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These are resources curated by the Duxbury Free Library about anti-racism, anti-oppression, privilege, and equity.

Resources for parents = pink
Resources on history = blue
General resources = white

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a collection of videos for the Growing Together anti-oppression initiative at the Duxbury Free Library

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Growing Together podcast playlist on Spotify

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Growing Together podcast playlist on Spotify

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How to Speak Up Against Discrimination in the Workplace

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How to Speak Up Against Discrimination in the Workplace

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By Megan Grams, Guest Blogger for YWCA Mohawk Valley

Despite being criminalized across the country, discrimination still persists in American workplaces. A Vox report on workplace discrimination based on age, gender, race, and disability notes that while more than 100,000 Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) cases are closed each year, only 18% of these result in proper compensation or changes in working conditions. Race claims are among the most commonly filed, yet have the lowest rate of success, with only 15% receiving some form of relief, often in the form of compensation. Meanwhile, Catalyst.org points out that 46% of LGBT employees are afraid of coming out in fears of being disfavored in the office.

This constant threat of disrespect, marginalization, and condescension cultivates an unsafe work environment for various vulnerable groups. If you or a co-worker have experienced an act of prejudice against you but don't know how or where to start, here are two pointers that could help.
Carefully Identify Discriminatory Behavior
It's highly important to distinguish when a co-worker perpetuates an office misdemeanor. Someone commits discriminatory behavior if they have a partiality against age, race, gender, sexuality, and disability, or other legally protected characteristic. Some clear examples of workplace discrimination are sexually loaded statements or comments targeted exclusively to women in the office.

However, acts of discrimination aren't always obvious. For example, stereotypes around migrants are cemented around terms of division, fear, and hate against the "stranger" among us. YWCA USA's national Stand Against Racism campaign highlights that it's important to address immigration rights to attain social justice in the workplace.

There are 28.2 million foreign-born workers in the country, and half of them hold at least a college degree. If they are denied benefits and opportunities by managements despite having sufficient or better qualification, that's an act of workplace discrimination.

Before you make your report, you should take extra vigilance in determining where bias may appear. Doing so could help you appropriately document the sensitive matter at hand before raising it to your superiors.
Find Comfort in Your Co-Workers & the Law
No one is truly alone in the office, and it's vital to have an office confidante. They can empower non-offending co-workers and give clarity on how to approach an offending co-worker.

A lot of people find speaking up against office discrimination a risky act because the offender might retaliate. However, this shouldn't stop you, as the state of New York has strengthened its labor code against employers who retaliate. Moreover, you don't need evidence to file a complaint, but having proof can strengthen your case. Know that you can send a complaint to the New York State Division of Human Rights or US Equal Opportunity Commission, and your identity will remain confidential as they conduct an impartial investigation. So, you can take comfort in knowing that New York has imposed the necessary measures to protect you from discrimination in the workplace.

Driven leaders who strive for workplace equality are needed. Maryville University highlights how today's management are challenged to practice change leadership, conflict management, and ethical decision-making. Current management techniques underline how important it is to prevent workplace discrimination from happening, and subsequently recommend enacting anti-discrimination policies as the first line of defense against office-based biases.

Leaders should be more proactive in cultivating a discrimination-free environment, as well as formally reprimand people who exhibit discriminatory behavior. It is only through these actions that leaders can introduce positive change, and, as a result, an equal, bias-free workplace can be nurtured.

However, if the management itself is the perpetrator of unjust treatment, it will be harder to ask for accountability and appropriate action. This is partly why, last year, the New York State Human Rights Law added supplemental amendments that aim to protect the jobs of those targeted by workplace discrimination. This legislation stresses that companies should take charge in protecting marginalized employees who experience unjust workplace practices. It is expected that at the end of the year, all New York employers will have done assessments in building safeguards to help prevent office bias and make sounding off on workplace harassment an easier thing to do
About YWCA Mohawk Valley
For 24-hour, free and confidential domestic and sexual violence services in Oneida County, call 315.797.7740.
To learn more about any of YWCA MV's services, please click here.
In 2018, YWCA MV provided more than 20,000 instances of service to individuals in Herkimer and Oneida counties via such programs as domestic and sexual violence crisis services, violence prevention education, residential services for homeless women and children, and emergency shelters and transitional housing for individuals escaping violence. For 24-hour, free and confidential sexual violence and child abuse services in Herkimer County, call 315.866.4120. YWCA Mohawk Valley is a nonsectarian organization engaged in the mission of eliminating racism, empowering women, and promoting peace, justice, freedom, and dignity for all.

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Guest Blog: How to Speak Up Against Discrimination in the Workplace - YWCA Mohawk Valley

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How to Speak Up Against Discrimination in the Workplace By Megan Grams, Guest Blogger for YWCA Mohawk Valley Despite being criminalized across the country, discrimination still persists in American workplaces. A Vox report on workplace discrimination based on age, gender, race, and disability notes that while more than 100,000 Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) cases are closed each...

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21-Day Racial Equity Habit-Building Challenge

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21-Day Racial Equity Habit-Building Challenge

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There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
- James Baldwin

The Council of the ABA Section of Labor and Employment Law is proud to announce our participation in a "21-Day Racial Equity Habit-Building Challenge ©," and we invite LEL Section members to join us. The 21-Day Challenge concept was conceived several years ago by diversity expert Eddie Moore, Jr. to advance deeper understandings of the intersections of race, power, privilege, supremacy and oppression. We are grateful to him for publicly sharing and encouraging others to use this concept as an educational tool.

Our Section will begin its 21-Day Challenge on Wednesday, June 17, 2020 based on our own syllabus, which was created for the Section. The goal of the Challenge is to assist each of us to become more aware, compassionate, constructive, engaged people in the quest for racial equity. It transcends our roles as lawyers. It is, of course, completely voluntary to do, and participation in the Challenge shall not be construed as agreement with every word of every assignment nor a commitment by any person to a particular professional position or strategy. Further, participants are free to opt out of participating along the way. There is no grade at the end of the Challenge.

The Challenge invites participants to complete a syllabus of 21 short assignments (typically taking 15-30 minutes), over 21 consecutive days, that include readings, videos or podcasts. It has been intentionally crafted to focus on the Black American experience. The assignments seek to expose participants to perspectives on elements of Black history, identity and culture, and to the Black community's experience of racism in America. Even this focus on Black Americans cannot possibly highlight all of the diversity of experiences and opinions within the Black community itself, much less substitute for learnings about any other community of color. This syllabus is but an introduction to what we hope will be a rewarding journey that extends far beyond the limits of this project.

If you plan to participate in the Challenge and would like to add your name to the Section's list of colleagues who are doing so, please send a message to the Section office.
21-Day Racial Equity Habit-Building Challenge is the registered copyright of America & Moore, LLC. 2014.

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Syllabus: 21-Day Racial Equity Habit-Building Challenge ©

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The Equal Opportunity in the Legal Profession Committee deals with affording all qualified individuals equal access and opportunity to practice law, especially labor and employment law, regardless of race, creed, color, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status or any other arbitrary distinction.

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Welcome to the Guide to Allyship.

Think of this guide as one of many starting points in your journey to become a better ally. This guide isn't meant to be comprehensive nor is it perfect. There are people far more versed than I, who have dedicated their life's work to this sort of education.

In light of recent events and tragedies, I've been hearing the word "ally" a lot. Many people want to be an "ally", and even more people are unable to fulfill the duties allyship requires.

I use the word "ally" loosely because I find it overused and often abused by those who label themselves "allies." Despite its current misuse, using a different word would only cause confusion. As you read through this guide, be aware that your definition of "ally" may not be the same as the definition I'll introduce you to.

What's so special about this guide?

There are many great guides out there, and I acknowledge their existence. What's different about this guide is that it's open source (any one can contribute to it) and it doesn't get into specifics: racism, transphobia, gender discrimination, etc. and that's by design.

This guide can't and shouldn't be everything to you. At some point, you need to take responsibility and further your education. When you're done with the guide, please find ways to learn more.

Finally, this is a resource to help anyone considering allyship better understand the pros and cons of what being an ally entails. Allies understand their role in collaboration with people whose lives are affected daily by systemic oppression.

Don't take the responsibility of being an ally lightly.

In the summer of 2016, someone I considered an ally stood by and watched as I, a Black person, was berated by a racist. To make matters worse, I had a conversation with this person earlier in the day about the power allies can wield in situations of discrimination. But when the time came for them to take action, they were more interested in protecting their comfort.

Upset, I couldn't understand what happened. Did the conversation we had not get through? What didn't they step up? Then it dawned on me:
Saying you're an ally is much easier than actually being an ally. Saying you're an ally looks good on paper, especially if you're never questioned about your inaction.
Many self-defined "allies" wear the phrase and ideology like an article of clothing, easily discarded when it's no longer fashionable to wear.

If only those from marginalized and underinvested communities could cast away the identities marking them as targets with such ease.

I noted before that I used the word "ally" loosely. In fact, I personally no longer use the word. However, I do think it's a good starting place for those learning to be better allies. I also believe there's an opportunity to explore a better definition of the word. The best definition of "ally" (that I've found) comes from author Roxane Gay in her article for Marie Claire, "On Making Black Lives Matter." In it, she notes:

Black people do not need allies. We need people to stand up and take on the problems borne of oppression as their own, without remove or distance.

We need people to do this even if they cannot fully understand what it's like to be oppressed for their race or ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, class, religion, or other marker of identity.

We need people to use common sense to figure out how to participate in social justice.

To recap: Being an ally doesn't necessarily mean you fully understand what it feels like to be oppressed. It means you're taking on the struggle as your own.

An individual from an underinvested community cannot easily cast away the weight of their identity (or identities) shaped through oppression on a whim. They carry that weight every single day, for better or for worse. An ally understands that this is a weight that they, too, must be willing to carry and never put down.

Why allies are necessary

Anyone has the potential to be an ally. Allies recognize that though they're not a member of the underinvested and oppressed communities they support, they make a concerted effort to better understand the struggle, every single day.

Because an ally might have more privilege and recognizes said privilege, they are powerful voices alongside oppressed ones.

Being an ally is hard work.

Many would-be allies fear making mistakes that could have them labeled as "-ist" or "-ic" (racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic, etc). But as an ally, you're also affected by a system of oppression. This means that as an ally, there is much to unlearn and learn-mistakes are expected. You need to own this as fact and should be willing to embrace the daily work of doing better.
As an ally, you need to own your mistakes and be proactive in your education, every day.
If you refuse to acknowledge that your words and actions are inherently shaped and influenced by systemic oppression, you're setting up yourself to fail.

Lack of self-awareness is not a trait of an ally. You'll be complicit in the oppression of those you intend to help. If you choose not to understand this, but label yourself an "ally", you're essentially a wolf in sheep's clothing. You'll find ways to infiltrate vulnerable communities and wield far more power than someone who is outwardly "-ist" or "-ic" because you're "trusted."

Just as society will not change overnight, neither will you. Here are some important do's and don'ts to consider as you learn, grow, and step into the role of an ally.

The Dos

Do be open to listening

Do be aware of your implicit biases

Do your research to learn more about the history of the struggle in which you are participating

Do the inner work to figure out a way to acknowledge how you participate in oppressive systems

Do the outer work and figure out how to change the oppressive systems

Do use your privilege to amplify (digitally and in-person) historically suppressed voices

Do learn how to listen and accept criticism with grace, even if it's uncomfortable

Do the work every day to learn how to be a better ally

The Don'ts

Do not expect to be taught or shown. Take it upon yourself to use the tools around you to learn and answer your questions

Do not participate for the gold medal in the "Oppression Olympics" (you don't need to compare how your struggle is "just as bad as" a marginalized person's)

Do not behave as though you know best

Do not take credit for the labor of those who are marginalized and did the work before you stepped into the picture

Do not assume that every member of an underinvested community feels oppressed

Contributed by Presley Pizzo. Please credit Presley when referencing this section.

While mistakes are to be expected, what's the best way to go about resolving them?

Note: Parts of this section were originally based on Kayla Reed's (@iKaylaReed) tweet sharing her definition of what it means to be an ally. It's another great definition that'll help you follow along with this section!

Imagine your privilege is a heavy boot that keeps you from feeling when you're stepping on someone's feet or they're stepping on yours, while oppressed people have only sandals. If someone says, "ouch! You're stepping on my toes," how do you react?

Because we can think more clearly about stepping on someone's literal toes than we usually do when it comes to oppression, the problems with many common responses are obvious:

Centering yourself: "I can't believe you think I'm a toe-stepper! I'm a good person!"

Denial that others' experiences are different from your own: "I don't mind when people step on my toes."

Derailing: "Some people don't even have toes, why aren't we talking about them instead?"

Refusal to center the impacted: "All toes matter!"

Tone policing: "I'd move my foot if you'd ask me more nicely."

Denial that the problem is fixable: "Toes getting stepped on is a fact of life. You'll be better off when you accept that."

Victim blaming: "You shouldn't have been walking around people with boots!"

Withdrawing: "I thought you wanted my help, but I guess not. I'll just go home."

In reality, most of us naturally know the right way to react when we step on someone's toes, and we can use that to help us learn how to react when we commit microaggressions.

Center the impacted: "Are you okay?"

Listen to their response and learn.

Apologize for the impact, even though you didn't intend it: "I'm sorry!"

Stop the instance: move your foot

Stop the pattern: be careful where you step in the future. When it comes to oppression, we want to actually change the "footwear" to get rid of privilege and oppression (sneakers for all!), but metaphors can only stretch so far!

Reacting in a fair and equitable way isn't about learning arbitrary rules or being a doormat. Rather, it's about restoring and maintaining dignity and respect for everyone involved - both the person who is hurt, and you. Still, it's hard to remember in the moment, because these issues are so charged in our society. As such, it may be helpful to reframe the situation so that you don't feel defensive.

You may have noticed it's easier to handle being corrected about something you didn't know if you're grateful for and even open to the opportunity to learn rather than embarrassed to have been wrong. Being able to let go of your ego is an incredibly important skill to develop.

Try starting with "Thanks for letting me know" to put yourself in a better frame of mind. If after you say that, you need to take some time to think about the situation, that's fine, too. Just remember that this isn't about changing the other person's frame of mind. They're allowed to be upset about being oppressed.

You've made a mistake and you want to apologize. Where do you begin?

What is an apology?

Before you can apologize, you need to know what an apology is.

Apologies are social contracts that hold you accountable. They tell others that you are taking responsibility, are open to the consequences of your actions, and plan to do better in the future.

Bad apologies are performances meant to protect pride and ego. They exist to make the apologizer feel and look good, while defending their intent.

Good apologies are heartfelt acts that let go of pride and ego. They center the pain of the impacted, regardless of the apologizer's intent.

Think of pain as a gradient-it doesn't have to be extreme to have a significant impact. Accidentally misgendering someone can cause them pain. Stepping on someone' toes can cause them pain.

Attributes of a good apology

Apologies aren't a magic fix and won't solve mistakes of the past, but there are a few attributes that make for a good apology.

Timely
Delivered at the right moment in the right place and time.

Consider the context in which you want to apologize and how that might affect not only you but also the person receiving your apology.

Context can include your current mental state (are you feeling defensive? Upset? Nervous? Calm?), the physical space you're in (private or public area), or the apology's medium (phone, online, text message, in person).

Respects boundaries
Given when the person receiving the apology consents to it.

Your desire to give an apology right now doesn't mean that the receiver is ready for it. Some people need space to process, and you should respect that. When they're willing to reconnect, if at all, they may let you know (or they may not).

Self-aware
Know that the act of apology may not lead to the closure you expect.

The apology receiver may choose to never interact with you again. Either after you give an apology or before you give it. You have to find a way to make peace with that. Do not pressure or shame someone into accepting your apology.

One of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is learning how to create closure within rather than expecting other people to give it to us.

Reflective
Signals that the apologizer is taking full responsibility for their actions.

Apologizing means letting go of your ego to show that you care about someone and want to make things right. Good apologies center the person being apologized to. They also take direct ownership of the actions that caused pain by naming them clearly.

This Guide is open-source, meaning that anyone can contribute. I'm a queer Black femme and my voice should not be the only one shaping this guide.

If you identify as a member of an underinvested community and want to contribute, please submit a pull-request on this GitHub repository.

If you aren't a GitHub user and would still like to contribute, send me an email at guidetoallyship [to] byamelie [dot] co.

This Guide is a labor of love and provided as a shareable resource for you to use. Please make sure to credit back to the site if you decide to use any content here.

And if you've found this Guide helpful, feel free to show your support and buy me a cup of tea.

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An open-source guide for anyone interested in becoming an ally.

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Fabienne's #KidLit Resources and Children's Book List 

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Fabienne's #KidLit Resources and Children's Book List 

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Fabienne’s #KidLit Resources - Book Lists

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Fabienne’s Stay Woke Children’s Book List

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Own the fight to end systemic racism at work

As with all organizational imperatives, the fight to end systemic racism needs to be led from the top and be informed by your employees, especially women of color who have been historically and systematically marginalized. But as you undertake this work, recognize that the systemic racism we are now grappling with in our national dialogue is NOT new.

Racism has chipped away at Black lives every single day for generations, including those of your Black leaders, colleagues, and staff. Consider the wider context of this moment: the killing of Black people by state-sanctioned racialized violence is unfolding amid a pandemic that is disproportionately impacting Black and Latinx communities. This is all happening because of institutionalized racism and sexism, which governs how we care for people in this country. Now is the moment to reflect deeply, examine your own organization, and speak up and show up for your staff.

Do not be silent in this moment

This is a moment when leaders everywhere need to speak out. If you are unsure what to say, seek guidance from your Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Lead or outside advocacy groups in developing a message that is authentic to you and your organization.

Don't let fear of saying the wrong thing keep you silent. If you make a mistake, apologize quickly and reiterate your commitment to combatting racial and gender discrimination.

Know that silence can feel like violence for Black communities. Black people across the country are calling on all of us to acknowledge the harm felt by their communities. Saying nothing builds on those acts of violence.

Be humble about where you're starting from and commit to backing up public statements with action. If you have not done this already, now is the time to add anti-racism to your core values and operationalize those values by evaluating all of your policies and decision-making processes through an anti-racist lens.

Don't just signal support. Root out racism at your workplace.

Assess the demographic makeup of your entire staff, at all levels, and up and down the wage scale.

Establish clear goals tied to becoming an anti-racist workplace and attach owners and success metrics to them so that you can track your organization's journey over time.

Apply an intersectional analysis as you seek to understand and improve the experience of your Black staff. Recognize the overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination some of them may face because of their race, gender, sexuality, gender identity, ability, and other critical forms of identity, and center their experiences in this work.

Investigate the effects of your external actions on Black people and people of color, particularly women. How do the products you produce or the policies you lobby for impact Black communities? What you can do through your business to support Black women? The work that your organization does externally is directly connected to your internal culture. It can either build credibility and trust or undermine your stated values.

Put resources towards efforts that actually enhance the lives of Black staff and Black communities. Invest in structural changes that will genuinely benefit communities of color. For example, you can commit to a strategic planning process that centers on anti-racism; hire facilitators that specialize in racial equity and racial healing; or design long-term programs to develop and retain your Black talent. Set significant resources aside for training that effectively teaches people of all races and genders how to combat racist behavior, including unconscious bias and microaggressions.

Hold conversations to bring awareness to racism at work and create genuinely safe spaces where people can share their experiences openly

Hold space for your Black employees to gather and respect their boundaries and wellbeing. This includes creating, funding, and prioritizing Black Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) and making time and space, either virtually or in real life, for ERGs to gather, support one another, and raise issues, such as toxic workplace culture, fears of retaliation, and other barriers that prevent clear pathways to career growth and promotions. And while this should be a safe space for your Black employees, communicate that there are channels - including anonymous ones - to address and correct issues raised by your Black ERG.

Lead with empathy. This is likely an exhausting and emotionally trying time for your Black staff. Ensure that they understand paid time off is an available option and that work can be reallocated in the interim. Respect the response you receive and make the offer again at a later time without an expiration date. This is not a time to add additional responsibilities or offload emotional labor onto your Black staff, particularly Black women who may be experiencing additional caregiving responsibilities at home. Encourage managers to ask their Black team members how they want to be supported and to honor whatever they may need, especially if you don't fully relate to their healing process.

Create opportunities for all staff to come together as a group. In addition to holding space for your Black staff to gather, bring your entire staff together to share what they are thinking and feeling, to answer questions or concerns, and to discuss how your organization should evolve to meet the essential demands of this moment. Recognize that every staff member is starting from a different place and that their proximity to and understanding of systemic racism will vary widely. Navigate these complexities by investing in experts and trained facilitators with cautiousness and understanding of these nuances - some of your staff are already consumed by racial injustices while others are only just coming to terms with it. Be prepared to meet each person where they are without tolerating sexist or racist views. Expect to manage and hold space for an array of emotions when you gather. Staff may be sad, angry, anxious, fearful, or a combination of all of these feelings.

Lead the way on anti-racist efforts while learning from your Black colleagues

Like other key priorities, anti-racism efforts should be led from the top, by the leadership team. It is incumbent to educate yourselves independently, as this is self-guided work that you must approach before leading your teams [See Demonstrating Your Leadership]. Be humble about what you don't know and reach out for advice from the experts. Do the work by studying how white supremacy, racial violence, and systemic racism have shaped, and continue to shape, American society. These issues are complex and pervasive. Consider how they shape your workplace and the lives of your employees.

Give voice to Black leadership, colleagues, or employees, but do not lean on them to address these issues; you must own this work. Involve Black staff in these efforts but don't expect them to do the work. Too often, Black staff and staff of color are called upon to help organizations navigate issues regarding race, only to end up shouldering burdens that are not theirs to carry. It is not right or fair to rely on your Black staff to tackle these issues; you must take the lead yourself.

If you're only asking for Black staff to weigh in on issues of race , that's an issue. Give Black staff the option to contribute to your anti-racism work from the expertise of their lived experience and cultural sensitivity, but do not make assumptions about their time, emotional capacity, or interest in contributing. Give them credit, ask for their input, and run decisions by them, but be careful not to tokenize your Black staff.

Encourage and empower everyone to speak out against racist workplace practices and adopt a zero tolerance policy for this behavior. Set up systems that enable and empower your employees to come forward if they confront racist, unsafe, or illegal practices at work. These should cover a range of behaviors, from the most egregious acts to microaggressions that deprive your staff of the dignity they deserve at work. All of your employees, particularly women of color, must feel comfortable shining a light on workplace practices that jeopardize their safety or undermine their dignity.

Make sure you have a whistleblower policy in place that promotes a culture of transparency and accountability and gives staff a concrete way to share their concerns. If you already have a whistleblower policy in place, review it and make sure it meets this moment. If not, work with your legal team to enact one that encourages your staff to unearth problems early and protects them from retaliation. Work with experts and facilitators to outline a clear process that facilitates learning, growth, and correction when incidents arise. Continue to check in with your staff about the processes that are created or revised. In a quickly evolving world, processes may need to be reevaluated or refreshed regularly.

Move into action swiftly to examine and dismantle racist and sexist practices embedded in all business functions

Evaluate the many ways racism shows up in the workplace and how racism harms staff and erodes company culture. A lack of diverse representation at your organization may indicate racism or sexism within your recruiting and hiring practices. And language used in performance evaluations may reveal internal biases that impact pay and promotions.

Remove racism from your recruiting, hiring, and talent management processes and increase Black representation across all levels and departments. If you have paused new hires or are moving more slowly to fill positions, take the time to look for and build a more diverse pool of candidates. And if you are in an industry that is growing and hiring, stay vigilant about protocols that promote the consideration of Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) and women, even when you need to staff up quickly. Below are some practical tips for diversifying your talent pool and advancing your Black staff:

Focus your talent pipeline: Recruit candidates from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and minority-serving institutions (MSIs). When recruiting at predominantly white institutions, seek out organizations that represent Black students and other students of color. Build relationships with networks that represent Black and POC emerging leaders. Work with your local high schools and community college systems.

Commit to diversity internship, fellowships and secondment programs and commit a percentage of your internship hires to BIPOC. Consider how to support HBCUs and MSIs outside of recruiting. This could include investing in scholarships or offering financial support to these institutions in other ways.

Overhaul your talent processes to remove racist practices. Conduct a thorough examination of your interview process, your performance management practices, your compensation structures, and your retention and promotion policies. How are these processes failing your Black staff? What additional mentorship and sponsorship can you offer your talent of color to ensure that they are supported at each stage of their career and have the opportunity to reach their fullest potential within your organization?

Examine your company policies related to dress code, including hairstyles and other matters related to appearance to ensure they are not barriers to BIPOC professional and socio-economic advancement. Know that perceptions about what is deemed appropriate are rooted in white supremacy. Learn about how respectability politics has impacted the Black community.

Position the fight to end systemic racism as an ongoing effort that you are committed to in the long run

Becoming an anti-racist organization is not a static achievement; it is life-long work that you and your colleagues must commit to each and every day. Make sure that the goals you set are understood, measurable, and embodied by everyone, and that every member of your team knows what role they play in achieving these goals. Remind everyone that you are building an essential muscle which will grow stronger with effort and time. There is no shortcut to this work; the only way forward is through.

As the author of So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo, says, "You don't need to be free of racism to be an anti-racist. Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself. And it's the only way forward."

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Building an Anti-Racist Workplace - TIME'S UP Foundation

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As with all organizational imperatives, the fight to end systemic racism needs to be led from the top and be informed by your employees, especially women of color who have been historically and systematically marginalized. But as you undertake this work, recognize that the systemic racism we are now grappling with in our national dialogue is NOT new.

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My White Friends Are Buying Books About Racism Instead Of Talking To Me

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My White Friends Are Buying Books About Racism Instead Of Talking To Me

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Mostly, my non-Black friends are doing all of the right things this week, both online and off. But that doesn't stop me from being mad.

They're going to protest marches directly in the line of fire, reassuring me that they're fine despite the pepper spray and violent cops. They're donating money to bailout funds and social justice groups. Those who belong to non-Black ethnic groups are posting messages to their own communities, asking others to recognize the ways Blackness works differently in society than, say, indigeneity or Asian-ness. They're making or sharing watercolors and graphic designs memorializing George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery. They're calling for the abolition of the police state, decrying systemic injustice, and, even better, detailing concrete actions that will challenge white supremacy in their own lives.

They promise to "educate themselves" about race in America and have the "tough conversations" with both their other white acquaintances and people of color - which is great! They post reading lists - James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michelle Alexander, Richard Rothstein, Jesmyn Ward, Robin DiAngelo.

If they're suddenly so desperate to understand the Black perspective on race in America, why haven't they just come out and asked?

It's those posts that absolutely infuriate me. Seeing their earnest commitments to engage with racism's legacy through books just proves to me that my friends haven't been listening to me at all.

I talk about race and racism a lot. I've written books about it myself, in fact, for kids and for adults. I've shared stories of racism that amused me (a white man on a conference call explaining to me why we need to center POC voices in art because he assumed anyone named Megan in my position had to also be white), inconvenienced me (being denied for an Airbnb until my white ex-boyfriend made the reservation), and terrified me (angry slurs and threats as I walked to work), connecting the dots of how systems of injustice affect me on every level.

What about my own experiences of racism didn't break through to them? If they're suddenly so desperate to understand the Black perspective on race in America, why haven't they just come out and asked? Haven't I been here this whole time?

"I know I'm not Ibram X. Kendi," I messaged a friend. "But you don't know that man."

I'm not bothered by anti-racism reading posts from casual acquaintances, or meme accounts, or the journalists and influencers I follow. And I'll admit the inconsistency that I'm not bothered by posts like these from people of color or white people in my very closest circles. This isn't the first time they've engaged with race in my presence.

But the people I'm talking about are my friends. They're co-workers, brunch dates, collaborators, workout buddies. They're the people who filled my days (pre-quarantine), whose birthdays and happy hours and book launches and baby showers and picnics and godd*mn weddings I have attended.

If the personal is political, it's depressing to think that my vulnerabilities and fears weren't enough to spur them to action before last weekend.

It takes work to identify and name the ways your experiences of the world are mirrored in hundreds of years of f*cked-up history. Sharing those experiences sometimes feels like a choice to own their power over your life. And make no mistake: Race informs every vector of mine, from the likelihood that I'll be approved for a loan to the kinds of messages I get on dating apps. Thinking and talking about the institutional bulwarks in my way makes me feel hopeless and tired. If Serena Williams and Cornel West can't overcome them, then who am I to think I can? Admitting to that kind of vulnerability has never been easy for me. But I feel like I owe those hard truths about my experiences with white supremacy to those who trust me enough to share what scares them with me.

I'm no racial theorist, and this isn't about my ego - if these nice white friends asked, I'd likely recommend many of those works of bestselling fiction and criticism. But if we accept the chestnut that the personal is political, it's depressing to think that my vulnerabilities and fears weren't enough to spur them to action before last weekend.

"We need to take anti-racist action," the posts say. "We need to be willing to learn." Those statements aren't for me or for their other Black and brown friends. We experience racism, and not just in theory. Well-meaning as the encouragement is, I'm not the one whose learning they're cheerleading. These posts make anti-racism feel like a trendy, white self-improvement program, completely disconnected from redistributing power. I know they hope to benefit others, but I don't think they realize that by the time they post, I've already been eliminated from their solutions for justice.

These posts make anti-racism feel like a trendy, white self-improvement program, completely disconnected from redistributing power.

Of course, all this anger is cloaking those same vulnerabilities I mentioned. Here's the thing I've avoided articulating for the last few paragraphs: I worry that these white people are frightened of me. That deep down, their fear of being confronted with justifiable anger is a force stronger than friendship. That their support was an illusion all along, and that while I thought I was sharing the weight of racist America's burdens with them, I was just taking on their loads of shame and fear. That it takes the deaths of people who look like me for them to care. That "solidarity" with the accounts following their Instagram stories is more important than real allyship with the friends they invite to their housewarmings - and that shyness and fear of conflict and embarrassment are deeper enemies of any movement towards justice than fake news.

