white people or sanitize, eroticize, erase or assimilate those of blacks.

1937

Behavior

"We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame," Hughes wrote nearly 100 years ago. "We know we are beautiful. And ugly too." We are all imperfectly human, and these imperfections are also markers of human equality.
The Nation, June 23, 1926

Color

Beautiful and hard-working black people come in all shades. If dark people have less it is not because they are less, a moral eloquently conveyed in these two classic novels, stirring explorations of colorism.

1970 | 1929

Whiteness

Malcolm X began by adoring whiteness, grew to hate white people and, ultimately, despised the false concept of white superiority - a killer of people of color. And not only them: low- and middle-income white people too, as Metzl's timely book shows, with its look at Trump-era policies that have unraveled the Affordable Care Act and contributed to rising gun suicide rates and lowered life expectancies.

1965 | Basic Books, 2019

Blackness

Just as Metzl explains how seemingly pro-white policies are killing whites, Forman explains how blacks themselves abetted the mass incarceration of other blacks, beginning in the 1970s. Amid rising crime rates, black mayors, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs embraced tough-on-crime policies that they promoted as pro-black with tragic consequences for black America.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017 ( Read the review.)

Class

Black America has been economically devastated by what Robinson calls racial capitalism. He chastises white Marxists (and black capitalists) for failing to acknowledge capitalism's racial character, and for embracing as sufficient an interpretation of history founded on a European vision of class struggle.

Zed Press, 1983

Spaces

As racial capitalism deprives black communities of resources, assimilationists ignore or gentrify these same spaces in the name of "development" and "integration." To be antiracist is not only to promote equity among racial groups, but also among their spaces, something the black power movement of the 1960s and 1970s understood well, as Joseph's chronicle makes clear.

Holt, 2006

Gender

I began my career studying, and too often admiring, activists who demanded black (male) power over black communities, including over black women, whom they placed on pedestals and under their feet. Black feminist literature, including these anthologies, helps us recognize black women "as human, levelly human," as the Combahee River Collective demanded to be seen in 1977.

Haymarket, 2017 | Ballantine, 2018 ( Read our profile of Glory Edim.)

Sexuality

I grew up in a Christian household thinking there was something abnormal and immoral about queer blacks. My racialized transphobia made Mock's memoir an agonizing read - just as my racialized homophobia made Lorde's essays and speeches a challenge. But pain often precedes healing.

Atria, 2014 | Crossing Press, 1984

By not running from the books that pain us, we can allow them to transform us. I ran from antiracist books most of my life. But now I can't stop running after them - scrutinizing myself and my society, and in the process changing both.
Ibram X. Kendi, a professor and director of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center at American University, is the National Book Award-winning author of "Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America" and the forthcoming "How to Be an Antiracist." Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.

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Ibram X. Kendi on books to help America transcend its racist heritage. No one becomes "not racist," despite a tendency by Americans to identify themselves that way. We can only strive to be "antiracist" on a daily basis, to continually rededicate ourselves to the lifelong task of overcoming our country's racist heritage.

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The Stoop podcast airs frank, fun conversations about black identity with journalists Hana Baba and Leila Day. The project was selected for NPR's first-ever Storytelling Workshop.

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The Stoop podcast airs frank, fun conversations about black identity with journalists Hana Baba and Leila Day. The project was selected for NPR's first-ever Storytelling Workshop.

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Black History in Two Minutes (or so) is the new way to immerse yourself in Black History. The digital video series features dozens of short, engaging and factually accurate videos about important historical events or people who have shaped American history. Like never before, people of all ages, backgrounds and educational levels can learn more about the African American experience.

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Home | Black History in Two Minutes (or so)

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Black History in Two Minutes (or so) is the new way to immerse yourself in Black History. The digital video series features dozens of short, engaging and factually accurate videos about important historical events or people who have shaped American history.

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"Charm City" was produced by Lynsea Garrison, with help from Rachel Quester, and edited by Lisa Tobin. "The Daily" is produced by Theo Balcomb, Annie Brown, Jessica Cheung, Paige Cowett, Lynsea Garrison, Michael Simon Johnson, Andy Mills, Rachel Quester, Ike Sriskandarajah and Clare Toeniskoetter, with editing help from Larissa Anderson. Lisa Tobin is our executive producer. Samantha Henig is our editorial director. Brad Fisher is our technical manager. Chris Wood is our sound engineer. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

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Introducing 'Charm City,' a 5-Part Audio Series from 'The Daily'

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Find us on RadioPublic, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast listening platform. See below for all of our episodes, show notes, information about our guests, further resources, and full transcripts:

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This week, Ana Marie Cox ( @anamariecox ) sits down with human rights lawyer, activist, and author Arjun Sethi ( @arjunsethi81 ) to discuss the one year anniversary of his book, American Hate: Survivors Speak Out -as relevant as ever after the massacres in El Paso... and, in the short time since, the arrests of six white men on charges related to mass violence . Arjun and Ana also discuss their frustration with how hate crimes are typically depicted in the media, and how the average American can get involved in the fight against white supremacy.

Then, Ibram X. Kendi ( ) from The Atlantic discusses his bestelling new book, How to Be an Antiracist . In soft-spoken, gentle urgency, Ibram guides us through the idea "there is no neutrality" in the face of racism: there is only racism and anti-racism. Ibram and Ana then discuss his various encounters with cancer; exploring a profound extended metaphor between the disease and racism in America.

You can find Arjun's previous With Friends Like These episode here .

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Stage Four Metastatic Racism with Arjun Sethi and Ibram X. Kendi | Crooked Media

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This week, Ana Marie Cox ( @anamariecox ) sits down with human rights lawyer, activist, and author Arjun Sethi ( @arjunsethi81 ) to discuss the one year anniversary of his book, American Hate: Survivors Speak Out -as relevant as ever after the massacres in El Paso...

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2 Dope Queens: Episodes | WNYC Studios | Podcasts

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Phoebe Robinson and Jessica Williams host a live comedy show in Brooklyn.

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4 Big Questions on Racial Justice in Education, Session 4,

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4 Big Questions -- Question 1: What are the biggest barriers to racial justice in education?

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Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man

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Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man

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Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man

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Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

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Brené Brown | Daring Classrooms | SXSWedu 2017

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What about Us? Teacher Learning During COVID-19

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What about Us? Teacher Learning During COVID-19

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What About Us? Teacher Learning During COVID-19

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The Key Bookstore | Afrocentric Interactive Online Bookstore

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Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You | Key Bookstore

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Usually Ships in 1-5 Days

Description

The Quarto Group will be donating 100% of their proceeds of the This Book is Anti-Racist eBook to Black Lives Matter and Color of Change, throughout the month of June. Organizations dedicated to combating racism and seeking justice for people of color.
Who are you? What is racism? Where does it come from? Why does it exist? What can you do to disrupt it? Learn about social identities, the history of racism and resistance against it, and how you can use your anti-racist lens and voice to move the world toward equity and liberation. "In a racist society, it's not enough to be non-racist-we must be ANTI-RACIST." -Angela Davis
Gain a deeper understanding of your anti-racist self as you progress through 20 chapters that spark introspection, reveal the origins of racism that we are still experiencing, and give you the courage and power to undo it. Each chapter builds on the previous one as you learn more about yourself and racial oppression. 20 activities get you thinking and help you grow with the knowledge. All you need is a pen and paper.

Author Tiffany Jewell, an anti-bias, anti-racist educator and activist, builds solidarity beginning with the language she chooses-using gender neutral words to honor everyone who reads the book. Illustrator Aurélia Durand brings the stories and characters to life with kaleidoscopic vibrancy.

After examining the concepts of social identity, race, ethnicity, and racism, learn about some of the ways people of different races have been oppressed, from indigenous Americans and Australians being sent to boarding school to be "civilized" to a generation of Caribbean immigrants once welcomed to the UK being threatened with deportation by strict immigration laws.

Find hope in stories of strength, love, joy, and revolution that are part of our history, too, with such figures as the former slave Toussaint Louverture, who led a rebellion against white planters that eventually led to Haiti's independence, and Yuri Kochiyama, who, after spending time in an internment camp for Japanese Americans during WWII, dedicated her life to supporting political prisoners and advocating reparations for those wrongfully interned.

Learn language and phrases to interrupt and disrupt racism. So, when you hear a microaggression or racial slur, you'll know how to act next time.

This book is written for EVERYONE who lives in this racialized society -including the young person who doesn't know how to speak up to the racist adults in their life, the kid who has lost themself at times trying to fit into the dominant culture, the children who have been harmed (physically and emotionally) because no one stood up for them or they couldn't stand up for themselves, and also for their families, teachers, and administrators.

With this book, be empowered to actively defy racism and xenophobia to create a community (large and small) that truly honors everyone.

About the Author

Tiffany Jewell is a Black biracial writer and Anti-Racist Montessori educator and consultant. She spends her time baking bread and macarons, building LEGOS, watching British detective shows, and dreaming up how she can dismantle white supremacy. Tiffany currently lives in Western Massachusetts (on the occupied land of the Wabanaki and the Nipmuck) with her two young activists, her partner, and a turtle she's had since she was nine. This is her first book for children and young adults. Find her on instagram: @tiffanymjewell.

Aurélia Durand is a French illustrator based in Paris. Her work is dedicated to representing people of color in society, and she uses bold art as a vivid demonstration. "I use vibrant colors and joyful music to spread good vibes to talk about diversity and open a conversation about why it matters to include more color in our society." She wants to create more nuanced illustrative stories by portraying women of color standing proudly and fiercely. Her work has been featured in advertising campaigns, galleries, and editorial magazines. Her clients include Apple, Refinery29, and Tinder. She shares her work online on different platforms, mainly Instagram, where she posts daily illustrations, live paintings, and animations. Find her on Instagram: @4ur3lia.

Praise For...

"STARRED REVIEW: Using clear, compelling language, Jewell employs four sections to deftly explain progressive understandings of identity, history, action, and solidarity as tools to encourage antiracist reflection, thought, and action. From the author's note introducing the idea that "racism is a problem, a very serious problem," to the volume's explorations of "spending that privilege" and "calling out and calling in," Jewell offers readers at various points in their activist journeys a necessary primer on antiracist thinking (a glossary helpfully defines underlined terms used throughout, including cisgender, neurodiverse, and femme). Thoughtful, energizing calls to action and journal prompts encourage readers to check in with themselves and to "grow from our discomfort." Durand's stylish illustrations punctuate the text-heavy pages; robust supplemental materials, including notes on the text and suggested reading, point toward ongoing learning."

- Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"WOW. Have you ever wanted to better understand who you are? What's happening to us in this racially-divided world, and what we can do about it? This Book Is Anti-Racist is bold in its honesty, and brilliant in its illustrative breakdown of an essential vocabulary on race and identity. This racial and intersectional literacy tool models what creative anti-racist work can look like. It has renewed us to keep up the fight."

- Winona Guo and Priya Vulchi, student activists, authors of Tell Me Who You Are: Sharing Our Stories of Race, Culture, and Identity, and co-founders of Choose.org

"Essential"- Kirkus Reviews

"STARRED REVIEW: A guidebook for taking action against racism. The clear title and bold, colorful illustrations will immediately draw attention to this book, designed to guide each reader on a personal journey to work to dismantle racism. In the author's note, Jewell begins with explanations about word choice, including the use of the terms "folx," because it is gender-neutral, and "global majority," noting that marginalized communities of color are actually the majority in the world. She also chooses to capitalize Black, Brown, and Indigenous as a way of centering these communities' voices. Organized in four sections-identity, history, taking action, and working in solidarity-each chapter builds on the lessons of the previous section. Underlined words are defined in the glossary, but Jewell unpacks concepts around race in an accessible way, bringing attention to common misunderstandings. Activities are included at the end of each chapter; they are effective, prompting both self-reflection and action steps from readers. The activities are designed to not be written inside the actual book; instead, Jewell invites readers to find a special notebook and favorite pen and use that throughout. Combining the disruption of common fallacies, spotlights on change-makers, the author's personal reflections, and a call to action, this powerful book has something for all young people no matter what stage they are at in terms of awareness or activism. Essential. (author's note, further reading, glossary, select bibliography"

- Kirkus Reviews

"A book that brings together kids, families, teachers, and administrators in conversation. Tough, vulnerable, important conversation."

- Matthew Winner, The Children's Book Podcast

"I was so fortunate to have my kids learn about social justice in Tiffany's classroom, so I know firsthand the profound impact her teachings have. Now young people everywhere can benefit from Tiffany's wisdom with her debut title, This Book is Anti-Racist. This book is a gift to our future."

- Jarrett J. Krosoczka, National Book Award Finalist and author of Hey Kiddo

"A book that brings together kids, families, teachers, and administrators in conversation. Tough, vulnerable, important conversation."-Matthew Winner, The Children's Book Podcast

"WOW. Have you ever wanted to better understand who you are? What's happening to us in this racially-divided world, and what we can do about it? This Book Is Anti-Racist is bold in its honesty, and brilliant in its illustrative breakdown of an essential vocabulary on race and identity. This racial and intersectional literacy tool models what creative anti-racist work can look like. It has renewed us to keep up the fight."-WINONA GUO & PRIYA VULCHI
CHOOSE Co-Founders/Co-Presidents

Product Details

ISBN: 9780711245211
ISBN-10: 0711245215
Publisher: Frances Lincoln Children's Books
Publication Date: January 7th, 2020
Pages: 160

Recommended Reading Level

Minimum Age:
Maximum Age:
Minimum Grade Level: 6
Maximum Grade Level: 10

Categories

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This Book Is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How to Wake Up, Take Action, and Do The Work (Paperback)

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The Quarto Group will be donating 100% of their proceeds of the This Book is Anti-Racist eBook to Black Lives Matter and Color of Change, throughout the month of June. Organizations dedicated to combating racism and seeking justice for people of color.Who are you? What is racism? Where does it come from?

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Changing

the

narrative

Chicago's only black woman-owned bookstore and gallery space.

A Note From

Our Proprietress:

"Here we are, 8 months into this journey that had no viable beginning, no plans for how we'd function, and no end game in sight.⁣⁣ I didn't use the statistics or market plans that I was told to-I've kinda just built the 'business' around whatever feels good to me (which I do NOT recommend). Somehow, it's worked and will continue working thanks to your unwavering support. I am grateful for the little community we've built in our space in West Town. I am grateful for the random conversations, the notes of affirmation, and the plethora of people who stop by 'just to see what we're all about'. I am grateful for the authors and artists who continue to make our space outstanding and the genuine love that pours in from visitors of all backgrounds. If you're still reading, let this act as your reminder that action is the ONLY catalyst for change. We'll never be completely ready, but getting to the other side of our dreams, our plans, and ourselves cannot be accomplished without taking that first step forward. Let's continue to support the magic, the finesse, and the audacity of Black women in all their glory ."

- DL Mullen

Our Mission

Semicolon Bookstore is committed to nurturing the connection between literature, art, and the pursuit of knowledge; while also using the power of words to better our community.

Help us #ClearTheShelves

with CPS Students

We were created with one thing in mind: community

We are committed to having a direct impact in raising literacy rates in Chicago and beyond. We do this through our consistent effort to support CPS school through direct donations in the form of books. In this time of

uncertainty, we want to give the gift of hope moving forward through #changingthenarrative.

​

On April 24, 2020, we are inviting CPS students to the store to

#cleartheshelves. Our hope is that they will happily take every book

we have. In our efforts, we are raising $25,000.

​

Follow Our Journey

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Bookstore | Semicolon Bookstore & Gallery | United States

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Chicago's only black woman-owned bookstore and gallery space. "Here we are, 8 months into this journey that had no viable beginning, no plans for how we'd function, and no end game in sight.⁣⁣ I didn't use the statistics or market plans that I was told to-I've kinda just built the 'business' around whatever feels good to me (which I do NOT recommend).

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Look to her most recent podcast episodes.

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Conversations that unlock the deeply human part of who we are, so that we can live, love, parent, and lead with more courage and heart.

Featured Conversations

Meet the Musicians

Carrie Rodriguez and Gina Chavez collaborated to write and perform our two podcast songs for Unlocking Us: Muy Podcasty and Oneder.

Carrie Rodriguez

Carrie Rodriguez collaborated with Gina Chavez to write and perform our two podcast songs for Unlocking Us: Muy Podcasty and Oneder.

Carrie Rodriguez, a singer-songwriter from Austin, Texas, finds beauty in the cross-pollination of diverse traditions. A passionate performer, she melds fiery fiddle playing, electrifying vocals and a fresh interpretation of new and classic songs with an "Ameri-Chicana" attitude. Her most recent release, the critically-acclaimed bilingual album, Lola, was named as one of NPR's top 50 albums of the year. Carrie has performed on stages across North America and Europe for the last decade, as well as on programs such as Austin City Limits, The Tonight Show, A Prairie Home Companion, and NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts. In the words of author Brené Brown, "She's the trifecta for me - beautiful singer, soulful songwriter, and kick-ass fiddler."

Carrie lives in Austin with her husband and musical collaborator Luke Jacobs, and their 4-year-old son Cruz. You can learn more about Carrie at https://www.carrierodriguez.com and on Instagram at @carrierockriguez

Gina Chavez

Gina Chavez collaborated with Carrie Rodriguez to write and perform our two podcast songs for Unlocking Us: Muy Podcasty and Oneder.

Gina Chavez is a radiant, passionate performer and activist. With more than a million views on her NPR Tiny Desk concert, an hour-long PBS special, and a 12-country tour as a cultural ambassador with the U.S. State Department, Chavez is uniting audiences with her genre-bending sound and gutsy voice.

Gina's music is deeply personal. Her passionate collection of bilingual songs traversing cumbia, pop, and soul take audiences on a journey to discover her Latin roots through music as she shares the story of life in Texas as a married, queer Catholic.

Gina is set to make waves with the release of her new album, La Que Manda ("the woman in charge"), this May. The first single, "She Persisted," is now available.

Gina lives in Austin with her wife, Jodi Granado. Together, they co-founded Niñas Arriba, a college fund that offers full scholarships to a private, Catholic university for young girls in Soyapango, El Salvador, where they used to live.

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Conversations that unlock the deeply human part of who we are so that we can live, love, parent, and lead with more courage and heart.

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The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Really explains the economic and social impact of denying effective citizenship to African Americans in the South and then how redlining was similarly devastating in Chicago and other northern cities

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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

Editor's note: On February 1, 2023, the College Board announced its finalized curriculum for an AP African American Studies course. It has removed work-present in the pilot program-by writers such as bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author of this article.

We've gathered dozens of the most important pieces from our archives on race and racism in America. Find the collection here.
And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith t he LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today. Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury By our unpaid labor and suffering, we have earned the right to the soil, many times over and over, and now we are determined to have it. done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.
- Deuteronomy 15: 12-15

- John Locke, "Second Treatise"

- Anonymous, 1861

Listen to the audio version of this article: Feature stories, read aloud: download the Audm app for your iPhone.

I. "So That's Just One Of My Losses"

C lyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. Ross's parents owned and farmed a 40-acre tract of land, flush with cows, hogs, and mules. Ross's mother would drive to Clarksdale to do her shopping in a horse and buggy, in which she invested all the pride one might place in a Cadillac. The family owned another horse, with a red coat, which they gave to Clyde. The Ross family wanted for little, save that which all black families in the Deep South then desperately desired-the protection of the law.

In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote-a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. "You and I know what's the best way to keep the nigger from voting," blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. "You do it the night before the election."

The state's regime partnered robbery of the franchise with robbery of the purse. Many of Mississippi's black farmers lived in debt peonage, under the sway of cotton kings who were at once their landlords, their employers, and their primary merchants. Tools and necessities were advanced against the return on the crop, which was determined by the employer. When farmers were deemed to be in debt-and they often were-the negative balance was then carried over to the next season. A man or woman who protested this arrangement did so at the risk of grave injury or death. Refusing to work meant arrest under vagrancy laws and forced labor under the state's penal system.

Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had. In her 2010 book, The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of Eddie Earvin, a spinach picker who fled Mississippi in 1963, after being made to work at gunpoint. "You didn't talk about it or tell nobody," Earvin said. "You had to sneak away."
"Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia," the AP reported.
When Clyde Ross was still a child, Mississippi authorities claimed his father owed $3,000 in back taxes. The elder Ross could not read. He did not have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse. He could not expect the police to be impartial. Effectively, the Ross family had no way to contest the claim and no protection under the law. The authorities seized the land. They seized the buggy. They took the cows, hogs, and mules. And so for the upkeep of separate but equal, the entire Ross family was reduced to sharecropping.

This was hardly unusual. In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. "Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia," the AP reported, as well as "oil fields in Mississippi" and "a baseball spring training facility in Florida."

Clyde Ross was a smart child. His teacher thought he should attend a more challenging school. There was very little support for educating black people in Mississippi. But Julius Rosenwald, a part owner of Sears, Roebuck, had begun an ambitious effort to build schools for black children throughout the South. Ross's teacher believed he should attend the local Rosenwald school. It was too far for Ross to walk and get back in time to work in the fields. Local white children had a school bus. Clyde Ross did not, and thus lost the chance to better his education.

Then, when Ross was 10 years old, a group of white men demanded his only childhood possession-the horse with the red coat. "You can't have this horse. We want it," one of the white men said. They gave Ross's father $17.

"I did everything for that horse," Ross told me. "Everything. And they took him. Put him on the racetrack. I never did know what happened to him after that, but I know they didn't bring him back. So that's just one of my losses."

The losses mounted. As sharecroppers, the Ross family saw their wages treated as the landlord's slush fund. Landowners were supposed to split the profits from the cotton fields with sharecroppers. But bales would often disappear during the count, or the split might be altered on a whim. If cotton was selling for 50 cents a pound, the Ross family might get 15 cents, or only five. One year Ross's mother promised to buy him a $7 suit for a summer program at their church. She ordered the suit by mail. But that year Ross's family was paid only five cents a pound for cotton. The mailman arrived with the suit. The Rosses could not pay. The suit was sent back. Clyde Ross did not go to the church program.

It was in these early years that Ross began to understand himself as an American-he did not live under the blind decree of justice, but under the heel of a regime that elevated armed robbery to a governing principle. He thought about fighting. "Just be quiet," his father told him. "Because they'll come and kill us all."

Clyde Ross grew. He was drafted into the Army. The draft officials offered him an exemption if he stayed home and worked. He preferred to take his chances with war. He was stationed in California. He found that he could go into stores without being bothered. He could walk the streets without being harassed. He could go into a restaurant and receive service.

Ross was shipped off to Guam. He fought in World War II to save the world from tyranny. But when he returned to Clarksdale, he found that tyranny had followed him home. This was 1947, eight years before Mississippi lynched Emmett Till and tossed his broken body into the Tallahatchie River. The Great Migration, a mass exodus of 6 million African Americans that spanned most of the 20th century, was now in its second wave. The black pilgrims did not journey north simply seeking better wages and work, or bright lights and big adventures. They were fleeing the acquisitive warlords of the South. They were seeking the protection of the law.

Clyde Ross was among them. He came to Chicago in 1947 and took a job as a taster at Campbell's Soup. He made a stable wage. He married. He had children. His paycheck was his own. No Klansmen stripped him of the vote. When he walked down the street, he did not have to move because a white man was walking past. He did not have to take off his hat or avert his gaze. His journey from peonage to full citizenship seemed near-complete. Only one item was missing-a home, that final badge of entry into the sacred order of the American middle class of the Eisenhower years.

In 1961, Ross and his wife bought a house in North Lawndale, a bustling community on Chicago's West Side. North Lawndale had long been a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, but a handful of middle-class African Americans had lived there starting in the '40s. The community was anchored by the sprawling Sears, Roebuck headquarters. North Lawndale's Jewish People's Institute actively encouraged blacks to move into the neighborhood, seeking to make it a "pilot community for interracial living." In the battle for integration then being fought around the country, North Lawndale seemed to offer promising terrain. But out in the tall grass, highwaymen, nefarious as any Clarksdale kleptocrat, were lying in wait.
From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market.
Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner's responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He'd bought "on contract": a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting-while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full-and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself.

The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay-taking their down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they'd bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat. "He loads them up with payments they can't meet," an office secretary told The Chicago Daily News of her boss, the speculator Lou Fushanis, in 1963. "Then he takes the property away from them. He's sold some of the buildings three or four times."

Ross had tried to get a legitimate mortgage in another neighborhood, but was told by a loan officer that there was no financing available. The truth was that there was no financing for people like Clyde Ross. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from "restrictive covenants" to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.

Their efforts were buttressed by the federal government. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured private mortgages, causing a drop in interest rates and a decline in the size of the down payment required to buy a house. But an insured mortgage was not a possibility for Clyde Ross. The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated "A," indicated "in demand" neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked "a single foreigner or Negro." These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated "D" and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.

"A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy," Charles Abrams, the urban-studies expert who helped create the New York City Housing Authority, wrote in 1955. "Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws."

The devastating effects are cogently outlined by Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro in their 1995 book, Black Wealth/White Wealth:

Locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history, African Americans who desired and were able to afford home ownership found themselves consigned to central-city communities where their investments were affected by the "self-fulfilling prophecies" of the FHA appraisers: cut off from sources of new investment[,] their homes and communities deteriorated and lost value in comparison to those homes and communities that FHA appraisers deemed desirable.

In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport. "It was like people who like to go out and shoot lions in Africa. It was the same thrill," a housing attorney told the historian Beryl Satter in her 2009 book, Family Properties. "The thrill of the chase and the kill."

The kill was profitable. At the time of his death, Lou Fushanis owned more than 600 properties, many of them in North Lawndale, and his estate was estimated to be worth $3 million. He'd made much of this money by exploiting the frustrated hopes of black migrants like Clyde Ross. During this period, according to one estimate, 85 percent of all black home buyers who bought in Chicago bought on contract. "If anybody who is well established in this business in Chicago doesn't earn $100,000 a year," a contract seller told The Saturday Evening Post in 1962, "he is loafing."

Contract sellers became rich. North Lawndale became a ghetto.

Clyde Ross still lives there. He still owns his home. He is 91, and the emblems of survival are all around him-awards for service in his community, pictures of his children in cap and gown. But when I asked him about his home in North Lawndale, I heard only anarchy.

"We were ashamed. We did not want anyone to know that we were that ignorant," Ross told me. He was sitting at his dining-room table. His glasses were as thick as his Clarksdale drawl. "I'd come out of Mississippi where there was one mess, and come up here and got in another mess. So how dumb am I? I didn't want anyone to know how dumb I was.

"When I found myself caught up in it, I said, 'How? I just left this mess. I just left no laws. And no regard. And then I come here and get cheated wide open.' I would probably want to do some harm to some people, you know, if I had been violent like some of us. I thought, 'Man, I got caught up in this stuff. I can't even take care of my kids.' I didn't have enough for my kids. You could fall through the cracks easy fighting these white people. And no law."
Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport.
But fight Clyde Ross did. In 1968 he joined the newly formed Contract Buyers League -a collection of black homeowners on Chicago's South and West Sides, all of whom had been locked into the same system of predation. There was Howell Collins, whose contract called for him to pay $25,500 for a house that a speculator had bought for $14,500. There was Ruth Wells, who'd managed to pay out half her contract, expecting a mortgage, only to suddenly see an insurance bill materialize out of thin air-a requirement the seller had added without Wells's knowledge. Contract sellers used every tool at their disposal to pilfer from their clients. They scared white residents into selling low. They lied about properties' compliance with building codes, then left the buyer responsible when city inspectors arrived. They presented themselves as real-estate brokers, when in fact they were the owners. They guided their clients to lawyers who were in on the scheme.

The Contract Buyers League fought back. Members-who would eventually number more than 500-went out to the posh suburbs where the speculators lived and embarrassed them by knocking on their neighbors' doors and informing them of the details of the contract-lending trade. They refused to pay their installments, instead holding monthly payments in an escrow account. Then they brought a suit against the contract sellers, accusing them of buying properties and reselling in such a manner "to reap from members of the Negro race large and unjust profits."

Video: The Contract Buyers League

In return for the "deprivations of their rights and privileges under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments," the league demanded "prayers for relief"-payback of all moneys paid on contracts and all moneys paid for structural improvement of properties, at 6 percent interest minus a "fair, non-discriminatory" rental price for time of occupation. Moreover, the league asked the court to adjudge that the defendants had "acted willfully and maliciously and that malice is the gist of this action."

Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer appealing to the government simply for equality. They were no longer fleeing in hopes of a better deal elsewhere. They were charging society with a crime against their community. They wanted the crime publicly ruled as such. They wanted the crime's executors declared to be offensive to society. And they wanted restitution for the great injury brought upon them by said offenders. In 1968, Clyde Ross and the Contract Buyers League were no longer simply seeking the protection of the law. They were seeking reparations.

II. "A Difference of Kind, Not Degree"

According to the most-recent statistics, North Lawndale is now on the wrong end of virtually every socioeconomic indicator. In 1930 its population was 112,000. Today it is 36,000. The halcyon talk of "interracial living" is dead. The neighborhood is 92 percent black. Its homicide rate is 45 per 100,000-triple the rate of the city as a whole. The infant-mortality rate is 14 per 1,000-more than twice the national average. Forty-three percent of the people in North Lawndale live below the poverty line-double Chicago's overall rate. Forty-five percent of all households are on food stamps-nearly three times the rate of the city at large. Sears, Roebuck left the neighborhood in 1987, taking 1,800 jobs with it. Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their prospects: Cook County's Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits directly adjacent to the neighborhood.

North Lawndale is an extreme portrait of the trends that ail black Chicago. Such is the magnitude of these ailments that it can be said that blacks and whites do not inhabit the same city. The average per capita income of Chicago's white neighborhoods is almost three times that of its black neighborhoods. When the Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson examined incarceration rates in Chicago in his 2012 book, Great American City, he found that a black neighborhood with one of the highest incarceration rates (West Garfield Park) had a rate more than 40 times as high as the white neighborhood with the highest rate (Clearing). "This is a staggering differential, even for community-level comparisons," Sampson writes. "A difference of kind, not degree."

In other words, Chicago's impoverished black neighborhoods-characterized by high unemployment and households headed by single parents-are not simply poor; they are "ecologically distinct." This "is not simply the same thing as low economic status," writes Sampson. "In this pattern Chicago is not alone."

The lives of black Americans are better than they were half a century ago. The humiliation of Whites Only signs are gone. Rates of black poverty have decreased. Black teen-pregnancy rates are at record lows-and the gap between black and white teen-pregnancy rates has shrunk significantly. But such progress rests on a shaky foundation, and fault lines are everywhere. The income gap between black and white households is roughly the same today as it was in 1970. Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, studied children born from 1955 through 1970 and found that 4 percent of whites and 62 percent of blacks across America had been raised in poor neighborhoods. A generation later, the same study showed, virtually nothing had changed. And whereas whites born into affluent neighborhoods tended to remain in affluent neighborhoods, blacks tended to fall out of them.

This is not surprising. Black families, regardless of income, are significantly less wealthy than white families. The Pew Research Center estimates that white households are worth roughly 20 times as much as black households, and that whereas only 15 percent of whites have zero or negative wealth, more than a third of blacks do. Effectively, the black family in America is working without a safety net. When financial calamity strikes-a medical emergency, divorce, job loss-the fall is precipitous.

And just as black families of all incomes remain handicapped by a lack of wealth, so too do they remain handicapped by their restricted choice of neighborhood. Black people with upper-middle-class incomes do not generally live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Sharkey's research shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000. "Blacks and whites inhabit such different neighborhoods," Sharkey writes, "that it is not possible to compare the economic outcomes of black and white children."

A national real-estate association advised not to sell to "a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education."

The implications are chilling. As a rule, poor black people do not work their way out of the ghetto-and those who do often face the horror of watching their children and grandchildren tumble back.

Even seeming evidence of progress withers under harsh light. In 2012, the Manhattan Institute cheerily noted that segregation had declined since the 1960s. And yet African Americans still remained-by far-the most segregated ethnic group in the country.

With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin. The resulting conflagration has been devastating.

One thread of thinking in the African American community holds that these depressing numbers partially stem from cultural pathologies that can be altered through individual grit and exceptionally good behavior. (In 2011, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, responding to violence among young black males, put the blame on the family: "Too many men making too many babies they don't want to take care of, and then we end up dealing with your children." Nutter turned to those presumably fatherless babies: "Pull your pants up and buy a belt, because no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt.") The thread is as old as black politics itself. It is also wrong. The kind of trenchant racism to which black people have persistently been subjected can never be defeated by making its victims more respectable. The essence of American racism is disrespect. And in the wake of the grim numbers, we see the grim inheritance.

The Contract Buyers League's suit brought by Clyde Ross and his allies took direct aim at this inheritance. The suit was rooted in Chicago's long history of segregation, which had created two housing markets-one legitimate and backed by the government, the other lawless and patrolled by predators. The suit dragged on until 1976, when the league lost a jury trial. Securing the equal protection of the law proved hard; securing reparations proved impossible. If there were any doubts about the mood of the jury, the foreman removed them by saying, when asked about the verdict, that he hoped it would help end "the mess Earl Warren made with Brown v. Board of Education and all that nonsense."
An unsegregated America might see poverty spread across the country, with no particular bias toward skin color.
The Supreme Court seems to share that sentiment. The past two decades have witnessed a rollback of the progressive legislation of the 1960s. Liberals have found themselves on the defensive. In 2008, when Barack Obama was a candidate for president, he was asked whether his daughters-Malia and Sasha-should benefit from affirmative action. He answered in the negative.

The exchange rested upon an erroneous comparison of the average American white family and the exceptional first family. In the contest of upward mobility, Barack and Michelle Obama have won. But they've won by being twice as good-and enduring twice as much. Malia and Sasha Obama enjoy privileges beyond the average white child's dreams. But that comparison is incomplete. The more telling question is how they compare with Jenna and Barbara Bush-the products of many generations of privilege, not just one. Whatever the Obama children achieve, it will be evidence of their family's singular perseverance, not of broad equality.

III. "We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony"

In 1783, the freedwoman Belinda Royall petitioned the commonwealth of Massachusetts for reparations. Belinda had been born in modern-day Ghana. She was kidnapped as a child and sold into slavery. She endured the Middle Passage and 50 years of enslavement at the hands of Isaac Royall and his son. But the junior Royall, a British loyalist, fled the country during the Revolution. Belinda, now free after half a century of labor, beseeched the nascent Massachusetts legislature:

The face of your Petitioner, is now marked with the furrows of time, and her frame bending under the oppression of years, while she, by the Laws of the Land, is denied the employment of one morsel of that immense wealth, apart whereof hath been accumilated by her own industry, and the whole augmented by her servitude.

WHEREFORE, casting herself at your feet if your honours, as to a body of men, formed for the extirpation of vassalage, for the reward of Virtue, and the just return of honest industry-she prays, that such allowance may be made her out of the Estate of Colonel Royall, as will prevent her, and her more infirm daughter, from misery in the greatest extreme, and scatter comfort over the short and downward path of their lives.

Belinda Royall was granted a pension of 15 pounds and 12 shillings, to be paid out of the estate of Isaac Royall-one of the earliest successful attempts to petition for reparations. At the time, black people in America had endured more than 150 years of enslavement, and the idea that they might be owed something in return was, if not the national consensus, at least not outrageous.

"A heavy account lies against us as a civil society for oppressions committed against people who did not injure us," wrote the Quaker John Woolman in 1769, "and that if the particular case of many individuals were fairly stated, it would appear that there was considerable due to them."

As the historian Roy E. Finkenbine has documented, at the dawn of this country, black reparations were actively considered and often effected. Quakers in New York, New England, and Baltimore went so far as to make "membership contingent upon compensating one's former slaves." In 1782, the Quaker Robert Pleasants emancipated his 78 slaves, granted them 350 acres, and later built a school on their property and provided for their education. "The doing of this justice to the injured Africans," wrote Pleasants, "would be an acceptable offering to him who 'Rules in the kingdom of men.' "

Edward Coles, a protégé of Thomas Jefferson who became a slaveholder through inheritance, took many of his slaves north and granted them a plot of land in Illinois. John Randolph, a cousin of Jefferson's, willed that all his slaves be emancipated upon his death, and that all those older than 40 be given 10 acres of land. "I give and bequeath to all my slaves their freedom," Randolph wrote, "heartily regretting that I have been the owner of one."

In his book Forever Free, Eric Foner recounts the story of a disgruntled planter reprimanding a freedman loafing on the job:

Planter: "You lazy nigger, I am losing a whole day's labor by you."

Freedman: "Massa, how many days' labor have I lost by you?"

In the 20th century, the cause of reparations was taken up by a diverse cast that included the Confederate veteran Walter R. Vaughan, who believed that reparations would be a stimulus for the South; the black activist Callie House; black-nationalist leaders like "Queen Mother" Audley Moore; and the civil-rights activist James Forman. The movement coalesced in 1987 under an umbrella organization called the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA). The NAACP endorsed reparations in 1993. Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a professor at Harvard Law School, has pursued reparations claims in court.

But while the people advocating reparations have changed over time, the response from the country has remained virtually the same. "They have been taught to labor," the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. "They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex‑slaves."

Not exactly. Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, "Never again." But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.

Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for "appropriate remedies."

A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers's bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions. But we are not interested.

"It's because it's black folks making the claim," Nkechi Taifa, who helped found N'COBRA, says. "People who talk about reparations are considered left lunatics. But all we are talking about is studying [reparations]. As John Conyers has said, we study everything. We study the water, the air. We can't even study the issue? This bill does not authorize one red cent to anyone."

That HR 40 has never-under either Democrats or Republicans-made it to the House floor suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential. If we conclude that the conditions in North Lawndale and black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you'd expect of a community that for centuries has lived in America's crosshairs, then what are we to make of the world's oldest democracy?

One cannot escape the question by hand-waving at the past, disavowing the acts of one's ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration. The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte. A nation outlives its generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delaware, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. If Thomas Jefferson's genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings's body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.

Black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000.

In 1909, President William Howard Taft told the country that "intelligent" white southerners were ready to see blacks as "useful members of the community." A week later Joseph Gordon, a black man, was lynched outside Greenwood, Mississippi. The high point of the lynching era has passed. But the memories of those robbed of their lives still live on in the lingering effects. Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don't look.

There has always been another way. "It is in vain to alledge, that our ancestors brought them hither, and not we," Yale President Timothy Dwight said in 1810.

We inherit our ample patrimony with all its incumbrances; and are bound to pay the debts of our ancestors. This debt, particularly, we are bound to discharge: and, when the righteous Judge of the Universe comes to reckon with his servants, he will rigidly exact the payment at our hands. To give them liberty, and stop here, is to entail upon them a curse.

IV. "The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From"

America begins in black plunder and white democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary. "The men who came together to found the independent United States, dedicated to freedom and equality, either held slaves or were willing to join hands with those who did," the historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote. "None of them felt entirely comfortable about the fact, but neither did they feel responsible for it. Most of them had inherited both their slaves and their attachment to freedom from an earlier generation, and they knew the two were not unconnected."

When enslaved Africans, plundered of their bodies, plundered of their families, and plundered of their labor, were brought to the colony of Virginia in 1619, they did not initially endure the naked racism that would engulf their progeny. Some of them were freed. Some of them intermarried. Still others escaped with the white indentured servants who had suffered as they had. Some even rebelled together, allying under Nathaniel Bacon to torch Jamestown in 1676.

One hundred years later, the idea of slaves and poor whites joining forces would shock the senses, but in the early days of the English colonies, the two groups had much in common. English visitors to Virginia found that its masters "abuse their servantes with intollerable oppression and hard usage." White servants were flogged, tricked into serving beyond their contracts, and traded in much the same manner as slaves.

