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Examples of prejudice & discrimination in society today (article) | Khan Academy

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How America has (and hasn't changed) since MLK

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How America has (and hasn't changed) since MLK

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Exactly 50 years after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., America is still far from his dream.

Across measures ranging from criminal justice issues to economic well-being, black Americans still lag far behind white Americans. In some cases, there has been progress since the civil rights era and King's death. But the situation has actually gotten worse for many black people.

There are myriad reasons for this. Outright racism. Policies that don't adequately address past and current systemic obstacles for black people, particularly segregation. Policies that make such problems worse- like restrictive covenants, redlining, blockbusting, and steering. And a total lack of attention to key issues, such as the criminal justice system's neglect of huge racial disparities in just about everything it does, from policing to incarceration.

Whatever the cause, the result is seen in the numbers below: From earnings to getting a college education to incarceration, black Americans generally do worse than their white peers. For all the hope that King professed, America is still a land of racial inequality.

1) Black Americans make much less money than their white peers

It's not just that black people generally make less money than their white counterparts; it's that the wage gap between black and white workers has widened steadily since the late 1970s.

A recent study on race and economic mobility found that black men in particular see much less mobility than their white counterparts, even after controlling for hours worked, employment rates, family structure, and a host of other variables. That could help explain how black workers remain so far behind.

2) Black people are still unemployed at nearly twice the rates as white people

How bad is the job market? The numbers suggest that can depend on your race. Historically, unemployment rates have been around twice as bad for black people as their white counterparts.

Racism likely plays a big role in that: Studies have found that when all else is held equal in job applications but the name of the applicant is changed to be stereotypically black as opposed to stereotypically white, the stereotypical white names "were 50 percent more likely to elicit positive responses from employers" - and some research suggests these kinds of disparities have gone unchanged since at least the late '80s.

3) White family wealth is nearly seven times greater than black family wealth

Given the numbers above, this statistic should be unsurprising: White families hold much more wealth than their black peers. As the Urban Institute noted, this is largely a result of the earnings gap - people accumulate less wealth over their lives if they're making less money on a yearly basis.

4) Black people are more than twice as likely to live in poverty

The good news is that black poverty rates have declined over the past few years. The bad news is there are still massive racial disparities in who remains poor.

5) Black kids are more likely to grow up in poor neighborhoods than they were decades ago

One of the key components to this story is neighborhoods. As Dylan Matthews wrote for Vox, studies have "found that federal subsidies designed to move poor families out of disadvantaged areas can substantially increase income for poor children when they grow up."

But, largely due to the persistence of residential segregation, black kids are still much more likely to grow up in a neighborhood with medium or high levels of poverty than their white peers. And in fact, black (and white) kids are actually more likely to live in a high- or medium-poverty neighborhood than they were during the civil rights era - a sign that even as poverty has generally declined, geographic concentrations of poverty have gone up.

6) School segregation remains fairly common

One of the great victories of the civil rights era was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that deemed racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Yet, as Alvin Chang wrote for Vox, racial segregation in schools has remained stubbornly high - in large part because residential segregation has kept black kids stranded in neighborhoods with mostly black schools and white kids in neighborhoods with mostly white schools.

And while local policy reforms could alleviate the problem, white parents in particular are often resistant to ideas that can spur more integration - fearing that it will make their schools worse.

7) Black-white high school completion gaps have narrowed

Here's some good news: The gap between black and white completion rates of high school has nearly closed since the 1960s. White Americans are still a little more likely to graduate, but the gap is nowhere as big as it was in the past.

8) The college education gap, however, remains huge

While black and white college graduation rates have increased over the years, white people are still more than 50 percent more likely to obtain a college degree.

9) Black voter turnout has generally trended up for the past couple of decades

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a tremendous victory for the civil rights movement, notably increasing voter registration and turnout in the South in the years following its passage. In the decades since, black voter turnout has fluctuated from presidential election to presidential election, but it's generally trended up - and when President Barack Obama was on the ballot, black voter turnout even surpassed white voter turnout.