Imagine if instead of posting Instagram stories pledging allegiance to anti-racism, they'd have a tipsy heart-to-heart with me on my stoop in summer or quickly checked in at the office Keurig when a tone-deaf op-ed started trending. If I was exhausted or sad, I might ask if we could put a pin in the conversation, but our care for each other would still come first. Imagine if we could talk about race without it being a performance of wokeness, a knee-jerk denial of its importance, or a devil's advocate debate. If nice people like them did more listening in the first place, maybe we wouldn't need this movement at all.

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My White Friends Are Buying Books About Racism. I Wish They'd Talked To Me Instead.

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Mostly, my non-Black friends are doing all of the right things this week, both online and off. But that doesn't stop me from being mad. They're going to protest marches directly in the line of fire, reassuring me that they're fine despite the pepper...

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Resources and Reading on Racial Justice, Racial Equity and Anti-Racism

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Resources and Reading on Racial Justice, Racial Equity and Anti-Racism

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Resources and Reading on Racial Justice, Racial Equity and Anti-Racism | Shorenstein Center

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A list of books, articles, podcasts, organizations, and other resources, curated by the Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability Project, to help better understand current issues about race, and what it means to be anti-racist.

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Resources for Transgender, Non-Binary, and Gender Non-Conforming People

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Resources for Transgender, Non-Binary, and Gender Non-Conforming People

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Below are some resources for transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming individuals and their allies.

If you are aware of other resources that should be on this list, please email us.

I AM: Trans People Speak: Video stories a campaign created by the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC) and sponsored by GLAAD to raise awareness about the diversity of transgender communities. It lifts the voices of transgender individuals, as well as their families, friends, and allies.

The Trevor Project: Trans + Gender Identity : A helpful guide to "Gender 101," with information on gender roles, transgender identities, proper terminology, and transphobia. The Trevor Project is the leading national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to LGBTQ people under 25.

National Center for Transgender Equality : Resources to learn more about issues impacting the trans community, as well as resources for members of the trans community around their legal rights.

Organizations to Support

Transgender Emergency Fund of M assachusetts : Provides critical assistance for low-income and homeless transgender people in Massachusetts

Boston GLASS : GLASS provides a continuum of services to LGBTQ+ youth of color (18-29) and their allies in the Greater Boston and Greater Framingham areas. (GLASS use of LGBTQ+ includes " lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, Two-Spirit, intersex, asexual, pansexual, people living with HIV, and other sexual and gender minorities. " )

Marsha P. Johnson Institute : The MPJI protects and defends the human rights of Black transgender people, through organizing, advocating, creating an intentional community to heal, developing transformative leadership, and promoting the collective power of Black transgender people. Named after Marsha P. Johnson, an activist, self-identified drag queen, performer, survivor, and a prominent figure in the Stonewall uprising of 1969.

The Okra Project : The Okra Project is "a collective that seeks to address the global crisis faced by Black Trans people by bringing home cooked, healthy, and culturally specific meals and resources to Black Trans People wherever we can reach them."

Transgender Health

Mental Health /Assistance in Crisis

Travel

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Resources for Transgender, Non-Binary, and Gender Non-Conforming People

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Below are some resources for transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming individuals and their allies. If you are aware of other resources that should be on this list, please email us. I AM: Trans People Speak: Video stories a campaign created by the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC) and sponsored by GLAAD to raise awareness about the diversity of transgender communities.

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Resources for Accountability and Actions for Black Lives 

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Resources for Accountability and Actions for Black Lives 

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Welcome To The Anti-Racism Movement — Here’s What You’ve Missed

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Welcome To The Anti-Racism Movement — Here’s What You’ve Missed

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A handy list of things that you're going to need to catch up on. Buck up, because it won't be easy.

Are you still reeling in shock at the presidential election results? Are you pulling at your hair wondering, "How did this country get so racist??" Are you posting statuses about how it is now time to come together to fight racism in the face of current political threats? Have you found yourself saying, "Well, at least this administration is waking people up."

Hi! I see you there! Welcome to the anti-racism movement. I know you were kind of hoping to sneak in the back of class in the middle of this semester and then raise your hand in a few days to offer up expert opinion like you've always been here - but you've been spotted, and I have some homework for you, because you've missed A LOT and we don't have the time to go over it all together. I'm glad you are here (I mean, I'd really rather you arrived sooner and I'm a little/lot resentful at how often we have to stop this class to cover all the material for people who are just now realizing that this is a class they should be taking, but better late than never I guess) and I know that once you catch up, you can contribute a lot to the work being done here.

If you are just now feeling the urgency of the need to fight systemic racism, chances are, you are white. I know, I know - I'm starting off with blanket assumptions about you and that doesn't feel good; you literally don't have to tell me about it, I'm quite familiar! But seriously, you are probably white or white passing (yes, I'm aware that Ben Carson and Lil Wayne exist and some people of color are capable of holding on to baffling amounts of denial, but I do not have whatever power it would take to break through that level of delusion so let's just stick with new white folk). I've written down this handy list of things that you've missed so far that you're going to need to catch up on, on your own time. This knowledge and preparation will not only make your fight against racism more effective, it will allow us to continue our progress as you catch up.

If you are just now feeling the urgency of the need to fight systemic racism, chances are, you are white. Click To Tweet

This work is the worst.

Woah, I know - I'm starting off in the most negative way possible but look, I need you to know what you are signing up for. Fighting racism is one of the most difficult things you will ever do. I mean, reading this essay might be a little uncomfortable, but it is NOTHING compared to the conversations you are going to have to have, the privilege you are going to have to sacrifice, and the brutality and pain you are going to have to be able to look in the eye every day. Not only will this work get harder and harder the further you dive in, you will also get what at times seems like a very small return on your efforts.

If you want a fucked-up silver lining, you can always remember that people of color (POC) are also doing this work, never have the option of taking a break, and also have to live through the actual racism being fought in the process. So, buck up and get ready.

Your welcome parade. You missed it.

It was a beauty too - floats and streamers and everybody was clapping and cheering. But then it ended and we swept up all the confetti and everyone had to get back to work. Sorry.

Every idea you have for how we can better fight racism has already been discussed.

I know you might be saying "but how can you know that Ijeoma, you don't know me?" I know. Trust me. I know. You are a 10-year-old explaining to a theoretical physicist how time travel might work. The theoretical physicist has already heard your theory and many others. She probably had some of those same theories when she was 10. And while your interest in time travel and your imagination and intelligence might well lead you to eventually help invent time travel, it will only do so after it has been paired with a lot of the education and experience that the physicist that you are trying to explain time travel to already has. But you are not actually 10, so your ideas are not cute. Keep them in your hat for now while you learn the basics.

Your journey to understanding that racism is a real problem and you have been contributing to it has already been covered.

Please don't raise your hand to tell us all the tale of how you came to see that you are part of an oppressive system. We were there. When you didn't know, when your obliviousness was contributing to our oppression, we were there being oppressed. When you were ignoring our cries for help, we saw you look away. As you stumbled along the path of recognition, we were the people you took down with you in each fall. We would rather not go over that all again.

But all is not lost, and your story does have real value - to people who are not in this room, who are afraid of acknowledging the part they play in a White Supremacist society. You can show fellow white people that they can survive the self-reflection necessary to fight racism. Please, share your story with them, it can do real good.

Your ramp-up period. You missed it.

When POC were very, very small, we got a few years of comfort and protection from some of the realities of a White Supremacist society. When we were safe at home with our parents, the effects of systemic racism were muted somewhat, although never entirely. Then when we were 4 or 5 and went to preschool we discovered we were four times more likely to be suspended from preschool, and by the time we went to kindergarten another kid called us a "nigger" or another racial slur, and from then on we've been neck-deep in that shit.

So, if you weren't there, you missed it. Nobody is going to hold your hand through this. If you fuck up, you will be called out. If you slow us down, you may be left on the side of the road. If we are angry at white people, we will say we are angry at white people, and nobody is going to add "not all white people" for your benefit. You will find a way to keep going - we have.

Nobody is going to hold your hand through this. If you fuck up, you will be called out. Click To Tweet

Free, individualized education is not a thing we do anymore.

I know you would prefer a nice, safe sit-down with someone who would patiently walk you through all of this, but we have millions of people we need to get right and an entire system of White Supremacy to fight. We do not have the time or energy. Also - that "free labor from POC" thing is kind of how we got into this mess. The questions you are asking have already been answered by POC - some of whom have already been compensated for their time and effort. Google is your friend. If we have to live it, the least you can do is Google it.

We care about multiple things here - at the same time.

Yes, we are aware of how dangerous this administration is. No, we do not have "better" battles to be picking right now. We are doing multiple things at once, because we cannot be sure if it is the cops that will kill us, or the racist jokes at work fostering an environment where we are seen as unreliable and dispensable that will leave us unable to feed our families. But we know that it all can kill us in body and spirit, one way or another, so we will drag people for cultural appropriation and demand that schools provide a more diverse education to our children, while also raising alarm about the Muslim ban, ICE raids, and police brutality.

You could maybe help pick up some of the slack instead of trying to refocus our efforts in a way that makes sense to someone who doesn't actually have to live with the consequences of what you think we should just "let go."

Your privilege is the biggest risk to this movement.

That's right: the biggest risk. The compromises you are willing to make with our lives, the offenses you are willing to brush off, the everyday actions you refuse to investigate, the comfort you take for granted - they all help legitimize and strengthen White Supremacy. Even worse, when you bring that into our movement and refuse to investigate and challenge it, you slow down our fight against White Supremacy and turn many of our efforts against us. When POC say, "check your privilege," they aren't saying it for fun - they are saying it because when you bring unexamined privilege into anti-racist spaces, you are bringing in a cancer.

Your privilege is the biggest benefit you can bring to the movement.

No, I'm not just talking nonsense now. Racial privilege is like a gun that will auto-focus on POC until you learn to aim it. When utilized properly, it can do real damage to the White Supremacist system - and it's a weapon that POC do not have. You have access to people and places we don't. Your actions against racism carry less risk.

You can ask your office why there are no managers of color and while you might get a dirty look and a little resentment, you probably won't get fired. You can be the "real Americans" that politicians court. You can talk to fellow white people about why the water in Flint and Standing Rock matters, without being dismissed as someone obsessed with playing "the race card." You can ask cops why they stopped that black man without getting shot. You can ask a school principal why they only teach black history one month a year and why they pretty much never teach the history of any other minority group in the U.S. You can explain to your white friends and neighbors why their focus on "black on black crime" is inherently racist. You can share articles and books written by people of color with your friends who normally only accept education from people who look like them. You can help ensure that the comfortable all-white enclaves that white people can retreat to when they need a break from "identity politics" are not so comfortable. You can actually persuade, guilt, and annoy your friends into caring about what happens to us. You can make a measurable impact in the fight against racism if you are willing to take on the uncomfortable truths of your privilege.

You will get better at this, but at first you will fuck up a lot, and you will always fuck up a little.

You are a human being and human beings are inherently flawed. You are also a human being who has lived with an entire life of unexamined privilege and racist social programming. You are going to fuck up hardcore. You are here because you are a decent human, and because you are a decent human you are going to feel pretty shitty when you fuck up. You will probably be called out, you may even be dismissed by some folk, and that may make you feel angry and defensive along with feeling shitty. You will need to get used to the pang of guilt from realizing you have fucked up and it has hurt people. Because it will hit you again and again.

It is okay to feel guilty about things that you are guilty of. It will not kill you, but hiding from that guilt and responsibility can kill others. So feel the guilt, realize you are still alive and intact, figure out how to do better, try to make amends if possible, and move forward. You are not alone. We are all fucking this up in various ways, every single one of us. Right now, there are whole big problematic chapters in our movement. We are all trying to do the work and wrestle with the ways in which we are causing more harm than good. But we have no choice but to keep working, even when it sucks.

You are here because you are a decent human, and because you are a decent human you are going to feel pretty shitty when you fuck up. Click To Tweet

I'm glad you are here. I'm angry you are so late - have I mentioned that? I'm very, very angry you are so late because so many of us have been lost fighting without you. And you are going to just have to live with that anger for a while because you deserve it. But I am also glad you are here. I am glad you are seeing more clearly now and have decided that you no longer want to be a part of the problem. Eventually, I may get over my anger and I may even trust you, but until then I'm still going to need you to do the work to help dismantle the system that you have benefited from and have helped maintain for so long.

Because I do need your help, and I do know that you can help in ways that I cannot. Your reward may not be the warm welcome and heartfelt thanks that you might have been hoping for, but a more just and equal world will have to suffice.

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Welcome To The Anti-Racism Movement - Here's What You've Missed

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Are you still reeling in shock at the presidential election results? Are you pulling at your hair wondering, "How did this country get so racist??" Are you posting statuses about how it is now time to come together to fight racism in the face of current political threats?

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White Allyship 101: Resources to Get to Work 

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White Allyship 101: Resources to Get to Work 

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Allyship Definition

Allyship is a process, and everyone has more to learn. Allyship involves a lot of listening. Sometimes, people say "doing ally work" or "acting in solidarity with" to reference the fact that "ally" is not an identity, it is an ongoing and lifelong process that involves a lot of work.

A white ally acknowledges the limits of her/his/their knowledge about other people's experiences but doesn't use that as a reason not to think and/or act. A white ally does not remain silent but confronts racism as it comes up daily, but also seeks to deconstruct it institutionally and live in a way that challenges systemic oppression, at the risk of experiencing some of that oppression. Being a white ally entails building relationships with both people of color, and also with white people in order to challenge them in their thinking about race. White allies don't have it all figured out, but are deeply committed to non-complacency.

Articles

Frances E. Kendall, How to Be an Ally if You Are a Person with Privilege

Peggy McIntosh, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations

Ali Michael Org, 10 Quick Ways to Analyze Children's Books For Racism and Sexism,

Allan Johnson, Excerpt from Privilege: Power and Difference

Margaret Biser, I used to lead tours on a plantation. You wouldn't believe the questions I got about slavery.

Holy shit, being an ally isn't about me!, Voices of WOC & Allies

Levana Saxon, Allyship and Accountability Glossary

Ryan Struyk, Blacks and whites see racism in the US very very differently

Matthew Hughey & W. Carson Byrd Born that Way: Scientific Racism is Creeping Back Into Our Thinking

NPR: Michael Martin, Fear of the Black Man, How Racial Bias Impacts Crime/Labor

Ernest Owens, 10 Messages of Wisdom We Need to Give Black Youth Right Now

Alexis Madrigal, The Racist Housing Policy that Made your Neighborhood

Goyette and Scheller, 15 Charts that Prove We're Far From Post Racial

Julie Turkowicz, A 'Historic Moment' for Native Americans

Nicholas Kristof, When Whites Just Don't Get It, Parts 1-7

Joy Sewing, Marrianne Williamson Asked White People To Apologize. She Got It Right

Tara Bahrampour, They Considered Themselves White, But DNA Tests Told a More Complicated Story

Books

Courageous Conversations About Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools, 2nd Edition (2015) Glenn Singleton

Race Amity: A Primer on America's Other Tradition, Natl Center for Race Amity

White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism, Paula Rothenberg

Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice, Eric Mason

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, Robin DiAngelo

Privilege: Power and Difference, Allan Johnson

Privilege: A Reader, Michael Kimmel & Abby Ferber

Raising Race Questions, Ali Michael

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander

Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson

America's Original Sin : America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America, Jim Wallis

Slavery By Another Name, Douglas Blackmon

When Affirmative Action Was White, Ira Katznelson

So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo

The Color of Law: The Forgotten Story of How Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Ibram X. Kendi

How to be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi

White Awake: An Honest Look at What it Means to be White, Daniel Hill

Empire of Cotton: A Global History, Sven Beckert

Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman

The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, Calvin Schermerhorn

The History of White People, Nell Irvin Painter

Films

13th, Ava DuVernay

When They See Us, Ava DuVernay

The Color of Fear, Lee Mun Wah

I'm Not Racist Am I?, Andre Lee

BOSS: The Black Experience in Business, PBS documentary

Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II, PBS based on book by Douglas Blackmon

Reconstruction, PBS based on book by Eric Foner

Videos

White Lies We Tell Our Children, Colin Stokes

The Enduring Myth of Black Criminality, Ta-Nehisi Coates via The Atlantic

How to Have a Voice and Lean Into Conversations on Race, Amanda Kemp

The Future of Race in America (on The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander

A Conversation with Black Women on Race, New York Times Op-Docs Series

A Conversation with White People about Race, New York Times Op-Docs Series

How Race Settled the Suburbs, Upworthy (Adam Ruins Everything)

Equity vs Equality, Carneades

Newsletter

For more resources, tips, and upcoming announcements, don't forget to sign up for our Dismantle Collective newsletter!

Support

You can also click here to donate to support our work.

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Resources for White Allies - Dismantle Collective

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Allyship is a process, and everyone has more to learn. Allyship involves a lot of listening. Sometimes, people say "doing ally work" or "acting in solidarity with" to reference the fact that "ally" is not an identity, it is an ongoing and lifelong process that involves a lot of work.

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Resources for Raising Anti-Racist Youth and Dismantling Racism in Yourself

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Resources for Raising Anti-Racist Youth and Dismantling Racism in Yourself

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As we grapple with the unrest in our community, address our grief and fears, and reach for a more equitable future for all, let's stay in tune to our youth and how they are processing these events and the long-standing inequities and violence against people of color that have fueled ongoing protests. This is heavy stuff that is distressing to all of us, especially our young people.

We challenge you to take a moment today to check in with youth and young adults in your household and community circles. Take time to listen, allow them to vent and process, and help them find constructive ways to channel their energies as change-makers. Our youth are critical voices in the conversation to chart our course forward to a more equitable and just society. Let's engage their voices, inspire their constructive action, and keep hope alive. For those of you who need additional tools to engage our youth, below are some resources that may be helpful to you as parents, guardians, caregivers, and other professionals who work with youth and children (with credit to our Youth Development Center of Excellence, and the equity team at Sound Transit):

Helping children at home:

Additional ways to help:

At a minimum, we should be actively and openly voicing support and compassion for those in our Y family who are lifted when we stand in solidarity with them.

Learn more about systemic equity

Get involved locally with Our Best (City of Seattle program aimed at expanding opportunity and improving life outcomes of young black men and boys.)

Things white people can do for racial justice:

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Resources for Raising Anti-Racist Youth and Dismantling Racism in Yourself

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As we grapple with the unrest in our community, address our grief and fears, and reach for a more equitable future for all, let's stay in tune to our youth and how they are processing these events and the long-standing inequities and violence against people of color that have fueled ongoing protests.

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David Silverman author talk: This Land is Their Land 

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David Silverman author talk: This Land is Their Land 

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As a Romani woman, more often called by the racial slur, "Gypsy," I watched the new Netflix original series, Gypsy, with some trepidation. The show is a psychological thriller-for the most part without many thrills-about Jean (Naomi Watts), a psychotherapist who becomes too entangled in her patients' lives to be professional, but not nearly enough to make for exciting television-and just today the series was cancelled after only one season. Series creator Lisa Rubin, admitted to Entertainment Weekly that the show takes its inspiration from the Stevie Nicks song "Gypsy," about a free-spirited woman who loves and disappears. The mythos of the Gypsy is a stew of stereotypes-the thief, the fortune teller, the free spirit, the seductress, and the liar, and Jean hits all of them, rebranding them as characteristics of a wealthy white woman just trying to "find herself."

Outside of a Stevie Nicks song, the Romani people are an oppressed ethnic minority whose diasporic roots date back to 10th-century India and are currently in the midst of a centuries-long human rights crisis-one that is, in part, perpetuated by the stereotypes of the Gypsy. Yet almost no one but the Roma themselves are pushing back on the series' title slur, the writing to the network and producers, or creating a petition to change the show's title. Along with simple ignorance, anti-Romani sentiment is so normalized that in 2017, a premier streaming service can release a show that takes an actual racial slur as its title and no one bats an eyelash.

You may be familiar with the word "gyp," which means to cheat someone as a Gypsy would. It's a slur as obviously offensive as "Jewed down," and yet people still say it in everyday conversation. Imagine replacing Gypsy as the show's title with any other ethnic slur-the show would never have been made. And yet, Gypsy was made, riding on the back of the romantic popularization of the word in fashion, beauty, and social media. Why is there so little acknowledgement and understanding around the slur's history? The answer is twofold: First, Roma are still not adequately represented in the UN and human rights organizations because we do not have a nation; second, many countries-including Greece, Italy, France, Hungary, Romania, and many others-still sanction the persecution of Roma through employment, housing, and education discrimination; ghettoization, police brutality, and political campaigns that insult violence against Roma.

Very often in pop culture, Gypsy stereotypes offer escapism for gadje, or non-Roma people. Jean wants to be special, swirling above the world of work, parenting, and upper-middle-class white-lady obligations with a glass of Bulleit bourbon in hand. She expresses this yearning through lying, debauchery, near-cheating, and boundary issues. The show plays on Gypsy stereotypes honed through history, including dishonesty, promiscuity, hedonism, and mental instability, that actively hurt and erase an already marginalized community. In depicting "Gypsy" ways as a lifestyle choice for carefree travelers and adventurers, the real system of oppression is also erased.

People who are oddly attached to the slur like to argue that the word can be used with good intentions. I often hear, "You don't understand, 'Gypsy' means a free-spirited person!" But that image of the carefree wanderer exists alongside an ugly and continued history of persecution. When Roma first arrived in Europe around the 11th or 12th century, the Catholic church denounced these dark-skinned people with many gods and would not allow them to settle anywhere. The book Roads of the Roma: a PEN Anthology of Gypsy Writers notes that as early as the 1300s, European countries began persecuting Roma by driving them off the land, enslaving them, or ordering them killed.

In the subsequent centuries, Roma have been forced to continue moving in order to avoid violence and harassment. Roma live mostly in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, however there are Roma living in every inhabitable continent in the world. Though many Roma have settled, their nomadic origins, along with the other stereotypes of mysticism and degeneracy, were used by Nazis to justify the extermination of tens of thousands of the Roma and Sinti (a sub-group of Roma, to which I belong). Under Nazi reign, it's estimated that between 20 to 50 percent of the Romani and Sinti population of Europe was wiped out. Rewriting a slur marked by apartheid and genocide to denote a white girl who goes to the beach with feathers in her hair, or a bad psychotherapist who connives to get closer to a patient's ex-girlfriend, actively erases the murders and persecution of Roma that still continue today.

The seductress stereotype that Jean timidly pursues in her quest for excitement stems from a long-held belief about animalistic, insatiable Romani women. Since the long period of Romani enslavement in the Balkans and the slave trade in the Americas, Romani women have been treated as sexual property. The Gypsy Lore Society, which is still in existence and regularly publishes articles of varying credibility about Roma, began in Victorian England as a club for men who had slept with Romani women. (Consent was not considered necessary.)

Today, Romani women and girls are among those the most targeted by sex traffickers due to our supposedly sex-crazed, deviant nature, Romani women are also routinely forcibly sterilized. We see the specter of this dangerously sexual, mysterious seductress in countless pop songs: From Santana and Leonard Cohen to Lady Gaga and Hilary Duff, the list of Gypsy muses rolls on. Stephen King made sure to squeeze both an evil witch and a sexpot Gypsy into Thinner, and the racist TLC travesty My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding did its very best to misrepresent us as ignorant despots who are somehow bothsexually repressed and oversexed.

The messages start early too. Esmeralda, the tambourine-shaking Roma dancer of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, is the only Disney heroine to perform a pole dance. The sexy Esmeralda stereotype reinforces the way outsiders exoticize and fetishize Romani women, and in Gypsy, Jean's restless escapades moonlighting as another, more seductive woman make a mockery of a deadly serious issue.

Roma still face segregation in classrooms, employment and education discrimination, and police brutality. Living in Europe as an adult, I regularly saw "No Gypsies" signs in storefront windows; America certainly isn't immune, thanks to its anti-Gypsy police task forces, and the fear mongering racism of Fox News. Even my privileged childhood in New England, after my Sinti grandmother fled from genocidal Germany, was peppered with ugly reminders of Gypsy stereotypes: One teacher used to give me detention for "casting the evil Gypsy eye"; a woman tried to hit my mother and my aunt with her car because she worried they'd steal the neighborhood husbands. Now, as a professor of English, I have students complain that they "don't want a Gypsy for a teacher" or unabashedly assert, "but other Gypsies really are thieves." I've been sexually assaulted after men discovered my ethnicity, because it was assumed that my kind don't get a say in consent.

These realities are real and harmful, and they are regularly dismissed and erased by privileged outsiders who argue they can take this slur and make it stand for glamour, or mystery, or anything they want. The whole premise behind Gypsy is a selfish return to freedom, but it's a freedom that Roma have never known.

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As a Romani woman, more often called by the racial slur, "Gypsy," I watched the new Netflix original series, Gypsy, with some trepidation. The show is a psychological thriller-for the most part without many thrills-about Jean (Naomi Watts), a psychotherapist who becomes too entangled in her patients' lives to be professional, but not nearly enough to make for exciting television-and just today the series was cancelled after only one season.

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Look here to find information and support for community building, health issues, violence, discrimination, legal barriers, transgender youth, and more.

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At PEPS, our mission is to connect parents to strengthen families and build community. We are committed to equity and identifying and breaking down barriers to parent support and wellness, interrupting their negative impact, and eliminating the persistent disparities in child outcomes.

We have an opportunity to make generational change by raising anti-racist children. PEPS is not an expert on social justice and antiracism - we have created a list of critical resources that can help parents to get started.

Join us in committing to learn, unlearn, and talk with your children about race.

ARTICLES AND RESOURCES FOR PARENTS AND CAREGIVERS

A resource roundup of podcasts, articles, and books to help parents get started: Your Kids Aren't Too Young to Talk About Race

Conversation Starters from Race Conscious - 100 Race Conscious Things You Can Say to Your Child

Explaining Racism and Protest to your kids through books

How to Use Books to Talk About Race

How to be an Anti-Racist: A Social Worker's Perspective

Look, Listen, and Learn - an early learning education program showcasing Black and Indigenous people and people of color

Protecting your mental health while fighting racial injustice

Resources for anti-racist parenting from Greater Good, a magazine that uses scientific research to create tips and tools for a more compassionate society

Resource list for families on Racism, Police Violence, and Black Lives Matter from Families of Color Seattle

Talking Race and Cultural Differences with Young Children

Talking to Your Kids About Race and Other Difficult Things

The prevalence of prejudice and implicit bias in society

Thoughts and guidelines for talking about racism and equality in age-appropriate ways (with kids 2-5 years)

Watch the Sesame Street Town Hall for kids and families, Coming Together: Standing Up to Racism - Sesame Street characters, adults, and kids share stories of prejudice, and explain white privilege alongside messages on how adults can talk with kids about racism, ways to take action, and create change

What is Identity Development?

ARTICLES AND RESOURCES FOR WHITE PARENTS TO RAISE ANTIRACIST CHILDREN

BOOKS FOR CHILDREN

A list of books on race and social justice, for kids K-5, from Seattle Public Library

A clickable bookshelf with resources for talking about race with children

An open source document with a collection of books for kids, grouped by age

Books can offer a window to diversity that your family may not encounter on a daily basis. Read more: Children's Books as Mirrors and Windows (includes a list of infant-toddler board books that promote diversity)

Books from the Coretta Scott King Book Awards winners list, for preschoolers to teens

Talking to Kids About Race and Racism, Early and Often (a New York Times article that includes books to help start the conversation)

20 Picture Books - readings to embrace race, provide solace, and do good

A Kid's Book About Racism by Jelani Memory (ages 5-9)

All Are Welcome by Alexandra Penfold (ages 5-9)

Counting on Community by Innosanto Nagara (ages 3-5)

I am Rosa Parks by Brad Meltzer (ages 5-9)

Last Stop on Market Street by Matt de la Peña (ages 3-5)

More, More, More, Said the Baby by Vera B. Williams (ages 0-3)

Please, Baby, Please by Spike Lee and Tonya Lewis Lee (ages 0-3)

Something Happened in Our Town by Marianne Celano, Marietta Collins, Ann Hazzard (ages 5-9) (Animated version)

Ten, Nine, Eight by Molly Bang (ages 0-3)

The Colors of Us by Karen Katz (ages 3-5)

The Day You Begin by Jacqueline Woodson (ages 5-9)

The Other Side by Jacqueline Woodson (ages 5-9)

We March by Shane W. Evans (ages 5-9)

BOOKS FOR ADULTS

An Antiracist Reading List by Ibram X. Kendi

Dr. Robin DiAngelo Discusses White Fragility at the Seattle Public Library (June 2018) Video or Audio

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

Thirty books suggested by staff librarians on the topic of "Interrupting Whiteness"

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Dr. Robin DiAngelo

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race by Beverly Daniel Tatum

ORGANIZATIONS & EDUCATORS: FOLLOW THEM; SUPPORT THEM; INVEST IN THEM

Is there a resource that you have found helpful as a parent or caregiver and would like to suggest it for others? Email us!

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At PEPS, our mission is to connect parents to strengthen families and build community. We are committed to equity and identifying and breaking down barriers to parent support and wellness, interrupting their negative impact, and eliminating the persistent disparities in child outcomes. We have an opportunity to make generational change by raising anti-racist children.

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

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

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Everyone Uses Singular 'They,' Whether They Realize It Or Not

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Everyone Uses Singular 'They,' Whether They Realize It Or Not

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Everyone Uses Singular ‘They,’ Whether They Realize It Or Not

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The singular, gender-neutral usage of “they” is now acceptable on college campuses, among the genderqueer and in the Washington Post. Linguist Geoff Nunberg traces the rise of the new “they.”

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FOR OUR WHITE FRIENDS DESIRING TO BE ALLIES

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FOR OUR WHITE FRIENDS DESIRING TO BE ALLIES

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Author's Note: I'm writing this in hopes that it can be used to lighten the load of marginalized folks, keeping in mind that not all marginalized people want to engage in the ally conversation, and that is perfect as well. For those who do, my prayer is that when someone asks you the question, "how can I be a stronger ally?" you might choose to save your breath/energy and send this in its place.
I have been asked by two dear friends, "how can I be a stronger ally?" Being the slow emotional processor that I am, I wanted to spend some time with this before I answered them. I surely appreciate and love these two individuals, and I appreciate their vulnerability in asking me this question.

I am not going to do much coddling here; I don't know that I believe that love requires coddling. Here are six things you can do to be stronger allies.