This "hard usage" originated in a simple fact of the New World-land was boundless but cheap labor was limited. As life spans increased in the colony, the Virginia planters found in the enslaved Africans an even more efficient source of cheap labor. Whereas indentured servants were still legal subjects of the English crown and thus entitled to certain protections, African slaves entered the colonies as aliens. Exempted from the protections of the crown, they became early America's indispensable working class-fit for maximum exploitation, capable of only minimal resistance.

For the next 250 years, American law worked to reduce black people to a class of untouchables and raise all white men to the level of citizens. In 1650, Virginia mandated that "all persons except Negroes" were to carry arms. In 1664, Maryland mandated that any Englishwoman who married a slave must live as a slave of her husband's master. In 1705, the Virginia assembly passed a law allowing for the dismemberment of unruly slaves-but forbidding masters from whipping "a Christian white servant naked, without an order from a justice of the peace." In that same law, the colony mandated that "all horses, cattle, and hogs, now belonging, or that hereafter shall belong to any slave" be seized and sold off by the local church, the profits used to support "the poor of the said parish." At that time, there would have still been people alive who could remember blacks and whites joining to burn down Jamestown only 29 years before. But at the beginning of the 18th century, two primary classes were enshrined in America.

"The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black," John C. Calhoun, South Carolina's senior senator, declared on the Senate floor in 1848. "And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals."

In 1860, the majority of people living in South Carolina and Mississippi, almost half of those living in Georgia, and about one-third of all Southerners were on the wrong side of Calhoun's line. The state with the largest number of enslaved Americans was Virginia, where in certain counties some 70 percent of all people labored in chains. Nearly one-fourth of all white Southerners owned slaves, and upon their backs the economic basis of America-and much of the Atlantic world-was erected. In the seven cotton states, one-third of all white income was derived from slavery. By 1840, cotton produced by slave labor constituted 59 percent of the country's exports. The web of this slave society extended north to the looms of New England, and across the Atlantic to Great Britain, where it powered a great economic transformation and altered the trajectory of world history. "Whoever says Industrial Revolution," wrote the historian Eric J. Hobsbawm, "says cotton."

The wealth accorded America by slavery was not just in what the slaves pulled from the land but in the slaves themselves. "In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America's manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together," the Yale historian David W. Blight has noted. "Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy." The sale of these slaves-"in whose bodies that money congealed," writes Walter Johnson, a Harvard historian-generated even more ancillary wealth. Loans were taken out for purchase, to be repaid with interest. Insurance policies were drafted against the untimely death of a slave and the loss of potential profits. Slave sales were taxed and notarized. The vending of the black body and the sundering of the black family became an economy unto themselves, estimated to have brought in tens of millions of dollars to antebellum America. In 1860 there were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the country.

Beneath the cold numbers lay lives divided. "I had a constant dread that Mrs. Moore, her mistress, would be in want of money and sell my dear wife," a freedman wrote, reflecting on his time in slavery. "We constantly dreaded a final separation. Our affection for each was very strong, and this made us always apprehensive of a cruel parting."

Forced partings were common in the antebellum South. A slave in some parts of the region stood a 30 percent chance of being sold in his or her lifetime. Twenty-five percent of interstate trades destroyed a first marriage and half of them destroyed a nuclear family.

When the wife and children of Henry Brown, a slave in Richmond, Virginia, were to be sold away, Brown searched for a white master who might buy his wife and children to keep the family together. He failed:

The next day, I stationed myself by the side of the road, along which the slaves, amounting to three hundred and fifty, were to pass. The purchaser of my wife was a Methodist minister, who was about starting for North Carolina. Pretty soon five waggon-loads of little children passed, and looking at the foremost one, what should I see but a little child, pointing its tiny hand towards me, exclaiming, "There's my father; I knew he would come and bid me good-bye." It was my eldest child! Soon the gang approached in which my wife was chained. I looked, and beheld her familiar face; but O, reader, that glance of agony! may God spare me ever again enduring the excruciating horror of that moment! She passed, and came near to where I stood. I seized hold of her hand, intending to bid her farewell; but words failed me; the gift of utterance had fled, and I remained speechless. I followed her for some distance, with her hand grasped in mine, as if to save her from her fate, but I could not speak, and I was obliged to turn away in silence.

In a time when telecommunications were primitive and blacks lacked freedom of movement, the parting of black families was a kind of murder. Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy-in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America's rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy. The labor strife that seeded Bacon's rebellion was suppressed. America's indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values. Assessing antebellum democracy in Virginia, a visitor from England observed that the state's natives "can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves."

V. The Quiet Plunder

The consequences of 250 years of enslavement, of war upon black families and black people, were profound. Like homeownership today, slave ownership was aspirational, attracting not just those who owned slaves but those who wished to. Much as homeowners today might discuss the addition of a patio or the painting of a living room, slaveholders traded tips on the best methods for breeding workers, exacting labor, and doling out punishment. Just as a homeowner today might subscribe to a magazine like This Old House, slaveholders had journals such as De Bow's Review, which recommended the best practices for wringing profits from slaves. By the dawn of the Civil War, the enslavement of black America was thought to be so foundational to the country that those who sought to end it were branded heretics worthy of death. Imagine what would happen if a president today came out in favor of taking all American homes from their owners: the reaction might well be violent.

"This country was formed for the white, not for the black man," John Wilkes Booth wrote, before killing Abraham Lincoln. "And looking upon African slavery from the same standpoint held by those noble framers of our Constitution, I for one have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation."

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Radical Republicans attempted to reconstruct the country upon something resembling universal equality-but they were beaten back by a campaign of "Redemption," led by White Liners, Red Shirts, and Klansmen bent on upholding a society "formed for the white, not for the black man." A wave of terrorism roiled the South. In his massive history Reconstruction, Eric Foner recounts incidents of black people being attacked for not removing their hats; for refusing to hand over a whiskey flask; for disobeying church procedures; for "using insolent language"; for disputing labor contracts; for refusing to be "tied like a slave." Sometimes the attacks were intended simply to "thin out the niggers a little."

Terrorism carried the day. Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political violence was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted out toward black people of ambition. Black schools and churches were burned to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who attempted to rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered. At the end of World War I, black veterans returning to their homes were assaulted for daring to wear the American uniform. The demobilization of soldiers after the war, which put white and black veterans into competition for scarce jobs, produced the Red Summer of 1919: a succession of racist pogroms against dozens of cities ranging from Longview, Texas, to Chicago to Washington, D.C. Organized white violence against blacks continued into the 1920s-in 1921 a white mob leveled Tulsa's "Black Wall Street," and in 1923 another one razed the black town of Rosewood, Florida-and virtually no one was punished.

The work of mobs was a rabid and violent rendition of prejudices that extended even into the upper reaches of American government. The New Deal is today remembered as a model for what progressive government should do-cast a broad social safety net that protects the poor and the afflicted while building the middle class. When progressives wish to express their disappointment with Barack Obama, they point to the accomplishments of Franklin Roosevelt. But these progressives rarely note that Roosevelt's New Deal, much like the democracy that produced it, rested on the foundation of Jim Crow.

"The Jim Crow South," writes Ira Katznelson, a history and political-science professor at Columbia, "was the one collaborator America's democracy could not do without." The marks of that collaboration are all over the New Deal. The omnibus programs passed under the Social Security Act in 1935 were crafted in such a way as to protect the southern way of life. Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farmworkers and domestics-jobs heavily occupied by blacks. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible. The NAACP protested, calling the new American safety net "a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through."

The oft-celebrated G.I. Bill similarly failed black Americans, by mirroring the broader country's insistence on a racist housing policy. Though ostensibly color-blind, Title III of the bill, which aimed to give veterans access to low-interest home loans, left black veterans to tangle with white officials at their local Veterans Administration as well as with the same banks that had, for years, refused to grant mortgages to blacks. The historian Kathleen J. Frydl observes in her 2009 book, The GI Bill, that so many blacks were disqualified from receiving Title III benefits "that it is more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title."

In Cold War America, homeownership was seen as a means of instilling patriotism, and as a civilizing and anti-radical force. "No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist," claimed William Levitt, who pioneered the modern suburb with the development of the various Levittowns, his famous planned communities. "He has too much to do."

But the Levittowns were, with Levitt's willing acquiescence, segregated throughout their early years. Daisy and Bill Myers, the first black family to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, were greeted with protests and a burning cross. A neighbor who opposed the family said that Bill Myers was "probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house."

The neighbor had good reason to be afraid. Bill and Daisy Myers were from the other side of John C. Calhoun's dual society. If they moved next door, housing policy almost guaranteed that their neighbors' property values would decline.

Whereas shortly before the New Deal, a typical mortgage required a large down payment and full repayment within about 10 years, the creation of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation in 1933 and then the Federal Housing Administration the following year allowed banks to offer loans requiring no more than 10 percent down, amortized over 20 to 30 years. "Without federal intervention in the housing market, massive suburbanization would have been impossible," writes Thomas J. Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. "In 1930, only 30 percent of Americans owned their own homes; by 1960, more than 60 percent were home owners. Home ownership became an emblem of American citizenship."

That emblem was not to be awarded to blacks. The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards' code of ethics warned that "a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood ... any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values." A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters-and "a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites."

The federal government concurred. It was the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant-a clause in the deed forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods.
One man said his black neighbor was "probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house."
"For perhaps the first time, the federal government embraced the discriminatory attitudes of the marketplace," the historian Kenneth T. Jackson wrote in his 1985 book, Crabgrass Frontier, a history of suburbanization. "Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized; FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy. Whole areas of cities were declared ineligible for loan guarantees." Redlining was not officially outlawed until 1968, by the Fair Housing Act. By then the damage was done-and reports of redlining by banks have continued.

The federal government is premised on equal fealty from all its citizens, who in return are to receive equal treatment. But as late as the mid-20th century, this bargain was not granted to black people, who repeatedly paid a higher price for citizenship and received less in return. Plunder had been the essential feature of slavery, of the society described by Calhoun. But practically a full century after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the plunder-quiet, systemic, submerged-continued even amidst the aims and achievements of New Deal liberals.

VI. Making The Second Ghetto

Today Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country, a fact that reflects assiduous planning. In the effort to uphold white supremacy at every level down to the neighborhood, Chicago-a city founded by the black fur trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable-has long been a pioneer. The efforts began in earnest in 1917, when the Chicago Real Estate Board, horrified by the influx of southern blacks, lobbied to zone the entire city by race. But after the Supreme Court ruled against explicit racial zoning that year, the city was forced to pursue its agenda by more-discreet means.

Like the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration initially insisted on restrictive covenants, which helped bar blacks and other ethnic undesirables from receiving federally backed home loans. By the 1940s, Chicago led the nation in the use of these restrictive covenants, and about half of all residential neighborhoods in the city were effectively off-limits to blacks.

It is common today to become misty-eyed about the old black ghetto, where doctors and lawyers lived next door to meatpackers and steelworkers, who themselves lived next door to prostitutes and the unemployed. This segregationist nostalgia ignores the actual conditions endured by the people living there-vermin and arson, for instance-and ignores the fact that the old ghetto was premised on denying black people privileges enjoyed by white Americans.

In 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled that restrictive covenants, while permissible, were not enforceable by judicial action, Chicago had other weapons at the ready. The Illinois state legislature had already given Chicago's city council the right to approve-and thus to veto-any public housing in the city's wards. This came in handy in 1949, when a new federal housing act sent millions of tax dollars into Chicago and other cities around the country. Beginning in 1950, site selection for public housing proceeded entirely on the grounds of segregation. By the 1960s, the city had created with its vast housing projects what the historian Arnold R. Hirsch calls a "second ghetto," one larger than the old Black Belt but just as impermeable. More than 98 percent of all the family public-housing units built in Chicago between 1950 and the mid‑1960s were built in all-black neighborhoods.

Governmental embrace of segregation was driven by the virulent racism of Chicago's white citizens. White neighborhoods vulnerable to black encroachment formed block associations for the sole purpose of enforcing segregation. They lobbied fellow whites not to sell. They lobbied those blacks who did manage to buy to sell back. In 1949, a group of Englewood Catholics formed block associations intended to "keep up the neighborhood." Translation: keep black people out. And when civic engagement was not enough, when government failed, when private banks could no longer hold the line, Chicago turned to an old tool in the American repertoire-racial violence. "The pattern of terrorism is easily discernible," concluded a Chicago civic group in the 1940s. "It is at the seams of the black ghetto in all directions." On July 1 and 2 of 1946, a mob of thousands assembled in Chicago's Park Manor neighborhood, hoping to eject a black doctor who'd recently moved in. The mob pelted the house with rocks and set the garage on fire. The doctor moved away.

In 1947, after a few black veterans moved into the Fernwood section of Chicago, three nights of rioting broke out; gangs of whites yanked blacks off streetcars and beat them. Two years later, when a union meeting attended by blacks in Englewood triggered rumors that a home was being "sold to niggers," blacks (and whites thought to be sympathetic to them) were beaten in the streets. In 1951, thousands of whites in Cicero, 20 minutes or so west of downtown Chicago, attacked an apartment building that housed a single black family, throwing bricks and firebombs through the windows and setting the apartment on fire. A Cook County grand jury declined to charge the rioters-and instead indicted the family's NAACP attorney, the apartment's white owner, and the owner's attorney and rental agent, charging them with conspiring to lower property values. Two years after that, whites picketed and planted explosives in South Deering, about 30 minutes from downtown Chicago, to force blacks out.

When terrorism ultimately failed, white homeowners simply fled the neighborhood. The traditional terminology, white flight, implies a kind of natural expression of preference. In fact, white flight was a triumph of social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist presumptions of America's public and private sectors. For should any nonracist white families decide that integration might not be so bad as a matter of principle or practicality, they still had to contend with the hard facts of American housing policy: When the mid-20th-century white homeowner claimed that the presence of a Bill and Daisy Myers decreased his property value, he was not merely engaging in racist dogma-he was accurately observing the impact of federal policy on market prices. Redlining destroyed the possibility of investment wherever black people lived.

VII. "A Lot Of People Fell By The Way"

Speculators in North Lawndale, and at the edge of the black ghettos, knew there was money to be made off white panic. They resorted to "block-busting"-spooking whites into selling cheap before the neighborhood became black. They would hire a black woman to walk up and down the street with a stroller. Or they'd hire someone to call a number in the neighborhood looking for "Johnny Mae." Then they'd cajole whites into selling at low prices, informing them that the more blacks who moved in, the more the value of their homes would decline, so better to sell now. With these white-fled homes in hand, speculators then turned to the masses of black people who had streamed northward as part of the Great Migration, or who were desperate to escape the ghettos: the speculators would take the houses they'd just bought cheap through block-busting and sell them to blacks on contract.

To keep up with his payments and keep his heat on, Clyde Ross took a second job at the post office and then a third job delivering pizza. His wife took a job working at Marshall Field. He had to take some of his children out of private school. He was not able to be at home to supervise his children or help them with their homework. Money and time that Ross wanted to give his children went instead to enrich white speculators.

"The problem was the money," Ross told me. "Without the money, you can't move. You can't educate your kids. You can't give them the right kind of food. Can't make the house look good. They think this neighborhood is where they supposed to be. It changes their outlook. My kids were going to the best schools in this neighborhood, and I couldn't keep them in there."

Mattie Lewis came to Chicago from her native Alabama in the mid-'40s, when she was 21, persuaded by a friend who told her she could get a job as a hairdresser. Instead she was hired by Western Electric, where she worked for 41 years. I met Lewis in the home of her neighbor Ethel Weatherspoon. Both had owned homes in North Lawndale for more than 50 years. Both had bought their houses on contract. Both had been active with Clyde Ross in the Contract Buyers League's effort to garner restitution from contract sellers who'd operated in North Lawndale, banks who'd backed the scheme, and even the Federal Housing Administration. We were joined by Jack Macnamara, who'd been an organizing force in the Contract Buyers League when it was founded, in 1968. Our gathering had the feel of a reunion, because the writer James Alan McPherson had profiled the Contract Buyers League for The Atlantic back in 1972.

Weatherspoon bought her home in 1957. "Most of the whites started moving out," she told me. "'The blacks are coming. The blacks are coming.' They actually said that. They had signs up: Don't sell to blacks."

Before moving to North Lawndale, Lewis and her husband tried moving to Cicero after seeing a house advertised for sale there. "Sorry, I just sold it today," the Realtor told Lewis's husband. "I told him, 'You know they don't want you in Cicero,' " Lewis recalls. " 'They ain't going to let nobody black in Cicero.' "

In 1958, the couple bought a home in North Lawndale on contract. They were not blind to the unfairness. But Lewis, born in the teeth of Jim Crow, considered American piracy-black people keep on making it, white people keep on taking it-a fact of nature. "All I wanted was a house. And that was the only way I could get it. They weren't giving black people loans at that time," she said. "We thought, 'This is the way it is. We going to do it till we die, and they ain't never going to accept us. That's just the way it is.'

"The only way you were going to buy a home was to do it the way they wanted," she continued. "And I was determined to get me a house. If everybody else can have one, I want one too. I had worked for white people in the South. And I saw how these white people were living in the North and I thought, 'One day I'm going to live just like them.' I wanted cabinets and all these things these other people have."

White flight was not an accident-it was a triumph of racist social engineering.

Whenever she visited white co-workers at their homes, she saw the difference. "I could see we were just getting ripped off," she said. "I would see things and I would say, 'I'd like to do this at my house.' And they would say, 'Do it,' but I would think, 'I can't, because it costs us so much more.' "

I asked Lewis and Weatherspoon how they kept up on payments.

"You paid it and kept working," Lewis said of the contract. "When that payment came up, you knew you had to pay it."

"You cut down on the light bill. Cut down on your food bill," Weatherspoon interjected.

"You cut down on things for your child, that was the main thing," said Lewis. "My oldest wanted to be an artist and my other wanted to be a dancer and my other wanted to take music."

Lewis and Weatherspoon, like Ross, were able to keep their homes. The suit did not win them any remuneration. But it forced contract sellers to the table, where they allowed some members of the Contract Buyers League to move into regular mortgages or simply take over their houses outright. By then they'd been bilked for thousands. In talking with Lewis and Weatherspoon, I was seeing only part of the picture-the tiny minority who'd managed to hold on to their homes. But for all our exceptional ones, for every Barack and Michelle Obama, for every Ethel Weatherspoon or Clyde Ross, for every black survivor, there are so many thousands gone.

"A lot of people fell by the way," Lewis told me. "One woman asked me if I would keep all her china. She said, 'They ain't going to set you out.' "

VIII. "Negro Poverty is not White Poverty"

On a recent spring afternoon in North Lawndale, I visited Billy Lamar Brooks Sr. Brooks has been an activist since his youth in the Black Panther Party, when he aided the Contract Buyers League. I met him in his office at the Better Boys Foundation, a staple of North Lawndale whose mission is to direct local kids off the streets and into jobs and college. Brooks's work is personal. On June 14, 1991, his 19-year-old son, Billy Jr., was shot and killed. "These guys tried to stick him up," Brooks told me. "I suspect he could have been involved in some things ... He's always on my mind. Every day."

Brooks was not raised in the streets, though in such a neighborhood it is impossible to avoid the influence. "I was in church three or four times a week. That's where the girls were," he said, laughing. "The stark reality is still there. There's no shield from life. You got to go to school. I lived here. I went to Marshall High School. Over here were the Egyptian Cobras. Over there were the Vice Lords."

Brooks has since moved away from Chicago's West Side. But he is still working in North Lawndale. If "you got a nice house, you live in a nice neighborhood, then you are less prone to violence, because your space is not deprived," Brooks said. "You got a security point. You don't need no protection." But if "you grow up in a place like this, housing sucks. When they tore down the projects here, they left the high-rises and came to the neighborhood with that gang mentality. You don't have nothing, so you going to take something, even if it's not real. You don't have no street, but in your mind it's yours."