That doesn't mean everything is perfect; a 2013 Supreme Court decision weakened the Voting Rights Act, and in the years since, states have more aggressively tried to restrict access to the voting booth in ways that could disproportionately hurt black voters, from strict voter ID laws to cuts in early voting.

10) Incarceration rates have grown a lot - and black people have suffered the most as a result

Responding to waves of crime in the 1960s through the early 1990s, lawmakers around the country passed laws that increased prison sentences and pushed for more incarceration to combat crime. Studies suggest this had only a small effect on crime rates. But it had an enormous effect on black people - who are disproportionately likely to be locked up.

A 2015 review of the research by the Sentencing Project concluded that only 61 to 80 percent of the disparity could be explained by higher crime rates in black communities - meaning as much as 39 percent is attributable to other factors, including, potentially, racial bias or past criminal records influencing a prison sentence.

The result was documented in a 2015 New York Times analysis, which found that there are, in effect, "1.5 million missing black men" in America who could be fathers or workers in their communities but instead are behind bars.

11) Black people are more likely to be shot and killed by police than their white counterparts

There's no good historical data on this, but we do know that, as it stands today, black people are much more likely to be shot and killed by the police than white people. Studies have suggested that socioeconomic factors and crime rates don't fully explain the gap - and that racial bias may be a factor, based on research that shows that police officers are quicker to shoot black suspects in video game simulations.

These disparities are one of the issues at the front and center for modern civil rights movements like Black Lives Matter. King, for his part, would have likely appreciated the continuation of these movements: As he said during his historic "I Have a Dream" speech, "We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality."

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How America has - and hasn't - changed since Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, in 11 charts

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Exactly 50 years after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., America is still far from his dream. Across measures ranging from criminal justice issues to economic well-being, black Americans still lag far behind white Americans. In some cases, there has been progress since the civil rights era and King's death.

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The release of a new study conducted for the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) by the American Institutes for Research revealed that African American students, particularly males, are most affected by racial segregation in the U.S. public school system. The study analyzed the test scores of 100,000 eighth grade students on the math portion of the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). In a Washington Post article, Black males struggle in segregated schools, reporter Lyndsey Layton explores how the study's findings show that African American students who attend schools with a majority of African American students, score lower on achievement tests than those who go to school with fewer African American students.

Layton notes that the overall black-white achievement gap, based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2013 math test for eighth grade students, was 31 points and has not changed from 2007 to 2013. In the new study, the achievement gap between white and African American students in a "high density" African American school (defined as a school with at least 60 percent of the students are African American) was 25 points, but at a lower density school (20 percent or less) it was only 17 points.

According to The Hechinger Report, the study was conducted because of increasing concern about resegregation in American public schools, and is an attempt to understand how segregation affects the achievement of students of color. Jill Barshay reports that the study shows that integration alone or steering funds to African American schools won't be enough to close this achievement gap. She calls attention to a portion of the report in which researchers used statistical techniques to determine how much of the gap could be attributed to factors inside the schools versus between schools, with results showing that more than half can be attributed to factors inside the school. In fact, only 15 percent of the achievement gap could be attributed to inequities in funding and resources between the schools.

Barshay also notes that one of the big achievement gap debates is centered on whether white students are being favored over their African American classmates, or whether administrators are directing better teachers and resources to schools with predominantly white students. A Washington Post article, How one principal is trying to get more black men into the classroom, features one group's mission to put more African American men in the classroom. Headed by Philadelphia principal Sharif El-Mekki, The Fellowship is an organization that aims to become a hub for the recruitment and retention of African American educators, bringing them together and providing professional support. With African American men making up only two percent of the nation's teachers, El-Mekki says that African American children aren't seeing teachers who look like them, and aren't necessarily told that they should consider a teaching career. "I don't think that seed is being planted," said El-Mekki. "We have to talk about it with black youth."

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Daily Dish: The Effects of Segregated Schools on African American Students

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The release of a new study conducted for the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) by the American Institutes for Research revealed that African American students, particularly males, are most affected by racial segregation in the U.S. public school system.

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A new study offers more evidence that segregated schooling is bad for students.