1. Listen more; talk less. You don't have to have something to say all of the time. You don't have to post something on social media that points to how liberal/how aware/how cool/how good you are. You are lovely, human, and amazing. You have also had the microphone for most of the time, for a very long time, and it will be good to give the microphone to someone else who is living a different experience than your own.

2. For one out of every three opinions/insights shared by a person of color in your life, try to resist the need to respond with a better or different insight about something that you read or listened to as it relates to their shared opinion. Try just to listen and sit with someone else's experience. When you do share in response to what someone has shared with you, it can sometimes (not always) feel like "whitesplaining" - meaning to explain or comment on something in an over-confident or condescending way. This adds to the silencing of the voices of people of color.

3. Being an ally is different than simply wanting not to be racist (thank you for that, by the way). Being an ally requires you to educate yourself about systemic racism in this country. Read Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me and Claudia Rankine's and so many other great books and articles that illuminate oppression and structures of white supremacy and white privilege. Use your voice and influence to direct the folks that walk alongside you in real life (or follow you on the internet), toward the voice of someone that is living a marginalized/disenfranchised experience.

Being an ally requires you to educate yourself about systemic racism in this country.

4. Please try not to, "I can't believe that something like this would happen in this day and age!" your way into being an ally when atrocities like the events in Charleston, S.C.,and Charlottesville, Va., happen. People of color have been aware of this kind of hatred and violence in America for centuries, and it belittles our experience for you to show up 300 years late to the oppression-party suddenly caring about the world. Don't get me wrong, I welcome you. I want for you to come into a place of awareness. However, your shock and outrage at the existence of racism in America echoes the fact that you have lived an entire life with the luxury of indifference about the lives of marginalized/disenfranchised folks. Please take several seats.

5. Ask when you don't know - but do the work first. This is nuanced. Some marginalized/disenfranchised folks will tell you not to ask them anything; don't be offended by that. Folks are tired, and that is understandable because it is exhausting to be a marginalized person in this world. However, there is something special that happens within human connections and relationships. In a nutshell, don't expect for people to educate you. Do the work to educate yourself. Ask questions within relationships that feel safe, and do so respectfully.

6. And finally, stop talking about colorblindness. It's not a thing. Colorblindness is totally impossible in a nation whose land was taken from the indigenous inhabitants through an attempt at genocide and horrific colonization. The same nation that enslaved humans and exploited them in every way imaginable built a nation on their backs, hung them, hunted them, and for centuries kept them from their basic inalienable rights and still does. The same nation that exploits and deports immigrants who were promised refuge within the American Constitution. The same nation that incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II and continues to promote bigotry, exclusion, and violence against LGBTQ/gender non-identifying folks. This nation that allows swastika-wearing, Confederate-flag-toting, anti-Semitic racists to have a platform for their hate. The same nation that promised religious freedom, yet targets those who do not believe in a white, capitalist Jesus.

Ask when you don't know - but do the work first.

I love Jesus. And promise, Jesus was not white (literally brown, and wonderfully Jewish) and would have never been a capitalist.

It will never be possible for us to be colorblind, and we shouldn't ever want to be.

I heard a saying once at an Al-Anon meeting that offered me liberation: "We are only as sick as our secrets (and our shame)." Shame can only live in the darkness; it can live within the systems of denial and defensiveness that we use to cover it up. We have to name these things, acknowledge them, and begin to do the deep work of transformation, restoration - and reparation.

Yup, now I'm talking about reparations.

Privilege means that you owe a debt. You were born with it. You didn't ask for it. And you didn't pay for it either. No one is blaming you for having it. You are lovely, human, and amazing. Being a citizen of a society requires work from everyone within that society. It is up to you whether you choose to acknowledge the work that is yours to do. It is up to you whether you choose to pay this debt and how you choose to do so.

Sometimes living with privilege can disillusion us into thinking that being in community with other humans doesn't require work. This is a lie; it requires a great deal of work. And all of that work requires being a human and trying to love other humans well.

You're going to make mistakes - expect this. But keep showing up.

I believe that this is holy work, the work of justice, the pursuit of it. It doesn't need an audience, and it will not always have one. It will happen most days in ways that are unseen. It might mean providing a meal or shelter, listening, using your particular area of expertise to help someone in need of that expertise who might not have access to it otherwise, bailing a protester out of jail, or paying a family's rent one month (if you have the resources to do so), or marching at a rally with marginalized folks alongside other allies. There may not always be a practical, tangible way to pursue this work, but I believe you will know it when you meet it face-to-face.

However it looks, it will be something that you do without needing to be thanked or receive praise - you are not a savior. Marginalized/disenfranchised folks can and will survive without you - we are magic. However, I urge you to pursue this work, knowing that a system of white privilege afforded you access to opportunities while denying them to so many others.

Above all, I urge you keep trying. You're going to make mistakes; expect this. But keep showing up. Be compassionate. Lead with empathy, always. Keep learning and growing. If you do this, I truly believe you'll be doing the work of an ally.
Please keep in mind that self care is hugely important. Take care of yourself and protect your energy before you attempt to care for anyone else. Some additional resources:

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For Our White Friends Desiring to Be Allies

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Author's Note: I'm writing this in hopes that it can be used to lighten the load of marginalized folks, keeping in mind that not all marginalized people want to engage in the ally conversation, and that is perfect as well.

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Opinion | It’s Time for ‘They’ (Published 2019)

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The singular “they” is inclusive and flexible, and it breaks the stifling prison of gender expectations. Let’s all use it.

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National Center for Transgender Equality

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About Families for Transgender EqualityFamilies for Transgender Equality (FTE) is a network of families with trans youth, and groups that support these families, who all want to change policies and society to improve trans people’s lives. Families for Transgender Equality provides:

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Racial Injustice | A History of Racial Injustice

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Learn more about our history of racial injustice.

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#BlackLivesMatter Resources Curated by Tia Madkins 

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#BlackLivesMatter Resources Curated by Tia Madkins 

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#BlackLivesMatter Resources Curated by Tia C. Madkins

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As caregivers, community members, and early childhood educators, we have a responsibility to ensure each child, family, and caregiver is safe from racism and discrimination and has equitable opportunities to thrive.

In order to do this, we must begin with ourselves. Set aside time in your day to do a personal inventory. What thoughts, feelings, and behaviors have you contributed to upholding systems of racism? What assumptions are you making? What actions or inactions have you taken that contribute to systems of oppression?

Next, consider your family and your friends-what behaviors, statements, or jokes have gone unchecked? What actions or inactions have you taken within your interpersonal relationships that have contributed to an unsafe community for our black and brown children, neighbors, and colleagues? How might you begin to lead by example within your own family or community?

Anti-racism work is something that has to be attended to in an ongoing way. In order to support you in this work, we have compiled the following resources. Note that this list is not exhaustive.

Resources for Adults

Video: 'I Can't Breathe: From Agony to Activism', Pitt Diversity

Implicit Bias Test, Harvard

Anti-Racism Resources, Sarah Sophie Flicker and Alyssa Klein

Black History Month Library

African American History: From Emancipation to the Present, Yale

5 Ways White People Can Take Action in Response to White and State-Sanctioned Violence, Medium

The critical role white parents play in shaping racism - and eradicating it, PBS

How Not to be an Ally: Common missteps and advice for effective allyship, Psychology Today

An Anti-Racist Reading List, The New York Times

Mental Health Support and Education, Steel Smiling

Center for Race & Gender Equality, YWCA Greater Pittsburgh

Race Research Online Directory, University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work

How to raise anti-racist kids: 20 resources for parents, Motherly

Podcast: Notice the Rage, Notice the Silence, On Being with Krista Tippett

Talking About Race, National Museum of African American History & Culture

Want to support Black Lives Matter? Here's where to start in Pittsburgh., Kidsburgh

Why Raising Kids to 'Not See Color' Doesn't Help Fight Racism, HuffPost

Video: What I am learning from my white grandchildren - truths about race, TEDx Talks

Video: Juneteenth Round Table with Rep. Chris Rabb & Rep. Ed Gainey, For Our Future Pennsylvania

Race and Equity Resource List, Pennsylvania Department of Human Services

Antiracism Meditation

Confronting Prejudice: How to Protect Yourself and Help Others, Pepperdine University

In My Skin Podcast, University of Pittsburgh Office of Child Development

Mental Health Issues Facing the Black Community, Sunshine Behavioral Health

Our Family's Commitment to Being Anti-Racist, PBS Kids

Black Lives Matter, Substance Abuse, and Addiction Recovery in the United States, Addicted.org

Citizen Journalism and Political Protests, Syracuse University

Black Boys Matter: Cultivating Their Identity, Agency, and Voice, NAEYC

Things to Know If You Love a Multiracial Child, Embrace Race

COVID-in-Color: Race-conscious Resources For Children & Families, Embrace Race

Exploring & Understanding Structural Racism, Embrace Race

"Love is not enough": Supports for Transracial Adoptive Families, Embrace Race

Nurturing Resistance & Joy in Black Children, Embrace Race

Raising Muslim American Children Who Thrive, Embrace Race

Anti-Hate Safety Resources, Asian American Federation

Asian Americans Advancing Justice

Parenting in Racially and Culturally Diverse Adoptive Families, Child Welfare Information Gateway

Not Equal: Racial Disparities In Addiction/Substance Abuse Treatment, AddictionResource.net

Stop AAPI Hate

After Atlanta: Teaching About Asian American Identity and History, Learning for Justice

Black Men Matter - Examining Mental Health Issues Among Black Men - A Guide To Freedom, Drug Rehab USA

Race and Ethnicity: How it affects your risk of cancer, HealthMatch

Racism is a Public Health Crisis, Milken Institute School of Public Health

Resources to Help Empower Asian and Pacific Islander Communities, Online MSW Programs

Resources for Educators

'All we are asking for is change!' How schools are taking steps toward justice-centered learning, Kidsburgh

Black Students Are Not 'Marginalized,' They Are the Center of Our Work, Education Post

Asian Americans K-12 Education Curriculum, Asian Americans Advancing Justice

Black Lives Matter Resources, Writix

Early Childhood Education

Elementary Education

Talking to Kids About Racism and Justice: a list for parents, caregivers & educators, Oakland Library

Video: Identity, Challenge and Dismantle: A Few Sociocultural Strategies for Teaching About Racism, SPSSI

An Essential Reading Guide for Fighting Racism, BuzzFeed News

Positive Racial Identity Development in Early Education (P.R.I.D.E) - Understanding PRIDE in Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh School of Education

P.R.I.D.E. Speaker Series, University of Pittsburgh School of Education

In My Skin: A P.R.I.D.E Podcast, University of Pittsburgh School of Education

Teacher's Corner, University of Pittsburgh School of Education

What is Race?, Flocabulary

Advancing Equity in Early Childhood Education Position Statement, NAEYC

Advancing Equity Initiative, NAEYC

Becoming Upended: Teaching and Learning About Race and Racism with Young Children and Their Families, NAEYC

The Impact of Racism on Child and Adolescent Health, The American Academy of Pediatrics

YogaRoots On Location Certified Yoga Teacher Training

Talking About Race, National Museum of African American History and Culture

Understanding Anti-Bias Education: Bringing the Four Core Goals to Every Facet of Your Curriculum, NAEYC

A Call to Action for White Educators Who Seek to Be Anti-Racist, PBS

Teaching #BlackLivesMatter, Teaching for Change

A Guide to Equity and Antiracism for Educators, Edutopia

How to Root Out Anti-Black Racism From Your School, EdWeek

How Indigenous, Black and POC Educators Envision a Better School Experience, KQED

Race & Ethnicity Resources, Teaching Tolerance

Webinar Recording: Racial Justice, Equity and the role of Child Care, Child Care Aware

Racial inequities in education can start as early as preschool, AXIOS

NEA activists launch series of video "primers" for anti-racist white educators, NEA

Tools for Anti-Racist Teaching, PBS Teachers Lounge

My Racial Journey, University of Pittsburgh Office of Child Development

PA Equity Inclusion Toolkit, Pennsylvania Department of Education

Equity Services, Pennsylvania School Boards Association

The Cultural Proficiency Framework, The Robbins Group

Diversity Toolkit: A Guide to Discussing Identity, Power and Privilege, University of Southern California

What White Colleagues Need to Understand, Teaching Tolerance

Building Antiracist White Educators

How to create anti-racist virtual classrooms: Strategies for teachers and families, Kidsburgh

How do you teach antiracism to the youngest students?, The Hechinger Report

How to Better Support Your Black Colleagues, Edutopia

Building Anti-Racist Early Childhood Programs with Implicit Bias Trainings & Resources, HiMama

Inclusion of All Children in Early Childhood Education Programs in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Office of Child Development and Early Learning

One School's Commitment to Equity Using Student-Centered Learning, Students at the Center Hub

A Simple Way to Self-Monitor for Bias, Edutopia

Mere Engagement: Reflections about the Connections Between Online Learning, Student Agency, and Student Engagement, Aurora Institute

Learning for Justice

Public Health Resources for Understanding Environmental Racism, Public Health Degrees

A Call to Action for White Educators Who Seek to Be Anti-Racist, PBS Teachers Lounge

How to Provide a Multicultural Education, Baylor University

135 Racial Equity Resources For Education, Professional & Community Development, Health, And Civil Rights, College Consensus

Resources for Discussing Racism and Violence with Children

Coming Together: Talking to Children About Race and Identity, Sesame Workshop

Talking to Kids About Anti-Asian Racism, Time for Kids

Racism and Violence: How to Help Kids Handle the News, Child Mind Institute

Video: A Clinical Perspective on Talking to Kids About Racism, Child Mind Institute

Talking to Children About Race, Policing and Violence, The New York Times

Addressing Race and Trauma in the Classroom: A Resource for Educators, The National Child Traumatic Stress Network

Resources for Talking about Race, Racism and Racialized Violence with Kids, Center for Racial Justice in Education

Anti-Racism for Kids: An Age-by-Age Guide to Fighting Hate, Parents.com

'Raising White Kids' Author On How White Parents Can Talk About Race, NPR

George Floyd. Ahmaud Arbery. Breonna Taylor. What do we tell our children?, USA Today

They're not too young to talk about race!, The Children's Community School

Talking to Children About Racial Bias, HealthyChildren

Video: "How do I make sure I'm not raising the next Amy Cooper?" with Jennifer Harvey, Embrace Race

Talking Race with Young Children, NPR

How to Talk to Kids about Race and Racism, Parent Toolkit

10 tips for teaching and talking to kids about race, Embrace Race

How to Talk with Kids About Racism and Racial Violence, Common Sense Media

Resources for Talking About Race, Racism and Racialized Violence with Kids, Center for Racial Justice in Education

How to Talk to Your Children About the Protests, The Wall Street Journal

Talking about Race with Kids and Teens, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh

Talking with Children About Racism, Police Brutality and Protests, Aha! Parenting

How To Talk To Your Kids About Race, Racism And Police Violence, WBUR

How to talk to kids about racism, explained by a psychologist, Vox

21 Anti-Racism Videos to Share With Kids, We are Teachers

Experts answer your kids' tough questions about race and racism, The Hechinger Report

Talking to Children Authentically about Race and Racism, PBS Kids

How To Talk About Race And Protests With Your Kids, Explained By A Child Psychologist, WBUR

The Power of We: A Sesame Street Special, Sesame Workshop

Video - PBS KIDS Talk About: Race & Racism, PBS Kids

Talking to Young Children About Race and Racism: A Discussion Guide, PDB Kids

Raising Kids Who Embrace Race, National PTA

So You Want to Raise a Young White Ally?, Embrace Race

Supporting Children's Leadership & Activism, Embrace Race

Supporting Healthy Racial Learning in Early Childhood, Embrace Race

Talking to Kids About Racism and Violence, Child Mind Institute

Children's Books

I Too Am America, by Langston Hughes, ages 5+

Baby Blessings: A Prayer For The Day You Were Born, by Deloris Jordan, ages 0-6

Lullaby, A Poem, by Langston Hughes, ages 0-6

Welcome, Precious, by Nikki Grimes, ages 0-5

Malcolm Little: The Boy Who Grow Up to Become Malcolm X, by IIyasha Shabazz, ages 6+

CROWN: An Ode To A Fresh Cut, by Derrick Barnes, ages 3-10

Turning 15 On The Road To Freedom: My Story of 1965 Selma Voting Right March, by Lynda Blackmon, ages 12+

A Child's Introduction To AA History, by Jabari Asim, ages 5+

10 Children's Books About Racism And Activism To Help Parents Educate Their Kids, HuffPost

31 Children's books to support conversations on race, racism and resistance, Embrace Race

These Books Can Help You Explain Racism and Protest to Your Kids, The New York Times

Books About Racism and Social Justice, Common Sense Media

Books on race and racism, by age, recommended by Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Kidsburgh

Reading Race in Picture Books with Children, Embrace Race

Resources for Social/Emotional Development

Helping Children Cope With Frightening News, Child Mind Institute

How to Foster Resilience in Kids, Child Mind Institute

What to Do (and Not Do) When Children Are Anxious, Child Mind Institute

NASP: Managing Strong Emotional Reactions to Trauma, National Association of School Psychologists

Supporting Young Children after Crisis Events, NAEYC

Coping with Grief After Community Violence, SAMHSA

The Brown Mama Blueprint Podcast, Pittsburgh Brown Mamas

Resources to Support Children's Emotional Well-Being Amid Anti-Black Racism, Racial Violence, and Trauma, Child Trends

Asian Mental Health Collective

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We all have a responsibility to ensure each child and family is safe from racism and discrimination and has equitable opportunities to thrive.

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10 tips for teaching and talking to kids about race

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10 tips for teaching and talking to kids about race

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EmbraceRace is a multiracial community dedicated to sharing and developing best practices for raising and caring for kids, all kids, in the context of race. We partnered with MomsRising - a transformative multicultural organization of more than a million members working to increase family economic security and end discrimination against women and mothers - to create these tips for our communities.

They are designed to help parents of all backgrounds talk to and guide their children about race early and often by lifting up age-appropriate activities that can be incorporated easily into your daily life. We hope these tips provide some much needed support for families committed to building tolerance, racial equity, and a social culture where all kids and families can thrive!

1) Start early.

By 6 months of age babies are noticing racial differences; by age 4, children have begun to show signs of racial bias.

Let your child know that it's perfectly okay to notice skin color and talk about race. Start talking about what racial differences mean and don't mean.

2) Encourage your child.

Encourage your child to ask questions, share observations and experiences, and be respectfully curious about race.

Expose your child to different cultural opportunities - photographs, films, books, or cultural events, for example - and discuss the experience afterwards.

You don't have to be an expert on race to talk with our child. Be honest about what you don't know and work with your child to find accurate information.

3) Be mindful.

What kids hear from us is less important than what they see us do.

You are a role model to your child. What you say is important, but what you do - the diversity of your friendship circle, for example - is likely to have a bigger impact.

If your child doesn't attend a diverse school, consider enrolling her in aer-school or weekend activities such as sports leagues that are diverse if you're able. Choose books and toys that include persons of different races and ethnicities. Visit museums with exhibits about a range of cultures and religions.

4) Face and know your own bias.

Let your child see you acknowledge and face your own biases.

We're less likely to pass on the biases we identify and work to overcome.

Give your child an example of a bias, racial or otherwise, that you hold or have held. Share with your child things you do to confront and overcome that bias.

5) Know and love who you are.

Talk about the histories and experiences of the racial, ethnic, and cultural groups you and your family identify with. Talk about their contributions and acknowledge the less flattering parts of those histories as well.

Tell stories about the challenges your family (your child's parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents and great grandparents, others) has faced and overcome.

6) Develop racial cultural literacy.

Develop racial cultural literacy by learning about and respecting others.

Study and talk about the histories and experiences of groups we call African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and whites, among others.

Be sure your child understands that every racial and ethnic group includes people who believe different things and behave in different ways . There is as much diversity within racial groups as across them.

7) Be honest.

Be honest with your child, in age-appropriate ways, about bigotry and oppression.

Children are amazing at noticing patterns, including racial patterns (who lives in their neighborhood versus their friends' neighborhoods, for example). Help them make sense of those patterns, and recognize that bigotry and oppression are sometimes a big part of those explanations.

Be sure your child knows that the struggle for racial fairness is still happening and that your family can take part in that struggle.

8) Tell stories.

"Lift up the freedom fighters ": Tell stories of resistance and resilience.

Every big story of racial oppression is also a story about people fighting back and "speaking truth to power." Teach your child those parts of the story too.

Include women, children and young adults among the "freedom fighters" in the stories you tell. A story about racial struggle in which all the heroes are men wrongly leaves many people out.

9) Be active.

Be active - don't be a "bystander" on race.

Help your child understand what it means to be, and how to be, a change agent.

Whenever possible, connect the conversations you're having to the change you and your child want to see, and to ways to bring about that change .

10) Plan for a marathon, not a sprint.

It's okay to say, "I'm not sure" or "Let's come back to that later, okay?" But then do come back to it.

Make race talks with your child routine. Race is a topic you should plan to revisit again and again in many different ways overtime.

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10 tips for teaching and talking to kids about race

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These tips are designed to help parents of all backgrounds teach and talk to their children about race early and often by lifting up age-appropriate activities that can be incorporated easily into your daily life.

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Simmons University Anti-Oppression LibGuide 

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Simmons University Anti-Oppression LibGuide 

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is the range of human differences, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual identity & orientation, age, socioeconomic class, physical ability or attributes, neurodivergence or neurological condition, religious or ethical values system, and national origin. (adapted from Ferris State University)

is defined as "the state, quality or ideal of being just, impartial, and fair." The concept of equity is closely tied to fairness and justice, and all three are context-specific to the historical, systemic barriers, disadvantages, and power disparities present in any given situation. It is helpful to think of equity as not simply a desired state of affairs or a "finish line," but instead as a continuous structural concept-a lens and mindset (proactively reinforced by policies, practices, attitudes, and actions) through which power and ownership are redistributed and inequity is challenged and addressed. (adapted from Race Equity and Inclusion Action Guide)

is involvement and empowerment, where the inherent worth and dignity of all people are recognized. An inclusive community promotes and sustains a sense of belonging; it values, celebrates, and recognizes the enriching benefits of diversity and practices respect for the talents, beliefs, identities, and lived experiences of its members. (adapted from Ferris State University)

is the systematic fair treatment of all people along all axes of identity and of any social position. In practice, it is the proactive operationalization of policies, practices, attitudes, and actions resulting in equitable access, opportunities, treatment, empowerment, and outcomes for all. (adapted from Center for the Study of Social Policy)

". Diversity & Inclusion have to do with the acknowledgment, valuing, celebration, and empowerment of difference, whereas Diversity & Inclusion" is a very frequently heard phrase. Though they go hand in hand, diversity & inclusion is notthe same as anti-oppression ference. Diversity & Inclusion and Anti-Oppression are all necessary in order to work toward Equity and Justice. Anti-Oppression challenges the systems and systemic biases that devalue and marginalize dif

Note: Definitions for diversity are...well...diverse. Context and environment play a big part in what we mean when we say "diversity," and as social justice movements have gained media spotlight, the term has unfortunately become somewhat hollowed out from being overused and under-defined from situation to situation. The definitions above do notcapture the many, many cultural and political nuances embedded in these terms, rather they are intended to provide a broad scaffolding for understanding and engaging with the dialogues in and outside Simmons a nd on which more specific iterations of these concepts as they apply to particular communities can be structured.

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The It Gets Better Project exists to uplift, empower, and connect LGBTQ+ youth around the globe.

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Free Webinars on Accessibility and Advocacy 

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Free Webinars on Accessibility and Advocacy 

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Solutions Center: Free Webinars on Ideas You Can Use - Respect Ability

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Choose Topic: Accessibility and Etiquette | Employment | Advocacy | Hollywood | Safety and Criminal Justice | Jewish Inclusion Accessibility and Etiquette Ensuring Accessibility During the Return of In-Person Events - And Why We Should Keep Doing Accessible Virtual Events Lauren Appelbaum, Vice President, Communications, RespectAbility Tatiana Lee, Senior Entertainment Media Associate, RespectAbility Disability 101 [click to continue...]

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Opinion | What Is Whiteness? (Published 2015)

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Our search for understanding in matters of race automatically inclines us toward blackness. But the answers lie in the construction of whiteness.

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Latino Public History in Boston, Massachusetts

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This tour will examine the efforts to present Latino history to the Boston public.

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Talking to Young Children About Race and Racism 

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Talking to Young Children About Race and Racism 

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Talking to Young Children About Race and Racism

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Here are tips, books, and resources to help you have meaningful conversations with young children about race, racism, and anti-racist behavior.

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CenterLink is an international nonprofit organization and member-based association of LGBTQ centers and other LGBTQ organizations serving their local and regional communities. Our mission is to strengthen, support, and connect LGBTQ community centers. We currently have over 325 member LGBTQ centers worldwide providing essential services, promoting growth, wellness, and connectivity in their communities.

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CenterLink the Community of LGBTQ Centers - for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender services and community.

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CenterLink is the national association of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community centers. CenterLink serves over 200 LGBT community centers across the country and the world.

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In this statement, GLSEN's National Student Council condemns police brutality and calls for greater support for Black lives

Read the Statement

Get involved and join your community, local, or state GLSEN chapter

GLSEN Chapters create LGBTQ-inclusive schools. Community-led chapters offer teacher trainings, student support, community outreach, and more.

Recent Research

Research, Reports, and Briefs

Research, Reports, and Briefs

Research, Reports, and Briefs

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In this statement, GLSEN's National Student Council condemns police brutality and calls for greater support for Black lives Read the Statement GLSEN Chapters create LGBTQ-inclusive schools. Community-led chapters offer teacher trainings, student support, community outreach, and more. Research, Reports, and Briefs Research, Reports, and Briefs Research, Reports, and Briefs

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​ ​ ​The definition of racism offered here is grounded in Critical Race Theory , a movement started in the 1970s by activists and scholars committed to the study and transformation of...

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My Pronouns: Resources for Personal Pronouns 

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My Pronouns: Resources for Personal Pronouns 

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Pronouns.org Resources on Personal Pronouns

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Pronouns.org Resources on Personal Pronouns

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A Call to Action for White Educators Who Seek to be Anti-Racist 

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A Call to Action for White Educators Who Seek to be Anti-Racist 

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I am a white mother and educator. For decades in school I have taught "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Unfortunately, for many of my students, the suffering often seems abstract and they falsely believe these are stories from a distant past. But, racism didn't end with the Civil Rights Movement. It is an ever present, persistent evil that impacts us all in every aspect of our daily lives. Wishing and hoping that systemic racism will just go away--or believing that it doesn't exist in our own communities--is its own form of violence. And recently I have been asking myself if I've made this point clearly enough in my teaching practice.

It should not have taken the recent brutal murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade, at the hands of police, to spark our consciousness. But it has, and this is now the time for me, and for other white parents and educators like me, to sit up, take notice, listen to Black communities, talk to our children and demonstrate anti-racist actions. This is not a time to be dismissive, but instead it's time for us to reach out, support in every way possible and take meaningful action. I am taking action to build a better future for my children and the children in my care. As a parent and educator I can help dismantle systemic racism. As I continue my own journey of learning about, and committing to, anti-racist action, here's what I believe we can do as educators to support meaningful change.

Our words must match our actions
Frankly, what we have done in the past has not worked. If our society had dismantled systemic racism, then we would not be seeing the necessary unrest that we see today. Our rhetoric needs to match our actions. As I think about what I do as an educator and as a parent, I am not 100 percent confident that my rhetoric and actions have always matched. But when I know better, I do better. I have friends, writers and public figures whose words I listen to, whose words I reflect on, and whose words I take to heart in order to support the change that needs to happen in our society. But it's not enough to read and reflect on those words, I must put those ideas into action.

We must broaden representation in classroom reading
When I reflect on my teaching practice and consider the words that I teach - the novels I use in my classroom, the authors whose works I use on a regular basis--it is clear that I have not had enough Black, Indigenous, or People of Color representation in my curriculum. On reflection, I have not ensured that every student who sits in a seat in my classroom has felt that their experiences were reflected in what we read. As a high school English teacher, I know that the white savior trope dominates our canon of American literature. I need to do a better job of including more writers who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. People like Maya Angelou and Zora Neale Hurston, people like Amy Tan and Ta-Nehisi Coates, people like Jason Reynolds and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, people like Sandra Cisneros and Junot Díaz, people like Celeste Ng and Ted Chiang, Langston Hughes and Cleo Wade, Sherman Alexie and Leslie Marmon Silko.

We must embrace tough conversations
First, we must be better listeners. It is time to de-center myself, my stories and my experience, especially when talking about race and racial justice. This is not about me; it's about my friends, colleagues, and community. We must be disciplined and listen to the stories and experiences of others. Listening means not interjecting my point of view or saying anything that might invalidate the experience of others. I listen to People of Color on the news, I read their words in books and on social media. I listen with the intention of hearing what they have to say so I can create a connection and an understanding. I listen to the conversations students have when they are in my classroom and I find teachable moments when the conversation needs to change. I do not pretend I don't hear it. Even if this may feel uncomfortable, we need to have these conversations. I listen to the questions my own children have about race and I answer truthfully and transparently. I acknowledge the mistakes I have made as well as the mistakes others make, and we talk about ways to actively change hearts and minds.

We must explore different ideas, and listen with intention to change
I talk openly about race issues, not just on social media but with people in real life. I initiate conversations (but only if they want to talk) with non-white friends, colleagues, and students, and I actively participate by asking questions to gain understanding. Not everyone in a cultural group feels the same way and by asking questions I can explore different ideas. Again, this requires being present in the conversation, and listening to learn. I talk to my students about racial stereotypes, about how so much of what we read in class overwhelmingly has white characters and about how literature supports learning empathy for others. As a parent, I talk to my children about current events, about historical events, about implicit bias and overt racism. I talk to them about the importance of speaking up, listening, and learning.

We must commit to constant self reflection and admit our own bias
I'm still learning. I am learning how much words matter. I love To Kill a Mockingbird but it is one of many books that uses the White Savior trope - as a society we have so much exposure to this idea that white people have to step in and save Black people. This reinforces that idea that Black people need to be saved by white people. Through my own reflection, I understand how this trope is harmful. True allies don't seek to "solve and save," instead we stand beside our Black friends and colleagues, build empathy, amplify their voices, and stand up alongside them. I now constantly check my thoughts, and question even those that are fleeting: are my ideas influenced by bias, white supremacy and racism? I recently read this from Greater Good Magazine, and it stayed with me: "Admitting that we are all subject to biases creates a safer space to examine them more carefully and take steps to fight them..."