Video: The Guardian of North Lawndale

We walked over to a window behind his desk. A group of young black men were hanging out in front of a giant mural memorializing two black men: In Lovin Memory Quentin aka "Q," July 18, 1974 ❤ March 2, 2012. The name and face of the other man had been spray-painted over by a rival group. The men drank beer. Occasionally a car would cruise past, slow to a crawl, then stop. One of the men would approach the car and make an exchange, then the car would drive off. Brooks had known all of these young men as boys.

"That's their corner," he said.

We watched another car roll through, pause briefly, then drive off. "No respect, no shame," Brooks said. "That's what they do. From that alley to that corner. They don't go no farther than that. See the big brother there? He almost died a couple of years ago. The one drinking the beer back there ... I know all of them. And the reason they feel safe here is cause of this building, and because they too chickenshit to go anywhere. But that's their mentality. That's their block."

Brooks showed me a picture of a Little League team he had coached. He went down the row of kids, pointing out which ones were in jail, which ones were dead, and which ones were doing all right. And then he pointed out his son-"That's my boy, Billy," Brooks said. Then he wondered aloud if keeping his son with him while working in North Lawndale had hastened his death. "It's a definite connection, because he was part of what I did here. And I think maybe I shouldn't have exposed him. But then, I had to," he said, "because I wanted him with me."

From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder. Adhering to middle-class norms is what made Ethel Weatherspoon a lucrative target for rapacious speculators. Contract sellers did not target the very poor. They targeted black people who had worked hard enough to save a down payment and dreamed of the emblem of American citizenship-homeownership. It was not a tangle of pathology that put a target on Clyde Ross's back. It was not a culture of poverty that singled out Mattie Lewis for "the thrill of the chase and the kill." Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.
Is affirmative action meant to increase "diversity"? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people.
Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long tradition of this country actively punishing black success-and the elevation of that punishment, in the mid-20th century, to federal policy. President Lyndon Johnson may have noted in his historic civil-rights speech at Howard University in 1965 that "Negro poverty is not white poverty." But his advisers and their successors were, and still are, loath to craft any policy that recognizes the difference.

After his speech, Johnson convened a group of civil-rights leaders, including the esteemed A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, to address the "ancient brutality." In a strategy paper, they agreed with the president that "Negro poverty is a special, and particularly destructive, form of American poverty." But when it came to specifically addressing the "particularly destructive," Rustin's group demurred, preferring to advance programs that addressed "all the poor, black and white."

The urge to use the moral force of the black struggle to address broader inequalities originates in both compassion and pragmatism. But it makes for ambiguous policy. Affirmative action's precise aims, for instance, have always proved elusive. Is it meant to make amends for the crimes heaped upon black people? Not according to the Supreme Court. In its 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court rejected "societal discrimination" as "an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past." Is affirmative action meant to increase "diversity"? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people-the problem of what America has taken from them over several centuries.

This confusion about affirmative action's aims, along with our inability to face up to the particular history of white-imposed black disadvantage, dates back to the policy's origins. "There is no fixed and firm definition of affirmative action," an appointee in Johnson's Department of Labor declared. "Affirmative action is anything that you have to do to get results. But this does not necessarily include preferential treatment."

Yet America was built on the preferential treatment of white people-395 years of it. Vaguely endorsing a cuddly, feel-good diversity does very little to redress this.

Today, progressives are loath to invoke white supremacy as an explanation for anything. On a practical level, the hesitation comes from the dim view the Supreme Court has taken of the reforms of the 1960s. The Voting Rights Act has been gutted. The Fair Housing Act might well be next. Affirmative action is on its last legs. In substituting a broad class struggle for an anti-racist struggle, progressives hope to assemble a coalition by changing the subject.

The politics of racial evasion are seductive. But the record is mixed. Aid to Families With Dependent Children was originally written largely to exclude blacks-yet by the 1990s it was perceived as a giveaway to blacks. The Affordable Care Act makes no mention of race, but this did not keep Rush Limbaugh from denouncing it as reparations. Moreover, the act's expansion of Medicaid was effectively made optional, meaning that many poor blacks in the former Confederate states do not benefit from it. The Affordable Care Act, like Social Security, will eventually expand its reach to those left out; in the meantime, black people will be injured.

"All that it would take to sink a new WPA program would be some skillfully packaged footage of black men leaning on shovels smoking cigarettes," the sociologist Douglas S. Massey writes. "Papering over the issue of race makes for bad social theory, bad research, and bad public policy." To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the fact that closing the "achievement gap" will do nothing to close the "injury gap," in which black college graduates still suffer higher unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of getting hired as white applicants with criminal records.

Chicago, like the country at large, embraced policies that placed black America's most energetic, ambitious, and thrifty countrymen beyond the pale of society and marked them as rightful targets for legal theft. The effects reverberate beyond the families who were robbed to the community that beholds the spectacle. Don't just picture Clyde Ross working three jobs so he could hold on to his home. Think of his North Lawndale neighbors-their children, their nephews and nieces-and consider how watching this affects them. Imagine yourself as a young black child watching your elders play by all the rules only to have their possessions tossed out in the street and to have their most sacred possession-their home-taken from them.

The message the young black boy receives from his country, Billy Brooks says, is " 'You ain't shit. You not no good. The only thing you are worth is working for us. You will never own anything. You not going to get an education. We are sending your ass to the penitentiary.' They're telling you no matter how hard you struggle, no matter what you put down, you ain't shit. 'We're going to take what you got. You will never own anything, nigger.' "

IX. Toward A New Country

When Clyde Ross was a child, his older brother Winter had a seizure. He was picked up by the authorities and delivered to Parchman Farm, a 20,000-acre state prison in the Mississippi Delta region.

"He was a gentle person," Clyde Ross says of his brother. "You know, he was good to everybody. And he started having spells, and he couldn't control himself. And they had him picked up, because they thought he was dangerous."

Built at the turn of the century, Parchman was supposed to be a progressive and reformist response to the problem of "Negro crime." In fact it was the gulag of Mississippi, an object of terror to African Americans in the Delta. In the early years of the 20th century, Mississippi Governor James K. Vardaman used to amuse himself by releasing black convicts into the surrounding wilderness and hunting them down with bloodhounds. "Throughout the American South," writes David M. Oshinsky in his book Worse Than Slavery, "Parchman Farm is synonymous with punishment and brutality, as well it should be ... Parchman is the quintessential penal farm, the closest thing to slavery that survived the Civil War."

When the Ross family went to retrieve Winter, the authorities told them that Winter had died. When the Ross family asked for his body, the authorities at Parchman said they had buried him. The family never saw Winter's body.

And this was just one of their losses.

Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built. In the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued in The Case for Black Reparations that a rough price tag for reparations could be determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the population by the difference in white and black per capita income. That number-$34 billion in 1973, when Bittker wrote his book-could be added to a reparations program each year for a decade or two. Today Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.

To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America's origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.

Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country's shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap. Reparations would seek to close this chasm. But as surely as the creation of the wealth gap required the cooperation of every aspect of the society, bridging it will require the same.
When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags.
Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate-the kind that HR 40 proposes-we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion-and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper-America's heritage, history, and standing in the world.

The early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about "black pathology," the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America's relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer.

And this destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its bounty. These laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the federal government-through housing policies-engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags.

On some level, we have always grasped this.

"Negro poverty is not white poverty," President Johnson said in his historic civil-rights speech.

Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences-deep, corrosive, obstinate differences-radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past-at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge-that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.

And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations-by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences-is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is-the work of fallible humans.

Won't reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say-that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

What I'm talking about is more than recompense for past injustices-more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I'm talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling "patriotism" while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

X. "There Will Be No 'Reparations' From Germany"

We are not the first to be summoned to such a challenge.

In 1952, when West Germany began the process of making amends for the Holocaust, it did so under conditions that should be instructive to us. Resistance was violent. Very few Germans believed that Jews were entitled to anything. Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29 percent believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people.

"The rest," the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, Postwar, "were divided between those (some two-fifths of respondents) who thought that only people 'who really committed something' were responsible and should pay, and those (21 percent) who thought 'that the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich.' "

Germany's unwillingness to squarely face its history went beyond polls. Movies that suggested a societal responsibility for the Holocaust beyond Hitler were banned. "The German soldier fought bravely and honorably for his homeland," claimed President Eisenhower, endorsing the Teutonic national myth. Judt wrote, "Throughout the fifties West German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and properly punished."

Konrad Adenauer, the postwar German chancellor, was in favor of reparations, but his own party was divided, and he was able to get an agreement passed only with the votes of the Social Democratic opposition.
"If I could take German property without sitting down with them for even a minute but go in with jeeps and machine guns," said David Ben-Gurion, "I would do that."
Among the Jews of Israel, reparations provoked violent and venomous reactions ranging from denunciation to assassination plots. On January 7, 1952, as the Knesset-the Israeli parliament-convened to discuss the prospect of a reparations agreement with West Germany, Menachem Begin, the future prime minister of Israel, stood in front of a large crowd, inveighing against the country that had plundered the lives, labor, and property of his people. Begin claimed that all Germans were Nazis and guilty of murder. His condemnations then spread to his own young state. He urged the crowd to stop paying taxes and claimed that the nascent Israeli nation characterized the fight over whether or not to accept reparations as a "war to the death." When alerted that the police watching the gathering were carrying tear gas, allegedly of German manufacture, Begin yelled, "The same gases that asphyxiated our parents!"

Begin then led the crowd in an oath to never forget the victims of the Shoah, lest "my right hand lose its cunning" and "my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth." He took the crowd through the streets toward the Knesset. From the rooftops, police repelled the crowd with tear gas and smoke bombs. But the wind shifted, and the gas blew back toward the Knesset, billowing through windows shattered by rocks. In the chaos, Begin and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion exchanged insults. Two hundred civilians and 140 police officers were wounded. Nearly 400 people were arrested. Knesset business was halted.

Begin then addressed the chamber with a fiery speech condemning the actions the legislature was about to take. "Today you arrested hundreds," he said. "Tomorrow you may arrest thousands. No matter, they will go, they will sit in prison. We will sit there with them. If necessary, we will be killed with them. But there will be no 'reparations' from Germany."

Survivors of the Holocaust feared laundering the reputation of Germany with money, and mortgaging the memory of their dead. Beyond that, there was a taste for revenge. "My soul would be at rest if I knew there would be 6 million German dead to match the 6 million Jews," said Meir Dworzecki, who'd survived the concentration camps of Estonia.

Ben-Gurion countered this sentiment, not by repudiating vengeance but with cold calculation: "If I could take German property without sitting down with them for even a minute but go in with jeeps and machine guns to the warehouses and take it, I would do that-if, for instance, we had the ability to send a hundred divisions and tell them, 'Take it.' But we can't do that."

The reparations conversation set off a wave of bomb attempts by Israeli militants. One was aimed at the foreign ministry in Tel Aviv. Another was aimed at Chancellor Adenauer himself. And one was aimed at the port of Haifa, where the goods bought with reparations money were arriving. West Germany ultimately agreed to pay Israel 3.45 billion deutsche marks, or more than $7 billion in today's dollars. Individual reparations claims followed-for psychological trauma, for offense to Jewish honor, for halting law careers, for life insurance, for time spent in concentration camps. Seventeen percent of funds went toward purchasing ships. "By the end of 1961, these reparations vessels constituted two-thirds of the Israeli merchant fleet," writes the Israeli historian Tom Segev in his book The Seventh Million. "From 1953 to 1963, the reparations money funded about a third of the total investment in Israel's electrical system, which tripled its capacity, and nearly half the total investment in the railways."

Israel's GNP tripled during the 12 years of the agreement. The Bank of Israel attributed 15 percent of this growth, along with 45,000 jobs, to investments made with reparations money. But Segev argues that the impact went far beyond that. Reparations "had indisputable psychological and political importance," he writes.

Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany's reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name.

Assessing the reparations agreement, David Ben-Gurion said:

For the first time in the history of relations between people, a precedent has been created by which a great State, as a result of moral pressure alone, takes it upon itself to pay compensation to the victims of the government that preceded it. For the first time in the history of a people that has been persecuted, oppressed, plundered and despoiled for hundreds of years in the countries of Europe, a persecutor and despoiler has been obliged to return part of his spoils and has even undertaken to make collective reparation as partial compensation for material losses.

Something more than moral pressure calls America to reparations. We cannot escape our history. All of our solutions to the great problems of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are troubled by what must go unspoken. "The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now," Clyde Ross told me. "It's because of then." In the early 2000s, Charles Ogletree went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to meet with the survivors of the 1921 race riot that had devastated "Black Wall Street." The past was not the past to them. "It was amazing seeing these black women and men who were crippled, blind, in wheelchairs," Ogletree told me. "I had no idea who they were and why they wanted to see me. They said, 'We want you to represent us in this lawsuit.' "

A commission authorized by the Oklahoma legislature produced a report affirming that the riot, the knowledge of which had been suppressed for years, had happened. But the lawsuit ultimately failed, in 2004. Similar suits pushed against corporations such as Aetna (which insured slaves) and Lehman Brothers (whose co-founding partner owned them) also have thus far failed. These results are dispiriting, but the crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.

John Conyers's HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can't be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as-if not more than-the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America's maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.

In 2010, Jacob S. Rugh, then a doctoral candidate at Princeton, and the sociologist Douglas S. Massey published a study of the recent foreclosure crisis. Among its drivers, they found an old foe: segregation. Black home buyers-even after controlling for factors like creditworthiness-were still more likely than white home buyers to be steered toward subprime loans. Decades of racist housing policies by the American government, along with decades of racist housing practices by American businesses, had conspired to concentrate African Americans in the same neighborhoods. As in North Lawndale half a century earlier, these neighborhoods were filled with people who had been cut off from mainstream financial institutions. When subprime lenders went looking for prey, they found black people waiting like ducks in a pen.
"Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches."
"High levels of segregation create a natural market for subprime lending," Rugh and Massey write, "and cause riskier mortgages, and thus foreclosures, to accumulate disproportionately in racially segregated cities' minority neighborhoods."

Plunder in the past made plunder in the present efficient. The banks of America understood this. In 2005, Wells Fargo promoted a series of Wealth Building Strategies seminars. Dubbing itself "the nation's leading originator of home loans to ethnic minority customers," the bank enrolled black public figures in an ostensible effort to educate blacks on building "generational wealth." But the "wealth building" seminars were a front for wealth theft. In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself. According to The New York Times, affidavits found loan officers referring to their black customers as "mud people" and to their subprime products as "ghetto loans."

"We just went right after them," Beth Jacobson, a former Wells Fargo loan officer, told The Times. "Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans."

In 2011, Bank of America agreed to pay $355 million to settle charges of discrimination against its Countrywide unit. The following year, Wells Fargo settled its discrimination suit for more than $175 million. But the damage had been done. In 2009, half the properties in Baltimore whose owners had been granted loans by Wells Fargo between 2005 and 2008 were vacant; 71 percent of these properties were in predominantly black neighborhoods.
​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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products of many generations of privilege

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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

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MCPS checking in more on students, offering secure online platform to talk to counselors

After three Montgomery County Public Schools students died by suicide in two weeks, county officials pledged to "do a lot more" to provide mental health resources to children during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Montgomery County Council Member Gabe Albornoz said during a committee meeting Thursday that "three MCPS students have taken their lives" in two weeks, an unusual spike in deaths in the state's largest school system.

"I just wanted to acknowledge that and let everybody know there will be upcoming committee sessions, because we know the social-emotional impact of the pandemic, and what students are facing right now, is crushing," Albornoz said during the County Council meeting.

School district spokeswoman Gboyinde Onijala said in an interview that it is against MCPS policy to disclose the cause of death of students, but confirmed that three students have died in the past two weeks.

Two school district officials, who asked to not be identified, confirmed that the three students died by suicide. Two were middle school students and one was a high school student, officials said. They did not disclose which schools the students attended.

Administrators at both Thomas S. Wootton High School and Silver Spring International Middle School sent messages to community members this week announcing "unexpected" student deaths, but the messages do not say how the students died.

During a school board meeting Thursday afternoon, board member Rebecca Smondrowski said she was "very concerned about some losses we've experienced in the last week or two." She asked MCPS staff members what they are doing to provide mental health resources to students while they are not in school buildings, due to the coronavirus.

Staff members highlighted a new video series that addresses topics like stress management and feelings of isolation; check-in phone calls with students; and opportunities for students to meet virtually and discuss their feelings.

In an interview Thursday night, after the board meeting, member Jeanette Dixon said the three students' deaths are "really devastating."

Typically, students would gather to comfort each other and to attend funerals and memorials. But because there is still a ban on large gatherings due to the pandemic, Dixon said she worries about students grieving the death of a classmate.

"I really am worried about them," Dixon said, urging students to reach out to a friend or trusted adult if they are struggling. "We all have to take care of each other."

Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services spokeswoman Mary Anderson wrote in an email on Thursday afternoon that the county does not have data about how many residents have died by suicide so far in 2020 or in 2019.

In 2018, eight Montgomery County residents between 10 and 19 years old died by suicide, according to state data.

Federal data show teen suicide is on the rise.

In 2017, suicide was the second leading cause of death for people age 10 to 24, with about 11 of every 100,000 people in that group dying of self-inflicted wounds.

Between 2007 and 2017, the suicide rate for people 10 to 14 years old tripled, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The growth was even more pronounced for people 15 to 19 years old: The suicide rate increased 76%.

In recent years, MCPS has taken a more direct approach to addressing students' mental health.

The school district last year launched a new initiative, BeWell 365, that incorporates into the curriculum lessons about managing emotions, resolving conflicts and accessing resources for themselves or friends.

Many schools have incorporated "mindfulness" into their routines, which can include exercises like deep breathing and yoga to help regulate emotions.

Ruschelle Reuben, MCPS' associate superintendent in the Office of Student and Family Support and Engagement, said the school district has been "very thoughtful and intentional" in ensuring mental health services are available to students during the pandemic.

The district created secure Zoom channels so counselors and psychologists could have confidential meetings with students and sent messages to students explaining how they can alert authorities if they feel they are in an unsafe situation, Reuben said.

Students have had virtual "community circles" to discuss their emotions with each other. School staff members make phone calls to students and families they know need assistance. The school district set up a form to request services or help finding resources.

MCPS also launched a video series called Waymaking, led by Director of School Psychology Christina Conolly.

The videos are on YouTube and on the school district's website. They tackle topics like stress, feelings of isolation and suicidal ideation.

"My message to students is: You are not alone," Reuben said in an interview Thursday night. "Just reach out. You're just an email, a phone call, a text message away from people who care about you and your well-being."

Talking about wanting to die

Looking for a way to kill oneself

Talking about feeling hopeless or having no purpose

Talking about feeling trapped or in unbearable pain

Talking about being a burden to others

Increasing the use of alcohol or drugs

Acting anxious, agitated or recklessly

Sleeping too little or too much

Withdrawing or feeling isolated

Showing rage or talking about seeking revenge

Displaying extreme mood swings

If someone exhibits warning signs of suicide:

Do not leave the person alone

Remove any firearms, alcohol, drugs or sharp objects that could be used in a suicide attempt

Call the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 (TALK) or

Montgomery County 24 Hour Crisis Center at 240-777-4000

Take the person to an emergency room or seek help from medical or mental health professionals

Source: Reportingonsuicide.org; Montgomery County

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County leaders call for more mental health resources after three student suicides in two weeks

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After three Montgomery County Public Schools students died by suicide in two weeks, county officials pledged to "do a lot more" to provide mental health resources to children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Montgomery County Council Member Gabe Albornoz said during a committee meeting Thursday that "three MCPS students have taken their lives" in two weeks, an unusual spike in deaths in the state's largest school system.

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Just what is going on with white people? Police shootings of unarmed African Americans. Acts of domestic terrorism by white supremacists. The renewed embrace of raw, undisguised white-identity politics. Unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring. Some of this feels new, but in truth it's an old story.