The study, from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, used previously compiled data from the Department of Education to track how first-grade students' reading abilities change over time, depending upon whether they attend a racially segregated or integrated school. It found that black students in segregated schools tended to make smaller gains in reading than their black counterparts in more integrated schools. This held true even when researchers accounted for black students' backgrounds.

The study defines a segregated school as one where 75 percent of its population is made up of minorities. Researchers used data from the 1998 - 99 Early Childhood Longitudinal Study on about 4,000 first-graders nationwide.

When accounting for the differences a student's background might have on their first-grade reading ability, the study's researchers looked at the concentration of school poverty, the years of experience students' teachers had and the type of literacy curriculum used by the teacher. Even after accounting for these factors, however, black students in segregated schools were still performing worse, researchers found.

"When similar groups of first-graders do better in one type of school than another, then it must be some aspect of the school that accounts for the difference," Kirsten Kainz, the director of statistics at the university's Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute and the author of the study, said in a press release. "This study goes further than any other in being able to say, 'It's not the kids.'"

The same trend did not necessarily hold true for Latino or white students, researchers found. Kainz told The Huffinton Post she isn't sure why this is.

Still, she said, the study's results indicate that policymakers should revisit the impact of segregation.

"We found no reason to believe that the negative impact in first grade is a function of [black students'] background characteristics," said Kainz over the phone. "It's another piece of evidence that the context in which kids learn really matters. Local and national policies that want to launch kids in successful literacy directions should be attending to these contexts."

The researchers also point out that although their study accounts for the impact a teacher's experience level might have on a student, it does not account for the broader effects high teacher turnover rates might have on segregated schools. Because of this, the study says "it is important to consider alternative specifications of individual teacher experience and school-wide teacher experience as potential explanations for the negative effects of segregation on student achievement."

Furthermore, the study points to previous research on Latino students, indicating that school poverty might have a greater influence on Latino academic achievement rather than school racial composition.

The study comes on the heels of the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, which led to the official desegregation of American schools. However, recent research from UCLA's Civil Rights Project shows that schools are on a path back to pre-Civil Rights era levels of segregation.

"The growth of segregation has been most dramatic for Latino students, particularly in the West [of the country], where there was substantial integration in the l960s, and segregation has soared. A clear pattern is developing of black and Latino students sharing the same schools; it deserves serious attention from educators and policymakers," that previous study said.

BEFORE YOU GO

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60th anniversary of brown v. board of education

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university chapel hill school segregation study

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Another Reason Why Segregated Education Is Bad For Young Students

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A new study offers more evidence that segregated schooling is bad for students. The study, from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, used previously compiled data from the Department of Education to track how first-grade students' reading abilities change over time, depending upon whether they attend a racially segregated or integrated school.

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Skeptics claim that concerns over racially divided schools are false alarms-but they're missing the full picture.

Is school segregation getting worse?

Plenty of people say yes, including scholars, journalists, and civil-rights advocates. For the first time in years, there's something approximating a consensus: Racially divided schools are a major and intensifying problem for American education-maybe even a crisis.

There's seemingly compelling numerical evidence, too. According to my analysis of data from the National Center on Education Statistics, the number of segregated schools (defined in this analysis as those schools where less than 40 percent of students are white), has approximately doubled between 1996 and 2016. In that same span, the percentage of children of color attending such a school rose from 59 to 66 percent. For black students, the percentage in segregated schools rose even faster, from 59 to 71 percent.

But not everyone is on board. In the eyes of some writers, the warning signs of segregation are all a false alarm-little more than a statistical mirage. The National Review writer Robert VerBruggen recently made this case, attacking what he called the "resegregation myth." VerBruggen and other skeptics contend that methods meant to identify school segregation are instead detecting something much more benign: The growing diversity of the American population.

This is possible because many measures of school segregation are narrow, focusing only on a single symptom. For instance, one common research technique is to count the number of schools above a certain demographic cutoff (for instance, more than 90 percent nonwhite). Another is to focus on "exposure," or how common it is for white and nonwhite students to encounter each other in the education system.