We must use media to strengthen understanding
I'm still learning about cultural appropriation, implicit bias and the historical events that have gone largely ignored, but which have inevitably led our country to this moment. Education plays a role in change. My own learning has been shaped by I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Invisible Man, and more recently, titles like Stamped, Just Mercy, The Hate U Give, Monster, and Dear Martin. These are books I can pass along to my colleagues, my high school students and to my own sons. I watch movies with my family like Akilah and the Bee, Raising Dion, See You Yesterday, Hidden Figures and BlacKkKlansman. I'm learning from podcasts such as Code Switch and Seeing White and my children and I listen to them at home and in the car.

I'm learning why and how Black communities are disproportionately impacted by Covid-19. I'm learning how and why Black people, especially Black men, are disproportionately killed by police. I'm learning and sharing the names and circumstances of the deaths with my children. I'm learning that I need to support organizations like the NAACP that actively support change. I'm learning that I need to show up.

We must keep doing the work
There is no quick fix for systemic racism. It requires continued, ongoing effort to dismantle white supremacy. But I also have hope. With our combined voices and our combined intelligence, we fight for racial justice and usher change. My Black students, colleagues and friends are in pain. As a white person, as a mother of white sons, as a white educator, it is incumbent on me to be more aware, to learn more, to empathize, to listen and to support others as we work to dismantle white supremacy and forge a new way forward.
More Resources

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a call to action for white educators who seek to be anti-racist

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A Call to Action for White Educators Who Seek to Be Anti-Racist | PBS Education

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I am a white mother and educator. For decades in school I have taught "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Unfortunately, for many of my students, the suffering often seems abstract and they falsely believe these are stories from a distant past.

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105 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice

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105 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice

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106 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice

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Note 1: This article was last updated on February 5, 2022.
Note 2: Our work is to fix what we broke and left broken. The work isn’t done…

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Diversity Toolkit: A Guide to Discussing Identity, Power and Privilege

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Diversity Toolkit: A Guide to Discussing Identity, Power and Privilege

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Introduction What Is Social Justice? Communal Agreements Icebreaker: Respect Activity Activities: Introducing Identity: "My Fullest Name" Understanding Privilege and Systems of Power: "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" Gender and Sexuality Workshop: Creating Gender-Free Nouns Race and Ethnicity: Diversity Profile Intersection Identity and Privilege: Crossing the Line Recap and Closing Activity Closing and Recommended Resources
Introduction

This toolkit is meant for anyone who feels there is a lack of productive discourse around issues of diversity and the role of identity in social relationships, both on a micro (individual) and macro (communal) level. Perhaps you are a teacher, youth group facilitator, student affairs personnel or manage a team that works with an underserved population. Training of this kind can provide historical context about the politics of identity and the dynamics of power and privilege or help build greater self-awareness.

The following activities are intended for groups of 10 to 60 people. For larger groups, you can break into multiple sessions with additional facilitators to ensure the conversations and activities remain focused. The diversity toolkit outlined here may be used as a guideline and can be modified to better fit your group's unique needs.

A note on facilitators: Facilitators should be well versed in the topics and themes we will be discussing, but they do not need to be experts. This workshop is organized as a popular education activity where the majority of the outcomes are learned from the experiences and knowledge of the individuals participating rather than a teacher/student relationship.

Facilitator Sensitivity

Facilitators will be experiencing and addressing the feelings that come with confronting participants' notions of identity, privilege, race and sexuality. Some participants may be required to attend this workshop (through work or school, etc.), so facilitators should be clear that participants are there because these are issues that affect everyone and that there will not be personal judgment of anyone's feelings about a particular issue. Facilitators should remind participants that:

Facilitators should emphasize that what is shared during the workshop is private and confidential. Participants can talk about how the workshop affected them personally and what they learned generally, but they should respect the privacy of the personal information of the other participants.

What Is Social Justice? Setting a Stage for Discussion

Before beginning, it's important that everyone have a basic understanding of two core concepts related to privilege and identity. This will allow everyone to start the conversations on the same page and ensure that the participants have a foundation upon which to build future knowledge.

The first core concept is culture, which is:

The second core concept is identity, which is:

Everyone Has Many Identities

Age, gender, religious or spiritual affiliation, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status are all identities. Some identities are things people can see easily (like race or assumed gender), while other identities are internalized and are not always easy to see (like a disability, socioeconomic status or education level). There are two types of identities that need to be defined in order to spark a discussion on social justice. The first type deals with identities that are part of a majority status - or "agent" - while the second includes identities that are part of the minority status - or "target."

Agent: Members of dominant social groups privileged by birth or acquisition who knowingly or unknowingly exploit and reap unfair advantage over members of the target groups.

Target: Members of social identity groups who are discriminated against, marginalized, disenfranchised, oppressed, exploited by an oppressor and oppressor's system of institutions without identity apart from the target group, and compartmentalized in defined roles.

After participants understand the difference between agent and target groups, the facilitator can begin a discussion on oppression. The key features of oppression are:

But remember:

When the facilitator talks about these concepts with the group, it is helpful to start with an understanding that everyone experienced being a target or agent at some point in their lives. This helps create a dialogue of understanding. This is not to say that some target statuses are more salient (for example, people can see I am a woman, or a Black woman, before they even speak with me) and others may be easier to conceal (for example, if I am lesbian). But each creates a burden on the individual and each has its own set of challenges to overcome.

Communal Agreements

Before initiating any activity, it is critical that the group builds communal agreements. Rather than naming these "rules" that are then placed upon the group, we will call these "agreements" because these are the guidelines built by the group that all members agree to follow during the course of the workshop. Once an agreement has been put forward, the facilitator should then ask for a definition of what that agreement means to ensure that there is a communal language. Below are several suggested agreements.

Icebreaker: Respect Activity

Source: Critical Multicultural Pavilion

Ask participants to find someone in the room they don't know and make an introduction. Talk for five to 10 minutes about respect. What does it mean to you to "show respect?" How do you show respect to others? After the allotted time, ask all participants to sit and open the discussion. How did people define respect? What were some of the core concepts discussed?

Common responses will likely include:

All responses are worthy of reflection in terms of their cultural and hegemonic influences. Ask participants where their ideas of respect come from and whom they are meant to protect. If the group raises any of the common responses above, challenge them to answer the following questions:

The point of the discussion is to reflect critically on assumptions and socializations regarding respect. The point is not to agree and to learn from each other's differences.

This activity helps to establish a basis of respect within the group, helping the participants take the first steps toward creating and maintaining a constructive discussion of social justice and equity. At the very least, participants meet someone new and exchange ideas with that person. The group also gets its first look at the similarities and differences between participants, potentially in ways that reflect privilege and power.

Activity One: Introduction Identity

Definition
Everyone has a personal and social identity. Personal identities include an individual's name, unique characteristics, history, personality and other traits that make one different from others. Social identity includes affinities one has with other people, values and norms that one accepts, and the ways one has learned to behave in social settings.

Objective
The following activity is particularly useful when working with participants who don't know one another very well. The goal of this activity is to warm up participants to sharing about themselves and start revealing a bit about each participant's background.

Materials
Markers and 8-by-10-inch sheets of paper folded horizontally.

Instructions
Write out your fullest name and tell your story. On the back of the piece of paper write the top three identities you feel closest to. The facilitator encourages participants to go around the circle to share any meanings, significance, culture, significant ancestors and the top three identities they hold dearest. Everyone will have a chance to share and be heard by the group.

Suggested questions if participants need help getting started:

Facilitators should encourage students to be creative. Make it clear that it is acceptable to write poetry, list adjectives that describe them, include humor, etc.

If your group is large, break into diverse small groups of five or six to make sure everyone has an opportunity to share their story. Ask for volunteers to get the group started and tell participants they can share their stories from memory, or read them.
Facilitator Notes

Discussion
When everyone has shared, ask participants how it felt to share their stories. Why is this activity important? What did you learn?

Activity Two: Understanding Privilege and Systems of Power

Activity
"Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"

Objective
The objective of this activity is to confront entrenched systems of power and privilege, and identify common situations when privilege is not acknowledged, to the detriment of the disadvantaged and oppressed.

Discussion
What is privilege? We all have privileges. What are yours? Were you surprised by any of the privileges you found in your invisible knapsack?

Activity Three: Gender and Sexuality

Group Definition
Have the group describe what they believe to be the definition of the terms "gender" and "sexuality."

Objective
The objective of this activity is to reconsider male-gendered nouns that we consider "generic." Generating gender-free nouns and pronouns will help participants incorporate more inclusive language in their daily speech and writing.

Instructions
Break participants into small groups and give them a printout of the chart below. Instruct participants to convert the suffixes of the nouns into gender-free, inclusive terms by changing the noun root word or substituting a non-gender-specific root word from another language. Tell participants that since male endings are so pervasive, it is OK to invent new words by replacing the endings of existing words with something non-gendered.

Discussion Questions
The facilitator should ask the following questions of the group while also encouraging them to share personal experiences that speak to their point. What are characteristics of what society believes a [woman/man/girl/boy] should be? What are the norms for appearance/behavior? What happens when someone falls outside of this norm? How do the words we use influence the way we think about certain professions?

Activity Four: Race and Ethnicity

Definition
Race is a social construction that has real consequences and effects. Race is colloquially used to refer to a person's skin color, religion or area of origin (e.g., Black, Jewish or African). Technically, however, race is based on national origin, sociocultural groups and self-identification. The U.S. government, including the Census Bureau and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, does not attempt to identify race according to biology, anthropology or genetics. Religious belief is not considered a race, but can be a factor in identifying one's sociocultural group. (For a full explanation of how each racial category is defined, refer to the U.S. Census About Race page). In a historical context, race has played a large part in how our society has evolved, and it shapes the way we see others and how we experience our lives. (For more on race from a historical perspective, read " A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America," by Ronald Takaki.)

Objective
The objective of this activity is to help participants take stock of the multicultural diversity in their lives. It should help participants get a clear image of how diverse or homogenous their surroundings are and identify ways to improve their exposure to multiculturalism on a daily basis.

Instructions
Fill in the appropriate boxes:

Activity Five: Intersectional Identity and Privilege

Activity
Crossing The Line

Objective
The purpose of this activity is to explore the diversity among the members of our community. How a person identifies can affect many facets of his or her life. We will use this activity to get to know one another on a deeper level. What are our values, backgrounds, and visible and invisible labels? This activity requires everyone to step outside of his or her comfort zone. Participants being vulnerable can help the group learn more about the identities they do not share.

Instructions
Have all participants line up in a straight line facing the facilitator. If the room is too small to have each participant standing shoulder to shoulder, an alternative is to have the group stand in a circle and step into the circle. The facilitator should explain that they will read a statement. If the statement describes you, then silently step across the line. Everyone should quietly notice who stepped across the line and who did not. After a moment, the facilitator will thank those who stepped forward and will then have everyone step back in line.

Discussion
Activity Six: Recap and Closing Activity

This toolkit was designed to address human issues that everyone faces and help participants recognize how they can better understand and work toward solving, or at least improving, these issues. Participants were often forced to confront socialized and entrenched notions of privilege, identity and social justice. Anything that was difficult to confront during the training will be even more difficult to confront in practice, but if these were easily solvable issues, they wouldn't be issues for long. Participants should feel better equipped with newfound knowledge and empathy, and prepared to apply the lessons they learned in their own lives and communities.

Objective
To practice giving positive feedback and to have participants leave the workshop feeling energized.

Instructions
Have participants mingle randomly in a large group and then instruct them to stop and share with the person in front of them one way in which that person "shined" during the workshop. Repeat several times so that each person gets feedback and support from different people in the group. If there are an odd number of participants, the facilitator should address the odd person out each time.

Completing this training is not the end, but merely the beginning. Hopefully, this toolkit has helped to create new understanding among your participants. Individuals should have learned about their own identity and of those around them, as well as the implications of socially constructed labels and stereotypes of an individual's experience. Those interested in this type of work may be interested in a career in social work, facilitation, advocacy or sociology. At the end of the training, facilitators should be prepared to provide additional resources for participants who want to learn more about issues of identity, power and privilege. Below we cite several resources to help you get started.

Recommended Resources

Resources for Additional Activities

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Citation for this content: The MSW@USC, the online Master of Social Work program at the University of Southern California.

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Diversity Toolkit: A Guide to Discussing Identity, Power and Privilege

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This training is meant for anyone who feels there is a lack of productive discourse around issues of diversity and the role of identity in social relationships, both on a micro (individual) and macro (communal) level.

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White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack 

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White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack 

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White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
Downloadable PDF © 1989 Peggy McIntosh "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" first appeared in Peace and Freedom Magazine, July/August, 1989, pp. 10-12, a For use in a bound volume there will be a copyright fee. McIntosh's lists must not be taken out of their autobiographical contexts. These articles may not be electronically posted except by the National SEED Project. publication of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Philadelphia, PA.
I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.

Through work to bring materials from Women's Studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are over-privileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to improve women's status, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can't or won't support the idea of lessening men's. Denials which amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages which men gain from women's disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened or ended.

Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of white privilege that was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.

Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable. As we in Women's Studies work to reveal male privilege and ask men to give up some of their power, so one who writes about white privilege must ask, "Having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?"

After I realized the extent to which men work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Then I remembered the frequent charges from women of color that white women whom they encounter are oppressive.

I began to understand why we are justly seen as oppressive, even when we don't see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence.

My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow "them" to be more like "us."

I decided to try to work on myself at least by identifying some of the daily effects of white privilege in my life. I have chosen those conditions which I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic location, though of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined. As far as I can see, my African American co-workers, friends, and acquaintances with whom I come into daily or frequent contact in this particular time, place and line of work cannot count on most of these conditions.

1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.

2. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.

3. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.

4. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.

5. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.

6. When I am told about our national heritage or about "civilization," I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.

7. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.

8. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.

9. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods that fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser's shop and find someone who can cut my hair.

10. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.

11. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.

12. I can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.

13. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.

14. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.

15. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.

16. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world's majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.

17. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.

18. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to "the person in charge," I will be facing a person of my race.

19. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven't been singled out because of my race.

20. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children's magazines featuring people of my race.

21. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared.

22. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of race.

23. I can choose public accommodations without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.

24. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.

25. If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones.

26. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in "flesh" color and have them more less match my skin.

I repeatedly forgot each of the realizations on this list until I wrote it down. For me, white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one's life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.

In unpacking this invisible knapsack of white privilege, I have listed conditions of daily experience that I once took for granted. Nor did I think of any of these perquisites as bad for the holder. I now think that we need a more finely differentiated taxonomy of privilege, for some of these varieties are only what one would want for everyone in a just society, and others give license to be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant and destructive.

I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a pattern of assumptions that were passed on to me as a white person. There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turf, and I was among those who could control the turf. My skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I could think of myself as belonging in major ways and of making social systems work for me. I could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely.

In proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made inconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress and violence, which I was being subtly trained to visit, in turn, upon people of color.

For this reason, the word "privilege" now seems to me misleading. We usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work systematically to overempower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one's race or sex.

I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power conferred systemically. Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society. Others, like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups.

We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages, which we can work to spread, and negative types of advantage, which unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies. For example, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege for a few. Ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At present, since only a few have it, it is an unearned advantage for them. This paper results from a process of coming to see that some of the power that I originally saw as attendant on being a human being in the United States consisted in unearned advantage and conferred dominance.

The question is: "Having described white privilege, what will I do to end it?

I have met very few men who are truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like me is whether we will be like them, or whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance, and, if so, what will we do to lessen them. In any case, we need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect our daily lives. Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the U.S. think that racism doesn't affect them because they are not people of color, they do not see "whiteness" as a racial identity. In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation.

Difficulties and dangers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many. Since racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the advantages associated with them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage which rest more on social class, economic class, race, religion, sex, and ethnic identity than on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are interlocking, as the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977 continues to remind us eloquently.

One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both active forms, which we can see, and embedded forms, which as a member of the dominant group one is taught not to see. In my class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.

Disapproving of the systems won't be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitudes. But a "white" skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate, but cannot end, these problems.

To redesign social systems, we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these taboo subjects. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.

It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.

Although systemic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me and I imagine for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the perquisites of being light-skinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching men, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base.

*This is an authorized excerpt of McIntosh's original white privilege article, "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women's Studies," Working Paper 189 (1988), Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley College, MA, 02481.
© 2010, Peggy McIntosh - Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley, MA
Some Notes for Facilitators on Presenting My White Privilege Papers

1. My work is not about blame, shame, guilt, or whether one is a "nice person." It's about observing, realizing, thinking systemically and personally. It is about seeing privilege, the "up-side" of oppression and discrimination. It is about unearned advantage, which can also be described as exemption from discrimination.

2. Please do not generalize from my papers. They are about my experience, not about the experiences of all white people in all times and places and circumstances. The paragraph in each paper before the list begins says this, and also allays fears of white people that a paper on white privilege will call them racist.

3. Keep "the lists" in their autobiographical contexts. It is a matter of scholarly integrity and accuracy not to claim more than I did. I compared my own circumstances with some of those of African American women I worked with. Being clear about this will actually increase your effectiveness as a facilitator. You can say, "This is from just one white woman coming to see she's white in her time and place and workspace. . . .She's writing about herself, not you."

4. The work goes best when you draw on participants' own personal experiences, not their opinions. Opinions invite argumentation. Telling about experience invites listening. Opinions tend to bring on conflict, whereas shared experiences tend to elicit curiosity and empathy. When participants move from experiential testimony to opinion, bring them back, knowing that most schooling discourages testimony.

5. When exploring privilege, it is useful to use "Serial Testimony," a disciplined mode in which each participant gets to respond in turn, uninterrupted, for, say, one minute, timed. I call this "the autocratic administration of time in the service of democratic distribution of time."

6. But without rigorous use of a watch or timer, Serial Testimony can be as undemocratic as any other form of discussion.

7. Understand that every participant has an intricate "politics of location" (Adrienne Rich) within the systems of social power. For example, all people in a workshop or class will have a lifetime of experiences of both advantage and disadvantage, empowerment and disempowerment, overwhelming or subtle, within many different systems of power.

8. Recognize that all people are both located in systems and also uniquely individual.

9. Co-presentations and panels of people speaking about their experiences one after another can be very effective. I do not usually arrange for "dialogues," since I feel they are often a veiled form of debating and fighting, rather than listening and learning. I discourage "crosstalk" after panels unless it further clarifies and respects what the panelists have said. This is what Peter Elbow called playing the "The Believing Game."

10. My lists of the unearned privileges I have relative to my colleagues are not "check lists" or "questionnaires." They are not "confessional readings."

11. Please draw attention to the specificity of "my sample." I compared my circumstances only with what I knew of the circumstances of my African-American female colleagues in the same building and line of work. This sample is very specific with regard to race, sex, region, location, workplace, vocation and nation.

12. Behind and within my examples are institutions that bear on my experience such as schools, the police, the IRS, the media, the law, medicine, business.

13. Do not get trapped in definitions of privilege and power. They lack nuances and flexibility.

14. Invite people to make their own autobiographical lists of privilege, for example, about:

15. Beware of gym-exercises which position people in only one aspect of their identities, asking them to step forward or backward from a baseline at a given prompt.

16. Urge participants to avoid self righteousness and preaching to family and friends about privilege, especially if it is something they have just discovered themselves. Explain the word "systemic." Help participants or students to think about what it is to see society systemically, and structurally, rather than only in terms of individuals making individual choices.

17. Think about why U.S. people, especially White people, have trouble seeing systemically. Explain the myth of meritocracy: that the unit of society is the individual and that whatever one ends up with must be whatever that individual wanted, worked for, earned, and deserved. Why do you think this myth survives so successfully, suppressing knowledge of systemic oppression and especially of its "up-side,"systemic privilege?

18. Help participants to strengthen three intellectual muscles: a) the ability to see in terms of systems as well as in terms of individuals; b) the ability to see how systemic discrimination , the downside, is matched by systemic privilege, the upside; c) the ability to see many different kinds of privilege systems.

19. You can argue that work on privilege in schools and universities makes people smarter, not necessarily better. Academic institutions do not claim that making us better is their primary goal, but accurate thinking is a goal they claim to foster.

20. When I present, or co-present with a person of color, on Privilege Systems, whether or not I am the first to speak, I usually:

tell how I came to see men's privilege and their obliviousness to it, which made me see laterally to my own race privilege and my obliviousness to it;

read some examples from my white privilege list, and sometimes read some of my heterosexual privilege list, class privilege list, Christian privilege list, and lists of privilege relative to Asian Americans, Indigenous people, Latino/as, etc.;

analyze some of the different misreadings of my paper by white people and people of color;

raise the question of how I can use unearned advantage to weaken systems of unearned advantage, and why I would want to.

The co-presenter and I take equal time to testify about how we came to see privilege systems in and around us. After this, we use Serial Testimony. We form either small circles of people, or pairs, to respond, in turn, uninterrupted, for one minute each, to the following prompts:
Round one: What are one or more ways in which you've had unearned disadvantage in your life?
Round two: What are one or more ways in which you've had unearned advantage in your life?
Round three: What is it like for you to sit here and talk about and hear about these experiences of unearned advantage and disadvantage?

Round three is like a debrief in itself. Any further debrief should be only on new learnings from the exercise. Random discussion of the exercise usually leads away from experience to generalizations and repetitions of the same opinions people came into the session with.

Some people "get" the idea of systemic privilege and ask "But what can I do?" My answer is, you can use unearned advantage to weaken systems of unearned advantage. I see white privilege as a bank account that I did not ask for, but that I can choose to spend. People with privilege have far more power than we have been taught to realize, within the myth of meritocracy. Participants can brainstorm about how to use unearned assets to share power; these may include time, money, energy, literacy, mobility, leisure, connections, spaces, housing, travel opportunities. Using these assets may lead to key changes in other behaviors as well, such as paying attention, making associations, intervening, speaking up, asserting and deferring, being alert, taking initiative, doing ally and advocacy work, lobbying, campaigning, protesting, organizing, and recognizing and acting against both the external and internalized forms of oppression and privilege.

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"White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" and "Some Notes for Facilitators" - National SEED Project

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White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack Downloadable PDF © 1989 Peggy McIntosh 'White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack' first appeared in P...

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RESOURCES FOR TALKING ABOUT RACE, RACISM AND RACIALIZED VIOLENCE WITH KIDS

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RESOURCES FOR TALKING ABOUT RACE, RACISM AND RACIALIZED VIOLENCE WITH KIDS

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Resources for Parents of Transgender Youth 

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Resources for Parents of Transgender Youth 

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check out our glossary on commonly used terminology

A guide to supporting transgender students K-12
Fact Sheet on U.S. Department of Education Policy Letter on Transgender Students
Explanation of how schools are required to treat transgender students
Transgender Child/Youth School Q&A
In this section we discuss frequently asked questions kids and families have about school for a transgender child. Here we answer some of the questions you or your child might have about their rights in school. Please also listen to our TransWaves podcast about youth rights by board adviser and attorney Zack Paakkonen. You can access this podcast on our home page.

Legal Resources

Suggested Videos for adults

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Resources For Parents - Trans Youth Equality Foundation

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check out our glossary on commonly used terminology A guide to supporting transgender students K-12 Fact Sheet on U.S. Department of Education Policy Letter on Transgender Students Explanation of how schools are required to treat transgender students Transgender Child/Youth School Q&A In this section we discuss frequently asked questions kids and families have about school for a transgender child.

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Introduction to Critical Race Theory Course 

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Introduction to Critical Race Theory Course 

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Introduction to Critical Race Theory 2017

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My name is Adrienne Keene, I'm an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University. I am a white-coded Indigenous woman, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and I study Native students navigating the college process, as well as Native representations, which I write about on my blog Native Appropriations. I'm also active on twitter, which is probably how many of you are finding this site. After I posted my syllabus for this course on my academia.edu, there was a lot of excitement and interest around creating a space for folks to read through the texts together, so this site is meant to facilitate that process.

This course is a labor of love, and comes out of my experiences co-teaching Critical Race Theory in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education with Drs Kimberly Troung and Daren Graves, as well as support, insight, and beautiful assignment ideas from Dr. Leigh Patel. I am indebted to the hundreds of CRT scholars who have come before me and continue to do this work, and the dozens of students who have learned with me in the various iterations of this course. I'm by no means an expert, and am very much still learning right along with all of you this semester.

Course Description:

This graduate seminar will explore the foundations and central tenets of Critical Race Theory, from its origins in Critical Legal Studies, to current applications, debates, and evolutions, with particular attention to CRT's intersections with the field of American Studies. We will also bring in CRT "offshoots" such as TribalCrit, LatCrit, AsianCrit, and DisCrit. CRT posits that racism is endemic to society, but that we must also remain committed to social justice and praxis. How do we navigate these tensions, use CRT to provide a toolkit for navigating scholarship, and work toward social change in the realms of race and racism?

How to use this site:

This site is meant to serve as an online interactive space and resource hub for those who would like to learn with the course this semester, but are not at Brown or able to take the course in person. Along the lefthand side of the blog you will find the syllabus, with links to many of the readings that are available online, as well as the Weekly Posts, that will offer discussion questions and links to PDFs of any readings not available online. The comments sections of these pages can serve as discussion spaces, as well as the hashtag #IntroCRT17 on Twitter, with the week added (ie, #IntroCRT17 #Week2).

This class will not "meet" in any formal sense, this is meant to be a self-guided course. I will post any relevant powerpoints or materials, but our physical class at Brown is a seminar, so there aren't typical lecture slides to share. The assignments are included if you'd like to participate, but with over 600 people subscribed to the course(!) I won't be able to offer feedback or grades. I'm working on getting a forum up and running to facilitate discussions more fluidly, so will update when it's ready!

For a broad overview of CRT and the central tenets, this is the powerpoint from the first week of class: Intro CRT class 1 2017

This is a work in progress, and my first time attempting something like this, so feel free to leave feedback or questions, and I'll be updating as we go!

Wado (Thanks),

Prof Keene
introCRT@gmail.com

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Introduction to Critical Race Theory 2017

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My name is Adrienne Keene, I'm an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University. I am a white-coded Indigenous woman, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and I study Native students navigating the college process, as well as Native representations, which I write about on my blog Native Appropriations.

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How to Be an Ally if You Are a Person with Privilege

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How to Be an Ally if You Are a Person with Privilege

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How to Be an Ally if You Are a Person with Privilege
Frances E. Kendall, Ph.D. © 2003

PLEASE DO NOT DUPLICATE further

One way to work for social justice is as an ally. The gay and lesbian community realized ten or fifteen years ago that, without the help of straight allies, gays and lesbians don't have the clout needed to fight heterosexist and homophobic legislation. Gradually the call for allies has spread to other communities in which discrimination is systemic.

What it means to be an ally varies greatly from person to person. For some, it means building a relationship of love and trust with another; for others, it means intentionally putting one's self in harm's way so that another person remains safe. Each type of alliance has its own parameters, responsibilities, and degree of risk. For example, being an ally to someone who is in a less privileged position than I am requires different work than is necessary if the person has privileges like mine. There are also a variety of styles that an ally can use. Some of us are bold and audacious, others are more reserved. The common bond is that we align ourselves with a person or people in such a way that we "have their backs."

Being an ally is integral to my work for social justice: I align myself with an individual or group for a common cause or purpose. When I use the term "ally," I am not talking about love or friendship, although I grow to love many of the people with whom I align myself. I even see myself as an ally of people whom I dont know, individuals who are members of groups with which I align myself as a matter of principle.

Those of us who have been granted privileges based purely on who we are born (as white, as male, as straight, and so forth) often feel that either we want to give our privileges back, which we cant really do, or we want to use them to improve the experience of those who dont have our access to power and resources. One of the most effective ways to use our privilege is to become the ally of those on the other side of the privilege seesaw. This type of alliance requires a great deal of self-examination on our part as well as the willingness to go against the people who share our privilege status and with whom we are expected to group ourselves.

[Note: In the following descriptions of ally behavior, the governmental term "target groups" refers to those who are at greatest risk of being targeted for discrimination, e.g., people of color, women, gays and lesbians, people with disabilities, and so on.]

Allies work continuously to develop an understanding of the personal and institutional experiences of the person or people with whom they are aligning themselves. If the ally is a member of a privileged group, it is essential that she or he also strives for clarity about the impact of privileges on her or his life.

Allies choose to align themselves publicly and privately with members of target groups and respond to their needs. This may mean breaking assumed allegiances with those who have the same privileges as you. It is importantnot to underestimate the consequences of breaking these agreements and to break them in ways that will be most useful to the person or group with whom you are aligning yourself.

Allies believe that it is in their interest to be allies and are able to talk about why this is the case. Talking clearly about having the privilege to be able to step in is an important educational tool for others with the same privileges.

Allies are committed to the never-ending personal growth required to be genuinely supportive. If both people are without privilege it means coming to grips with the ways that internalized oppression affects you. If you are privileged, uprooting long-held beliefs about the way that the world works will probably be necessary.

Allies are able to articulate how various patterns of oppression have served to keep them in privileged positions or to withhold opportunities they might otherwise have. For many of us, this means exploring and owning our dual roles as oppressor and oppressed, as uncomfortable as that might be.

Allies expect to make some mistakes but do not use that as an excuse for inaction. As a person with privilege, it is important to study and to talk about how your privilege acts as both a shield and blinders for you. Of necessity, those without privileges in a certain area know more about the specific examples of privilege than those who are privileged.

Allies know that those on each side of an alliance hold responsibility for their own change, whether or not persons on the other side choose to respond or to thank them. They are also clear that they are doing this work for themselves, not to "take care of" the Other.

Allies know that, in the most empowered and genuine ally relationships, the persons with privilege initiate the change toward personal, institutional, and societal justice and equality.

Allies promote a sense of inclusiveness and justice in the organization, helping to create an environment that is hospitable for all.