Why? Where did the notion of "whiteness" come from? What does it mean? What is whiteness for?

Scene on Radio host and producer John Biewen took a deep dive into these questions, along with an array of leading scholars and regular guest Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika, in this fourteen-part documentary series, released between February and August 2017. The series editor is Loretta Williams.

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Just what is going on with white people? Police shootings of unarmed African Americans. Acts of domestic terrorism by white supremacists. The renewed embrace of raw, undisguised white-identity politics. Unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring. Some of this feels ne

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everyday antiracism: getting real about race in school

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anti-racism; diversity; education; educator resources; social justice; race politics; professional growth; k-12; college classroom; theories and applications; equity; pedagogy; dominant culture; poc; racism; teacher resources

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education / administration / school superintendents & principals

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education / educational policy & reform / general

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education/student life & student affairs

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educational equalization - united states

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education / administration / school superintendents & principals

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education / educational policy & reform / general

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education/student life & student affairs

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Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in School

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Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in School [Pollock, Mica] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in School

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Foreword by Terrence J. Roberts, PhD.

A Letter to Readers

Acknowledgments

An Introduction to Social Comprehension and Strategies to Prepare You for the Work Ahead
Chapter 1: Exploring Our Identities
Lesson: Affirming Our Identities: Identity Webs
We introduce the elements of our own identities (such as sister, athlete, bilingual, reader) and look for connections to or wonders about the identities of others.

Lesson: Placing Ourselves in the World: Stories of Our Names
Using a mentor text, we write the stories of how we got our names, how our names make us feel, and our experiences with our names.

Lesson: Journeying into Our Family Histories: "Where I'm From" Poems
We use the structure of a "Where I'm From" poem to share our family histories, storied objects, and moments.

Synthesis: Making Thinking Visible
Chapter 2: Listening with Love
Synthesis: Making Thinking Visible
Chapter 3: Being Candid
Lesson: Seeing Our Own Bias: Drawing Activity
We learn about how bias works, and we use an activity to help us see some of our own bias and brainstorm how we can confront it.

Lesson: Understanding Microaggressions: Poem Analysis
We analyze examples of microaggressions to understand what they are and how they affect people, and we look for microaggressions in our own lives.

Lesson: Refusing to Let Others' Biases Define Us: Identity Statements
We assert who we are with confidence. We recall labels others have tried to put on us, reject those labels, and choose how we define who we are.

Synthesis: Making Thinking Visible
Chapter 4: Becoming Better Informed
Lesson: Understanding How Our Identity Affects Us: Our News
We identify what is happening in our world-personal events, news stories, media-and consider how our identity shapes what we give our attention to.

Lesson: Moving Beyond Our Initial Thinking: Mini-Inquiries
We use a mini-inquiry to learn more about a topic and examine how new information changes our perspective.

Synthesis: Making Thinking Visible
Chapter 5: Finding Humanity in Ourselves and in Others
Lesson: Broadening Our Ideas About Who We Are Responsible To and For: Our Universe of Obligation
We consider who we feel responsibility to and why. We also consider how that responsibility can change in certain situations.

Lesson: Understanding Others' Perspectives: Intent Versus Impact
We work to understand two sides of a divisive issue by listening to both perspectives.
Chapter 6: Facing Crisis Together
Suggested Resource Stacks

References and Inspiration

This book is based on the idea that we can develop skills and habits to help us comprehend social issues and participate in relevant, transparent conversations. Social comprehension, like academic comprehension, is how we make meaning from and mediate our relationship with the world. We understand that the meaning making, or socialization, is learned, not inherited. Each chapter in this book includes lessons and/or practical help for students to learn and engage in a targeted social comprehension concept. Our thinking will change often as we practice being more socially literate citizens of the world, so we allow for and model the same for our students as we construct comprehension and cultivate our empathy together. The "At First I Thought . . . Now I Think" journal page in this introduction gives you and your students a tool to reflect on how the experiences in the lessons are affecting your outlook. In the work of social comprehension, we want to be as transparent as possible and make our thinking visible.

The final chapter of the book addresses how we, as educators, can continually refine our own approach to this work. If we are going to be on the front lines of helping children make sense of the news they bring to school and the curriculum the world keeps handing them, we must have a strong foundation of social comprehension in place. If we can commit to approaching this work as the lead learner, teaching with curiosity and modeling vulnerability rather than rigid certainty, we can build habitats of trust where kids (and adults) participate in a learning discussion, and where expression, identity, and social literacy matter.

- Introduction

A sense of urgency for pedagogy rooted in empathy and humanity is palpable in communities around the world. But how can teachers actualize such instruction and make it accessible to students? Where is the professional development teachers yearn for to facilitate important, and at times, challenging conversations? Being the Change is the resource every educator needs right now! Against a socio-politically charged backdrop where tensions run high, Sara is a beacon of light who offers practical, compassionate guidance that makes it possible to do the work of social comprehension. The journey to accomplishing this isn't linear; it is messy, tangled, circuitous. But Sara provides a pathway for teachers and our students. She offers a sustained, clear voice that reminds us of why this work is necessary and how it can look in our classrooms. Being the Change is invaluable to all educators as we work to empower our students as change-makers who positively influence the world.

- Sonja Cherry-Paul

****

Sara Ahmed is the ultimate upstander; she cares enough to confront. Her gentle and wise voice is a model for how to be in this tumultuous age. She shares text sets that ask big questions and resist simplistic answers. She invites teachers and students to address tensions in today's classrooms and examine bias in their thinking. Being the Change offers practical tools for building a classroom community that is inclusive, candid, and caring. This book is a treasure.

- Penny Kittle

****

What an incredibly powerful, practical, beautiful book. As I read I could not help but think how this book has the potential to radically change conversations in classrooms (and larger communities) around compassion, listening, empathy, and knowing. It is books like these that heal. It is hope and possibility and humanity within these covers.

Perhaps the greatest compliment I could give is that as I read, the teacher in me itched to get out of this room and into the presence of kids- to experience these lessons in real time, to hear children's stories, to dig into this work because for the first time I feel capable. This book is a roadmap with an entry point all of us can access and guidance through the most challenging places we could go. I don't feel afraid of what could happen, I feel energized about what Sara has taught me I can help happen.

I could not help but think of the million and one ways I could use Sara's thinking and teaching, to engage in this work whole heartedly from the moment children step through the doors.

- Kristi Mraz

****

In her book, Being the Change, Sara K. Ahmed offers us not only the roadmap of how to create and maintain components of meaningful social change within our instruction but also the necessary tools for us to navigate the hard conversations we invite in and those we have not had the courage to have...yet. By centering her book on developing the identity of the very children we teach, she gives us invaluable tools to navigate the hard topics that are constantly surrounding our learning community. While she writes in her book that there is no magical formula for making the world a better place, within the pages of this book and in her willingness to help us grow not just as educators but as human beings with her impactful lesson ideas, she has given us something near magic. A resource to be used in every school, this book will leave a trail of change for a better world in its wake if we let it.

- Pernille Ripp

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Being the Change is based on the idea that people can develop skills and habits to serve them in the comprehension of social issues. Sara K. Ahmed identifies

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Putting our best book forward

Each Great on Kindle book offers a great reading experience, at a better value than print to keep your wallet happy.

Explore your book, then jump right back to where you left off with Page Flip.

View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look.

Enjoy features only possible in digital - start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more.

Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration.

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the racial healing handbook: practical activities to help you challenge privilege

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and engage in collective healing (the social justice handbook series)

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social science / discrimination & race relations

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white privilege; microaggressions; allyship; empathic listening; assertiveness; identity politics; internalized oppression; trauma; exclusion; shame; guilt; white fragility; implicit bias; so you want to talk about race; new jim crow; whiteness; racial bias; white rage; white people racism; books on racism; social justice books for adults; one person no vote; white feminism; white supremacy; anti racism book; race relations; white frailty; dying of whiteness; white ally; racial oppression; racial divide; minority stress theory; conversations about race; biased; hidden prejudice

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social science / discrimination & race relations

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The Racial Healing Handbook: Practical Activities to Help You Challenge Privilege, Confront Systemic Racism, and Engage in Collective Healing (The Social Justice Handbook Series)

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The Racial Healing Handbook: Practical Activities to Help You Challenge Privilege, Confront Systemic Racism, and Engage in Collective Healing (The Social Justice Handbook Series) [Singh PhD LPC, Anneliese A., Wing Sue Ph.D., Derald, Wise, Tim] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers.

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Hosted by Brendan Penn, a black male elementary STEM teacher. Welcome to The PennTalk Podcast, a safe and open space for anyone who wants to share what is in their heart, on their mind, and desires to learn. Join us!

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Tweets by BmoreStandsUp

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While you might remember what happens at the end of all (or at least most of) the books you read, the exact words printed on the last page may not embed themselves in your brain quite so well.

To celebrate National Book Lovers Day on August 9, WordTips writer Sam Walker compiled a list of last lines from 19 beloved books of all eras. Without context, these final sentences don't give away much, if anything, about the plot, and many of them-like Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and F. Scott's Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby-are long-standing classics that hardly qualify for spoiler alerts anyway. That said, there are a few more recent novels on the list (Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower among them), so proceed with caution if you like to read your books from front to back.

1. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
"The eyes and faces all turned themselves towards me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room."
Sylvia Plath's only novel is technically fiction, but it's loosely based on her own experience as a "guest editor" at Mademoiselle.

2. The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne
"But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing."
A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh was based on a black bear cub named Winnipeg ("Winnie" for short), though the real Winnie was a female bear.

3. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
"So, if this does end up being my last letter, please believe that things are good with me, and even when they're not, they will be soon enough. And I will believe the same about you. Love always, Charlie."
As Stephen Chbosky's coming-of-age novel climbed the bestseller list in 1999, some people tried to have it banned for its frank discussion of things like homosexuality, sexual abuse, and substance abuse.

4. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."
Dickens's final line in A Tale of Two Cities might be better remembered if it weren't overshadowed by the book's opening quote: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ..."

5. Stardust by Neil Gaiman
"She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars."
Stardust isn't Neil Gaiman's most famous novel, but it did get the blockbuster treatment in 2007; the all-star cast included Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Claire Danes.

6. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
"I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before."
Before Huckleberry Finn got his own novel, he appeared in Tom Sawyer as the "juvenile pariah of the village."

7. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
"She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously."
Steinbeck was inspired to write this Dust Bowl epic after witnessing the poor living conditions at California's migrant labor camps.

8. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
"Oh, my girls, however long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this."
Louisa May Alcott was undeterred when fans begged her to have Jo marry Laurie. "I won't marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone," she wrote in her journal.

9. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
"But now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper."
Steven Spielberg bought the rights to Arthur Golden's bestselling novel, intending to direct the film, but passed it to Rob Marshall to free himself up for A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
"In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment."
Haruki Murakami's Yomiuri Prize-winning novel wasn't without critics. The New York Times review called it "fragmentary and chaotic."

11. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
"But I don't think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt."
Alice Walker's 1982 epistolary novel-meaning it was written in the form of letters-won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award, and has since been adapted for stage and screen.

12. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
"How wonderful the flavor, the aroma of her kitchen, her stories as she prepared the meal, her Christmas Rolls! I don't know why mine never turn out like hers, or why my tears flow so freely when I prepare them - perhaps I am as sensitive to onions as Tita, my great-aunt, who will go on living as long as there is someone who cooks her recipes."
Laura Esquivel's classic novel, rife with recipes and magical realism, proves that there's much more to cooking than simply getting food on the table.

13. The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway
"Up the road, in his shack, the old man was sleeping again. He was still sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old man was dreaming about the lions."
Coming off an unproductive decade, Ernest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea in 1952 to prove to critics that he wasn't washed up.

14. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
"Then starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat."
When Truman Capote traveled to Kansas to investigate the Clutter family murders for In Cold Blood, he was accompanied by his childhood friend and fellow author, Harper Lee.

15. On The Road by Jack Kerouac
"... I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."
Jack Kerouac drew inspiration for his 1957 novel from his own cross-country road trips, as well as from the experiences of fellow Beat writers like Neal Cassady.

16. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind
"When they finally did dare it, at first with stolen glances then candid ones, they had to smile. They were uncommonly proud. For the first time they had done something out of Love."
This bestselling German historical fantasy by Patrick Süskind follows a French orphan whose heightened sense of smell leads him into trouble.

17. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
"He turned out the light and went into Jem's room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning."
Harper Lee used Truman Capote in her work, too: Scout's neighbor, Dill, is based on him.

18. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Before landing on The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald experimented with many other titles, including: Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires; On the Road to West Egg; Under the Red, White, and Blue; and Gold-Hatted Gatsby and The High-Bouncing Lover.

19. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
"I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."
Since female writers were so heavily discriminated against in the mid-19th century, Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights under the alias "Ellis Bell."
This article contains affiliate links to products selected by our editors. Mental Floss may receive a commission for purchases made through these links.

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Systemic vs. Systematic : How to Use Each Word Correctly

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While you might remember what happens at the end of all (or at least most of) the books you read, the exact words printed on the last page may not embed themselves in your brain quite so well.

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For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education (Race, Education, and Democracy)

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For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education (Race, Education, and Democracy) [Emdin, Christopher] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and…

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Racial dynamics vary country to country. As a result, we believe that correcting racial disparities in each country requires a tailored approach. As a new group staffed by U.S.-based advocates with limited bandwidth and resources, we initially decided to focus our direct service efforts on elevating animal advocates of color in the U.S. However, the global response we received after the Caucus went live on July 23 was staggering.

Within the first 72 hours of the Caucus launch, we received many requests from people asking to join from all over the world. As of this writing, the Caucus has 66 sign ups with representation from 10 countries, including: Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, India, Mexico, Poland, South Africa, Spain and the U.S.

This excitement for the Caucus illustrates the undeniable need for a dedicated space for animal advocates of color to build community, share resources, advance their careers, and so much more. It also reminds us that we are in a global movement where coalitions are strengthening and where national borders do not determine place of work.

Before launching the Caucus we had several internal conversations about what we should name the space. We landed on "POC Caucus" because "POC" is widely used in the U.S.; it can be a powerful, prideful, and unifying term that captures the enormous strength we and our ancestors have cultivated to overcome various oppressions; and it allows us to stand together in solidarity.

However, as society advances so too does language. In the context of a global animal protection movement, we have determined that POC is not the best descriptor for the caucus.
An Evolution in Language
Some critique the term POC because it centers whiteness as the norm, with all others "of color." It can also fail to acknowledge the wide range of experiences felt by various communities, notably that Black and Indigenous folks are marginalized in unique ways. It may also imply that white folks are devoid of race, which is part of the ideology we are trying to overcome. Importantly, in an increasingly globalized movement and world, many people may not identify as POC as it's a U.S. social and cultural construct that does not translate universally.

There are still instances in which the term POC is appropriate and we will continue to use it in specific U.S. contexts. However, because of the reasons listed above, we are choosing to harness the globally inclusive spirit of a new term: People of the Global Majority.

The term People of the Global Majority has been adopted by many people to describe the majority of the world who consider themselves non-white. We like this phrase for our Caucus because as our movement (and society) are increasingly connecting globally we want to be clear that all people of the global majority are welcome in the Caucus. We also find it powerful to highlight that despite the fact that POC are still sometimes called "minorities" in the U.S., we are actually the majority of the global population. In addition, Tamanna Syed of Brandeis University points out that:
"The North American media tends to exclude Arabs, West Asians, Mediterraneans, South Asians, East Asians, [Latinx folks], Pacific Islanders, and Aboriginals from the term "people of color." ... The term "global majority" is empowering. It unites people from all corners of the world that are struggling against white oppression."
Many people who live in countries outside the U.S. have a hard time accepting and identifying with the binary options we in the U.S. have set forth: you are either white or POC. It reinforces an imperialist tendency to say that one needs to be born in the U.S. in order to be considered white, despite the fact that many white folks from other countries face cultural- and race-based prejudice, e.g. white Latinx folks living in the U.S..

To better describe the full range of people who are welcome in the Caucus and better serve the international animal advocacy community, we are changing our name to the Global Majority Caucus.

To be clear, the Caucus is for anyone who holds an animal rights ethic (working/engaging in the movement is not required) and who identifies as:

Mixed-race or multiracial

Person of color, including Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Islander folks

Person of the global majority

We are inspired by the global network of animal advocates and hope to better empower it with this clarity of vision and name. Stand with us in advocating for nonhuman animals and for racial equity within our movement. Sign up for the Global Majority Caucus today!

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Language Matters: POC Caucus Renamed Global Majority Caucus

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Before launching the Caucus, we had several internal conversations about what we should name the space. We landed on "POC Caucus" because "POC" is widely used in the U.S.; however, there are a number of critiques for this term that we believe apply to the caucus so we have determined that POC is not the best descriptor.

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Deep and complex image of black masculinity and boyhood in a children’s book by bell hooks.

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Bell Hooks was born Gloria Watkins on September 25, 1952. She grew up in a small Southern community that gave her a sense of belonging as well as a sense of racial separation. She has degrees from Stanford University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. She has served as a noted activist and social critic and has taught at numerous colleges. Hooks uses her great-grandmother's name to write under as a tribute to her ancestors. Hooks writes daring and controversial works that explore African-American female identities. In works such as Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism and Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, she points out how feminism works for and against black women. Oppressed since slavery, black women must overcome the dual odds of race and gender discrimination to come to terms with equality and self-worth.

Chris Raschka was born in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania on March 6, 1959. He received a B.A. from St. Olaf College in 1981. Before becoming a full-time author, he was an art teacher in St. Croix, Virgin Islands and a freelance artist, cartoonist, and editorial illustrator. He is an author and illustrator of children's books including Yo! Yes?, Charlie Parker Played Be Bop, and Mysterious Thelonious. Hello, Goodbye Window won the Caldecott Medal in 2006 and A Ball for Daisy won the Caldecott Medal in 2012.

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I be boy. All bliss boy. All fine beat. All beau boy. Beautiful. "This stunning volume celebrates all things boy." -Publishers Weekly, starred review Famed author bell hooks brings us a tight, exuberant story that captures the essence and energy of what it means to be a boy.

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A thread of podcasts since y’all dont wanna read:

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A thread of podcasts since y’all dont wanna read:
— Muted. Argue with yourself. (@___inCANdescent) June 17, 2020

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The Untold Story of Latinos in America "We are all Americans of the New World, and our most dangerous enemies are not each other, but the great wall of ignorance between us."

Juan González, Harvest of Empire

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The Untold Story of Latinos in America "We are all Americans of the New World, and our most dangerous enemies are not each other, but the great wall of ignorance between us." Juan González, Harvest of Empire

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A student at Lyons Community School in New York does an exercise before a student "circle."

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About 20 years ago, a group of educators launched one of the biggest recent experiments in American education when they started creating charter schools designed for poor, minority kids. The idea was to create classrooms that are rigorous and strict. We talk with a student named Rousseau Mieze, who grew up in a school like that and then became a teacher. (10 minutes)

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If you enjoyed this episode, you may like these How a stolen library book got one man into his dream school and changed his life forever. Or at least that's the story he tells himself. A story about someone who's desperately trying - against long odds - to make it to the United States and become an American.

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The boundary lines for 11 schools in the Catonsville area had to be redrawn to relieve overcrowding. But there was a chance to achieve something more, something that could help improve the lives of all children: integration.

Sanford, an African-American father of two boys, had volunteered to represent Johnnycake Elementary on the boundary committee that would recommend changes to the Baltimore County school board.

In an area where most schools had been segregated for decades, he knew the group might have to confront issues of race and class head on. But as they met for months over the fall of 2015, he was shocked at how quickly the conversation shifted to words that stung: concern about those kids and how they might affect our property values.

They were talking about the children he loved, their friends, his community.

So he bided his time through four meetings. Finally, on a cold night in November 2015, Sanford rose to speak. He was hurt, but he didn't yell.