Doubters like VerBruggen argue that people using these metrics have been fooled by demographic change. The past several decades have seen a precipitous increase in the racial diversity of U.S. schoolchildren. For example, since 1996, the share of Hispanic and Asian students in public schools has grown from 17 to 31 percent. As a result, across the board, schools have tended to become less white.

When diversity increases, some measures of segregation are likely to get worse, more or less by default. For instance, if an integrated school is growing, but most of the new students are Hispanic, at some point, it'll tip over and become segregated. If white students become a smaller share of the American population overall, all else equal, "exposure" to white students will probably decline.

VerBruggen claims that this shift, and little else, is responsible for the perceived crisis. "The rise in 'segregation' disappears when one measures segregation properly," he asserts. He and others say that, with slim evidence of increasing segregation, policies designed to proactively integrate schools are an obsolete form of social engineering.

It's a simple case. Too simple: There is plenty of evidence that resegregation is urgently real.

School segregation seems like it would be easy to gauge: Just add up the number of segregated schools, and see whether that number is going up or down over time. But the reality, unfortunately, is a lot more complicated.

The core problem is that the nation's schools are evolving in many ways at once. Student populations undergo slow shifts; new schools are constantly opening and closing; attendance boundaries are drawn and redrawn. As a result, the effects of large-scale demographic change and those of local school policy get tangled up with one another. It can be hard for researchers to separate one factor from the other.

Making things even tougher, increased national diversity tends to generate mixed signals about whether segregation is happening. As skeptics like Verbruggen point out, some measures of segregation, especially those that focus on the prevalence of white students, tend to look worse when student diversity increases. But other measures tend to look better. For example, one statistic known as a "dissimilarity index" calculates how many people would have to swap places to achieve demographic balance. When diversity increases evenly, dissimilarity indexes will improve -because the share of minority students in the least-integrated schools will grow, making fewer swaps necessary.

Contrary to the assertions of VerBruggen and others, there is broad statistical evidence of new racial stratification in schools. A recent (and helpfully illustrated) piece in Vox runs through some of that evidence, focusing on the changing role of attendance boundaries. The short version: Entire school districts are becoming more racially distinct from each other, even while racial diversity within those districts may be increasing.

In addition, while sweeping statistical indices have their uses, they tend to overlook some lower-level trends, like school openings and closures. That's a major blind spot when talking about the causes of new segregation. According to my analysis of the most recently available federal data, closures are about three times as common among segregated schools, and new schools account for a substantial share of current segregation. In 2016, 38 percent of all segregated schools had opened within the last two decades, compared to 20 percent of predominantly white and integrated schools. In at least this sense, nearly four-tenths of educational segregation is the result of students being shuffled into newly opened schools.

And there are other numbers that suggest a worsening trend. Almost everybody agrees that economic segregation is growing in schools, and many of those dubious about racial segregation like to advance this idea as a competing, alternative theory for educational inequality. But while income segregation can be simpler to measure than race, race and income are closely interwoven. The poorest schoolchildren are very disproportionately nonwhite; the poorest schools are usually racially segregated. The existence of economic segregation does not contradict evidence of racial segregation-it helps confirm it. It shows that, underneath the confounding effects of growing diversity, American schoolchildren are still being divided on the basis of social caste.

While resegregation skeptics are relying on oversimplified statistical evidence, there are even larger holes in their argument. One major reason civil-rights advocates fear resegregation is because they've directly observed changes to school policy that seem likely to contribute to racial isolation. Changes like this won't necessarily show up in statistical measures of student demographics-at least, not right away-but they're still important.

For example, most researchers believe that court-ordered integration plans, maintained by many school districts throughout the 1970s and 80s, were effective at reducing segregation. But since the turn of the century, hundreds of court orders have been terminated, and virtually no new ones have been created.

In places where segregation is already firmly established, government action can have the effect of "locking in" those racial lines. Here, an analogy might help: Imagine a housing subdivision where almost everyone is white, surrounded by neighborhoods that are heavily nonwhite. Now, imagine that the subdivision builds a large wall, hires a security guard for the entrance, and refuses to sell houses to anyone new. You'd be hard-pressed to argue these changes weren't segregative, even if, for the time being, everyone continues to live in the same place.