Allies with privilege are responsible for sharing the lead with people of color in changing the organization and hold greater responsibility for seeing changes through to their conclusion.Sharing the lead is very different formtaking the lead. When we take the lead we get to keep ourselves central and see ourselves as riding in to fix everything. Sharing the lead requires that we are in alignment and partnership with people who are working toward the greater good of all of us.

Allies are able to laugh at themselves as they make mistakes and at the real, but absurd, systems of supremacy in which we all live. As many oppressed people know, humor is a method of survival. Those with privilege must bevery careful not to assume that we can join in the humor of those in a target group with whom we are in alliance.

Allies understand that emotional safety is not a realistic expectation if we take our alliance seriously. For those with privilege, the goal is to "become comfortable with the uncomfortable and uncomfortable with the too-comfortable" and to act to alter the too-comfortable.

Allies know the consequences of not being clear about the Others experience. Some of these are:

lack of trust

lack of authentic relationships

lack of foundation for coalition

For allies with privilege, the consequences of being unclear are even greater. Because our behaviors are rooted in privilege, those who are in our group give greater credence to our actions than they might if we were members of groups without privilege. Part of our task is to be models and educators for those like us.

Frances E. Kendall, Ph.D. 960 Tulare Avenue, Albany, CA 94707 510-559-9445

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UFM - How to Be an Ally if You Are a Person with Privilege

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How to Be an Ally if You Are a Person with Privilege Frances E. Kendall, Ph.D. © 2003 PLEASE DO NOT DUPLICATE further One way to work for social justice is as an ally. The gay and lesbian community realized ten or fifteen years ago that, without the help of straight allies, gays and lesbians don't have the clout needed to fight heterosexist and homophobic legislation.

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REFRAMING AGING

The Reframing Aging page on Frameworks Institute website provides an overview of the Reframing Aging initiative, and links to all the research studies and reports that have been developed over the course of the project so far. Especially helpful as you are changing the narrative is the GAINING MOMENTUM Communications Toolkit, which includes these examples of how to reframe.

Many of the leading aging organizations involved in Reframing Aging have developed resources and trainings as well. Here are links to some of their resources for changing the narrative:

Gerontological Society of America - To learn more about the national reframing initiative check out their page on Reframing Aging.

Grantmakers in Aging Is offering a free-yes, free!-video series on Reframing Aging and Ageism.

American Geriatrics Society - This editorial from the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society on why it is changing its style guide and its language about how to refer to older adults is a great resource and example to share with those in your organization who might not be convinced that change is necessary.

American Society on Aging (ASA) - ASA is hosting a four-part webinar series on topics related to reframing aging. Especially helpful is its special issue of Generations, focused on The Pernicious Problem of Ageism.

National Council on Aging (NCOA) and National Hispanic Council on Aging (NHCOA) - This blog shares the perspectives of reframing aging for Latino older adults. The NHCOA blog is a great resource as well on public policy issues from a Latino perspective.

AARP - AARP's Disrupt Aging campaign has lots of resources, stories and video examples to use in advancing a new story of aging.

FRAMING FRAILTY

FrameWorks Institute has developed some framing recommendations for those who are describing their work with older people who are experiencing challenges in their lives. Here are three of their resources we recommend to help you address this issue:

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Reframing Aging Toolkit / Resources - Changing the Narrative

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The Reframing Aging page on Frameworks Institute website provides an overview of the Reframing Aging initiative, and links to all the research studies and reports that have been developed over the course of the project so far. Especially helpful as you are changing the narrative is the GAINING MOMENTUM Communications Toolkit, which includes these examples of how to reframe.

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Kelly said:
"From the age of two we started to notice that Evie didn't quite fit in. I thought that my son was going to be gay, but it became apparent that there was something more than that.

"Evie always wanted to play with dolls, and never had any interest in traditional boys toys, like cars or dinosaurs. We had an older son and the two could not have been more different.

"Evie loved bracelets and constantly wanted to wear one, and when I bought the children Guess Who? to play she unclipped all the female faces and put them in a handbag to carry around with her.

"Evie would look longingly at other little girls who were wearing dresses or skirts, and every time I picked her up from the childminder she would be have raided the dressing up box for a princess costume. She would come to the door to meet me in a sparkly pink dress and a tiara with a big smile on her face.

"At other children's houses she would love putting on the princess outfits, and would have a meltdown when she had to take them off as it was time to leave.

"I wasn't sure how to cope with how Evie was behaving. Some family members said I should try and make her be a boy, get her to play with boys' toys and dress her in boys' clothes, but it became a daily battle. Every time we went to the supermarket she would make a beeline for the aisle with all the dolls and girls toys and get very upset when I told her they weren't for her.

"I told myself it was a phase but the longer it went on, the more I realised that this wasn't a temporary thing, it's who Evie is.

"I didn't know anything about trans children but I spent hours researching online. I found YouTube videos featuring trans children in America, and cried as I watched them. As a parent you don't want your child to be trans, as you know the path ahead of them will be so much harder. They may well be bullied at school and discriminated against as they grow older, and they may need life-changing surgery to feel at home in their body. You worry about their future as other people may judge them and find them difficult to understand.

"From the age of four we started to let Evie bring girls' clothes and toys into the house, and when she was five she told me her biggest dream in the world was to own a dress, so I bought her one and she barely took it off.

"It was around this time that I found Mermaids, and they were an incredible source of information and support. Suddenly, instead of being at a loss as to what to do I was in daily contact with other parents around the country who were in the same situation, who shared my worries and fears. But they also provided amazing support, and I know we are lucky that Evie identified as trans so young.

"Families who have teenagers who have just come out as trans face the trauma of puberty, but thankfully that is years away for Evie. We started seeing the specialist staff at the Tavistock just as Evie turned five, so hopefully the right treatment will be available if she decides to go down that road in the future.

"Mermaids have also helped Evie to meet other trans children by organising meet-ups in our area, and it's been brilliant for her to see other kids who are going through the same things she is.

"As time went on Evie began to identify more and more strongly as a girl. By the time she was six she would come home from school, take off her boys' uniform and put her dress on. You could see her visibly relax as she clearly felt happier and better in herself when she was wearing it. Soon after she told me she was a girl, and by May 2015 she asked if she could begin living as a girl.

"We informed school, who were slow to start with and struggled to get their heads around what was going on, but have been really good since then. Evie wears a skirt, uses the girls' toilets and goes swimming with the girls. They all get changed in private so that hasn't been a problem.

"Her classmates don't have any issue with Evie, she's always been one of the girls as far as they are concerned and now that's just been formalised.

"This is just who Evie is, she's my child, I love her and I'm so proud of her. I feel she was born trans, that it's something that happens in the womb and no-one has any control over it. This isn't something me or my husband can simply tell her to stop doing, as although she was born physically male, her gender identity is clearly female and that's who she is.

"If she does change her mind and wants to go back to living as a boy in a few years then that would be great, as it would save her a lot of hardship. But as it stands I cannot imagine how that would ever happen.

"I know the future may be difficult for Evie, but I also know that someone from Mermaids will have been there before us, got through it and will help us to get through it too. Their support is so essential for families like ours. Mermaids mean we are never on our own."

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Need support now? Contact our helpline or webchat. How Do I Best Support My Transgender Child? Knowing how to support and advocate for your child when they've come out as transgender can feel overwhelming. One of our mums, Sarah, shares her journey - from learning about the trans community to helping her child feel comfortable in school, at the doctor's and on social media.

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Asian Americans Advancing Justice | Chicago

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Bystander Intervention Trainings

To combat the current rise in harassment and discrimination and to also proactively prepare for the future increase of hate incidents, Advancing Justice | Chicago is partnering with New York-based nonprofit Hollaback! and CAIR-Chicago to plan and implement an aggressive scaling up of locally-led bystander hate incident intervention trainings for community members.

Attend a Training

The Problem

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen a sharp rise in anti-Asian harassment across the country, with Illinois being the 3rd ranked state in number of reported incidents. When attacks towards Asians and Asian Americans started making the news, it became clear to us that the same trends we saw during 9/11 of scapegoating, blame, possible violence, and loss of business will affect our communities long term due to COVID-19.​

Our Program

learn about the types of disrespect and dangers that Asian and Asian American folks are facing right now and throughout history - from microaggressions to violence.

talk through five strategies (5Ds) for intervention and how to prioritize your own safety while intervening.

practice using the 5Ds so that participants are confident intervening the next time they witness Anti-Asian harassment.

Bystander Intervention Trainings in the News

Testimonials

"This training was thoughtful, useful, and has increased my understanding of anti-Asian/American harassment as well as better prepared me for bystander intervention. The interactive format made me think on my feet as I might need to in a real situation, and I also appreciated the hosts making space for everyone's comfort level in participating. I would absolutely recommend this training to individuals, organizations, and even businesses to learn the tools needed to help address harassment in the world today."

"After attending a training myself, I brought this training to my colleagues and graduate students. Since the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, my department has been activated and eager to do racial justice work. They have been focusing on systemic changes they can make to support BIPOC, but this training provided us with different resources and support that can be used in our daily lives. I'm thankful for this resource and the opportunity to share it with others."

"This was one of the most outstanding trainings that provided concrete, realistic and compassionate actions to help in a tense and hurtful situation."

"This training provides real, on the ground, nuts and bolts examples and techniques so that what is learned here can be applied with ease in the real world."

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Bystander Intervention Trainings - Advancing Justice-Chicago

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To combat the current rise in harassment and discrimination and to also proactively prepare for the future increase of hate incidents, Advancing Justice | Chicago is partnering with New York-based nonprofit Hollaback! and CAIR-Chicago to plan and implement an aggressive scaling up of locally-led bystander hate incident intervention trainings for community members.

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Do you feel overwhelmed by the destructive power of racism, but unsure of what to do about it? The good news is, while the scope of racism in the U.S. might be vast, progress is possible. Step-by-step and piece-by-piece, we can work to end racism, but to begin this work, we must truly understand what racism is. First, review how sociologists define racism, then consider ways that each of us can work to end it.

Sociologists see racism in the U.S. as systemic it is embedded in every aspect of our social system. This systemic racism is characterized by unjust enrichment of white people, unjust impoverishment of people of color, and an overall unjust distribution of resources across racial lines (money, safe spaces, education, political power, and food, for example). Systemic racism is made up of racist ideologies and attitudes, including subconscious and implicit ones that might even seem well-meaning.

It is a system that grants privileges and benefits to whites at the expense of others. This system of social relations is perpetuated by racist worldviews from positions of power (in the police or news media, for example), and alienates people of color who are subordinated, oppressed, and marginalized by such forces. It is the unjust costs of racism born by people of color, like denial of education and employment, incarceration, mental and physical illness, and death. It is racist ideology that rationalizes and justifies racist oppression, like the media narratives that criminalize victims of police and vigilante violence, like Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Freddie Gray, as well as many others.​

To end racism, we must combat it everywhere it lives and thrives. We must confront it in ourselves, in our communities, and in our nation. No one person can do it all or do it alone, but we can all do things to help, and in doing so, work collectively to end racism. This brief guide will help get you started.

These actions are mostly for white people, but not exclusively.

1. Listen to, validate, and ally with people who report personal and systemic racism.Most people of color report that whites do not take claims of racism seriously. It's time to stop defending the idea of a post-racial society, and recognize instead that we live in a racist one. Listen to and trust those who report racism, because anti-racism begins with basic respect for all people.

2. Have hard conversations with yourself about the racism that lives within you. When you find yourself making an assumption about people, places, or things, challenge yourself by asking whether you know the assumption to be true, or if it is something you have simply been taught to believe by a racist society. Consider facts and evidence, especially those found in academic books and articles about race and racism, rather than hearsay and "common sense."

3. Be mindful of the commonalities that humans share, and practice empathy. Do not fixate on difference, though it is important to be aware of it and the implications of it, particularly as regards power and privilege. Remember that if any kind of injustice is allowed to thrive in our society, all forms can. We owe it to each other to fight for an equal and just society for all.

1. If you see something, say something. Step in when you see racism occurring, and disrupt it in a safe way. Have hard conversations with others when you hear or see racism, whether explicit or implicit. Challenge racist assumptions by asking about supporting facts and evidence (in general, they do not exist). Have conversations about what led you and/or others to have racist beliefs.

2. Cross the racial divide (and others) by offering friendly greetings to people, regardless of race, gender, age, sexuality, ability, class, or housing status. Think about who you make eye contact with, nod to, or say "Hello" to while you are out in the world. If you notice a pattern of preference and exclusion, shake it up. Respectful, friendly, everyday communication is the essence of community.

3. Learn about the racism that occurs where you live, and do something about it by participating in and supporting anti-racist community events, protests, rallies, and programs. For example, you could:

Support voter registration and polling in neighborhoods where people of color live because they have historically been marginalized from the political process.

Donate time and/or money to community organizations that serve youth of color.

Mentor white kids on being anti-racist citizens who fight for justice

Support post-prison programs, because the inflated incarceration rates of black and Latino people lead to their long-term economic and political disenfranchisement.

Support community organizations that serve those bearing the mental, physical, and economic costs of racism.

Communicate with your local and state government officials and institutions about how they can help end racism in the communities they represent.

1. Advocate for Affirmative Action practices in education and employment. Countless studies have found that qualifications being equal, people of color are rejected for employment and admission to educational institutions far greater rates than white people. Affirmative Action initiatives help mediate this problem of racist exclusion.

2. Vote for candidates who make ending racism a priority; vote for candidates of color. In today's federal government, people of color remain disturbingly underrepresented. For a racially just democracy to exist, we must achieve accurate representation, and the governing of representatives must actually represent the experiences and concerns of our diverse populace.

3. Combat racism through national-level political channels. For example, you could:

Write senators and members of Congress to demand an end to racist practices in law enforcement, the judiciary, education, and the media.

Advocate for national legislation that would criminalize racist police practices and institute ways to monitor police behavior, like body cams or independent investigations.

Join the movement for reparations for the descendants of African slaves and other historically oppressed populations within the U.S., because theft of land, labor, and denial of resources is the foundation of American racism, and it is on this foundation that contemporary inequalities thrive.

Keep in mind that you don't have to do all of these things in your fight against racism. What's important is that we all do at least something.

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Do you feel overwhelmed by the destructive power of racism, but unsure of what to do about it? The good news is, while the scope of racism in the U.S. might be vast, progress is possible. Step-by-step and piece-by-piece, we can work to end racism, but to begin this work, we must truly understand what racism is.

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How White Parents Can Talk To Their Kids About Race

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How White Parents Can Talk To Their Kids About Race

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subscribe to Life Kit podcast

subscribe to Life Kit podcast

Most people have heard about "the talk" - the conversation many African American parents have with their kids about how to avoid altercations with police or what to do and say if they're stopped.

The recent unrest sparked by anger over police brutality against African Americans has parents who aren't black thinking more about how they talk to their kids about race.

Michel Martin, weekend host of All Things Considered, spoke with Jennifer Harvey, author of Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Michel Martin: You wrote a piece for CNN about how not to raise racist kids. You said most white parents have come up in families in which white silence was a pervasive norm in our socialization. These same parents are now passing such silence on to their kids. Could you talk a bit more about that? What is the consequence of that silence?
Jennifer Harvey: Many white Americans were raised in families that thought that they were teaching equality. The way that they did that was to just say, "Well, we're all equal" and not say anything more explicit about what it means when you believe everyone should be equal.

Many members of our society do not experience equality. And so what happens is that in the racist culture we live in - Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum talks about it as "smog" - our kids, our youth, we adults just breathe it in. So we end up showing up in racist ways, even when we come from families where equality was the presumed value.

It breeds a lack of capacity among white people to engage in conversations about race and to respond when racism is happening. If I hear racism out on the street or from a co-worker, should I challenge it? What should I say about it? If my African American colleagues or friends see me be silent because I don't know what to do, I become untrustworthy.
With videos like the one of George Floyd's death, do you wait for your child to come to you? Do you show it to the child and say, "This is something I need to talk about with you?"
My daughter is told, "Police are safe - go find one if you're in trouble," but her African American cousin is learning complicated messages about the police from his parents. Those differing messages mean they can be great friends for a while. But eventually, the depth of their friendship will erode because my white child will not be able to identify with her African American cousin or her African American friends.

White Americans have to teach our kids how to identify with that experience and how to be good friends to black and brown youth as they grow up. That requires us teaching them about racism. And it requires us modeling anti-racism, which is something a lot of white Americans really struggle with.

White families should not wait to talk about racism with children, because segregation is so deep that if we just wait, it will never come up. I never show my children videos of black people being killed by police, and I try not to watch those videos myself. But I do talk about the videos with them.
How are you discussing the unrest that's being shown in the media?
I started doing that work with my own children before they even had words. I would make sure we were in spaces where we were opposing police brutality, attending vigils and organizing. I knew they wouldn't exactly understand what was going on. One time after a rally, my 5-year-old said, "Black people are not safe." And I said, "Yes, that's true." And then she said, "But we're white, so we are safe." And I said, "Yeah, that's true too."

Then I said to her, "The reason we went to this rally is because we're trying to tell the government that everybody deserves to be safe." So now, six years later, she's already got a deep understanding of this. And so we can talk about what happened to George Floyd. We're much further along the conversation.

I discussed that with my children by talking with them about how they might respond when they have been harmed or an injustice or an unfairness has happened to them and they aren't heard. Because we've been having these conversations, my kids understand that peaceful protest has not yielded justice for black and brown people in this country.
For people who say, "You know what - this stuff just gives me a headache. I don't want to be bothered. This isn't my problem. Why do I have to think about this? I have problems of my own," what do you say?
We're wrestling with it as a family and acknowledging that it's really unsettling, but also appreciating that people are really hurt and really angry. And the government hasn't responded.

I'm always trying to complicate messages about following rules and obeying the law. I made sure they knew that Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. were breaking the law. They need to know sometimes that's what's required. They're certainly unsettled and it's a scary time for everybody, but they do appreciate that when you've been hurt and harmed and no one is given justice, sometimes eruptions happen.
This story originally aired on The audio was adapted for the Life Kit podcast by Audrey Nguyen, and the text was adapted for digital by Sylvie Douglis. If you want more Life Kit, subscribe to our weekly newsletter. All Things Considered.
I ask them, would they call it a headache if it was their child or their sister or their brother or their parent? We're talking about our fellow human beings. What would you do on behalf of your own?

And then my work as a parent is to raise my kids in a way where they experience communities of color, black people, Latino people, being human beings they identify with as part of their human network. And that's something that hasn't really happened in part because of segregation in the United States.

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How White Parents Can Talk To Their Kids About Race : Life Kit

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NPR's Michel Martin talks with Jennifer Harvey, author of Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America, about how to talk with white kids about racially charged events - and how to keep the conversation going.

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158 Resources to Understand Racism in America

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158 Resources to Understand Racism in America

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158 Resources for Understanding Systemic Racism in America

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

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'There Is No Neutral': 'Nice White People' Can Still Be Complicit In A Racist Society

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'There Is No Neutral': 'Nice White People' Can Still Be Complicit In A Racist Society

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For white people who have just recently recognized their own complicity in America's racist systems and are looking to "fix" that - it's not going to happen overnight.

"It's a little bit like saying 'I want to be in shape tomorrow' ..." says author Robin DiAngelo. "This is going to be a process."

DiAngelo is the author of White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. The book came out in 2018 and is back on the bestseller lists as streets fill with protesters calling for an end to police violence against black people.

The status quo in the United States is racism, DiAngelo says, and "it is comfortable for me, as a white person, to live in a racist society."

To sustain the momentum of these protests, DiAngelo says, it must become uncomfortable for white people to continue to benefit from racist systems.

"We've got to start making it uncomfortable and figuring out what supports we're going to put in place to help us continue to be uncomfortable," she says. "Because the forces of comfort are quite seductive."

Interview Highlights
On encouraging white people to reflect on how race has shaped their lives
This [work] will be lifelong: really thinking deeply about what it means to be white, how your race shapes your life. We live in a society that turns race over to people of color. They have a race. We're just people. And so we see ourselves as outside of race. And that's problematic for many reasons. But there's so much potentially rich insight that we can gain from deeply reflecting on our own racial experiences.
On how white people can be complicit in racist systems without recognizing their own racism

Nice, white people who really aren't doing anything other than being nice people are racist. We are complicit with that system. There is no neutral place.

Racism is what happens when you back one group's racial bias with legal authority and institutional control. ... When you back one group's collective bias with that kind of power, it is transformed into a far-reaching system. It becomes the default. It's automatic. It's not dependent on your agreement or belief or approval. It's circulating 24/7, 365.

Racism is the foundation of the society we are in. And to simply carry on with absolutely no active interruption of that system is to be complicit with it. And in that way, we can say that nice, white people who really aren't doing anything other than being nice people are racist. We are complicit with that system. There is no neutral place.
On challenging definitions
We've been taught to think about a racist as someone who consciously and intentionally seeks to hurt people based on race. And if that's what you think it means to be racist, then of course it's offensive that I would say you were racist. That's not what I mean by that. ... All of the racism I've perpetrated in my life was neither conscious nor intentional, but harmful to other people nonetheless.
On suggesting that white people ask how - rather than if - they have been shaped by race and racism
When you change your understanding of what it means to be racist, you will no longer be defensive. ... Who among your listeners right now would ever say they're consciously, intentionally mean across race? I think that definition [of racism as individual, conscious, malintent across race] is the root of most of the defensiveness.

When you change your definition, it's actually liberating. ... It's transformative. You know, you can stop defending, deflecting, denying, explaining away, giving all the evidence for why you are different and couldn't possibly have been impacted by the society you live in.

And you can start getting to work actually trying to identify: All right. It was inevitable that I was socialized into this system. It's inevitable that I will have blind spots. ... And so I'm going to focus my energy on how I've been shaped by the system, but not if.

We have to change our question. If our question is if I've been shaped, the answer will be an easy no. And then what further action is required of us? Nothing.

When the answer is how, well, that sets you on a lifelong process.
On specific steps white people can take
I would start with some very deep reflection on what it means to be white: How your own race shapes your life. ... Our voices, our part in this has been missing for all too long.

But again, we're never going to understand this if we don't listen to black, Indigenous and other peoples of color. So start reading what they're writing, listening to their videos, attending their talks and educating yourself.

There are two really excellent resources. ... One is Dr. Eddie Moore's 21-Day Racial Equity [Habit] Building Challenge - it'll walk you through a daily practice. And Layla Saad's Me and White Supremacy Workbook. That's a book you do rather than read. That will start us on what is a process - not a moment or an instant.
On asking white people to have humility
I've never met a white person who didn't have an opinion on racism. ... That doesn't make it informed. It's so complicated and nuanced and layered. ... So be willing to consider that maybe your opinions are not as informed as you think they are. ...

Most white people live segregated lives. Most of us don't really even know black people. Most of us go cradle to grave with few, if any, authentic, sustained cross-racial relationships and no real sense of loss about that. And yet, we have these opinions that we feel are equal to people who have, you know, studied and struggled and worked on these issues for decades. And so it's a little bit like saying, well, I've been to the Epcot Center, therefore I'm qualified to wade in on a debate with Neil deGrasse Tyson on whether Pluto is a planet.
On the two questions she hears most frequently
There are two top questions I get when I give a talk ... The first one is: What do I do? And when I get that question, I offer one back: ... How have you managed not to know? How have you managed to be a full-functioning, likely educated adult in 2020 and not know the answer to that question? And that's meant to challenge that person that, that's on you. The information's everywhere. Why haven't you sought it out up until this moment? What did it take to get you to ask that question?

So that's meant to be a challenge, but it's also a sincere question. Take out a piece of paper and jot down your answer to why you don't know what to do, or how to get started. And there will be your map. Everything you write on that piece of paper can be addressed. None of it will be quick or easy. But begin with that list.

The second top question that I get is: How do I tell or talk to other white people about racism? ... You notice that that question assumes that it's not us. We're good to go. We're down now. Let's go out and change the world.

It is us. We can never take ourselves out of that equation. And I think actually, the more we work on our own conditioning, the more effective we will be at helping others see theirs.
On maintaining momentum
We've seen these moments before. We thought we were post-racial after the civil rights movement. We thought we were post-racial after Obama's presidency. We are so not post-racial and we have never been. I do see these protests being sustained and different kinds of demands coming out of them. That is hopeful.

But the key is: What will happen when those cameras go away and when it's no longer - for lack of a better word, for white people, anyway - "exciting" or "righteous" to go down and protest? In some ways, that's the easier kinds of actions. What are we going to do to sustain it when we no longer have that kind of pressure, when we're back into our racial comfort zone?
Mallory Yu and Sarah Handel produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Beth Novey adapted it for the web.

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'There Is No Neutral': 'Nice White People' Can Still Be Complicit In A Racist Society

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For white people who have just recently recognized their own complicity in America's racist systems and are looking to "fix" that - it's not going to happen overnight. "It's a little bit like saying 'I want to be in shape tomorrow' ..." says author Robin DiAngelo. "This is going to be a process."

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Institutionalized Racism: A Syllabus - JSTOR Daily

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How can we help students understand George Floyd’s death in the context of institutionalized racism?

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must be intentional in breaking down the systems that continue to oppress and disenfranchise the Black community with Black women being the most effected. Going through these daily prompts you will be called to think critically and act tangibly in solidarity.

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What This Wave of Anti-Asian Violence Reveals About America

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What This Wave of Anti-Asian Violence Reveals About America

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Too often, attention to nonwhite groups is only as pressing as the injuries that they have suffered.

Credit... Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Ms. Cheng is a comparative race scholar and author of "The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief" and "Ornamentalism."

A 23-year-old Korean woman in New York was punched in the face last March and accused of having the coronavirus. More incidents followed as the virus spread, with Asian-Americans being spat on, beaten, slashed, even attacked with chemicals.

In response to pandemic-related violence like this, advocacy organizations came together to document cases of harassment and vitriol against Asian-Americans. Stop AAPI Hate received 2,800 reports in 2020, around 240 of which were physical assaults, and the AAPI Emergency Response Network has received over 3,000 reports since it started tracking Covid-specific hate incidents last year.

The violence has continued into the new year. In January, in San Francisco, an 84-year-old Thai man died after being assaulted on the street; across the Bay, in Oakland's Chinatown, a 91-year-old man was shoved to the ground. Some of these cases have made it to national news, but most haven't. The low profile of this wave of violence is a reminder of how racial violence goes unexamined when it doesn't fit neatly into the standard narrative of race in America.

Racial violence in the United States is not simply Black and white, even if it looks that way. Instead, it can reveal layered victimizations and mediated enmity. The recent incidents of anti-Asian violence in the Bay Area, in particular, highlight this: Some Asian-Americans were outraged by the violence and demanded justice, but since the perpetrators in these cases were Black, many others felt deeply uncomfortable with contributing to the criminalization of African-Americans.

And here we come to the heart of the complexity of "speaking up" for Asian-Americans. Thanks to the " Model Minority " myth - popularized in 1966 by the sociologist William Petersen and later used as a direct counterpoint to the "welfare queen" stereotype applied to Black Americans - Asian-Americans have long been used by mainstream white culture to shame and drive a wedge against other minority groups.

They are always caught in a no-win position between whites and Black Americans. They are thought to be "white adjacent," but of course they can never belong to the club. They are persistently racialized, yet they often don't count in the American racial equation. The central, though often unspoken, question underlying all of this is: Are Asian-Americans injured, or injured enough, to deserve our national attention?

To ask this question is to reveal something about how this country thinks about a racial calculus based on damage and hierarchy. Asian-Americans exist in a weird but convenient lacuna in American politics and culture. If they register at all on the national consciousness, it is either as a foreign threat (the Yellow Peril, the Asian Tiger, the Spy, the Disease Vector) or as the domestic but ultimately disposable prism for deflecting or excusing racism against other minorities.

This recent onslaught of anti-Asian violence can partly be attributed to our former president, who spoke nonstop of the "Chinese virus" and even the "kung flu," but he could not have rallied the kind of hatred that he did without this country's long history of systemic and cultural racism against people of Asian descent.

For our histories are more entangled than how we tell them. Few people know that many of the same families that amassed wealth through slavery also profited from the opium trade in China; that at least 17 Chinese residents were the targeted victims of one of the worst mass lynchings in American history in Los Angeles's "Negro Alley" in 1871; that America's immigration policy and ideas of citizenship were built on top of laws like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese laborers from immigrating to the U.S. for 10 years; or that the "Model Minority" myth veils how Bhutanese- and Burmese-Americans experience poverty rates over 30 percent.

I think of James Baldwin's words: "This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it."

When it comes to Asian-American grief, do Americans want to know?

These past few weeks, it seems as if Americans have opened to a kind of knowing. As I saw these recent incidents of anti-Asian violence unfold in the news, I felt a profound sense of grief. But I also experienced something akin to relief. Maybe, I thought, now people will start to respond to anti-Asian violence with the same urgency they apply to other kinds of racism.

But then I started to feel a familiar queasiness in the pit of my stomach. Is this indeed what it takes? A political imagination (or, really, lack thereof) that predicates recognition on the price of visible harm?

There is something wrong with the way Americans think about who deserves social justice - as though attention to nonwhite groups, their histories and conditions, is only as pressing as the injuries that they have suffered. Racial justice is often couched in arcane, moralistic terms rather than understood as an ethical given in democratic participation.

It seems crazily naïve to suggest that we ought to learn, value and want to know about all of our countrymen out of respect rather than guilt. Yet while legitimizing racial and cultural differences exclusively in terms of injury may motivate reform in the short run, in the long term it feeds a politics of tribalism that erupts over and over again.

Two decades ago, I wrote in my book "The Melancholy of Race" that "we are a nation at ease with grievance but not with grief." We still are. In the desire to move past racial troubles - in our eagerness to progress - we as a nation have been more focused on quantifying injury and shoring up identity categories than doing the harder work of confronting the enduring, ineffable, at times contradictory and messier wounds of American racism: how being hated and hating can look the same; how the lesson of powerlessness can teach justice or, perversely, the ugly pleasures of power; how the legacy of anger, shame and guilt is complex.

Unprocessed grief and unacknowledged racial dynamics continue to haunt our social relations. The discourse of racial identity has obscured the history of American racial entanglements. And why is entanglement important? Because the challenge of democracy is not about identifying with someone like yourself (that's easy to do) nor about giving up your self-interest (that's hard to ask). It's about learning to see your self-interest as profoundly and inevitably entwined with the interests of others.