"You are dividing races," he said, admonishing them in an almost gentle tone. "You're dividing everyone. That is not what we are here for.

"I am almost ashamed, but it had to be said. Do the right thing. It is about our children."

People of every race and class live in southwestern Baltimore County. But many have moved into neighborhoods - and sent their children to schools - with people who look like them.

To the south of U.S. 40 are the predominantly white communities that feed Hillcrest, Catonsville, Westchester and Westowne elementary schools. To the north are the largely black communities that feed Edmondson Heights and Johnnycake elementaries.

At the start of the redistricting process, county schools Superintendent Dallas Dance looked at the map and saw a rare opportunity: to better integrate students of different races and classes.

"When you have a diverse school population, all students thrive," Dance said, adding that not just low-income students of color benefit, but also affluent students. "When you have integrated schools, students have the opportunity to push each other."

Educators across the country are looking back to the successes that followed the Supreme Court's 1954 order to desegregate schools. In the 1970s and 1980s, when schools were the most integrated they would be, black students made stunning gains in national tests in reading and math. In some subjects, they cut the so-called achievement gap with white students in half - and white achievement did not suffer.

But after a backlash against busing in the 1970s, the courts backed away from requiring districts to integrate. In 2007, the Supreme Court struck down even voluntary school desegregation plans, making it illegal for schools to assign students based solely on race.

Schools have gradually resegregated, and progress in closing the achievement gap has mostly stalled. None of the efforts to shrink it - by setting higher standards, imposing more testing, holding teachers more accountable - have worked.

By 2014, even as the state's population grew more diverse, more than one-quarter of its public schools were highly segregated, according to the Maryland Equity Project at the University of Maryland.

Maryland was the third-most-segregated state in the nation for black students in 2014, the Civil Rights Project at the University of California at Los Angeles reported last year.

In those segregated schools, researchers say, students will often find themselves with less-experienced teachers in less-rigorous classes - and more likely to lag behind their peers.

"It was like, they were fighting to keep what they got, and we were fighting to keep what we got, instead of us fighting to figure out how to make what we had better."

School districts still have tools they can use to integrate, including creating magnet programs and charter schools, and redrawing school boundary lines. But small, voluntary steps like these in Maryland have proved almost impossible to execute.

Baltimore County - the largest school district in the region, with 112,000 students and an increasingly diverse population - could be a leader in integration. But at the time of the redistricting, there were six new members on the county school board and Dance's contract was up for renewal. He didn't feel that he could force the issue.

The school board, meanwhile, didn't make integration a priority, and there was no push from the community to take it on.

That meant the question of diversity was essentially turned over to the committee of about 45 people, most of them parents.

As the process unfolded, redrawing the boundary lines exposed fault lines between their communities.

"It was like, they were fighting to keep what they got, and we were fighting to keep what we got," Sanford said, "instead of us fighting to figure out how to make what we had better."

About this series

At a time when Maryland's population is growing more diverse, the schools are becoming more segregated. Baltimore Sun reporters Liz Bowie and Erica L. Green examined local attempts to better integrate schools by race and class. Along with photographer Lloyd Fox, they interviewed students, teachers, parents and researchers. The Sun also commissioned an analysis from the Maryland Equity Project at the University of Maryland to create a database that breaks down every public school's racial and socioeconomic makeup. This project was supported with a grant from the Education Writers Association, a professional organization of members of the media who cover education at all levels.

In Baltimore County, the emotionally charged exercise of redistricting will be repeated in coming years as a booming population has forced a massive building plan. Since 2011, when the total enrollment was roughly 105,000, about a thousand new students have been added each year. Officials plan to spend $1.3 billion for 15 new buildings, and renovations and additions to many deteriorating facilities.

Decisions about which schools get renovated or replaced involve a complex mix of factors, including the conditions of the buildings, anticipated growth, and to a certain extent, campaigning by parents and politicians. Many of the changes require new school boundaries.

While some districts rely on school administrators to draw the new lines, many others, including Baltimore County, use volunteers from the community. The county's policy calls for a committee made of teams of three or four people from each of the schools affected.

Led by a consultant, Matthew Cropper, the group was to scrutinize the map and divide blocks, streets and houses among the Catonsville-area schools. Cropper, who was paid roughly $61,700, according to the school system, ran the meetings, developed the maps and was to be a neutral third party.

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The board directed the committee to give preference to solutions that left communities intact and allowed children to walk to school. Members were also to consider diversity of the students.

One in five Baltimore County schools was highly segregated in 2014, according to the Maryland Equity Project. The percentage of such schools has grown over the past three decades.

Some districts make diversity a priority when redrawing school boundary lines, but they are the exception. The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank based in New York, has identified only 50 such districts in the nation. They include Montgomery County.

In Baltimore County, the current school board chair believes that the board and the superintendent have always placed an emphasis on ensuring that resources were evenly spread among schools.

"This board has had equity as a primary platform in our decision-making process," Edward Gilliss said. "I like to think that equity lens has carried through on these redistricting processes."

He said the board created a transparent redistricting process with substantial community input.

The night Sanford stood up to speak, the tensions in the cafeteria reflected the clashing perspectives of parents on either side of U.S. 40.

North of the highway are Johnnycake and Edmondson Heights elementary schools, with largely minority students from low-income families. Neither was scheduled to get a new building, but both were in need of work.

Johnnycake was 85 percent black and Hispanic. Three-quarters of its students received free or reduced-price lunches. Only a quarter of its fifth-graders were passing English and math tests.

The school had 105 more students than it had room for. Children learned in six trailers lined up next to the main building. Special-education students who needed small-group help met with teachers in a former supply room transformed into a mini-classroom. Students attended math class in the cafeteria.

OPEN GALLERY

Sanford thought that the portable classrooms were a safety risk and an eyesore in a community where he and others paid property taxes for their well-maintained, single-family homes.

He and other Johnnycake parents began the redistricting process thinking about how to improve student-teacher ratios and get the children out of the trailers and back into the main school building.

On the south side of Route 40 in Catonsville were four aging, crowded schools made up of predominantly white families whose PTAs had come together for years to fight for renovations and more space. These parents from Westchester, Hillcrest, Westowne and Catonsville elementaries had in many cases paid a premium for their houses so they could ensure that their children were in some of the best schools in the county.

Hillcrest, for example, is 68 percent white. A quarter of its students received subsidized lunches. About half of fifth-graders passed the English tests. Fifty-nine percent passed math.

Hillcrest parents loved that they could walk their children to school in a closely knit community. Construction had already begun on the new Catonsville and Westowne schools, and parents saw redistricting as the final step in their winning battle before they moved into the new buildings the next year.

Parents said they didn't want their children to have to cross busy U.S. 40 to go to school, or to be moved to schools they saw as inferior.

James Kitchel, a Hillcrest father, said he didn't expect when he walked into the cafeteria at Catonsville High School on a hot September night that he would be confronted with parents from many other schools. He and other parents thought it would just be their four schools redrawing a few lines.

Integration wasn't what they had fought for, or thought about.

'We're going to defend this spot'

When the consultant presented options for the new boundary lines in September, it didn't take long for feelings to get raw.

Video of the meetings was posted on a website. Parents and others could comment on the site's public email forum, where comments could be read by anyone. Those emails - in the end, the printout totaled 145 pages - quickly became a barometer of the parents' perspectives.

By the end of September, proposals that moved students from more affluent, white neighborhoods north across U.S. 40 and into Johnnycake and Edmondson Heights caused a storm of protest.

"You are potentially causing our property values in Academy Heights to plummet!" one parent wrote in an email. "This is unacceptable Baltimore County. ... Are you punishing Westowne families for wanting a better school? You should be ashamed of yourselves. ... Keep Catonsville in Catonsville. Bring affluent families to Westowne."

Another parent wrote: "If my child has to cross Route 40 to attend school next year, she will be going to a private school . ... The parents at Westowne have worked hard over the last few years to improve the environment of our school and to have to give that up to attend a lower ranking school is unacceptable."

"I felt as though we didn't live on that side of Catonsville, so they didn't want us on that side of Catonsville."

The retorts from the parents on the other side of U.S. 40 poured in.

"Wow! Hope my Ed Heights child doesn't ruin yours," one mother wrote on a Facebook post. "How exactly do you quantify a 'lower standard of education'? Perhaps the almighty rating will rise if more involved parents became a part of the school community, but the 'Catonsville' parents need to stop talking about this issue as if we are some disease to be avoided."

Johnnycake representative Obi Linton, the father of three children in the school, has lived in Catonsville for 19 years. He didn't expect that reaction from a community that he knew as warm and friendly at the farmers' market, the annual holiday parade and the tree-lighting ceremony.

Sanford was disturbed. He saw the language, looked at his 11-year old twin sons and thought how little had changed since Jim Crow.

"Is this what they have to deal with?" he thought. "This ain't the '40s and '50s."

From the moment the consultant, Cropper, presented the oversized maps outlining options, Sanford said, it became clear that working for the good of all children wasn't the primary goal.

Economic and racial composition of Maryland public schools

Maryland is an economically and racially diverse state. But that diversity is not always reflected in the composition of its public schools. Twenty-eight percent of Maryland schools are considered racially isolated - more than 90 percent of their students are of the same race. In 23 percent of schools, more than 75 percent of students come from low-income families.

Minority student population

Free & reduced lunch students

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data. Data analysis by the Maryland Equity Project, College of Education, University of Maryland.

For a fullscreen, interactive version, click here.

"Everybody started picking spots on the map," he said. "And they were like, 'We're going to defend this spot.'"

Sanford noticed that parents at some schools, such as Johnnycake, kept to themselves as other schools were joining together to get what they wanted. He said they played numbers games, to make sure that schools were full enough with families from certain neighborhoods that they didn't have to take others.

The process took on the tone of a political campaign, with Hillcrest parents putting signs in their yards and even passing out cookies in the shape of the letter option they wanted at one of the evening meetings.

"I felt as though we didn't live on that side of Catonsville," he said. "So they didn't want us on that side of Catonsville."

Everyone knew what he meant. U.S. 40, which runs from east to west across Maryland, had long divided the county. During the civil rights movement, Freedom Riders marched along the thoroughfare to protest hotels and other businesses that refused to serve blacks.

Today, houses south of U.S. 40 in the Catonsville area sell for tens of thousands of dollars more than homes north of U.S. 40. And the code phrase for those who are open-minded is that they are the kind of people who will cross Route 40 to go shopping and eat out.

At one meeting, Stephen Price, principal of Lansdowne Elementary School, urged others to think beyond the road as a racial dividing line.

"There is overcrowding above Route 40, and we have to address it," Price said. "It is a road. It is not a wall.

"We have to have a conversation."

Dance, the superintendent, knew that integrating the schools would be tough. Growing up, he'd attended largely segregated schools in Richmond, Va. He wanted better for the 112,000 students in the school system he was leading. He believed that all children benefited when they were in classes that reflected a range of races, cultures, and socio-economic backgrounds.

He felt he had no true power to force integration, and no mandate from his bosses on the school board to do so. But he was hoping he could encourage it. He knew of its power to change lives, proved in a stack of research.

That research included a study of students in Montgomery County.

The 2010 study tracked students in public housing after their families were randomly assigned to higher-income neighborhoods through a housing voucher. Five to seven years later, those students significantly outperformed their peers, who had been left behind in public housing.

By the end of elementary school, the children who had moved out had already cut their achievement gap in half in math and by a third in reading.

Particularly striking was that the county was pouring additional money into its highest-poverty schools at the time, but integration had a greater impact on student achievement than the extra resources.

Another decades-long research study published in 2015 by Rucker C. Johnson of UC-Berkeley showed that blacks who attended desegregated schools were less likely to go to jail, more likely to graduate and more likely to pursue higher education. The researchers found that integration also had long-term effects on subsequent generations, making it more likely that their children would graduate from college, get good jobs and be healthier.

With integration, achievement gap shrinks

After the nation's schools were desegregated, black achievement rose dramatically on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. By 1988, at the point the schools were most integrated, the gap between white and black achievement was smallest. Then schools began to resegregate, and progress stalled. Today, the gap is still significant.

Average reading score for 17-year olds

Average math score for 17-year olds

*In 2004, the format of the assesment changed.
Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics

Researchers and educators say the effect of integration isn't magic. Rather, they believe that middle-class parents bring resources and social capital to the schools. By advocating for smaller class sizes and more rigorous academics for their own children, they can help improve conditions for all children.

There is also evidence that all children - including white children - gain from learning in a setting with children of different races and backgrounds.

"They benefit socially and emotionally being around diverse populations," Dance said. "They understand how to communicate. They understand how to collaborate more."

Parents were debating school boundary lines as the county population was not only growing, but becoming more diverse. Twenty-five years ago, Baltimore County was 77 percent white. Today it's 43 percent white.

Still, segregation persists. In 1990, only one in 10 county schools had a student body that was more than half minority. The proportion has tripled to about one in three today, according to the Maryland Equity Project analysis.

Minority students in Maryland are more likely to attend school with minority students. White students are more likely to attend schools with white students. If schools were integrated, as research has shown benefits all students, the demographics of the schools would match the demographics of people living in the school district.

Select a school district to see how segregated your district is.

SELECT DISTRICT

If you are a black student in Maryland this is .

This is the racial makeup of an average school in Maryland .

Depending on your race, the makeup of your school is likely to be different.

SELECT RACE

Poor students in Maryland are more likely to attend school with other poor students, just as middle-income and affluent students are more likely to be in schools with others of that socioeconomic background. If schools were integrated by income, as research shows helps all students, the demographics of the schools would match the demographics of the people living in that school district.

Select a school district to see how segregated your district is.

SELECT DISTRICT

If you in , this is socioeconomic makeup of the school you are likely to attend.
This is the socioeconomic makeup of the average school in .

Depending on your economic level, the makeup of your school is likely to be different.

SELECT SOCIOECONOMIC BACKGROUND

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data. Data analysis by the Maryland Equity Project, College of Education, University of Maryland.

The typical white student in Baltimore County attends a school that is mostly white. The typical black student attends a school that is mostly black.

Students from low-income families are similarly segregated from students from wealthy families.

As the income gap in the country grows, researchers say, the achievement gap between poor and affluent students is also widening - and more rapidly than the gap between black and white students.

Dance believes integration could boost black achievement for less money than is currently being spent. The federal government sends roughly $40 million in Title I funds to Baltimore County to help the poorest, most segregated schools. He doesn't believe as much money would be needed if schools were better integrated.

Halfway through the redistricting process, one of the committee members, Cara Detwiler, a white teacher at Johnnycake, saw that none of the options relieved her school's overcrowding. Alternatives that would have moved Johnnycake students south to largely white schools below U.S. 40 had been rejected, as had options that would have brought other students north.

"It was easier for me than it would have been if I was black. I didn't have to worry about being the angry, black woman. Instead, I was just the naggy white woman. And that's different."

At the committee's October meeting, the fifth-grade teacher took the microphone.

"No one is talking about the fact that there is no diversity change north," she said, adding that the school would remain 94 percent minority.

Detwiler, a native of Catonsville, didn't expect enthusiasm for integration, but she hoped parents and teachers on the boundary committee might at least have a conversation about it. As a white teacher, she was aware that she was in a unique position to force such a discussion.

"It was easier for me than it would have been if I was black," Detwiler said. "I didn't have to worry about being the angry, black woman. Instead, I was just the naggy white woman. And that's different."

For years, the Title I label - stamped on schools with predominantly poor students - hung over Johnnycake like "a black cloud," Principal Bre-Anne Fortkamp said. It carried the same stigma as the words "inner city," a place stereotyped as poor, chaotic - inferior.

Fortkamp, who is white, knew that the test scores at her school were lower than those at schools on the other side of U.S. 40. But she had attended some of the best schools in Baltimore County herself - Riderwood Elementary, Dumbarton Middle and Towson High School - and had tested horribly. She believed that "kids are not test scores."

As a principal, she took pride in other numbers - such as the more than 95 percent of families who responded on end-of-year surveys that they felt welcomed at the school and believed their children were getting a good education.

"All the same reasons people are afraid to go into neighborhoods were the same reasons people didn't want Johnnycake. And it was very black and white."

As much as they didn't want to believe it, parents and staff who represented Johnnycake in the redistricting discussions had no doubt that their school was confronting racism.

"All the same reasons people are afraid to go into neighborhoods were the same reasons people didn't want Johnnycake," Fortkamp said. "And it was very black and white."

The Johnnycake children did have struggles, said Gary Budd, a fourth-grade teacher. Some had lost family members to violence. Some had to wake up early to feed younger siblings and were cranky from lack of sleep.

But Budd, who is white, said he could relate.

"These are good kids who might have had some rough times in their lives," he said. "We all have a common denominator: life."

That was most clear to Sanford, who felt he had much in common with the parents from south of U.S. 40 who wanted their children to have the best educational advantages. He moved to his neighborhood for a better life, and Johnnycake was a part of that. He believed his twin boys had received an excellent education there, which had helped them gain admission into a competitive middle school.

He felt he played as much a role in his children's education as their teachers. There were homework checks every day, pop quizzes ahead of vocabulary tests, and his children weren't allowed to bring home Cs.

He could have spent more money on a bigger house on the other side of U.S. 40, he said, but he chose his smaller, ranch-style home so it would be easy to take care of when he got older.

He had his sons' academic careers planned out, all the way through college.

"I want them to do better than me", said Sanford, who drives a tractor trailer for the U.S. Postal Service. "I tell my sons, 'I expect nothing but greatness from you.'

"I think anybody who loves and cares about their kids holds them to that standard."

Yet now he stood listening to other parents, and what he heard them saying was that he wasn't good enough, that his standards for his children were inferior.

"All they saw was a black man whose kids go to Johnnycake," he said. "They thought, 'You're black, I'm white, I can do things you can't do.' Maybe - but your kids can't do things my kids can. I would put my two kids up against anybody on that side of 40."

Sanford felt it as a blow to his entire community. The redistricting process had shown Sanford and his fellow parents that their children - the ones they saw as smart and full of potential - were seen only as liabilities.

Meanwhile, parents and faculty at the Catonsville schools south of U.S. 40 were feeling frustrated that the tightly controlled committee meetings didn't allow for discussion or horse-trading. Kitchel, the Hillcrest father, and parents from other mostly white schools had been meeting for years before the redistricting process. Now they decided to get together independently.

One night they went to Matthew's 1600, a local restaurant, to try to hammer out a compromise among themselves over their shared boundary lines.

When the consultant found out, he shut them down. He said he didn't want them to work outside of the committee.

Many of the parents who spoke out at the meetings and online expressed concern about their children crossing U.S. 40.

They said they didn't intend to hurt the people on the other side of the highway. For them, it wasn't about race, or even class. Instead, they said they wanted to protect the high standards of their schools and give their children the best chance for a good education.

In interviews, parents said they offered to embrace some of Johnnycake's students, as long as the balance of their schools did not shift so that the majority were students of color or came from low-income families.

Some research suggests that once a school has more than 40 percent of its students living in poverty, achievement starts to drop off.

"Honestly, it is hard to hold it against parents," said Erica Mah, an Asian-American Hillcrest parent. "They are looking at what is going to happen to my child, and not the greater good."

Parents said they feared their children's education would suffer if students weren't being pushed to perform at the highest levels.

"Honestly, it is hard to hold it against parents. They are looking at what is going to happen to my child, and not the greater good."

The parents' worries were not baseless. The highest-performing schools are usually those with the wealthiest families. The percentage of Hillcrest fifth-graders who passed state standardized tests in 2016 in English and math was double that at Johnnycake. And the Hillcrest families were wealthier.

Parents at Westowne said in interviews that their school was a model for integration. About half of its students were black and Latino, and 46 percent qualified for a free or reduced-price meal. But when the idea of moving half of Westowne's students out was floated as an option, parents fought back.

PTA president Justine Stull, who is white, said she had moved to her neighborhood in part because she believed her children would benefit from the diversity. But she worried that adding more minority children could tip the balance in her kids' classrooms, burdening them with students who needed extra help.