In American schools, metaphorical walls are going up all over the place. For instance, school districts in the south are traditionally larger than elsewhere in the country, often including entire counties. As a practical matter, this makes southern districts easier to integrate: Their wide expanse means they contain many white and nonwhite students alike. But in recent years, southern districts have begun to fragment. Sometimes this is caused by white neighborhoods and cities that attempt to "secede" and form their own, all-white districts. In other places, fragmentation is driven by statewide political forces, such as in North Carolina, where a conservative legislature is currently weighing breaking up large districts. No matter the cause, the ongoing splintering of districts places integration further out of reach.

In Memphis, Tennessee, for example, new racial lines are being drawn around the area's schools. In 2013 the majority-black Memphis city school district merged with the schools of the surrounding county, which were majority-white. At first blush, this was a move that promised integration. That is, until the next year, when six cities seceded from the merged district. Five of the six new districts are even whiter than the original county district had been-a new geography of segregation, freshly imposed.

And there are other ways to raise barriers to integration. In many big-city school districts, policymakers have spurred the growth of new charter schools to compete with traditional public schools. But because charters usually operate independently of the district they're in, students transferring into them can't be as easily included in a district's integration plans. This is another form of fragmentation, with charters acting as islands, administratively detached from the district around them. Perhaps not coincidentally, charters are also usually highly segregated, with students often sorted into distinct racial groups. Legal barriers are still barriers; this, too, is resegregation.

Underneath all of this is a deeper question: How much does the cause of segregation matter?

Imagine if a landlord, confronted with a leaking roof, responded by saying that the real problem is just too much rain. It's true that, in some sense, rain causes leaks-but only because there was something wrong with the roof in the first place. And at the end of the day, the leaks are still a problem that needs to be fixed.

Likewise, it's true that diversity in schools is increasing. But it's only making segregation worse because of flaws that already existed in the education system. The fundamental defect in American schools-the hole in the roof, if you will-is that they have long exhibited patterns of racial concentration, mostly due to housing segregation and decades of discriminatory education policy. If schools were already integrated to begin with, you'd expect increasing diversity to raise all boats relatively evenly. Most schools would get less white, but few would find themselves truly segregated. Instead, in a long-segregated system, the effects of increased diversity are inevitably lopsided. Schools already suffering from a relatively high degree of segregation have found themselves completely isolated.

Because of this, demographic changes are not experienced evenly. Because black students were already overrepresented in segregated schools, they often bear the brunt of an increase in racial isolation, whatever the proximate cause of those increases. That's why the share of black students in segregated schools has increased by 11 percent nationwide in the last two decades, faster than the share of either white students or nonwhite students overall, both of which have risen by about 6 percent, according to my analysis.

And, ultimately, there's just not much reason to think that identifying the exact cause of resegregation will ameliorate its harms. The vast majority of research into school segregation does not focus on its causes, but rather on the costs of attending a racially isolated school. There are many. They include reduced academic achievement, increased exposure to the criminal justice system, and significantly worsened professional and educational outcomes. Children in integrated schools find it easier to live and work in diverse environments; children in segregated schools are more prone to hold racially prejudiced views later in life. Racial isolation also tends to deprive children of color of what are sometimes obliquely called "networks of opportunity"-in plain language, the day-to-day connections most people rely on to get a job or get into college.

And of course, there's another reason to worry about school segregation, regardless of its cause: the problem of second-class citizenship. Ironically, this problem generates less discussion than wonky, technocratic concerns about test scores and income mobility. But it was pivotal in propelling the school-integration push of the 1960s and 70s, and for good reason. Civil-rights advocates are not wrong to worry that, beyond any set of individual outcomes, it is not healthy nor sustainable for a society to effectively consign most children of color to an alternative system of schools. Doing so helps construct or reinforce ideas about racial caste in the minds of Americans-and, worst of all, in the minds of the children themselves.

None of these ills will heal themselves so long as segregated schools exist, or grow in number. And right now, such schools are growing in number, for reasons ranging from the benign to the nefarious. Dedicated advocates and smart policymakers can thwart school resegregation, and eventually reverse it. But it will not reverse itself.