But is this a lesson Americans are prepared to hear?

Asian-Americans are tired of insisting that others care. The truth is that few are listening. All we can do is to continue to tell our truths, to know, even just for ourselves, that we are here. As the poet Rita Dove wrote, "Here, / it's all yours, now - / but you'll have / to take me, / too."

Anne Anlin Cheng is a professor of English and American studies at Princeton.

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Opinion | What This Wave of Anti-Asian Violence Reveals About America

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Too often, attention to nonwhite groups is only as pressing as the injuries that they have suffered. Ms. Cheng is a comparative race scholar and author of "The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief" and "Ornamentalism." A 23-year-old Korean woman in New York was punched in the face last March and accused of having the coronavirus.

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The Anti-Racist Starter Pack: 40 TV Series, Documentaries, Movies, TED Talks, and Books to Add to Your List

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The Anti-Racist Starter Pack: 40 TV Series, Documentaries, Movies, TED Talks, and Books to Add to Your List

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Parade: Entertainment, Recipes, Health, Life, Holidays

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So you want to be an ally but don't know where to start? First of all, thank you and welcome. This is an ever growing community of people who refuse to accept Black death and institutionalized racism as the norm. This community takes measurable steps, is intentional about their day-to-day interactions, and is committed to self- education. Where to begin? Look no further than the below starter pack of TV shows, documentaries, films, TED talks, and books that can ground your activism and ensure you're offering this movement more than lip service. Grab an accountability partner (or start a group!) as a way of debriefing what you learn and ensuring you stick with it.

There's no better day than today! Here's your anti-racist starter pack.

TV Series

1. Ava DuVernay's When They See Us stopped the world when she told the stories of the (now) Exonerated Five. This is a cautionary tale for some on the dangers of making the narrative match a racist agenda and insight into the fear of Black families across the country, and world.

2. OWN's Queen Sugar: Queen Sugar shares the beauty and complexity in family, legacy, and justice through the warmth of a Black family. Over the course of the seasons, we become even more exposed to Black rural advocacy and the power in land ownership.

3. FX's (available on Netflix): The Black LGBTQ+ community is no stranger to over-policing and brutal violence and Pose gives us a front row seat to the resilience and ingenuity of Ballroom culture and the fight for autonomy and safety.

4. Netflix's Seven Seconds: Before the hashtags and media, what is it like for a Black family learning they've lost a loved one and for a police officer realizing he took a life. How do these stories intertwine and what insight can we glean about repairing harm?

5. Dear White People (available on Netflix):Dear White People has drawn controversy from many who have been afraid to push past the title, but it's great insight to the inner workings of Black student activists and their campus experiences.

Related: 40 Ways White Women Can Help Fight Racism
Documentaries

Netflix's 13th by Ava DuVernay: Many cite The New Jim Crow (book by Michelle Alexander) as what woke them up to the extreme injustice in our criminal justice system and arguably 13th would be the documentary version of that, exposing how deep-rooted institutionalized racism is.
Related: Self-Care for Black Women Activists Right Now

1. The Children's March: Youth-led activism has been on the rise since the fearless survivors of Parkland sparked a 21st century gun violence movement. To understand the shoulders on which we stand, learn about the children of Alabama that brought a racist police chief and segregation to its knees.

2. The Kalief Browder Story (available on Netflix): For many of us, protesting is a right we take for granted. For those in the belly of our criminal justice system, advocating for yourself can be deadly. We must honor Kalief's sacrifice by knowing his story and ending cash bail.

3. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975: The Black Liberation movement of the late 20th century is riddled with stereotypes and propaganda causing many to believe that the movement died following the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. This documentary sets the record straight from the source with powerful interviews and recollections.

4. LA92 (available on Netflix): It's important that we never lose sight of the legacy of police violence. To understand the righteous anger of the Black community, learn more about the LA riots following the Rodney King trial.

Related: Beyoncé, LeBron James, Viola Davis, Taylor Swift and More Celebs Demand Justice for George Floyd
Movies and Short Films

1. Fruitvale Station (directed by Ryan Coogler): When advocating around police brutality, we often lose touch with the humanity of those we fight for. In this masterful film, we see a glimpse of what is stolen from us each time police use excessive force.

2. Higher Learning (directed by John Singleton): Since 2016, many have become hyper-aware of the deep rifts that exist in American society and others have always known that we have very different experiences of this country. Higher Learning will surprise you in how relevant it is to today and showing some of the hurdles to achieving a "post-racial" society.

3. Do The Right Thing (directed by Spike Lee): Eric Garner and George Floyd have both drawn connections to a fiction character who preceded them both: Radio Raheem of Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing. The film masterfully highlights where unrest stems from and what leads to the rage felt in uprisings and rebellions.

4. If Beale Street Could Talk (directed by Barry Jenkins): Activism can be very glorified by those privileged to be advocating from the abstract. This film-part love story, part drama-gives us a look into what is truly at stake for those facing wrongful incarceration head on.

5. I Am Not Your Negro (directed by Raoul Peck): James Baldwin has provided novels, personal essays, and prose to last many lifetimes! The film adaptation explores the extended history of racism through Baldwin's recollections and personal observations.

Related: 18 New Artists, Songs and Albums to Add to Your Playlists in Honor of Black Music Month

TED Talks

1. Bryan Stevenson's We Need To Talk About An Injustice:Bryan Stevenson is one of the leading racial justice advocates, working with people incarcerated on death row. If anyone can diagnose recent injustices and understand the steps forward it would be him.

2. Kimberle Crenshaw on The Urgency of Intersectionality: Following 2016, 'intersectionality' became quite the buzzword, yet gets used out of context often by both the Right and Left alike. Hear from the black woman who coined the term in the '80s as to how we use intersectionality to defend Black women.

3. Baratunde Thurston on How To Deconstruct Racism, One Headline At A Time: Racism isn't funny, but in this TED talk you'll learn about the pervasive nature of racism and laugh out loud way more times than you'll be able to count.

4. T. Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison on The Trauma of Systemic Racism is Killing Black Women:Racism is traumatic. Oftentimes we are focused so much on legislative changes and urgent calls to action, that we neglect the emotional well being of Black people everywhere facing PTSD from this cyclical violence. Dive more into self-care as radical preservation with this joint TED talk.

5. Verna Meyers on How To Overcome Our Biases? Walk Towards Them: #AllLivesMatter is the new color blind and both terms are proof that people fear being accused of biases more than they feel committed to addressing them. Let's lose the shame and take bold steps deeper into your allyship.

6. Heather McGhee's Racism Has A Cost for Everyone:My liberation is bound in yours. This is not a feel good statement but a reality when it comes to how racism impacts policy, budgets, and prevents us from achieving a society that works for us all

7. The Human Stories Beyond Mass Incarceration:We can never lose sight of the people behind the statistics and in this powerful TED talk, you'll be reminded of why we fight this fight.

8. Marlon Peterson's : Marlon Peterson is formerly incarcerated and one of the leading national experts on alternatives to incarceration. Learn about why we desperately need more empathy when it comes to addressing harm.

9. Emma Harrison's From Reform to Abolition: The Future of the U.S. Prison System: More than ever before, people are Googling abolition and exploring what a society without prisons looks like. Have questions about why we can't reform these systems or what this looks like in reality? Listen up!

10. Rayna Gordon's Don't Be A Savior, Be An Ally:Sometimes with the best intentions we still fall short. Hear from Rayna about thoughtful allyship that seeks to uplift and support not take over or "save."

Related: 25 Anti-Racist Instagram Accounts to Follow for Listening, Learning and Action-Taking
Books

1. by Bryan Stevenson: You've likely heard the story of someone who served decades in prison for a crime they didn't commit. How does that happen and how do we ensure people don't disappear behind the bars and into bureaucratic systems that value process more than justice?

2. Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward: America often equates Black to mean urban America when more of us live in "middle America" and the deep South than anywhere else. Ward is a literary artist who spins the stories of Black men in Mississippi with so much love and a deep desire to protect those she loves.

3. Free Cyntoia by Cyntoia Brown-Long: Everyone from Rihanna to Kim Kardashian was tweeting about Cyntoia Brown-Long, the young woman incarcerated for defending herself against her abuser and a sexual predator. Cyntoia's story is one that many women share-and this book sheds light on how systems set up to protect us, fail us time and time again.

4. by Trevor Noah: Noah's book reads like an episode of his late night show which is to say it's informative, compelling, and well researched. This is a must read for those looking to understand race and class.

5. Unafraid of the Darkby Rosemary L Bray: Racism feels like this big scary monster which can make some of us feel like we don't know where to begin in dismantling it and others feel it's not relevant to them at all. Bray sets the record straight with these vignettes and anecdotes about what racism looks like in practice but also how police interventions can work to alleviate the pressures.

6. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective by Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor: "Listen to Black women!" Want to learn what Black women from movements past have to say about justice and freedom? Look no further than this foundational manifesto.

7. Children of Blood and Bones by Tomi Adeyemi: Science fiction is a powerful tool for exploring problems from the distance we normally aren't afforded with day-to-day life. This first part of the electric new trilogy explores issues of fear, revenge, and what it takes to build a new future.

8. When They Call You A Terrorist by Patrisse Khan Cullors: Cullors co-founded Black Lives Matter over five years ago alongside two other Black women organizers. Years later, she reflected on her own journey to that moment and what it means to be labeled a terrorist by the government that has sought to erase you and those you love.

9. Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice by Paul Butler: This Harvard Law grad turned prosecutor went from high-powered attorney to wrongfully accused Black man in one day. What that experience taught him is cemented through this book and will tell you all you need to know about this rigged system.

10. Pushout by Monique Morris: Black girls and women are often left out of the conversation when it comes to criminal justice reform but Morris reiterates exactly how Black girls are oversexualized, more likely to be described as aggressive, and more frequently suspended or expelled, leading to this school-to-prison pipeline we hear so much about.

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The Anti-Racist Starter Pack: 40 TV Series, Documentaries, Movies, TED Talks, and Books to Add to Your List

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So you want to be an ally but don't know where to start? First of all, thank you and welcome. This is an ever growing community of people who refuse to accept Black death and institutionalized racism as the norm. This community takes measurable steps, is intentional about their day-to-day interactions, and is committed to self- education.

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Psychologists are studying the processes by which young children learn about race-and how to prevent prejudice from taking root

Cite this

Weir, K. (2023, May 18). Raising anti-racist children. Monitor on Psychology, 52(4). https://www.apa.org/monitor/2021/06/anti-racist-children

Racism occurs across a spectrum. It lives within individuals and between them, within institutions and across society. And at every level, children are affected by discriminatory beliefs and practices, said Farzana Saleem, PhD, an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. "Racism is learned early on in development, and children receive many messages about race and racism from a young age."

Kids pick up on what their parents and teachers say (and don't say), who and what they see on TV, what their dolls look like, and how other people are treated in their schools and neighborhoods. "Humans are sponges for their social environment," said Evan Apfelbaum, PhD, an associate professor of management and organizations at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University. Over decades, research has explored how children come to understand race-and how they learn racism. Yet the science is a long way from prescribing a formula for anti-racism. "There's a whole host of factors that can affect kids' holistic understanding of race-and so much research that needs to be done," he said.

Psychologists are among those working to fill the knowledge gap, studying the processes and influences that lead children to develop ideas about race-and how to fight back against the biased messaging they might learn so early. Dismantling White supremacy and other forms of racism won't be easy. But children can be taught to do better than their parents' generations did. "We learn racism very easily through our society," said Sarah Gaither, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. "But we are malleable. No one is born racist."

Race in early childhood

When do children understand race? It's not an easy question, in part because "race" isn't the rigid construct it's often made out to be. "It's well established that there's no biological basis for race," said Diane Hughes, PhD, a professor of applied psychology at New York University. "Race has meaning because we give it meaning-especially in the U.S., where our history is largely structured to uphold these 'racial differences,'" she said. "We assume that there are unobservable underlying personality traits that correlate to certain physical characteristics."

Even infants have the perceptual abilities to see those physical differences and to start responding to them. International research led by psychologists at the University of Toronto showed that between 6 and 12 months of age, babies begin to show a preference for members of their own racial groups. At 7 months, babies in uncertain situations are more likely to follow the gaze of a member of their own race (Xiao, N. G., et al., Child Development, Vol. 89, No. 3, 2018). And by 9 months, they associate faces from their own race with happy music and those from other racial groups with sad music (Xiao, N. G., et al., Developmental Science, Vol. 21, No. 2, 2018). The researchers suggest these patterns may develop as a result of lack of exposure to other-race individuals during infancy-and that such implicit associations could pave the way to the development of other racial biases in early childhood and beyond.

Within the first years of life, children are bombarded with messages from their environment that shape their beliefs and judgments about other people. It doesn't take long for such messages to stick. By preschool, children begin showing both implicit and explicit bias toward members of other races. Kristin Shutts, PhD, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that at age 3, White children are equally likely to befriend Black or White children. But by age 4 or 5, White children are more likely to choose other White kids as friends (Child Development Perspectives, Vol. 9, No. 4, 2015).

Some evidence suggests that bias might be related to the information young children have already gleaned about social status. In a series of studies, Yarrow Dunham, EdD, at Yale University, and colleagues found that by age 3 or 4, White American children were more likely to associate both Black and Asian faces with anger, while rating White faces as having more positive emotions. Black American children did not show this same ingroup preference. This suggests that ingroup bias isn't implicit. Rather, from a very young age, children are picking up on the status hierarchy of the culture around them (Psychological Science, Vol. 24, No. 6, 2013).

By age 5 or 6, an ingroup preference-and outgroup bias-is well established, Hughes said. And those early beliefs are reinforced by what children see around them. "When they see that Black boys are the ones who get sent to the principal's office or that Black children tend to struggle more when reading aloud, they may attribute certain meanings to different racial groups," Hughes said. "Kids are operating in this universe where they're drawing a lot of conclusions about what they see."

By middle childhood, children have a more sophisticated understanding not only of race but also of racism. Though the biases they learned in early childhood are still present, older kids begin to understand that race may be a taboo topic. "It's around ages 9 to 11 when kids seem to really start understanding the social guidelines about what is and isn't considered culturally sensitive and what constitutes discrimination," said Apfelbaum. He, Kristin Pauker, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Hawai'i Mānoa, and colleagues showed this with an experiment modeled on the game Guess Who?, where kids ask yes or no questions to guess the person in an array of faces that their opponent has picked. In this version, about half of the faces were Black and half were White, so asking about race early on was an effective strategy to narrow down the field. But the researchers found that while 8- and 9-year-olds asked frequently about race, a majority of 10- and 11-year-olds avoided the question (Developmental Psychology, Vol. 44, No. 5, 2008).

"Older kids begin to understand the race question as something more than just a way to win the game. They're more concerned with how they're viewed with respect to social conventions and cultural sensitivity," Apfelbaum said. "It shows the age at which behavior starts to shift. And that suggests it's one important time to think about interventions by educators and parents."

Racial-ethnic socialization

As children grow and learn, messages about race come from all corners: news media and entertainment, teachers and peers, community interactions, and, of course, families. All children, including White children, learn about race through a process known as racial-ethnic socialization, and scholars say that addressing socialization more purposefully will be necessary for dismantling racism.

But for families of color, racial-ethnic socialization also serves the critical purpose of preparing children for the racism and discrimination they may encounter. "Racial socialization in non-White families occurs in the context of structural inequality and oppression. It's proactive, but it also has protective goals," Hughes said.

Researchers have most commonly studied four aspects of racial-ethnic socialization, based on a framework developed by Hughes and colleagues: 1) cultural socialization (messages about racial pride and heritage); 2) preparation for bias (discussions of discrimination and how to cope); 3) promotion of mistrust (teaching children to be wary of other racial groups or environments); and 4) egalitarianism (avoiding discussions of race and valuing individual qualities over racial group membership) (Developmental Psychology, Vol. 42, No. 5, 2006). "Based on interviews and surveys with hundreds of parents over the course of more than 25 years, we find much of what parents and adolescents discuss in family conversations about race involve these four aspects," Hughes said.

Of those four categories, cultural socialization has been shown to be most consistently associated with positive outcomes, according to a review of 259 studies by Adriana Umaña‐Taylor, PhD, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 82, No. 1, 2020). Research has shown cultural socialization linked to positive outcomes in children from a variety of backgrounds, including Black, Asian American, and Latinx, Umaña‐Taylor said. "There's considerable evidence that cultural socialization is linked positively with mental health and academic outcomes."

Preparation for bias can also be helpful, Umaña‐Taylor said, "likely because it prepares kids with coping strategies for the experiences of marginalization they might encounter." But promotion of mistrust, while similar, is sometimes linked with youth maladjustment, she said. "That may be because while both approaches recognize the societal structures of racism and discrimination, promotion of mistrust isn't accompanied by coping strategies."

Families of all racial and ethnic backgrounds draw on these strategies when talking about race with their children, but some groups are more likely to choose one approach over another. "The racial-ethnic socialization strategy of egalitarianism-the idea that we're all one big happy human race-is used most often by White families," said Riana Elyse Anderson, PhD, an assistant professor of health behavior and health education at the University of Michigan. Black families, on the other hand, are more likely to blend messages of racial heritage and pride with preparation for bias, she added. And those messages can balance each other out in helpful ways. "By and large, if you combine pride messaging and preparation for bias, you see better psychological and academic outcomes in children," she said. "Teaching pride without warning can cause children to run into challenges they're unprepared for. But focusing only on bias and discrimination can drive anxiety or depression."

Families of color are often well versed in having explicit conversations about race, Anderson said. Still, research points toward ways to make the discussion more productive. In a paper still in press, Anderson found that greater racial-ethnic socialization competency among Black parents was associated with better psychosocial outcomes in their adolescents. To improve competency, she and psychologist Howard C. Stevenson, PhD, an expert on racial stress and trauma at the University of Pennsylvania, developed the Engaging, Managing, and Bonding through Race (EMBRace) intervention. The five-session intervention blends trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy with racial socialization messages to help parents address their racial stress and trauma so they can better approach racial socialization with their children (Family Process, Vol. 58, No. 1, 2019). "We want to address parents first, helping them unpack some of this before we help them think about what they might say or do differently as a parent," Anderson said.

The problem with color blindness

White families, meanwhile, have the luxury of approaching discussions of race from their privileged position in U.S. society. "On average, White parents avoid talking about race with their kids at all," Hughes said. "They don't have to protect their children from oppression and racism."

If they do bring up race, they often put off the conversation until kids are older. With Skidmore College psychologists Jessica Sullivan, PhD, and Leigh Wilton, PhD, Apfelbaum uncovered one reason why: Parents mistakenly don't think their kids are ready. The researchers surveyed U.S. adults and found participants estimated that children develop the capacity to process and understand race at around age 5, though research suggests they're capable of understanding the concept as toddlers. The belief that children weren't developmentally ready was the strongest predictor of delaying discussions of race, the researchers found (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol. 150, No. 2, 2021). "There are potentially years during which kids are starting to think about race and coming to their own impressions of what it means before parents broach the topic," Apfelbaum said. "It's a missed opportunity for parents to help frame that discussion in constructive ways."

Children are exposed to race and systemic racism from an early age, Hughes said, and avoiding or delaying the conversation leaves kids to fill in the blanks on their own. "Kids see structural inequality all around them-in the media, in their neighborhoods, in school," she said. Even when schools are integrated, kids see de facto segregation. They see kids of the same race sitting together at lunch or joining the same clubs and activities. "There are all of these things causing kids to attach meaning to race, and nobody is correcting their inferences," Hughes said. "If they're told everyone has equal opportunities but see these differences, they draw their own conclusions and attach deeper meaning to external appearance."

Promoting a more egalitarian or "color-blind" view can have negative consequences for interracial interactions. Hughes has found that when parents teach color-blind attitudes, their children are less likely to report friendships with children of other races. "My guess is that teaching egalitarianism allows kids to maintain a sense of privilege. Kids might think if race doesn't matter, they'd rather be with the group that has better outcomes," she said.

Color blindness can also make people less sensitive to recognizing discrimination. Apfelbaum, Pauker, and colleagues introduced elementary school children to stories that taught either a color-blind mindset or a mindset that emphasized valuing diversity (Psychological Science, Vol. 21, No. 11, 2010). "Children exposed to the value-diversity message were more likely to recognize discrimination when it occurred," Pauker said. "And they were more likely to describe what they saw in a way that made teachers more likely to intervene."

Although children begin learning about race from very young ages at home, schools are critical settings for teaching about race and discrimination. "It is clear that schools, like families, convey messages across multiple methods of expression. Images displayed in the classroom, curriculum choices, policies, and practices are just a few examples of how racial-ethnic socialization is transmitted within the school context," said Saleem.

"Kids look to teachers to understand how to navigate racial norms and what's appropriate to say and do," Apfelbaum added. And what teachers don't say is often as important as what they do say. Pauker and Elizabeth Brey, PhD, of the University of Hawai'i Mānoa, explored the role of teachers' nonverbal behavior in a study in which they assigned children ages 5 to 8 to either orange or green groups. (Because students already have preconceived ideas about race, the researchers invented these groups as a proxy for social categories.) After observing how other kids from each group were treated by teachers, children answered questions about new students from each group. When asked who was smarter, they picked students who had been in the group that received positive nonverbal feedback from teachers, such as smiles and nods (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Vol. 188, 2019). "When children have conflicting sources of information, they often rely on nonverbal behavior to provide them with information," Pauker said. "They form stereotypes based on how the teacher is interacting with other students."

Yet educators can certainly have positive impacts as well. "When the school climate is one where different cultures and backgrounds are celebrated and valued, students are better adjusted," said Umaña‐Taylor. She developed an eight-session, teacher-led intervention called the Identity Project that provides adolescents with tools and strategies with which to consider their racial and ethnic backgrounds as they explore concepts of their own identity. The intervention was linked to improved psychosocial functioning one year later (Journal of Youth and Adolescence, Vol. 47, 2018). "The intervention promotes positive identity development for all students, including White students and students of color," she said. "That has significant implications for their own adjustment, and for society as a whole, since people who have a clearer sense of themselves are more willing to engage with those who are different from them."

Teaching the value of diversity

For parents, teachers, and other adults who want to help children understand race and racism, awareness is a good start. White parents who are more aware of racial bias are more likely to discuss race with their children (Perry, S. P., et al., Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 75, No. 4, 2019). But awareness is a first small step on a long journey.

Hughes runs community workshops to help parents learn to talk about race with their children, and she said that while most attendees are well intentioned, they're often anxious about how and when to start the conversation. Her advice: Just start. "The fear of talking about race makes parents avoid talking about it at all. But you can't just react to situations as they arise or wait for your kids to ask questions. You need to be intentional about what you want your kids to know about race," she said. "If you can't find exactly the right words, don't worry. Childhood happens over a long period, and you get to keep practicing this conversation."

Meaningful intergroup contact is also important for teaching acceptance, Gaither said. Yet it's not enough to simply sit next to a Black man on a bus or chat with a Latinx grocery clerk. "It has to be meaningful, long-term contact. Being exposed to adults and kids from different backgrounds is one of the best tools psychology has to offer for developing positive attitudes about other groups," she said.

In many communities, that's challenging. "It can be effortful for parents to find opportunities for kids to see people who look different than they do," Gaither said. Choosing diverse communities and schools, interacting with babysitters or teachers from other groups, even pen pal programs that connect children from different backgrounds can all be ways to start breaking down barriers, she added. Parents would also do well to look critically at their own interactions. "If you're telling children you value diversity but you have no diversity in your friendships, kids pick up on that conflicting information," Pauker said.

Teachers, too, should be having conversations about race with even very young students, Hughes said. But most teachers are White, and there's a need for more tools to help them include race and diversity in their curricula. "Teachers need practice, and they need training on talking about racial issues in their classrooms," she said.

Efforts are being made to meet that need. The Southern Poverty Law Center's Learning for Justice project (formerly Teaching Tolerance) is in its 30th year working to eradicate hate by fighting intolerance in schools. The project, which provides free resources and guidance to help educators work against racial injustice and encourage student and community action, has plans to expand its reach to caregivers and other communities in 2021. Many other researchers are also tackling the problem. Among them is Umaña‐Taylor, whose team developed a teacher professional development program, Equipping Educators for Equity Through Ethnic-Racial Identity, that prepares educators to have discussions about race, ethnicity, and identity with their students.

"Professional development programs such as these will be essential to create equitable and just schools where all student can thrive," she said.

Prejudice is malleable

Although it's important to start teaching anti-bias messages as early as possible, it's also valuable for children to understand that racist beliefs don't have to be permanent. In a not-yet-published study, Pauker, Apfelbaum, and colleagues applied a growth mindset approach to the way children think about prejudice. "Just because you or someone you know said something prejudiced doesn't mean you'll be that way forever," Apfelbaum said. "Our preliminary research suggests that seeing prejudice as something that can change gets kids to stay interested in interacting across racial lines because it lowers the stakes that any mistakes they make will be a blemish that stays there forever."

While there's been a recent uptick in parents and educators wanting to address racism, it's unlikely there will ever be a universal curriculum for teaching children about race, Gaither said. "There's no one-size-fits-all model. A lot of people want to create change, but we need data about what changes will work for a particular group or school." Rushing to make changes that aren't yet proven could end up doing more harm than good, which is why psychological research is so critical, she added.

Among the many outstanding questions is how best to help multiracial children process their beliefs and experiences with race and identity. A review of the literature on racial-ethnic socialization in multiracial families found most parents do not discuss multiracial identity with their children (Atkin, A. L., & Yoo, H. C., Developmental Review, Vol. 53, 2019). Those conversations probably aren't being addressed sufficiently at school, either. "They are the fastest-growing youth population in the U.S., yet we don't exactly know how they fit into these curricula and interventions," Gaither said.

Even as the research continues, adults must keep up the hard work of confronting their own biases and teaching their children to do the same, Anderson said. "People often have the intent, but they don't sustain it. The books everyone purchased last summer [after George Floyd's murder] are now dusty," she said. To raise anti-racist children, parents, caregivers, teachers-and psychologists-have to work to keep the effort top of mind. "It starts with us as adults," Anderson said. "As professional psychologists, we need to be consistently interrogating ourselves and those around us. There's no way we'll be competent providers if we haven't first talked with ourselves."

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Further reading

RECASTing racial stress and trauma: Theorizing the healing potential of racial socialization in families
Anderson, R. E., & Stevenson, H. C., American Psychologist, 2019

RESilience Initiative
APA, 2018

Resilience in African American children and adolescents: A vision for optimal development
APA, 2008

Something happened in our town: A child's story about racial injustice
Celano, M., et al. Magination Press, 2018

Talking to children about racism: Breaking the cycle of bias and violence starts at home
Hughes, D. L., et al., Child & Family Blog, 2020

Recommended Reading

Contact APA

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Psychologists are studying the processes by which young children learn about race. Dismantling White supremacy and other forms of racism won't be easy, but children can be taught to do better than their parents' generations did.

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Juneteenth Reminds Us Just How Far We Have to Go

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Juneteenth Reminds Us Just How Far We Have to Go

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A contemporary depiction of viewers of the statue "The Freed Slave," on view at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. Credit... The Print Collector/Getty Images

Ms. Masur, who teaches history and has written extensively about the Civil War and Reconstruction, the antislavery movement, emancipation, politics and the state, is the author of " Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction."

For two and a half centuries, starting long before the establishment of the United States, people of African descent fought against slavery every way they could. Americans legally bought and sold Black people as property, and enslaved status passed through generations, from mothers to their children.

It took a deadly civil war, at a cost of more than 650,000 lives, to rid the United States of that institution. To commemorate Juneteenth - now established as a national holiday on June 19 - is to recognize the importance of slavery in United States history, to remember the horrors of bondage and the jubilation of freedom.

Yet abolishing slavery was only one piece of a complex puzzle. It marked an ending, confirmed on Dec. 6, 1865, with ratification of the 13th Amendment. But it was also part of a much longer struggle to secure for Black Americans the rights and privileges promised to white Americans, a struggle that began long before Juneteenth and endures today.

For decades before the Civil War, Black Northerners and their white allies fought to rid their communities, and the nation, not only of slavery but of racist laws and institutions.

At the time of the American Revolution, slavery was legal throughout the British North American colonies. Though Northern states, starting with Vermont in 1777, gradually abolished slavery, many subjected free Black people to discriminatory regulations. Over time, the white Northerners who supported such measures insisted that newly freed people were poor and therefore likely to become criminals or public charges, or that Black people were racially inferior, or that the United States was destined to be a white nation - or some combination of all those ideas.

Those views were enshrined in laws in the Midwest, where newly admitted states, starting with Ohio in 1803, imposed special residency requirements on free Black people, barred their children from public schools, forbade them from testifying in court cases involving whites, and prohibited Black men from voting.

Black Americans mobilized against those laws. In Ohio and elsewhere, they were a minority of the statewide population and recognized that they needed white supporters if the discriminatory laws were to be repealed. They held meetings, organized petition drives and issued addresses to the white citizens of their states.

In the Northeast, Black sailors who had been unjustly incarcerated while their ships were in Southern ports told their stories to sympathetic whites, who in turn pushed the legislatures of Massachusetts and New York to provide funding for rescuing Black Northerners from Southern prisons. In the early 1840s, Black and white Americans petitioned Congress to secure for free Black sailors basic rights to pursue their livelihoods, to move freely and to the presumption of innocence.

Congress did not act. In fact, when Congress did pass legislation that involved the rights of free Black Americans, it was the oppressive Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made free Black Northerners more vulnerable than ever to kidnapping and enslavement.

The Northern struggle made clear that abolishing slavery would not, on its own, lead to justice or even basic fairness for free Black Americans.

In October 1864, just before President Abraham Lincoln was elected to a second term, a large group of Black activists met in Syracuse, N.Y. Many had been writing, speaking and working for racial justice for decades. Most were from the free states, but a handful made the trip from slave states like Tennessee, Virginia and Florida.

In an " Address to the American People," the convention insisted that the nation must not only abolish slavery but erase "from its statute-books all enactments discriminating in favor or against any class of its people" and establish "one law for the white and colored people alike." The vote, the delegates insisted, was "the keystone in the arch of human liberty" without which "the whole may at any moment fall to the ground."