"There is an overlap between race, poverty and childhood trauma," she said. "They have learning issues that lead to behavioral struggles, behavioral needs."

She was concerned about the impact of other students' behavior on her own children's learning.

"We don't want to talk about these things," Stull said. "They are too hard."

OPEN GALLERY

Race wasn't the only issue. Class divisions emerged as well. Kitchel, who had long advocated for solutions to overcrowding at Hillcrest, had collaborated with parents from the other Catonsville-area schools - Westchester, Westowne and Catonsville - for years. But now they were fighting about how many students Hillcrest would unload to the others.

A vocal group of parents didn't want their children to go to Catonsville Elementary School because they worried it could set them on a path to Arbutus Middle School. Arbutus is largely white, but it is poorer than Catonsville, and the parents didn't want their children to be in a school with a large low-income population.

With all the disagreement among the four Catonsville schools, Kitchel felt that bringing in the other schools was just confusing the process.

"You had way too many schools involved chasing too few new seats involved," he said. The new schools just couldn't take that many students from Johnnycake before they would be overcrowded again.

Donna Knutson, a black Hillcrest parent, said most parents were going to buy a house in the best neighborhood they could.

Still, she said, "You can put it as a financial issue so you don't have to talk about it as a racial issue and a social issue. It is a really good argument to disguise other issues."

At a certain point in the process, she said, it became clear that the parents were not going to discuss diversity. She said everyone retreated to their safe places.

"It was every man for himself."

In November, the consultant presented a new option. It would have integrated the schools, but it was a radical redrawing of all of the boundaries. Where earlier proposals would have required a few hundred students to change schools, the new plan, known as Option J, would have moved 2,100.

Given the large number of students that would have been affected, it was clearly just a theoretical exercise. It was quickly voted down.

But Detwiler, the teacher, upset that they'd never discussed diversity, didn't let the moment go. A video of the meeting shows her taking the microphone.

"It is a real disappointment that we weren't brave enough to have the conversation about this earlier," she told fellow committee members. "Wouldn't it have been important to have gone to public discussion, so that people couldn't hide behind property values as the reason why they don't want to really integrate their schools?"

There was no response.

This was the meeting in which Sanford stood to admonish parents about their language. He said he believed all the parents were in the room for their children, but that no one was thinking of the community as a whole.

He got applause, but neither his nor Detwiler's words would affect the outcome.

After the meeting, Detwiler sat in her car and cried.

OPEN GALLERY

"I was just so frustrated," she said later. She was angry that the wider world would so easily dismiss the Johnnycake students - kids she knew had big plans and goals.

"They have some inkling that there are things working against them," she said. "But they don't know how deeply set that is."

Detwiler decided to tell her fifth-graders about the redistricting process. She showed them an online survey designed to solicit final input on the new boundary maps for Catonsville.

The 10- and 11-year-olds knew their school needed more space. They spoke of how the cafeteria line was too long, and their art teacher needed her own classroom.

She told them that there had been a process that would have helped with those issues, but that some people didn't want their kids to come to Johnnycake, or Johnnycake kids to go to their schools. She explained that people didn't want their kids to travel farther to a school that was rated lower than the one they went to now.

"No, it's because we're black."

She was referring to Greatschools.com, a website with school reviews and rankings that is widely consulted by parents and real estate agents. The site had rated Johnnycake a 3 out of 10.

The kids were indignant. They could not understand how their hard work - the musicals, the after-school clubs, their essays and research - added up to a 3.

Detwiler said one fifth-grader stopped the discussion to explain what the issue was.

"No," he said. "It's because we're black."

School pulls out of process

Johnnycake representatives said any students they sent to Hillcrest would have received a good education.

But they were more worried about whether their kids, who were used to being greeted with a hug every day at Johnnycake, would feel welcome at a less diverse school south of U.S. 40.

They were offered an option in which 50 of Johnnycake's 597 children would move to a mostly white school. But with such a small number, parents said, their children would just be tokens. Their committee representatives rejected it.

In December, the Johnnycake representatives pulled their school out of the process. They said they didn't want any of their children moved.

Looking back, the Johnnycake principal said, she was naive about the opposition that the idea of integration would spark.

"I was not prepared for that," Fortkamp said. "Maybe, shame on me. As a parent, I understand that they felt they had their child's best interest. I just didn't think it would get so ugly.

"We decided we'd rather stay overcrowded - and have them be loved."

Change won't happen 'overnight'

Detwiler kept thinking someone would step in to help make things right: that Dance would get involved, or the school district's Office of Equity and Cultural Proficiency.

Dance said that if he had tried to force integration, the school board would have fired him. The work had to come from the parents and community.

"What I have to remind myself is that the problem didn't happen overnight and without some type of transformational change, it is not going to change overnight either," Dance said. "If you want something drastic to happen now, it is going to take court action. There is not enough political will to do it."

School districts that have voluntarily integrated their schools have done so, Dance said, when a county government or school board set a new policy that explicitly called for increasing diversity, and then set up a strategy to carry it out.

Baltimore County has never taken that step because no political pressure has been put on leaders to do so.

Integration wasn't even on the school board's agenda.

"I don't believe the board aggressively considered making schools more diverse as a significant factor in the final outcome," said Michael Collins, a board member during the redistricting process.

Collins doesn't remember a single discussion about integration in his five and a half years on the board. He said the board didn't see integration as an objective because they believed their schools already offered equal access to good teachers and curriculum.

Collins doesn't believe Dance would ever have been fired if he forced the issue. "We might have said Dallas this is not going to work, but we wouldn't have said go find another job," Collins said.

Hillcrest parent Donna Knutson said forced integration would have led people to sell houses and move, just as in the desegregation period decades ago. She and other parents thought more could have been done to make integration work. But they believed it needed to be a separate conversation.

Join the conversation

As a follow-up to the series, The Sun, Maryland Humanities and Loyola University of Maryland's Center for Innovation in Urban Education will be hosting a community dialogue about the path forward for school integration.

The forum will be held Wednesday, March 29 from 6:30 - 8 p.m. at Loyola University. For more information and to RSVP go to www.loyola.edu/join-us/bridging-divide.

The forum is funded through a grant from the Education Writers Association.

We'd also like to hear about your experiences. Share your thoughts here.

Preston Smith, a Kansas City demographer who helps districts redraw school boundaries, said a growing number of school boards are taking control of the process back from the community. They are drafting the lines themselves, and then asking for community input.

Nicholas Stewart, the school board member who represented the southwest county, suggested the board could change the charge to the boundary committees. Rather than being told to "maintain" diversity, he said, volunteers could be told to "increase" it.

Sanford, of Johnnycake, thinks the adults missed something.

During the meetings, when adults were inside the cafeteria debating, their children - kids of different races and economic backgrounds, kids who didn't know each other - were playing together outside. His sons had so much fun, he said, that they asked to go to every meeting, so they could keep playing with the kids from Catonsville and other schools south of 40.

"Our kids are good enough to play together, but they can't learn together?" Sanford said. "We can't see what they see."

The committee settled on a plan. They would move 346 of the 5,900 students. By the time the new boundaries are phased in, Hillcrest will have moved 87 students to Westchester and Catonsville schools.

The plan didn't move enough students to solve the problem of overcrowding at Hillcrest or Johnnycake. Meanwhile, a beautiful new building, Catonsville Elementary, still has space, as does Westchester.

The Baltimore County school board took up the recommendation in March, six months after the committee began meeting.

The vote was unanimous: The board approved the plan. The racial and socioeconomic makeup of the 11 schools changed little.

There was little mention of Johnnycake, and none of integration.

Contact Liz Bowie at liz.bowie@baltsun.com
Contact Erica L. Green at erica.green@baltsun.com

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The boundary lines for 11 schools in the Catonsville area had to be redrawn to relieve overcrowding. But there was a chance to achieve something more, something that could help improve the lives of all children: integration.

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In February of 2019, a positive behavior support coach who was employed by the district in Madison, Wis., allegedly physically assaulted and ripped the hair out of the head of an 11-year-old Black girl. In the same school district, several teachers and substitutes have been fired or resigned earlier this academic year after reports they used racial slurs in the classroom. In the neighboring school district of Middleton, Wis., a school bus driver was fired after the district confirmed he had slapped a Black child. All these incidents in Wisconsin happened within months of each other.

In Binghamton, N.Y., four 12-year-old Black girls reported they were strip-searched at their school for acting too hyper and giddy in January. School officials likely assumed the girls were on drugs because their Black joy was unrecognizable. Of course, no drugs were found and the district denies strip searching the girls. However, the district does admit that asking students to remove some of their clothing is in compliance with a "sobriety check". The girls' parents dispute the district's claims, and a civil lawsuit from the parents and a third-party investigation are still ongoing.

Last Halloween, 14 staff members at Middleton Heights Elementary, 30 miles west of Boise, Idaho, were involved in dressing up as Mexicans and the border wall for Halloween. The district's superintendent issued a public apology and placed the teachers on paid administrative leave.

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"Teachers, We Cannot Go Back to the Way Things Were

"White Teachers Need Anti-Racist Therapy"

"Dear White Teachers: You Can't Love Your Black Students If You Don't Know Them"

"'Grit Is in Our DNA': Why Teaching Grit Is Inherently Anti-Black"

Sadly, incidents like these fill my social-media timeline on a weekly basis. With regularity, school districts' spokespersons portray these incidents as isolated events, the work of a few overzealous, culturally insensitive but "good" teachers. These responses never acknowledge how racism is systemic, institutionalized, and structural, or how racism breeds and is maintained by violence.

Physical and psychological attacks on Black and Brown children's bodies and culture are more than just racist acts by misguided school educators; they are the spirit murdering of Black and Brown children. This type of violence toward children of color is less visceral and seemingly less tragic than physical acts of murder at the hands of White mobs and White self-appointed vigilantes, the shooting of unarmed people of color by police officers in their own homes and communities, or the senseless violence in some Black communities, which are all conditions of racism.

What I am talking about is a slow death, a death of the spirit, a death that is built on racism and intended to reduce, humiliate, and destroy people of color.

Legal scholar Patricia Williams coined the term "spirit murdering" to argue that racism is more than just physical pain; racism robs people of color of their humanity and dignity and leaves personal, psychological, and spiritual injuries. Racism is traumatic because it is a loss of protection, safety, nurturance, and acceptance-all things children need to enter school and learn.

The spirit murdering of Black and Brown children leaves a trail of unanswered questions: How do children learn after being physically assaulted or racially insulted by a person who is supposed to protect them, love them, and teach them? How does a Black or Brown child live, learn, and grow when her spirit is under attack at school, and her body is in danger inside the classroom? How does a parent grapple with this reality? How are children's imagination and humanity stunted by the notion that they are never safe in their schools because of the color of their skin or the God they pray to? Where does the soul go to heal when school is a place of trauma?

School officials continue to misdiagnose the spirit murdering happening in their schools every day, even in a time when folks are screaming in the streets that Black Lives Matter, demanding immigration rights, calling to end police brutality, standing up to Islamophobia and transphobia, and demanding racial justice. When schools mirror our society's hate, educational justice becomes out of our reach.

Related Video

In 2016, Bettina L. Love, the author of this Commentary, spoke to Education Week about African-American girls and discipline. Here's what she had to say:

Bettina L. Love is an associate professor of educational theory and practice at the University of Georgia. She is an author, most recently of We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom (Beacon Press, 2019). This is the third in a series of essays she is writing about race in America for Education Week.

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How Schools Are 'Spirit Murdering' Black and Brown Students

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In February of 2019, a positive behavior support coach who was employed by the district in Madison, Wis., allegedly physically assaulted and ripped the hair out of the head of an 11-year-old Black girl. In the same school district, several teachers and substitutes have been fired or resigned earlier this academic year after reports they used racial slurs in the classroom.

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The Most Searched: A Celebration of Black History Makers

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Modified Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were.

This essay has been kicking around in my head for years now and I've never felt confident enough to write it. It's a time in my life I'm ashamed of. It's a time that I hurt people and, through inaction, allowed others to be hurt. It's a time that I acted as a violent agent of capitalism and white supremacy. Under the guise of public safety, I personally ruined people's lives but in so doing, made the public no safer... so did the family members and close friends of mine who also bore the badge alongside me.

But enough is enough.

The reforms aren't working. Incrementalism isn't happening. Unarmed Black, indigenous, and people of color are being killed by cops in the streets and the police are savagely attacking the people protesting these murders.

American policing is a thick blue tumor strangling the life from our communities and if you don't believe it when the poor and the marginalized say it, if you don't believe it when you see cops across the country shooting journalists with less-lethal bullets and caustic chemicals, maybe you'll believe it when you hear it straight from the pig's mouth.

WHY AM I WRITING THIS
As someone who went through the training, hiring, and socialization of a career in law enforcement, I wanted to give a first-hand account of why I believe police officers are the way they are. Not to excuse their behavior, but to explain it and to indict the structures that perpetuate it.

I believe that if everyone understood how we're trained and brought up in the profession, it would inform the demands our communities should be making of a new way of community safety. If I tell you how we were made, I hope it will empower you to unmake us.

One of the other reasons I've struggled to write this essay is that I don't want to center the conversation on myself and my big salty boo-hoo feelings about my bad choices. It's a toxic white impulse to see atrocities and think "How can I make this about me?" So, I hope you'll take me at my word that this account isn't meant to highlight me, but rather the hundred thousand of me in every city in the country. It's about the structure that made me (that I chose to pollute myself with) and it's my meager contribution to the cause of radical justice.

YES, ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS
I was a police officer in a major metropolitan area in California with a predominantly poor, non-white population (with a large proportion of first-generation immigrants). One night during briefing, our watch commander told us that the city council had requested a new zero tolerance policy. Against murderers, drug dealers, or child predators?

No, against homeless people collecting cans from recycling bins.

See, the city had some kickback deal with the waste management company where waste management got paid by the government for our expected tonnage of recycling. When homeless people "stole" that recycling from the waste management company, they were putting that cheaper contract in peril. So, we were to arrest as many recyclers as we could find.

Even for me, this was a stupid policy and I promptly blew Sarge off. But a few hours later, Sarge called me over to assist him. He was detaining a 70 year old immigrant who spoke no English, who he'd seen picking a coke can out of a trash bin. He ordered me to arrest her for stealing trash. I said, "Sarge, c'mon, she's an old lady." He said, "I don't give a shit. Hook her up, that's an order." And... I did. She cried the entire way to the station and all through the booking process. I couldn't even comfort her because I didn't speak Spanish. I felt disgusting but I was ordered to make this arrest and I wasn't willing to lose my job for her.

If you're tempted to feel sympathy for me, don't. I used to happily hassle the homeless under other circumstances. I researched obscure penal codes so I could arrest people in homeless encampments for lesser known crimes like "remaining too close to railroad property" (369i of the California Penal Code). I used to call it "planting warrant seeds" since I knew they wouldn't make their court dates and we could arrest them again and again for warrant violations.

We used to have informal contests for who could cite or arrest someone for the weirdest law. DUI on a bicycle, non-regulation number of brooms on your tow truck (27700(a)(1) of the California Vehicle Code)... shit like that. For me, police work was a logic puzzle for arresting people, regardless of their actual threat to the community. As ashamed as I am to admit it, it needs to be said: stripping people of their freedom felt like a game to me for many years.

I know what you're going to ask: did I ever plant drugs? Did I ever plant a gun on someone? Did I ever make a false arrest or file a false report? Believe it or not, the answer is no. Cheating was no fun, I liked to get my stats the "legitimate" way. But I knew officers who kept a little baggie of whatever or maybe a pocket knife that was a little too big in their war bags (yeah, we called our dufflebags "war bags"...). Did I ever tell anybody about it? No I did not. Did I ever confess my suspicions when cocaine suddenly showed up in a gang member's jacket? No I did not.

In fact, let me tell you about an extremely formative experience: in my police academy class, we had a clique of around six trainees who routinely bullied and harassed other students: intentionally scuffing another trainee's shoes to get them in trouble during inspection, sexually harassing female trainees, cracking racist jokes, and so on. Every quarter, we were to write anonymous evaluations of our squadmates. I wrote scathing accounts of their behavior, thinking I was helping keep bad apples out of law enforcement and believing I would be protected. Instead, the academy staff read my complaints to them out loud and outed me to them and never punished them, causing me to get harassed for the rest of my academy class. That's how I learned that even police leadership hates rats. That's why no one is "changing things from the inside." They can't, the structure won't allow it.

And that's the point of what I'm telling you. Whether you were my sergeant, legally harassing an old woman, me, legally harassing our residents, my fellow trainees bullying the rest of us, or "the bad apples" illegally harassing "shitbags", we were all in it together. I knew cops that pulled women over to flirt with them. I knew cops who would pepper spray sleeping bags so that homeless people would have to throw them away. I knew cops that intentionally provoked anger in suspects so they could claim they were assaulted. I was particularly good at winding people up verbally until they lashed out so I could fight them. Nobody spoke out. Nobody stood up. Nobody betrayed the code.

None of us protected the people (you) from bad cops.

This is why "All cops are bastards." Even your uncle, even your cousin, even your mom, even your brother, even your best friend, even your spouse, even me. Because even if they wouldn't Do The Thing themselves, they will almost never rat out another officer who Does The Thing, much less stop it from happening.

BASTARD 101
I could write an entire book of the awful things I've done, seen done, and heard others bragging about doing. But, to me, the bigger question is "How did it get this way?". While I was a police officer in a city 30 miles from where I lived, many of my fellow officers were from the community and treated their neighbors just as badly as I did. While every cop's individual biases come into play, it's the profession itself that is toxic, and it starts from day 1 of training.

Every police academy is different but all of them share certain features: taught by old cops, run like a paramilitary bootcamp, strong emphasis on protecting yourself more than anyone else. The majority of my time in the academy was spent doing aggressive physical training and watching video after video after video of police officers being murdered on duty.

I want to highlight this: nearly everyone coming into law enforcement is bombarded with dash cam footage of police officers being ambushed and killed. Over and over and over. Colorless VHS mortality plays, cops screaming for help over their radios, their bodies going limp as a pair of tail lights speed away into a grainy black horizon. In my case, with commentary from an old racist cop who used to brag about assaulting Black Panthers.

To understand why all cops are bastards, you need to understand one of the things almost every training officer told me when it came to using force:

"I'd rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6."

Meaning, "I'll take my chances in court rather than risk getting hurt". We're able to think that way because police unions are extremely overpowered and because of the generous concept of Qualified Immunity, a legal theory which says a cop generally can't be held personally liable for mistakes they make doing their job in an official capacity.

When you look at the actions of the officers who killed George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, David McAtee, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, or Freddie Gray, remember that they, like me, were trained to recite "I'd rather be judged by 12" as a mantra. Even if Mistakes Were Made™, the city (meaning the taxpayers, meaning you) pays the settlement, not the officer.

Once police training has - through repetition, indoctrination, and violent spectacle - promised officers that everyone in the world is out to kill them, the next lesson is that your partners are the only people protecting you. Occasionally, this is even true: I've had encounters turn on me rapidly to the point I legitimately thought I was going to die, only to have other officers come and turn the tables.

One of the most important thought leaders in law enforcement is Col. Dave Grossman, a "killologist" who wrote an essay called "Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs". Cops are the sheepdogs, bad guys are the wolves, and the citizens are the sheep (!). Col. Grossman makes sure to mention that to a stupid sheep, sheepdogs look more like wolves than sheep, and that's why they dislike you.

This "they hate you for protecting them and only I love you, only I can protect you" tactic is familiar to students of abuse. It's what abusers do to coerce their victims into isolation, pulling them away from friends and family and ensnaring them in the abuser's toxic web. Law enforcement does this too, pitting the officer against civilians. "They don't understand what you do, they don't respect your sacrifice, they just want to get away with crimes. You're only safe with us."

I think the Wolves vs. Sheepdogs dynamic is one of the most important elements as to why officers behave the way they do. Every single second of my training, I was told that criminals were not a legitimate part of their community, that they were individual bad actors, and that their bad actions were solely the result of their inherent criminality. Any concept of systemic trauma, generational poverty, or white supremacist oppression was either never mentioned or simply dismissed. After all, most people don't steal, so anyone who does isn't "most people," right? To us, anyone committing a crime deserved anything that happened to them because they broke the "social contract." And yet, it was never even a question as to whether the power structure above them was honoring any sort of contract back.

Understand: Police officers are part of the state monopoly on violence and all police training reinforces this monopoly as a cornerstone of police work, a source of honor and pride. Many cops fantasize about getting to kill someone in the line of duty, egged on by others that have. One of my training officers told me about the time he shot and killed a mentally ill homeless man wielding a big stick. He bragged that he "slept like a baby" that night. Official training teaches you how to be violent effectively and when you're legally allowed to deploy that violence, but "unofficial training" teaches you to desire violence, to expand the breadth of your violence without getting caught, and to erode your own compassion for desperate people so you can justify punitive violence against them.

HOW TO BE A BASTARD
I have participated in some of these activities personally, others are ones I either witnessed personally or heard officers brag about openly. Very, very occasionally, I knew an officer who was disciplined or fired for one of these things.

Police officers will lie about the law, about what's illegal, or about what they can legally do to you in order to manipulate you into doing what they want.

Police officers will lie about feeling afraid for their life to justify a use of force after the fact.

Police officers will lie and tell you they'll file a police report just to get you off their back.

Police officers will lie that your cooperation will "look good for you" in court, or that they will "put in a good word for you with the DA." The police will never help you look good in court.

Police officers will lie about what they see and hear to access private property to conduct unlawful searches.

Police officers will lie and say your friend already ratted you out, so you might as well rat them back out. This is almost never true.

Police officers will lie and say you're not in trouble in order to get you to exit a location or otherwise make an arrest more convenient for them.

Police officers will lie and say that they won't arrest you if you'll just "be honest with them" so they know what really happened.

Police officers will lie about their ability to seize the property of friends and family members to coerce a confession.

Police officers will write obviously bullshit tickets so that they get time-and-a-half overtime fighting them in court.

Police officers will search places and containers you didn't consent to and later claim they were open or "smelled like marijuana".

Police officers will threaten you with a more serious crime they can't prove in order to convince you to confess to the lesser crime they really want you for.

Police officers will employ zero tolerance on races and ethnicities they dislike and show favor and lenience to members of their own group.

Police officers will use intentionally extra-painful maneuvers and holds during an arrest to provoke "resistance" so they can further assault the suspect.

Some police officers will plant drugs and weapons on you, sometimes to teach you a lesson, sometimes if they kill you somewhere away from public view.

Some police officers will assault you to intimidate you and threaten to arrest you if you tell anyone.

A non-trivial number of police officers will steal from your house or vehicle during a search.

A non-trivial number of police officers commit intimate partner violence and use their status to get away with it.

A non-trivial number of police officers use their position to entice, coerce, or force sexual favors from vulnerable people.

If you take nothing else away from this essay, I want you to tattoo this onto your brain forever: if a police officer is telling you something, it is probably a lie designed to gain your compliance.

Do not talk to cops and never, ever believe them. Do not "try to be helpful" with cops. Do not assume they are trying to catch someone else instead of you. Do not assume what they are doing is "important" or even legal. Under no circumstances assume any police officer is acting in good faith.

Also, and this is important, do not talk to cops.

I just remembered something, do not talk to cops.

Checking my notes real quick, something jumped out at me:

Do

not

fucking

talk

to

cops.

Ever.

Say, "I don't answer questions," and ask if you're free to leave; if so, leave. If not, tell them you want your lawyer and that, per the Supreme Court, they must terminate questioning. If they don't, file a complaint and collect some badges for your mantle.

DO THE BASTARDS EVER HELP?
Reading the above, you may be tempted to ask whether cops ever do anything good. And the answer is, sure, sometimes. In fact, most officers I worked with thought they were usually helping the helpless and protecting the safety of innocent people.

During my tenure in law enforcement, I protected women from domestic abusers, arrested cold-blooded murderers and child molesters, and comforted families who lost children to car accidents and other tragedies. I helped connect struggling people in my community with local resources for food, shelter, and counseling. I deescalated situations that could have turned violent and talked a lot of people down from making the biggest mistake of their lives. I worked with plenty of officers who were individually kind, bought food for homeless residents, or otherwise showed care for their community.

The question is this: did I need a gun and sweeping police powers to help the average person on the average night? The answer is no. When I was doing my best work as a cop, I was doing mediocre work as a therapist or a social worker. My good deeds were listening to people failed by the system and trying to unite them with any crumbs of resources the structure was currently denying them.

It's also important to note that well over 90% of the calls for service I handled were reactive, showing up well after a crime had taken place. We would arrive, take a statement, collect evidence (if any), file the report, and onto the next caper. Most "active" crimes we stopped were someone harmless possessing or selling a small amount of drugs. Very, very rarely would we stop something dangerous in progress or stop something from happening entirely. The closest we could usually get was seeing someone running away from the scene of a crime, but the damage was still done.

And consider this: my job as a police officer required me to be a marriage counselor, a mental health crisis professional, a conflict negotiator, a social worker, a child advocate, a traffic safety expert, a sexual assault specialist, and, every once in awhile, a public safety officer authorized to use force, all after only a 1000 hours of training at a police academy. Does the person we send to catch a robber also need to be the person we send to interview a rape victim or document a fender bender? Should one profession be expected to do all that important community care (with very little training) all at the same time?

To put this another way: I made double the salary most social workers made to do a fraction of what they could do to mitigate the causes of crimes and desperation. I can count very few times my monopoly on state violence actually made our citizens safer, and even then, it's hard to say better-funded social safety nets and dozens of other community care specialists wouldn't have prevented a problem before it started.

Armed, indoctrinated (and dare I say, traumatized) cops do not make you safer; community mutual aid networks who can unite other people with the resources they need to stay fed, clothed, and housed make you safer. I really want to hammer this home: every cop in your neighborhood is damaged by their training, emboldened by their immunity, and they have a gun and the ability to take your life with near-impunity. This does not make you safer, even if you're white.

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE A BASTARD?
So what do we do about it? Even though I'm an expert on bastardism, I am not a public policy expert nor an expert in organizing a post-police society. So, before I give some suggestions, let me tell you what probably won't solve the problem of bastard cops:

Increased "bias" training. A quarterly or even monthly training session is not capable of covering over years of trauma-based camaraderie in police forces. I can tell you from experience, we don't take it seriously, the proctors let us cheat on whatever "tests" there are, and we all made fun of it later over coffee.

Tougher laws. I hope you understand by now, cops do not follow the law and will not hold each other accountable to the law. Tougher laws are all the more reason to circle the wagons and protect your brothers and sisters.

More community policing programs. Yes, there is a marginal effect when a few cops get to know members of the community, but look at the protests of 2020: many of the cops pepper-spraying journalists were probably the nice school cop a month ago.

Police officers do not protect and serve people, they protect and serve the status quo, "polite society", and private property. Using the incremental mechanisms of the status quo will never reform the police because the status quo relies on police violence to exist. Capitalism requires a permanent underclass to exploit for cheap labor and it requires the cops to bring that underclass to heel.

Instead of wasting time with minor tweaks, I recommend exploring the following ideas:

No more qualified immunity. Police officers should be personally liable for all decisions they make in the line of duty.

No more civil asset forfeiture. Did you know that every year, citizens like you lose more cash and property to unaccountable civil asset forfeiture than to all burglaries combined? The police can steal your stuff without charging you with a crime and it makes some police departments very rich.

Break the power of police unions. Police unions make it nearly impossible to fire bad cops and incentivize protecting them to protect the power of the union. A police union is not a labor union; police officers are powerful state agents, not exploited workers.

Require malpractice insurance. Doctors must pay for insurance in case they botch a surgery, police officers should do the same for botching a police raid or other use of force. If human decency won't motivate police to respect human life, perhaps hitting their wallet might.

Defund, demilitarize, and disarm cops. Thousands of police departments own assault rifles, armored personnel carriers, and stuff you'd see in a warzone. Police officers have grants and huge budgets to spend on guns, ammo, body armor, and combat training. 99% of calls for service require no armed response, yet when all you have is a gun, every problem feels like target practice. Cities are not safer when unaccountable bullies have a monopoly on state violence and the equipment to execute that monopoly.

One final idea: consider abolishing the police.

I know what you're thinking, "What? We need the police! They protect us!" As someone who did it for nearly a decade, I need you to understand that by and large, police protection is marginal, incidental. It's an illusion created by decades of copaganda designed to fool you into thinking these brave men and women are holding back the barbarians at the gates.

I alluded to this above: the vast majority of calls for service I handled were theft reports, burglary reports, domestic arguments that hadn't escalated into violence, loud parties, (houseless) people loitering, traffic collisions, very minor drug possession, and arguments between neighbors. Mostly the mundane ups and downs of life in the community, with little inherent danger. And, like I mentioned, the vast majority of crimes I responded to (even violent ones) had already happened; my unaccountable license to kill was irrelevant.

What I mainly provided was an "objective" third party with the authority to document property damage, ask people to chill out or disperse, or counsel people not to beat each other up. A trained counselor or conflict resolution specialist would be ten times more effective than someone with a gun strapped to his hip wondering if anyone would try to kill him when he showed up. There are many models for community safety that can be explored if we get away from the idea that the only way to be safe is to have a man with a M4 rifle prowling your neighborhood ready at a moment's notice to write down your name and birthday after you've been robbed and beaten.

You might be asking, "What about the armed robbers, the gangsters, the drug dealers, the serial killers?" And yes, in the city I worked, I regularly broke up gang parties, found gang members carrying guns, and handled homicides. I've seen some tragic things, from a reformed gangster shot in the head with his brains oozing out to a fifteen year old boy taking his last breath in his screaming mother's arms thanks to a gang member's bullet. I know the wages of violence.

This is where we have to have the courage to ask: why do people rob? Why do they join gangs? Why do they get addicted to drugs or sell them? It's not because they are inherently evil. I submit to you that these are the results of living in a capitalist system that grinds people down and denies them housing, medical care, human dignity, and a say in their government. These are the results of white supremacy pushing people to the margins, excluding them, disrespecting them, and treating their bodies as disposable.

Equally important to remember: disabled and mentally ill people are frequently killed by police officers not trained to recognize and react to disabilities or mental health crises. Some of the people we picture as "violent offenders" are often people struggling with untreated mental illness, often due to economic hardships. Very frequently, the officers sent to "protect the community" escalate this crisis and ultimately wound or kill the person. Your community was not made safer by police violence; a sick member of your community was killed because it was cheaper than treating them. Are you extremely confident you'll never get sick one day too?

Wrestle with this for a minute: if all of someone's material needs were met and all the members of their community were fed, clothed, housed, and dignified, why would they need to join a gang? Why would they need to risk their lives selling drugs or breaking into buildings? If mental healthcare was free and was not stigmatized, how many lives would that save?

Would there still be a few bad actors in the world? Sure, probably. What's my solution for them, you're no doubt asking. I'll tell you what: generational poverty, food insecurity, houselessness, and for-profit medical care are all problems that can be solved in our lifetimes by rejecting the dehumanizing meat grinder of capitalism and white supremacy. Once that's done, we can work on the edge cases together, with clearer hearts not clouded by a corrupt system.

Police abolition is closely related to the idea of prison abolition and the entire concept of banishing the carceral state, meaning, creating a society focused on reconciliation and restorative justice instead of punishment, pain, and suffering - a system that sees people in crisis as humans, not monsters. People who want to abolish the police typically also want to abolish prisons, and the same questions get asked: "What about the bad guys? Where do we put them?" I bring this up because abolitionists don't want to simply replace cops with armed social workers or prisons with casual detention centers full of puffy leather couches and Playstations. We imagine a world not divided into good guys and bad guys, but rather a world where people's needs are met and those in crisis receive care, not dehumanization.

Here's legendary activist and thinker Angela Y. Davis putting it better than I ever could:

"An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment-demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance."

( Are Prisons Obsolete, pg. 107)

I'm not telling you I have the blueprint for a beautiful new world. What I'm telling you is that the system we have right now is broken beyond repair and that it's time to consider new ways of doing community together. Those new ways need to be negotiated by members of those communities, particularly Black, indigenous, disabled, houseless, and citizens of color historically shoved into the margins of society. Instead of letting Fox News fill your head with nightmares about Hispanic gangs, ask the Hispanic community what they need to thrive. Instead of letting racist politicians scaremonger about pro-Black demonstrators, ask the Black community what they need to meet the needs of the most vulnerable. If you truly desire safety, ask not what your most vulnerable can do for the community, ask what the community can do for the most vulnerable.

A WORLD WITH FEWER BASTARDS IS POSSIBLE
If you take only one thing away from this essay, I hope it's this: do not talk to cops. But if you only take two things away, I hope the second one is that it's possible to imagine a different world where unarmed black people, indigenous people, poor people, disabled people, and people of color are not routinely gunned down by unaccountable police officers. It doesn't have to be this way. Yes, this requires a leap of faith into community models that might feel unfamiliar, but I ask you:

When you see a man dying in the street begging for breath, don't you want to leap away from that world?

When you see a mother or a daughter shot to death sleeping in their beds, don't you want to leap away from that world?

When you see a twelve year old boy executed in a public park for the crime of playing with a toy, jesus fucking christ, can you really just stand there and think "This is normal"?

And to any cops who made it this far down, is this really the world you want to live in? Aren't you tired of the trauma? Aren't you tired of the soul sickness inherent to the badge? Aren't you tired of looking the other way when your partners break the law? Are you really willing to kill the next George Floyd, the next Breonna Taylor, the next Tamir Rice? How confident are you that your next use of force will be something you're proud of? I'm writing this for you too: it's wrong what our training did to us, it's wrong that they hardened our hearts to our communities, and it's wrong to pretend this is normal.

Look, I wouldn't have been able to hear any of this for much of my life. You reading this now may not be able to hear this yet either. But do me this one favor: just think about it. Just turn it over in your mind for a couple minutes. "Yes, And" me for a minute. Look around you and think about the kind of world you want to live in. Is it one where an all-powerful stranger with a gun keeps you and your neighbors in line with the fear of death, or can you picture a world where, as a community, we embrace our most vulnerable, meet their needs, heal their wounds, honor their dignity, and make them family instead of desperate outsiders?

If you take only three things away from this essay, I hope the third is this: you and your community don't need bastards to thrive.

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I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were. This essay has been kicking around in my head for years now and I've never felt confident enough to write it. It's a time in my life I'm ashamed of.

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"Would some communities be safer without police? That's the question at the heart of Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?, a collection of essays and reportage penned by some of Truthout's most compelling and enlightened thinkers-including #BlackLivesMatter co-founder Alicia Garza. With heartbreaking, glass-sharp prose, the book catalogs the abuse and destruction of black, native, and trans bodies. And then, most importantly, it offers real-world solutions."
-Chicago Review of Books

"A must-read for anyone seeking to understand American culture in the present day."
-Xica Nation

" Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is an urgently necessary book, one that deepens and complicates thinking around police violence without waiting for a fresh on-camera brutality to restart the national conversation."

"This brilliant collection of essays, written by activists, journalists, community organizers and survivors of state violence, urgently confronts the criminalization, police violence and anti-Black racism that is plaguing urban communities. It is one of the most important books to emerge about these critical issues: passionately written with a keen eye towards building a world free of the cruelty and violence of the carceral state."
-Beth Richie, author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation

" Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is a powerful collection of essays by organizers, legal activists and progressive journalists that take us beyond the 'few bad apples' theory of police violence, insisting that we interrogate the essential role and purpose of police and policing in our society. These writers have highlighted some of the critical questions that the anti-state violence movement is wrestling with."
-Barbara Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision

"This timely and essential set of essays written by activists, organizers and journalists offers a window into our particular historical moment centered on an ongoing struggle against state violence. As a long-time organizer immersed in the current Movement for Black Lives, I read the contributions hoping to learn and to be inspired. I found the essays to be informative, illuminating and challenging. The book covers topics ranging from police torture and the fight for accountability to how we might best engage in transformative organizing that could lead to a word without police. I cannot recommend this anthology any more highly. It's an indispensable primer for anyone who wants to understand the current rebellions and uprisings against police impunity."
-Mariame Kaba, founder and director of Project NIA

" Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is an extraordinary collection of writings by activists living and working at the epicenter of police violence and the anti-Blackness and structural racism so foundational to U.S. systems of policing. Simultaneously enraging, invigorating, radically imaginative, practical, and inspiring, this essential book relocates justice in accountable social, economic, and cultural relationships, pointing the way toward foundational transformation rather than cosmetic reform."
-Kay Whitlock, co-author of Considering Hate and Queer (In)Justice

"America is at war, and the violence that propels that war is largely directed at people of color, especially Black youth. One instance of such a war is evident in the violence by the police against Black communities, the criminalization of everyday behavior, the assaults on Black bodies, and the ever growing incarceration state. Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? addresses this violence in a way no other book has done in the last forty years. It reveals the underlying causes, economic and ideological, that drive such violence so as to provide a comprehensive understanding of its roots, its multiple layers, history, and different forms while at the same time it offers a discourse of critical engagement and transformation in order to address it. Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is an invaluable resource for asking questions about the emergence of racist violence and state terrorism as a defining principle of everyday life and how they can be addressed. Everyone who cares about justice and democracy and a future in which they mutually inform each other should read this book."
-Henry Giroux, author of Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle

"We know the names: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, Laquan McDonald. And we've seen the uprisings: L.A., Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago. Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? goes behind the headlines to ask the deeper questions: Do the police make communities (particularly, communities where Black and Brown people live) safer? Who do community residents fear? Are there ways to address those fears without the police and carceral state? What would we have to create in order to do this? What steps must we take to get there? Each of the essays examines these inter-related questions in depth. Read together, they provide an extremely thorough, and timely, examination of the issues underlying these recent events, forcing us to rethink the very idea of justice in this country."
-Alan Mills, Uptown People's Law Center

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"Would some communities be safer without police? That's the question at the heart of Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?, a collection of essays and reportage penned by some of Truthout's most compelling and enlightened thinkers-including #BlackLivesMatter co-founder Alicia Garza.

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Are you racist? 'No' isn't a good enough answer - Marlon James | Comment is Free

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What White Colleagues Need to Understand

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White supremacy doesn't stop at the teachers' lounge door.

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Until recently, Read Across America Day was-in everything but title-National Dr. Seuss Day. It's even celebrated on March 2, his birthday. If you're like me, you remember teachers wearing the iconic Cat in the Hat top hat/tie combo. You might recall school librarians or administrators dressing up as Thing One and Thing Two or a school lunch when Green Eggs and Ham were served. This is America, and it's probably not much of a stretch to guess that you probably have a favorite Dr. Seuss book (mine is probably Hop on Pop).

You may have noticed that Read Across America has looked a little different for the last few years. Rather than exclusively celebrate the works of Dr. Seuss, as it had done since 1998, in 2017 the NEA shifted its focus to "Celebrating a Nation of Diverse Readers." They began prominently featuring titles focused on diverse American experiences.

This year, Read Across America Day was preceded by the publication of a new study. Researchers Katie Ishizuka and Ramón Stephens examined 50 children's books and 2,200 characters created over Theodore Seuss Geisel's nearly 70-year career "to evaluate the claims that his children's books are anti-racist." Their findings were shocking.

I get it. You grew up on Dr. Seuss. I did too! It's probably safe to assume that most people did and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But we have to recognize that two things can be true at the same time:

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Until recently, Read Across America Day was-in everything but title-National Dr. Seuss Day. It's even celebrated on March 2, his birthday. If you're like me, you remember teachers wearing the iconic Cat in the Hat top hat/tie combo.