The Syracuse meeting also had a practical vision. It founded a National Equal Rights League to demand "a recognition" of Black Americans' rights as citizens of the United States. Northern and Southern delegates returned home to start their own branches. In fall 1865, George T. Downing of Rhode Island, who attended the Syracuse meeting, led an effort to send Black lobbyists to Washington to push for federal legislation that would affirm the principle of racial equality.

Republicans in Congress were ready. Some had been involved in prewar Northern struggles for racial equality. Others recognized that the nation was at a crossroads and that abolition would mean little without federal protections for Black Americans.

The Congress that met in 1865-66 adopted the nation's first civil rights statute, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the 14th Amendment. These measures passed despite full-throated Democratic opposition, including charges - so familiar today - that the new policies interfered with the prerogatives of the states and gave Black Americans unfair advantages over whites.

Juneteenth, then, should serve not only to remind us of the joy and relief that accompanied the end of slavery, but also of the unfinished work of confronting slavery's legacy. Thanks to the efforts of generations of activists, laws that explicitly discriminate based on race are a thing of the past. But today's conservatives echo their 19th-century predecessors when they justify federal inaction on voting rights with arguments about states' rights and spurious claims of electoral corruption. These arguments join a growing attack on the teaching of American history itself.

Americans need to understand that the original Constitution, which protected slavery while providing few federal safeguards for individual rights, did not create a path toward abolition or racial equality. To the contrary, before and after Juneteenth, it was Black people and their white allies who fought to eradicate the racist legacies of slavery and who demanded that the federal government take action to protect the rights of all.

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Opinion | Juneteenth Reminds Us Just How Far We Have to Go

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Ms. Masur, who teaches history and has written extensively about the Civil War and Reconstruction, the antislavery movement, emancipation, politics and the state, is the author of " Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction."

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Gender Pronouns are Changing. It's Exhilarating. 

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Gender Pronouns are Changing. It's Exhilarating. 

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Credit... Michael Morris

The other day I had occasion to use the pronoun "they" in the new way, referring to a specific person. Not your grandfather's singular "they" with its generic meaning - "A student can hand their paper in early if they want to" - but "they" as in, "Roberta wants a haircut, and they also want some highlights."

I wangled it, but it required a bit of conscious effort. Pronouns sit deep in our cognition, used constantly and bound by habit. "It's their turn to use the kite, don't you think?" I said, thinking consciously about my sentence in a way that I don't have to usually.

I know some find it wearying. Why does language have to change all the time, with all we have to think about? But we are not unique: There are times when the language firmament shifts under people's feet, and they get through it. In the 1700s, English speakers had to get used to a new idea that double and triple negatives were "wrong." Shakespeare could write, "There's never none of these demure boys come to any proof" for Falstaff in " Henry IV, Part II," but now we had to deal with the idea that two negatives signify a positive, despite no one being taught this aboutFrench and countless other languages.

In standard English, "thou" as the singular second-person pronoun fell away, and one used "you" in both singular and plural. For a while, people used singular verb forms with "you." John and Abigail Adams did it all the time. "I wish you was nearer to us," wrote Abigail - these days embodied in our minds as, say, Laura Linney's prim portrayal - in 1775. But grammarians didn't like it, so people had to shape up and start saying, even to one person, "you were."

What seems to gall some people about the new singular "they" is that people are requesting to be addressed in a novel way that feels counterintuitive to many. But then just some decades ago, some will remember how disorienting it could be to adapt to using "Ms." rather than delineating women as married or unmarried on the basis of "Mrs." and "Miss." Now that custom can look somewhere between coarse and hilarious. (Think of the "Schitt's Creek" scene when Rolanddeceptively introduces Stevieas "Miss Felmington.")

I remember how it felt to be an English speaker in the late 1980s when seemingly overnight, one was to say "Asian" rather than "Oriental," "Latino" rather than "Hispanic," and shortly thereafter, "African American" rather than "Black," with "Oriental," especially, considered from then on offensive (while "Black" has made a return as an adjective). And yet the earth kept spinning, and references to "Orientals" are now as antique as Atari and McDonald's hamburgers in Styrofoam boxes.

Because pronouns are used so much, it's easy to think that the way they are at a given time is the way pronouns are supposed to be. But there is a language in New Guinea called Berik in which there is one pronoun for second person and one pronoun that means "he," "she," "it" and "they"; only in the first person is there a difference between "I" and "we." Berik speakers manage quite well. I know someone given to a quirk of referring to himself archly as "we." In doing so and also referring to people with the new singular "they," he is using an English in which you don't differentiate singular from plural in any pronouns at all. Yet he manages just fine.

Language change is a spectator sport. It isn't whether but how things will change over time, and getting to witness a major change like what's happening to "they" is a kind of privilege, a top ticket.

Just as people said "you was" in the singular for a while, there will probably be some flutter in terms of how we deal with singular "they" and verb agreement. Already we are taught that the "proper" use of singular "they" is with plural agreement - "they are ready for their highlights now."

However, there will be a natural temptation to use the third-person singular form with "s" with singular "they": "They wants to see you now." My guess is that this will be especially common in Black English, where using "s" with "they" is already an aspect of its grammar and thus will feel correct. Just possibly, this will influence standard usage, given the impact that Black English often has on general American English these days.

Another guess is that there may be a call to differentiate singular "they" in writing by capitalizing it. Maybe that will catch on. Maybe not. But discussion will be as lively as the one in Sweden over the gender-neutral pronoun "hen," which has dug in for real.

You just never know how things are going to morph. Way back in Old English, the word for "she" was "heo," and over time that started to sound so much like "he" that in some dialects you just said "he" for men and women. Were things going to stay that way, given that a great many languages have gender-neutral pronouns of that kind? One may have wondered. But instead, English developed a new pronoun. Possibly it was by yanking a new feminine pronoun from a word that meant "that," used with nouns of feminine gender. Or possibly it was something mysterious that happened in northern England and Scotland; theories are various, but the result was a new pronoun, "she." And most likely, some people at first didn't like it.

They died, and here we are. As the school year starts, I'm seeing yet more interesting things. A linguistics professor I know tells me that when she presented "The boy wants to see a picture of herself" as a mistaken sentence - a classic kind of blackboard example in linguistics since the 1960s - a couple of students said that these days, that sentence can actually be used by some people. I'm already listening around for examples.

They tell you mountains become sand, but you never get to see it happening. Language change happens faster, and you actually get to witness it. It's something to treasure.

Have feedback? Send a note to McWhorter-newsletter@nytimes.com.

John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of "Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever" and the forthcoming " Woke Racism."

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Opinion | Gender Pronouns Are Changing. It's Exhilarating.

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The other day I had occasion to use the pronoun "they" in the new way, referring to a specific person. Not your grandfather's singular "they" with its generic meaning - "A student can hand their paper in early if they want to" - but "they" as in, "Roberta wants a haircut, and they also want some highlights."

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Colonialist perspectives have dominated, and continue to dominate, social, political and literary discourses everywhere. Colonialism survives in international conflicts, in the fragmented societies of former colonies, in the parameters that define the normal and the acceptable, and in the white ideals into which we are constantly punishing our bodies and minds.

Decolonizing your bookshelf means actively examining and resisting colonialist narratives in the books that you read, and diversifying your reading to include books by authors from communities that have been victims of colonialism and systemic racism. The importance of combating the cultural and psychological effects of colonialism perpetrated through language was argued by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o in his classic work, Decolonising the Mind. While the very act of reading and writing in English and other European languages across the world, and especially in former colonies, cannot be dissociated from colonialist underpinnings, the practical and subversive potential of the colonized appropriating the colonizer's language to counter colonialist narratives cannot be ignored.

Decolonizing Your Bookshelf: The Why

Tea, chintz, dainty confections, muslin, silks and exotic spices are fixtures in beloved British Victorian and Regency era novels that serve as many people's introduction to English literature in Britain's former colonies. Many readers, including me, have spent hours romanticizing about elaborate costumes, sprawling gardens and fancy parties that they have encountered in these books. In comparison, the time we have spent acknowledging and thinking about the atrocities that were inflicted on the colonies to ensure a steady supply of these objects - and of wealth - in England is probably abysmally low. My home state of Bengal in India, a major producer of the textiles so prized by the English aristocracy, was ravaged by famines at the same time characters in British novels pottered about in gardens, sipped tea and nibbled at desserts sweetened with sugar introduced to the western world through slave trade and exploitation.

The horrors of colonialism have by now been widely studied by historians. Yet awareness of them in the psyche of the common public in former colonial powers is conspicuously low. A misplaced nostalgia for imperial pasts continues to shape politics and daily life. In the erstwhile colonies, while the effects of colonialism do define the study of history, literary and cultural discourses are still influenced directly and indirectly by colonial conditioning.

So here's why you should decolonize your bookshelf: because the story told by the dominant narrative is simply not complete. Repeating an incomplete story over and over again does not make it whole. If you are curious about the world around you, even if that curiosity is limited to your immediate surroundings, you must decolonize your bookshelf to piece together as many parts of the story as you can.

Reading diverse books broaden our perspectives. They help us better understand the present political and social institutions, and to identify and protest injustice. Decolonizing your bookshelf will enable you to understand and empathize with marginalized communities, to learn to listen to the experiences of others, and to let voices that were silenced by the overt exclusion of colonialism in the past and the covert tyranny of markets in recent times be heard.

One reason books have the potential to affect us so profoundly is that they introduce us to new places, cultures, and people, and to the human element that connects us across all this diversity. Reading widely can only deepen this sense of wonderment at finding parts of yourself in faraway places and among unfamiliar people. I, an Indian woman reading in a small Indian town, found the greatest understanding in the writing of an Italian woman whose identity is still unknown to the world, and companionship on the day a great personal tragedy struck in the writing of a queer author born in Nigeria. Why not broaden the range of voices that we allow in our bookshelves, even if just to increase our chances of making that special connection?

Photo by Pickawood on Unsplash

Decolonizing Your Bookshelf: The How

Decolonizing your bookshelf is about reading more, not reading less. It is more about what you can read and what you can question in the books that you read, than what you cannot read. It is about examining what constitutes literary canons and why, and demanding more stories be given their rightful place in our libraries and bookshops.

Read Your Favorite Genres

You do not have to read a specific type of book in order to decolonize your bookshelf. Writers from different backgrounds are writing all kinds of books, and do not deserve to be pigeonholed. Just as science fiction, fantasy, and detective novels once casually propagated racist, misogynist, and homophobic beliefs, many writers have been deconstructing and reshaping these genres with their antiracist, anti-imperialist narratives. Read whatever genres you want to read - fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, thrillers or romance - and consciously ensure that you read authors of color, queer authors and authors from backgrounds different from your own.

Read the Classics

Decolonizing your bookshelf does not mean swearing off classics, either. Authors of color producing great literature is not a recent phenomenon. The literary traditions of people of color are as old as that of western cultures. These books just did not, and do not, receive the positive press that is lavished on white men of yore. Want to explore, but don't know where to start? Check out this round up of 100 classics by people of color and this introduction to two centuries of African American writing.

Think Beyond Diaspora

Acknowledge that every culture or country can be heterogenous in itself. Diaspora books and immigration stories set in the west are great, and offer unique perspectives, but they are not enough. If you want to know more about a culture, actively seek out books by native writers and by underrepresented voices within the community. This might not always be easy, but talk to people, do your research. We, people of color, also need to address the racism, colorism, casteism, homophobia, and sexism in our communities, the dynamics of which are often linked to colonial pasts, and advocate for better representation. Here is a list of diverse books from India to get you started.

Read Translated Literature

Colonialism has made English a global language. Though many former colonies have adopted and shaped the language as their own, it still is not the first language of the majority of inhabitants of the world. Scores of important books are being written in other languages every year. Yet very few books written in non-European languages are translated into English, depriving deserving authors of global readership and readers of a wealth of literature. Seek out the books that do get translated. Read them. Buy them. Demand wider access to world literature.

Connect the Dots

Above all, establish connections between the books you read. As Priyamvada Gopal, whose book Insurgent Empire is a compelling account of anti-colonial struggles in Britain's colonies and their impact on the western world's idea of freedom, notes in an essay, "'Diversity' in and of itself, however, is not the same as 'decolonisation' and can serve to militate against it if all it generates is a glib pluralism that allows the centre, and its attendant orthodoxies, to remain unchallenged and unchanged." Do not let your antiracist, diverse reading be disconnected from the other books that you have read and will read. Use your reading to reconstruct the narratives of our times. Break free from social, cultural and political hegemony and ask questions. Here are some more books that will help you do that.

CW: Self-harm and suicide

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Decolonizing Your Bookshelf: The What, The Why, and The How

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Colonialist perspectives have dominated, and continue to dominate, social, political and literary discourses everywhere. Colonialism survives in international conflicts, in the fragmented societies of former colonies, in the parameters that define the normal and the acceptable, and in the white ideals into which we are constantly punishing our bodies and minds.

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What If Disability Rights Were For Everyone? 

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What If Disability Rights Were For Everyone? 

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Credit... Guillem Casasus

Mr. Ne'eman is a doctoral candidate in Health Policy at Harvard and a visiting scholar at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis. He previously served as executive director of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network and as one of President Barack Obama's appointees to the National Council on Disability, and is currently writing a book on the history of American disability advocacy.

In the fight between red state governors and the federal government over measures to control the pandemic, the Biden administration has deployed an unexpected weapon: disability rights law. Citing the Americans with Disabilities Act (A.D.A.), President Biden's Department of Education launched investigations into five states that have prohibited schools from requiring masks. Already, a Federal District Court has blocked Iowa's ban on mask requirements, citing the A.D.A. The legal reasoning is simple: by prohibiting mask mandates, these states may be pushing disabled students - who are at greater risk from Covid - out of the classroom.

When the public thinks about disability rights, they usually imagine laws that protect those with visible disabilities - wheelchair users, for instance, or people with Down syndrome. But the scope of disability law is far broader, encompassing less obvious diagnoses. Young people with diabetes, asthma or other conditions that put them at risk from Covid may not think of themselves as people with disabilities - but by legal definition they stand to benefit from disability law's protections.

President Biden's efforts to protect mask mandates represent only the latest effort to use disability laws to protect broad swaths of the public. In recent years, the A.D.A. has been used to challenge immigration restrictions, police brutality, mass incarceration and many other broad social problems.

The disability rights movement emerged to champion the interests of people who had been pushed to the margins of our society, seeking to rectify a long and dark legacy of disabled Americans being forced into institutions, discriminated against in the workplace, and denied access to mainstream schools. For those who experienced such horrors, the movement exists to secure the rights of a specific oppressed minority group.

But the increasingly broad reach of disability rights protections also offer a set of tools to help many who never thought of themselves as disabled and perhaps never will. Which raises a question: Can a movement born to address discrimination against a particular minority evolve into something greater - a larger push for rights for all? And what would that evolution mean for the future of disability rights advocacy?

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Eighteen months ago, the world broke. As Covid spread throughout the country, so too did the experience of disablement. Like the polio generation, students suddenly found themselves able to attend school only through the miracle of technology. Those adults who couldn't work from home began each morning with a complex calculus of risk and worry familiar to many chronically ill people with compromised immune systems. But for those lucky enough to bring our jobs home with us, a new universe of possibilities opened up.

There is a certain irony in these changes. "People with disabilities found that accommodations they were denied for decades suddenly became universally available during the pandemic," said Colin Killick, executive director of the Disability Policy Consortium, a disability rights advocacy organization (disclosure: I serve as a volunteer member of the consortium's board). The sudden willingness to offer flexibility long deemed impossible for the disabled minority before Covid was frustrating, Mr. Killick told me, "but it also presents an opportunity to imagine what a world in which accommodations were available to all might look like."

Disability rights law goes beyond many other civil rights statutes. The A.D.A. prohibits obvious discrimination, but it also requires reasonable accommodations and modifications - changes to typical policies and practices to give disabled people equal access and opportunity to participate. This is an obvious necessity for people with disabilities, but it also offers an intriguing precedent for the broader public.

In May, the House passed the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, legislation that would require employers to offer pregnant workers the same reasonable accommodations protections made available to disabled workers. Pregnancy is not a disability under the A.D.A., but disability law has inspired a more expansive vision of workplace rights. Just as wheelchair users have the right to ramps and elevators, pregnant workers may win the right to more frequent breaks or to sit down in jobs that usually require standing.

Beyond legal protections, the work of the disability rights movement is also at the core of one of the Biden administration's major policy initiatives: a proposed mega-expansion in Medicaid home care that stands to benefit both those with lifelong disabilities and many seniors for whom disability has never been a part of their personal identity. As we begin to plan for post-Covid health policy, the mounting death toll in nursing homes and the longstanding abuses in such settings have forced many to rethink the wisdom of congregate care. In doing so, aging advocates are heading down a path disability groups traveled long ago. Activists are succeeding in extending the disability rights revolution in the interest of fundamental human rights and dignity.

During the 1980s, Judy Heumann, one of the pioneers of the modern disability rights movement, co-founded the World Institute on Disability, which worked to export the ideas of the disability rights movement into aging policy. "Frequently, I talk to older people who are telling me about the problems they're facing from aging, and it's things that disabled people have been working on our whole lives," Ms. Heumann told me recently, "Maybe one of the outcomes of Covid will be that we'll make the reforms necessary to allow people to remain in their homes and communities and not end up in these segregated places where over and over again we see atrocities."

Yet there is a tension here, one that raises an important challenge for leaders in disability rights. Though the disability rights movement emphasizes the importance of proud disabled identity, many - perhaps most - who benefit from disability rights don't know it. Few see themselves as part of a disabled minority group. The disability rights movement remains obscure, even as its legal and policy victories have become more relevant than ever. Increasingly, activists are struggling with a simple question: How do you go about representing a constituency that doesn't know you exist?

I recently spoke to Ryan Easterly, the executive director of the WITH Foundation, an organization that promotes health equity for adults with developmental disabilities. "For professional advocates, disability is often acknowledged as a core part of who we are," he told me, "but the average person with a disability may not always feel that way." Mr. Easterly began his activism as a teenager participating in the Alabama Governor's Youth Leadership Forum, a program designed to build advocacy skills and connection to the larger disability community for youth with disabilities. Such programs represent an important investment in the disability movement's future - but efforts to encourage a proud disability identity may not be enough to reach many who benefit from disability protections.

According to Mr. Easterly, those who are diagnosed with a condition early in life have more opportunities to see their disability as part of themselves. For others who acquire a disability, especially from trauma, age or acquired illness, the path is more of a struggle. And regardless of a disability's origin, other forms of marginalization can complicate things. "Often, getting a diagnosis is the first step to disability identity," Mr. Easterly explained, "But that takes resources - resources that aren't as readily available in communities of color, who don't get access to that identity."

He raises an important point: Though worthwhile, the modern effort to recast disability as a positive form of self-identity has reached some more than others. Disability identity remains an important tool - but positioning the disability rights movement only around people who identify as disabled leaves out those for whom life circumstance blocks access to identity, leaving many struggling with the problems of disability without the words to claim it.

Framing disability rights as identical to other identity-based movements can present other problems, too. Early disability rights leaders borrowed heavily from the language of race-based civil rights activism. In 1966, the National Federation of the Blind's Jacobus tenBroek made the comparison explicit in a seminal law review article that shaped the movement's future direction: "As with the Black man, so with the blind. As with the Puerto Rican, so with the post-polio. As with the Indian, so with the indigent disabled." Later, activists with the organization ADAPT, previously called Americans Disabled for Accessible Public Transit, sought to frame themselves as the heirs of Rosa Parks, carrying signs reading "I can't even get to the back of the bus."

For some parts of the disability community, such comparisons were not entirely without merit. After all, disability rights emerged out of the systemic exclusion of disabled people from schools and communities. Throughout the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of disabled Americans were subject to institutionalization and sterilization by a eugenics movement that sought to wipe them from the earth.

Still, disability is not the same as race. In relying so heavily on such a comparison, the disability movement may do itself and others a disservice. The breadth of the definition of disability encompasses many life experiences that don't fit neatly into the frame of a minority struggling against an oppressive majority. At times, disabled activists' analogies to race suggest a kind of stolen valor, especially from a movement that frequently falls short on racial diversity.

What's more, in drawing such a sharp line between those whom disability rights protects and those it makes demands on, the disability movement may be leaving power on the table. Covid-19 has illustrated that disability rights are of near-universal relevance. An opportunity is emerging to frame disability advocacy in the language of shared social and economic liberties we should all protect, for reasons of self-interest as much as abstract notions of equity.

To accomplish this, activists may need to consider universalizing the disability movement, presenting disability rights as broad protections available to all Americans, not just those who self-identify as disabled.

There is some precedent for this. Conceptually, scholars have long promoted a "social model" of disability, which presents disablement as emerging out of the interaction between an individual and their environment. Just as dyslexia would be unlikely to be diagnosed in a pre-literate society, so too are other forms of disablement only noticeable when context makes them important.

The experiences of those with at-risk diagnoses during Covid offers a powerful validation to what at first seems like abstract theory. By one estimate, nearly half of American adults have a chronic condition that places them at greater risk. Their medical issues existed before Covid, many even met the technical criteria for A.D.A. protections - but they are now more relevant than ever before.

Disability legal protections are similarly flexible. When the Supreme Court issued a series of opinions restricting the definition of disability, leaving many people with less obvious impairments out of the scope of nondiscrimination law, advocates convinced Congress to pass the A.D.A. Amendments Act of 2008. The law ensured the A.D.A..'s definition of disability was interpreted broadly.

There are other examples to build on. Laws like the Family and Medical Leave Act (F.M.L.A.) and HIPAA's privacy protections (under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) overwhelmingly benefit disabled people - but because they create rights available to all, they are thought of as universal, not targeted, protections. Similarly, the Affordable Care Act's prohibition on insurers charging more to those with pre-existing conditions represented one of the greatest disability policy achievements in a generation. Yet few saw it as a gift only for the disabled because proponents sold it to the public as a universal benefit that helped everyone.

Not every disability policy priority can be recast in such universalist terms. Sign language interpreters or supported employment services could never be replaced by broad and diffuse benefits spread across the entire population. Relatively few people need these things, and those that do need them to be financed with a level of resources far above what others get. In such cases, the framing of an oppressed minority group is useful. Even if the disability movement is to expand beyond identity politics, it won't be able to leave them entirely behind. The prism of identity remains essential for many whose disability experiences are defining.

Still, the disability rights movement could position many other disability priorities as public goods, akin to clean air or privacy rights. Laws like the A.D.A. would still serve as a backstop for the minority that identifies as disabled, but could also come to be seen as useful protections for a larger public, much like HIPAA or F.M.L.A.

One can imagine future disability advocacy proceeding on two tracks. A small vanguard of "loud and proud" activists, motivated by disability culture and the discursive claims of identity politics, can mobilize to secure new laws and public programs. Meanwhile, these initial policy victories will be defended and grown because of their concrete impact on the lives of the far larger group of people who benefit from disability protections even without identity. Reaching the latter group will require activists to highlight "bread and butter" issues the public can easily understand. Keeping students safe from a deadly pandemic, guaranteeing rights to pregnant workers, and helping seniors stay in their own homes all seem like good places to start.

The Biden administration's leveraging of disability law is a welcome effort to protect the rights of disabled students in a pandemic. But it is also more - it suggests a complex future for disability politics, where disability laws may come to be seen as both the liberation of a discrete minority group and a broad protection that benefits all regardless of self-identification. Such a change will present a challenge to a disability rights movement used to an exclusively "minority group" model of activism - but also a tremendous opportunity to make disability rights relevant to an American public that already receives so much from it.

Ari Ne'eman (@aneeman) is a doctoral candidate in Health Policy at Harvard and a visiting scholar at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis. He is currently working on a book on the history of American disability advocacy.
Now in print: "The Times is committed to publishing Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com. About Us: Essays From the Disability Series of The New York Times," edited by Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson.

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Opinion | What if Disability Rights Were for Everyone?

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Mr. Ne'eman is a doctoral candidate in Health Policy at Harvard and a visiting scholar at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis. He previously served as executive director of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network and as one of President Barack Obama's appointees to the National Council on Disability, and is currently writing a book on the history of American disability advocacy.

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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

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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.
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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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For Transgender Youth, Stigma is Just One Barrier to Health Care 

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For Transgender Youth, Stigma is Just One Barrier to Health Care 

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Discrimination, delays and systemic hurdles prevent young trans people from reaching the care they need, a new study finds.

Piper, a 17-year-old transgender girl in Georgia, one of 20 states that have introduced bills limiting gender-affirming treatments to minors. "I'm just more confident in my body," she said. Credit... Aboubacar Kante for The New York Times

Piper, a 17-year-old transgender girl, says she knows she is fortunate.

She lives just outside Atlanta, with a supportive family and two rescued leopard geckos, Saturn and Juno. Queer Med, a private gender clinic, is a short drive away; two years ago, she started a regimen of gender-affirming hormones there, after five months of asking - a comparatively short wait. The treatments have precipitated a monumental shift in Piper's perception of herself. "I'm just more confident in my body," she said. (Piper's family members asked that she be identified by only her first name to protect their privacy.)

Things are not perfect. Piper still sees a regular pediatrician for her other health needs, but staff members there still occasionally use the wrong pronouns or her former name. Her family's new insurance plan is not accepted at Queer Med, so they must pay out of pocket for every visit - about $150 not including lab fees.

And the threat of her care becoming unavailable is constant, as Georgia is one of 20 states this year that introduced bills to prohibit or restrict gender-affirming treatments to minors. Piper plans to leave the South after high school, out of concern for her health and safety. But it could all be much worse, she knows. "I am so lucky," Piper said. "A lot of people don't get the chance."

Many obstacles prevent young transgender people from getting the health care they need, according to a recent study in the journal JAMA Pediatrics; these include stigma and discrimination from the health care system as well as legal, economic and social obstacles to obtaining gender-affirming care. A 2019 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that about 1.8 percent of high school students in the United States identified as transgender.

The JAMA paper is the first review of qualitative studies on young transgender people's experiences getting access to health care. It encompassed 91 studies from 17 countries over several decades, and it included transgender and nonbinary youth from 9 to 24 years old - a broad range, made necessary by the extremely limited data on the subject.

"There's currently such a huge disconnect between health care providers and trans youth," said Dr. Lauren Chong, a pediatric trainee at the Sydney Children's Hospitals Network in Australia and an author of the review.

"The findings were not surprising at all," said Talen Wright, a graduate student studying transgender people's mental health at University College London's division of psychiatry, who was not involved with the research. "It's powerful evidence that things need to change."

The major medical associations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, have endorsed gender-affirming treatment for adolescents. (However, m edical guidelines recommend against children under 18 undergoing gender-affirming genital surgery.)

But treatment remains contentious for some health care providers, lawmakers and parents precisely because adolescents are involved. Puberty blockers and hormone therapy, the two gender-affirming treatments given to minors, are most effective if taken when puberty begins, around the ages of 8 to 14, before the age of independent medical consent in most states.

No single set of rules dictates when and how transgender adolescents may receive gender-affirming care. But clinicians generally conduct a series of mental health evaluations in accordance with care practices, such as those set by the World Professional Association for Transgender Healthcare or the Endocrine Society. These evaluations are meant to assess an adolescent's understanding of themselves and confirm that medical intervention makes sense.

"It's to ensure patients make a fully informed decision that protects their future well-being," Dr. Chong said.

Dr. Michele Hutchison, a pediatric endocrinologist at Arkansas Children's Hospital who was not involved with the research, added: "We want to make sure it's 100 percent justifiable and safe, to the extent you can ever do that in medicine."

For the most part, she said, her young patients are sure of their decision. "By the time these kids come to me, they've known a long time," she said.

But some young patients in the JAMA review criticized what they saw as "gate-keeping" measures in these evaluations that restricted timely access to puberty blockers and hormone therapy at a moment in development when those treatments would be most effective. Some adolescents said they felt the need to prove that they were "trans enough" to get approval, and others expressed frustration when a parent did not give approval for hormone therapy, thus blocking their access to care.

Talen Wright, a trans woman and Ph.D. candidate in the U.K., studies the mental health of transgender and gender-diverse people, a vocation she found in part because of her own experiences in the medical system. Credit... Tori Ferenc for The New York Times

"We have to be really thoughtful about the structural barriers that we are creating ourselves as providers," said Dr. Gina Sequeira, a co-director of the Seattle Children's Gender Clinic, who was not involved with the research. "The majority of the kids I see have already overcome many, many barriers."

Transgender patients also face broader barriers to health care, the JAMA review found. Insurance proved a common and thorny issue; some families struggled to get puberty blockers covered, and others had difficulty finding a trans-friendly provider in network. And those without insurance faced high costs.

There are also wait-lists, often several months long, to make an appointment. Dr. Cassie Brady, a pediatric endocrinologist at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee who was not involved with the research, said that her clinic often has a wait-list of around 50 people. "We're doing everything we can to get these children in," she said.

For a young transgender person, merely the prospect of walking into a clinic can be distressing. One 14-year-old in the review said they felt " petrified" to enter places out of fear that their gender identity would be mocked or dismissed. Another adolescent said that clinicians glossed over their identity, calling it " just a phase."

Hayden Wolff, who graduated from Tufts University in Massachusetts in 2021, started his medical transition at 18. He recalled a visit to his school's clinic, where his electronic health records were outdated.

"Here I am with a high fever, trying to get care, and I get misgendered in front of everyone else in the room," Mr. Wolff said.

Hayden Wolff, a Tufts University graduate now living in the Bay Area, recalled being misgendered by medical staff and treated like a "trans specimen" by one doctor. Credit... Anastasiia Sapon for The New York Times

The review's authors also noted that more research was needed on the long-term effects of gender-affirming treatments. When Mr. Wolff met with doctors in Boston, he was urged to hold off on hormones if he was worried about fertility. Doctors in California told him not to worry, even though they were not sure of longer-term outcomes.

"You have to make decisions without much information and data," Mr. Wolff said.

He decided to freeze his eggs. The doctor who saw him in Boston had never treated a transgender patient before and made Mr. Wolff feel like a "trans specimen," he said. Nurses at the clinic asked Mr. Wolff invasive questions that were unrelated to the egg-freezing procedure.

"Lab nurses would ask me if I was going to get my penis after this, which ultimately is none of their business," he said. "If you're a kid, you don't feel like you have the power to say to someone, 'You're making me uncomfortable.'"

Clinicians said that it would not take much to begin to improve the health care experience of young transgender patients. For instance, patients should be allowed to list their own name and gender before seeing a doctor. "This hit me the closest as a trans person who has received medical care, waiting for them to call my wrong name or waiting for them to address me as 'mister,'" said Dr. Baer Karrington, a pediatric resident at Seattle Children's.

In the examination room, Dr. Chong said, doctors and attendants should use gender-neutral terminology and avoid terms like "ovaries" and "uterus." "You can just say reproductive organs," she said.

Dr. Sequeira noted that young transgender people of color, as well as rural youth, are disproportionately underrepresented in pediatric gender clinics. "The future of this work is to make it accessible to youth that we're not currently serving," she added.

Piper's rescued leopard geckos, Juno and Saturn, have spurred her interest in becoming a zoologist. Credit... Aboubacar Kante for The New York Times

Telemedicine could help bridge that gap, she noted, and doctors in all fields could be better educated in how to care for patients who are transgender. Dr. Karrington said that, during pediatric training, they learned about transgender health care only in the adolescent rotation, which did not address younger transgender children being treated elsewhere in the hospital.

Transgender adolescents and clinicians both expressed a desire to see more transgender providers, who may share life experiences with their young patients. Dr. Karrington, who is the first transgender resident in their program, said they could count the number of transgender pediatricians they knew on both hands. In Atlanta, Piper's doctor at Queer Med is transgender, which she found comforting. "They know what I'm going through and they can attest to the fact that it gets better," Piper said.

While Piper hopes more transgender people become doctors, she wants to be a zoologist, inspired by her geckos. "It's my calling," she said. "I've known that for a long time."

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For Transgender Youth, Stigma Is Just One Barrier to Health Care

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Discrimination, delays and systemic hurdles prevent young trans people from reaching the care they need, a new study finds. Piper, a 17-year-old transgender girl, says she knows she is fortunate. She lives just outside Atlanta, with a supportive family and two rescued leopard geckos, Saturn and Juno.

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Holy s**t, being an ally isn’t about me!

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Holy s**t, being an ally isn’t about me!

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What a difference five months makes.

Five months ago, I was as effective a white "ally" as Trump is a president.

Five months ago: In Pantsuit Nation, a black woman posted a thread asking for input from other people of color (POC). It seemed innocuous enough a request. Surely in this liberal sea of white, the melanin-deficient progressives would allow the POC one lousy post without intrusion, right? Wrong. Angry white commenters hijacked and derailed the post, accusing the black woman of everything from racism to "separation politics." Clambering at the opportunity to chime in (because I also felt the pain of being silenced while white), I rushed to her defense, asking my own skinfolk to sit out one solitary post directed at, and for, POC. Serendipitously, a black woman replied to me and asked if I wanted to become a member of an intersectional feminist group led by WOC (women of color) and for WOC. Heck yes, I wanted to join because I was not a racist - not this white woman. That is how I found myself in a WOC-led, intersectional feminism group - a group to which I still belong.

I started there as a clueless woman, who thought she knew everything. I'll give you a little bit of my background. I'm a small-town Midwestern Spanish-German cis straight Christian American white woman. I couldn't wait to prove to myself and everyone else that I was one of the good white people and definitely no racist. Nope. Not me.

I attempted to get the WOC in the group to like me by trying my usual online friendship tactics: complimenting each one on her intelligence, her hair, her profile picture ... and of course, hitting "like" on every comment and post. However, my effort went unrewarded. No one paid any attention to my efforts, and no one praised me.

Like a determined toddler, I decided that surely, if the WOC understood all of my good deeds for POC (smiling at black and brown people on the metro, telling POC that I was not racist and didn't care about skin color, and actually having 2 Muslim and 2 black friends), that they would like me. They would finally understand my feelings. Well, when I mentioned these things, I was told to stop asking for cookies.

I really didn't understand what cookies were. Much of the language in this group was new to me - "privilege" this and "appropriation" that, "centering" this and "reparations" that, "derailing" this and "white tears" that. I figured, if I started asking lots of questions, the WOC would realize my good intentions. They would see me as the white heroine who was trying to "get it." But no. "Look it up on Google," they said again and again.

I huffed and puffed and at one time considered leaving the group. They rolled their eyes at this (I could feel it through my computer screen).

What was I doing so wrong? And more importantly to me, what was I really getting out of this group when the WOC neither wanted nor needed my help, my praise or my opinions? Why didn't they want to stop and teach me how to do better?

This was me five months ago:

Defensive when I wasn't the center of attention or felt ignored.

Constantly worried about whether I was liked and accepted.

Always asking myself how things benefited me.

Refusing to listen or feel anything when POC shared their truths, simply waiting anxiously for my turn to speak.

Asking POC to educate me over and over again and not understanding when they told me to educate myself.

Balking at questions left unanswered, but when POC did volunteer their labor, I disrespected it by not really believing what they said.

Feeling a nearly overwhelming urge to exclaim, "But I'm not like that!" when they expressed anger or frustration at white people.

White women (WW), have you ever been there and done those things? Most of us have.

That person I was five months ago - good intentions and all - was extremely dangerous to POC and their fight for liberation. I'll admit that I joined the group for validation. I wanted to be told, "You're the right kind of white person." This is the kind of bullshit that makes me and progressive WW like me (and maybe you, too?) just as scary as abject racists who seek to destroy POC.

I have realized just how much we exhaust POC. We don't listen. We think so highly of ourselves, that we refuse to change. We deny being part of the problem. We believe everything is about us and for us because we are white. As tough as it is to admit, it has always been this way.

That was me when I joined the group. I was a menace. Begrudgingly, I stayed. I listened. I learned. As I heard WOC express their unique struggles, pain, accomplishments and joys, something dawned on me.

Hey, what if - just what if - WOC didn't need to be grateful for my attempts at being an ally? What if this one thing was actually not about me?

I am embarrassed to say this, but in my ignorance, this notion was astounding. I suddenly became acutely aware that everything in my life had always been about me. In my 40 years of life, people mostly sang my praises. When they didn't, it had nothing to do with the color of my skin.

This is White Privilege. As white people (WP), society generally loves - or at least accepts - us. We are never made to feel unsafe or unwanted because of our skin color. We are never silenced and stereotyped because we are white. Many of us WP feel a jolt to our very being when someone doesn't seem to care whether or not we join the party.

Once I gleaned this tiny bit of enlightenment - it wasn't about me or for me, my feelings are not all that important here, do the work or hit the road, no pats on the back for treating POC as worthy human beings - this became my "He's Just Not That Into You" AHA moment of clarity.

I saw with new eyes. Instead of asking what I was getting out of allyship, I began asking what POC were getting out of me as a potential ally. De-centering myself, I went from "How can I make them like me?" to "How can I be better by them?"

I realized that posts about the horrors of whiteness were not necessarily directed at me personally but more at the systemic injustices of a white society. Where many of us white folks were flabbergasted by the election results and had begun fighting only after Trump was elected, POC were not at all surprised by the election and had already been fighting for several hundred years. My own white resistance was in its infancy. These eye-opening realizations have enabled me to show up and to keep my promises; to join the battle for POC liberation in real life instead of just as a keyboard warrior; to put my money where my mouth is; to lay down my defenses when I am called out; and in turn to call out other white so-called "progressives" with a kind but stern heart.

I learned these lessons precisely because WOC in this group knew that I wouldn't learn these lessons if they spoon-fed me my allyship. When I missed the mark and WOC gave me nothing, they actually gave me everything. They knew what I did not: That we as WP have to walk our own path to gain understanding. We need to get to a place where we are dismayed at the ugliness of racism and how we contribute to that ugliness.

WP, we must walk this road if we are trying to help POC fight for liberation. Sometimes white Baby does indeed need to be put in the corner. Only then can she see beyond her own nose, feel the raw truths of POC, and begin to face the systems of oppression that break their spirits and take their lives.

So here I am five months later, aware of these truths and comfortable with POC leadership. Now can I finally say that I am an ally?

No.

I do not get to bestow that title upon myself or claim that I am "woke." As WP, none of us get to do that. Just as a recovering alcoholic is always recovering, we will always be allies-in-training. Even though I hope to be part of the solution, as a well-intentioned WP, I must recognize that I will always be part of the problem. I may have learned from POC about how to glimpse my better self, be a better friend, and stop needing recognition for being a "good ally," but I can never fully understand their world or experience their truths.

The past five months have taught me this: If we are to really do the work to fight against racism and oppression using our allyship, we must realize that our learning - both in white society and in our own racist hearts - will be a lifelong endeavor. As WP, we have to commit to this work for the rest of our lives. We owe POC at least that much.

* This is the collective product of women of color and allies. This piece specifically comes from the voices of a group of allies.

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Holy shit, being an ally isn't about me!

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Five months ago: In Pantsuit Nation, a black woman posted a thread asking for input from other people of color (POC). It seemed innocuous enough a request. Surely in this liberal sea of white, the...

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Show Up: Your Guide to Bystander Intervention

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Show Up: Your Guide to Bystander Intervention

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7 ways to support the young activists in your life!

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7 ways to support the young activists in your life!

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Many children and youth see injustices in the world around them and want to address those injustices to create a better world. And they are doing so in a whole variety of ways, from protest to policy advocacy to educating themselves and their peers on social media. As parents, teachers, and other adults with relationships to young activists, we can help or hinder their efforts. Here are some tips about how to support their leadership and work.

1. Question your own assumptions

We live in an adultist society in which we are bombarded with messages that young people are less informed, more emotional, and less capable of independent critical thinking than adults are. As adults, we need to unlearn these misconceptions and question our tendencies to see ourselves as the experts and youth as just students or "future leaders." Read about ageism, about the history of youth organizing, and how the meaning of childhood and youth has varied in different times and places.

2. Be ready to learn

Young people have direct experiences, complex critical analyses, and important political strategies that they can share. Adults need to really hear what young people are saying and can learn from what they are doing. Their visions, tactics, and modes of interaction can and should expand our own understandings of the world around us.

3. Offer resources

Adults have particular material and social resources that often are harder for young people to access. We can provide financial support, introduce youth to key decision-makers or influential members of our communities, give them rides, cook meals, and offer our conference rooms, living rooms, or classrooms for their meetings.

4. Provide institutional memory and continuity

Young people move through institutions, especially schools, much more quickly than most adults do. Adults can provide important information about what previous cohorts of youth have done and how institutions have responded in the past. This can be especially important when institutions have made commitments that are not being fulfilled.

5. Offer supportive labor

Young people want our active engagement and support; activism can be exhausting! Adults can provide encouragement and care, including listening to young people's frustrations and showing that their feelings and experiences matter to us. We can also offer material labor, from printing fliers to screening their social media accounts for harassment and trolling.

6. Don't talk too much or take the lead (check yourself)

Because of our age-based power and privilege, adults are often too quick to answer questions, give our opinions, and control the conversation in intergenerational activist spaces. We need to step back and give young people room to develop and articulate their own positions.

7. Connect them to each other

Our institutional positions are often ones that allow us to connect youth to each other. As teachers, we may be able to help youth activists at one school find those at another through our relationships with other teachers. As parents and community members, we may be able to connect youth activists in our lives with other organizations and groups. Young activists are great at finding one another on social media, but we may have complementary contacts that can help strengthen their connections outside of their normal social circles.

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7 ways to support the young activists in your life!

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Many children and youth see injustices in the world around them and want to address those injustices to create a better world. And they are doing so in a whole variety of ways, from protest to policy advocacy to educating themselves and their peers on social media.

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Talking to Children After Racial Incidents 

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Talking to Children After Racial Incidents 

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Parents have a natural instinct to teach and protect their children. Police-involved killings, the shooting of Dallas officers, peaceful protests that turn violent - incidents that are often traumatic for adults - can make these two instincts feel in conflict.

Do we try to explain the strife our child sees on television? Or should we try to shield her from such "grown up" problems?

Howard Stevenson, a clinical psychologist at Penn GSE, studies racial literacy and racial trauma. He works with educators and families to help them understand the emotions that racial incidents can bring about, and how to reduce their negative effects on health and well being.

We asked Stevenson what ideas he had for adults who are searching for a way to discuss racial incidents with their children.
Why is this a conversation parents and guardians need to have?
Stevenson: We can't hide our children from the world. Your child is probably already more aware of race, class, and gender differences than you realize. This can be a time to teach your child about social justice, while also helping process how painful these events can be for them, and for you.
Why talk about social justice?
Stevenson: Adults often have a romanticized view of childhood that ignores how much children actually know. Our research, for example, has found elementary children are acutely aware of racial attitudes. Talking about injustice allows children to make sense of the things that don't go right in the world.

At some point, your child will be treated differently. Or one of her friends will be. They will be exposed to or have a sense of unfairness or injustice that is rightfully upsetting.

Explain that: "I'd like for you to be able to talk about it if someone treats you unfairly because of the color of your skin, or because you are a girl, or because of your religion, or because of a disability."

Right now, as chaotic as things might seem, is a good time to begin having these conversations with your child. It opens the door to you saying, "Here's what we are going to do. Here's how we can face this. You might feel helpless, which is natural and OK. I want to talk to you about this so you can feel strong."
Why talk about race?
Stevenson: We tell our kids not to approach strangers promising them candy. That's a scary situation for a child to imagine. Why do we do it? So children will be prepared for what to do.

Talking about race in America can be scary. People don't want to be seen as a racist or someone trying to start a conflict. But the less prepared we are to think about race and talk about race, the scarier those conversations are when they occur. And children need tools for how to feel and speak about these issues.
Remember "Affection, Correction, and Protection"
Stevenson: Think of this as a three-step plan for conversations about race and social justice:

1. Embrace your child's difference. Make it clear how much you care about her, how her difference is a gift, not a liability, and how not everyone will view it as a positive.

2. Correct misperceptions the world has about people who are diverse. We certainly know the adult world is filled with misinformation after a racist incident makes news. Kids hear that too. Help them better understand that no one is less human than another.

3. Monitor your child's emotions before, during, and after the conversation. Say, "this is an ongoing conversation." You're going to keep talking about these issues and they should too. When another incident makes headlines, follow up.

Reason it out
Stevenson: Kids are smarter than we give them credit for. Rather than simply give them rules ("Don't talk to strangers") give them reasons ("I would be afraid that a stranger would misunderstand you.")

Explain the reasons and emotions of why you are having this talk with a child. Explain that you want them to be able to talk about what makes them afraid, because that will make them strong.

It's OK if they're upset by what's happening in the world. You are too. Any reaction, as long as it's not violent or retaliatory, is OK.
How can you partner with other parents?
Stevenson: Every parent feels isolated having these hard conversations with their children. When you have the chance, practice having a hard conversation with your partner or a friend before you have to have it with your child.

Remember that other parents are struggling in the same ways that you are. Reach out to like-minded parents in your life at church, at your kids' games, waiting to pick them up from camp. What are we trying to say? What do we think they need to hear? What feelings am I having? Can I model how to share those feelings? If we can't communicate that, maybe someone else can. Who is that?
Avoid either/or
Stevenson: There's a reason many simple stories are told in terms of good guys and bad guys: It's easy to grasp. But this either/or construction doesn't help children reflect on the complexities in the world. Everyone has a family and loved ones.

A useful lesson is to teach a child how to refute an over-simplified either/or characterization. For example, why can't it be true that all Black, White, or Brown people act a certain way?

Many instances of injustice happen because a person dehumanizes someone else. It's much easier to be cruel or unfair if you are thinking of someone as not human. Ask your child to think, what if that person were my sibling? What feelings would I have?

Or ask, how would you like to be seen if a stranger comes up to you? That's how I'd like you to think about other people.
Listen
Stevenson: Don't assume you are the only one with wisdom to bring to the conversation. Children teach us too.

The more you listen for what your child already knows, what they are concerned about, what they are afraid of, the more you'll be able to help them speak and feel confidently about matters of social justice. And keep listening, because your child will need you to keep that conversation going.

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Talking to children after racial incidents

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Parents have a natural instinct to teach and protect their children. Police-involved killings, the shooting of Dallas officers, peaceful protests that turn violent - incidents that are often traumatic for adults - can make these two instincts feel in conflict.Do we try to explain the strife our child sees on television?

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A line of white people snaked around the entrance of Saint Agatha's Catholic Church in North Lawndale Wednesday. Inside the sanctuary the Chicago chapter of Showing up for Racial Justice (SURJ) was convening the first in a series of workshops called " Ally Is a Verb: Finding Your Role in the Movement for Black Liberation. "

There had been such immense interest in the event that SURJ had to cap attendance at 200 people and convene a second, simultaneous workshop for another 80 people in Wicker Park.

The Chicago chapter of SURJ is part of a national network that aims to educate and mobilize white people "to act as part of a multiracial majority for justice with passion and accountability"-in other words, to bring white people into conversations about racism and their roles in perpetuating it, and mobilize them to collaborate with nonwhite people working to counteract racial injustice. Founded in response to racist backlash in the wake of Barack Obama's election, many SURJ chapters have transitioned from education- to action-oriented work since the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson almost two years ago. This workshop was intended to prompt white people to grapple with their privilege and explore ways they could participate in the movement for racial justice.

The workshop began with SURJ members providing locational context for the crowd, which was seated in a semicircle of maroon chairs and church pews. "Most of us here are settler colonizers," said a SURJ member named Maisie. "The land we're on was stolen from the Anishinaabe people," the Native American tribes that lived in the Great Lakes region when French colonizers arrived in the 18th century.

Lydia, another SURJ member, talked about the history of predatory real estate practices targeting African-Americans in North Lawndale and organizing around racial justice and civil rights issues in the neighborhood by groups such as the Contract Buyers League.

With this historical context in place, the group was primed for discussion.

"How many of you guys have heard the concept of 'safe space'?" A SURJ member named Heidi asked the group, referring to the concept of social and physical places in which people can feel free of to be themselves without fear of mockery, intimidation, or exclusion. Most raised their hands. "We want to throw that out of the window and talk about ' brave space,'" she said.

"The idea of brave space is we want to be in a place that we challenge ourselves," Heidi continued. "In order for me to learn, I need to take risks-I need to be involved in difficult conversations and I need to sometimes say controversial things. We have to embrace the idea that this is challenging and difficult. Being uncomfortable is not the same thing as being unsafe."

The attendees were then split into small groups of four to five people, asked to introduce themselves with their names and preferred gender pronouns, and invited to discuss three questions. The first: What's an example of a time when you've struggled against harmful systems as an ally?

I found myself in a group with three white women from Ohio and Indiana and one white man from Miami, who spoke of his experience in the world as a "white Hispanic."

"I'm uncomfortable with my whiteness," said one white woman, who described growing up in a black neighborhood in Toledo. Everyone else echoed the feeling in their own introductions.

From there, the discussion unfolded in the spirit of a mini group-therapy session, with participants talked about the difficulties of confronting racism in relatives and other white people they know.

After a few minutes, SURJ moderators asked the entire gathering what it means to be an "ally." Voices from around the room volunteered opinions:

"Solidarity."

"Your fight is my fight."

"Being in a social location of privilege and siding with folks experiencing oppression,"

"Listening."

"Being chosen as an ally."

"Being accepted as an ally."

"You can try to be trustworthy, but you don't decide if you're trustworthy."

"Not waiting to be chosen but to be proactive."

"Seeing and enacting your world through a lens of privilege, seeing that as inextricable from who you are."

This last thought piqued Heidi's curiosity. She asked the woman who had offered it to elaborate. The woman responded by describing how easy it is for her to take the Red Line "as a white, able-bodied, cis-passing person," and that being an ally meant taking stock of all the privileges that afforded her: a clean train, ease of using the stairs, not being bothered by strangers.

The second assignment asked participants to discuss their relationships with the police throughout their lives. Carolyn from Indiana talked about being arrested when she threw a house party as a high school student, and avoiding interactions with cops ever since. Alex from Miami observed that calling the police when one, for example, has a problem with a noisy neighbor, needlessly brings the state into one's personal life.

The last discussion prompt created a palpable paralysis: What gifts do you bring to the movement for black liberation; what do you hope to receive or have already received? No one seemed to have a good answer.

As the workshop drew to a close another SURJ member, Rachel, invited participants to close their eyes and acknowledge the work they had done. "Let's do a collective breath so we can put it in our bodies and remember it," she said.

When they opened their eyes, a woman from the audience said, "In our group we were talking about a lot of action-oriented steps as allies, but some people are still in the thought space. . . I just want to thank you all for coming and being in that space." The sound of fingers snapping in appreciation filled the sanctuary. "I'm proud of you all at whatever space that you are," the woman concluded.

In a demonstration of allegiance in action, the organizers at Saint Agatha's redirected media Wednesday to a simultaneous event happening blocks away-the takeover of an empty lot in front of Chicago Police Department's Homan Square interrogation facility, led by Black Youth Project 100 and the #LetUsBreathe Collective. "We just want to make sure we're a sideshow and not the main event," explained SURJ member Michelle. "White people are too often the main event."

After the workshop SURJ member Ashley Ray reflected on the risk of the group's consciousness-building efforts turning into a tool for white people to simply build an self-affirming identity as "allies."

"I've seen people get caught up in that hype," she mused. "Our role here isn't to help people of color. We are, in different ways, hurt by racism and white supremacy as well . . . so it's not for us to go in and save anybody. We're actually trying to save ourselves as well."

Ray also grappled with SURJ's premise that there are certain types of outreach and activism that white people are capable of because they are white. Should white people be on the front lines of the movement because they have more power to convince other white people that racial oppression is real?

"But then the problem is that you're centering the white people and you're also teaching white people that 'You need to listen to me,'" she said.

Ultimately, Ray said, this work for her is about "being there for [people of color] in the way that they say they need us."

As the sanctuary cleared out, a handful of SURJ members stood outside discussing the results of the workshop. A tall black man with car keys in hand and a backwards Bulls cap approached.

"I want you all to know that all lives matter, though," he said. "That's what I believe." An awkward silence descended on the group. He continued: "I've never been a race type of person. What happened 400 years ago, that's what they deal with 400 years ago. Don't put it all on me."

"You think it affects you? Or your life today at all?" Ray ventured.

As part of our 50th anniversary celebration, the newly nonprofit Reader is giving out 50 incredible prizes for 50 days. We've partnered with some of Chicago's most popular establishments for prize packages that include concert tickets, theatre tickets, gift certificates to popular restaurants and retailers, and more. The best part is, every Reader Revolution member will be automatically entered to win, no matter what giving level you're at.

He pondered for a moment. "No. Because I do what I want to do." He continued, talking about the importance of love and living according to the gospel of Jesus. "I don't want this to scare you all or nothing, but I just got out of prison. I did 12 years for a crime I didn't commit. But the whole debacle in prison was, 'Oh man they killed Mike Brown, it's a racial thing!' I said, 'Do you all realize that this man just went into a store and strong-arm robbed somebody? It was on video!'"

He continued, saying that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson "had a right to do what he did" when he fatally shot Brown.

"He had a right to kill him?" Ray asked, dismayed.

"He wasn't trying to kill him," the man responded. "It was an accident."

The SURJ members were thrown off guard by this line of argument, typically heard among the white people whose minds they try to change. But the conversation continued for a while.

"As a white person I'm not gonna tell a black person you're wrong about your perception of race, especially about something that impacts them so much more than it impacts me," Ray reflected the next morning. "I don't feel it's my job to try to get this person to agree with me, but it is my responsibility in this interaction to show them the respect that I believe they deserve."

SURJ will host two more "Ally Is a Verb" workshops on Wednesday, July 27, and Wednesday, August 3. The Chicago chapter's next monthly meeting is on August 11 and is open to everyone.

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What does it mean to be a white ally? - Chicago Reader

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A line of white people snaked around the entrance of Saint Agatha's Catholic Church in North Lawndale Wednesday. Inside the sanctuary the Chicago chapter of Showing up for Racial Justice (SURJ) was convening the first in a series of workshops called " Ally Is a Verb: Finding Your Role in the Movement for Black Liberation.

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4 Ways to Make Your Workplace Equitable for Trans People

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4 Ways to Make Your Workplace Equitable for Trans People

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No matter where you work, being openly trans on the job can be tough - and it is simply not safe for many trans people to advocate for themselves. Seemingly innocuous elements of many jobs (think paperwork, dress codes and restroom access) can become obstacles for trans employees to navigate.

On June 15, 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that all LGBTQ people are protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Up until then, workers could be fired for being trans in 26 states.

While this ruling is a victory for the LGBTQ community, it doesn't change the fact that, for decades, trans people have lived and worked in perpetual fear that they'd be fired for being transgender.

And it's important to note that the ruling doesn't mean workplace discrimination against trans folks just magically disappears - it just means trans people can sue for it now, if they have the resources to do so.

Even if employers and coworkers genuinely want to be inclusive, they often aren't sure where to start. Here are four ways that you can make your workplace - digital or otherwise - more welcoming and equitable for trans people.

(A note for readers: This advice is primarily written for a cisgender audience. "Cisgender" and "cis" describe men and women whose gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth-in other words, people who are not transgender.)

1. Do your own research instead of asking intrusive questions.

It's natural to be curious about experiences that are different from your own. However, that doesn't make it appropriate to ask intrusive personal questions, especially at work. So, if you have questions about what it's like to be trans, consider turning to books, videos, podcasts and other resources created by trans educators, rather than placing the burden on your transgender friends or coworkers.

Looking for a place to start? Try these recommended books and podcasts:

2. Be intentional about your language and correct mistakes.

In my work as a trans educator, I hear a lot of questions about how to navigate gendered language. Perhaps the most common question is how to handle pronouns - and, more specifically, what to do if you hear someone misgender a coworker.

Chase Strangio is the deputy director for Trans Justice with the ACLU LGBT & HIV Project, and he was part of the legal team arguing for trans rights in the Supreme Court. He recommends checking in with the misgendered person before taking action.

"And then, if that the person is struggling and needs support, then I think it can and should be a very simple and straightforward intervention," says Strangio. A simple correction, such as "So-and-so uses they/them pronouns," should do the trick.

Of course, correcting someone at work can feel awkward, scary and even rude. Keep in mind that it's ultimately ruder to misgender someone, or to let that mistake go unacknowledged, than it is to quickly remind someone of your coworker's pronouns.

"Especially if you're someone in an organization that has power, making those corrections is critical," says Strangio.

In fact, if you have institutional power within your organization, Strangio has other suggestions as well: "Whether it's trainings or email signature pronoun use or exercises around non-binary trans identities, I think those things need to happen in the workplace to institutionalize practices and create systems of accountability."

One last pronoun question: what if you are the person who misgenders your coworker? The secret is to correct yourself quickly and move on. According to author and journalist Meredith Talusan, over-apologizing can make the misgendered person feel like they need to comfort you, making an awkward situation even worse.

"It becomes about the cis person's remorse over using the wrong pronoun," says Talusan. "I think the best way to handle it is to just say that you made a mistake ... then make a really conscious effort to not make that mistake again."

3. Actively acknowledge and address inequities in your workplace.

Many cis people probably can't imagine going an entire day without access to a restroom. But that's the reality for many trans and gender nonconforming people across the country. When Strangio started at the ACLU, he spent years trekking to an entirely different floor of his building in order to access a single-user, all-gender bathroom.

"A lot of people would say, 'You're read as male; why don't you just use the men's bathroom?'" Strangio recalls. "I think there is this lack of understanding, both of past trauma around single-sex spaces that many trans people carry, and also... that people's identities may not be entirely binary and that forcing people into those spaces can be really harmful."

The ACLU now has ample all-gender bathrooms, which Strangio describes as "a huge and important victory of internal advocacy within the organization."

This story illustrates the difference between equality, inclusion and equity. Strangio may have been included (i.e., hired) and treated equally (that is, given access to the same single-sex restroom as everybody else). But until the ACLU added more all-gender restrooms, he was not being given the same basic rights - in this case, safe and convenient restroom access - as his cisgender coworkers. In other words, he was not being treated equitably.

The conclusion? It's vital to look beyond inclusion and push for true equity. Otherwise, workers with marginalized identities may always be struggling to secure the same basic rights that other employees may take for granted.

"We're deeply, deeply affected by our social environment," says Talusan. "And if we are not in a workplace where we acknowledge and try to address those inequities, then it becomes very difficult for people from marginalized backgrounds to work there."

4. Work as a team to create change.

Making your work environment equitable takes teamwork.

"Cis people can contribute to an environment that is conducive and friendly towards trans people," says Talusan. "But at the same time, they always have to involve and consult with trans people."

Be sure your help is wanted, and be aware of what you're asking. For instance, rather than "volun-telling" your trans coworkers to lead an equity committee in addition to their regular job, you can ask your manager or HR department to bring in a professional trans consultant, who can help you make sure that your workplace is truly equitable.

Full disclosure, I have my own equity consulting company, but don't take my word for it; Talusan says that "in many cases, trans consultants are invaluable, especially in situations where a company is dealing with these issues for the first time."

Advocating for change can be challenging and intimidating, so there's no shame in asking for help. Find a group of likeminded coworkers, and team up to tackle trans inequities.
Your team can also look into the work of outside organizations, like:
· Marsha P. Johnson Institute works to protect and defend the rights of Black transgender people.

· Sylvia Rivera Law Projectworks to improve access to respectful and affirming social, health and legal services for the community, regardless of gender identity and expression, income or race, and without facing harassment, discrimination or violence.

· Transgender Law Centeris a trans-led organization that works to change policy and law in order protect and advance the rights of transgender and gender nonconforming people.

· Audre Lorde Project is a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit, Trans and Gender Non-Conforming People of Color community organizing center.
Tuck Woodstock is the host of the podcast The audio portion of this story was produced by Sam Leeds and Audrey Nguyen. For more Life Kit, subscribe to our weekly newsletter. Gender Reveal.

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4 Ways To Make Your Workplace Equitable For Trans People : Life Kit

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This week, the Supreme Court ruled LGBTQ workers are protected from job discrimination. So how can your workplace be truly equitable to transgender people? Gender Reveal host Tuck Woodstock answers questions about making the workplace safer and more inclusive for trans people and provides simple ideas to help you be a trans ally at work and beyond.