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Skeptics claim that concerns over racially divided schools are false alarms-but they're missing the full picture. Is school segregation getting worse? Plenty of people say yes, including scholars, journalists, and civil-rights advocates. For the first time in years, there's something approximating a consensus: Racially divided schools are a major and intensifying problem for American education-maybe even a crisis.

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School Segregation Still as Bad as it was in the 60s

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School Segregation Still as Bad as it was in the 60s

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Illustration by Gluekit (Getty [4]; AP Photo [3])

Ronald Reagan came to North Carolina on October 8, 1984, a month before American voters would decide whether to give him another four years in the White House. In 1980, running against Jimmy Carter, he'd won the state by only 39,000 votes, but it was now morning in America again, and the president was in an appropriately sunny mood as his rally began, shortly after noon, in downtown Charlotte.

As is customary in politics, Reagan praised his audience, then himself. Soon, he turned to attacking the Democrats, whom he accused of keeping people "in bondage as wards of the state." They wanted dependents, not citizens. And instead of listening to Americans, liberals would tell Americans what to do.

To illustrate his point, Reagan alluded to a matter of fierce contention across the South: the court-ordered integration of public schools and the yellow buses that frequently made that integration happen, carrying white children to predominantly black schools and black children to white ones.

But there was no cheering, no applause, only the stony silence that accompanies an errant note. And when a reaction did come, it was in the form of a Charlotte Observer editorial titled, flatly, "You Were Wrong, Mr. President." The paper's editors chided Reagan, writing that Charlotte's "proudest achievement of the past 20 years is not the city's impressive new skyline or its strong, growing economy. Its proudest achievement is its fully integrated schools."

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Back then, the claim was true. Charlotte-Mecklenburg (the district includes Charlotte's surrounding suburbs in Mecklenburg County) had achieved true racial parity in its schools, and had done so without the violence or rancor that accompanied similar efforts, not only in the Deep South but in Northern cities like Boston and Chicago. In Memphis, Tennessee, opponents of integration buried a school bus. In Charlotte, the buses came and went. Long known as the Queen City, Charlotte had an enviable new nickname: "The city that made desegregation work."

The nickname would not apply today. Charlotte, in 2018, looks like most other American cities, where schools are nearly as segregated as they were before the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education, which declared separate but equal schools to be unconstitutional. Some cities, like New York, never really integrated their schools, hiding for decades under the guise of Northern liberalism. Many others complied with court orders, but did so unwillingly and incompletely, without ever convincing people that integration was a public good. Charlotte was the rare city that made its citizens believe in integration, and those citizens in turn made integration work. Their retreat from that experiment has been revealing-and complete.

Earlier this year, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, or CMS, published a report titled "Breaking the Link," which explored the relationship between poverty and education. A single sentence in the introduction grimly sums up the state of things: "If you are born poor in Charlotte, you are likely to stay that way." In a low-poverty school (i.e., a school where less than a quarter of students are eligible for a free lunch and breakfast program), 95.2 percent of students graduate; only 77.6 percent graduate in a high-poverty school, where more than half of students are eligible for free lunch. The latter have younger, less experienced teachers. There are more disciplinary problems at these schools, and test scores are lower.

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The links between poverty and education also pertain to race. "For all grade spans, low-poverty schools were composed of mostly white students," the report's authors wrote, "whereas in high-poverty schools, the majority of students were black and Hispanic." This was the toxic nexus that Charlotte had once tried to dispel. And it did so with success, so that its schools made it onto the front page of The Wall Street Journal in 1991. Only a decade after that, the experiment ended, and now the gains of that time have been squandered.

James Ferguson is a civil rights lawyer who worked on the legal effort to desegregate Charlotte's schools. That was 50 years ago. He does not want to believe the work was futile, but a life of fighting discrimination cautions against shows of optimism. History is littered with disappointments, including his own. He was in junior high, at a segregated school in Asheville, North Carolina, when the Supreme Court delivered the Brown ruling. Like many, he thought things would change at once. But they didn't change at all because people in Birmingham, Alabama weren't going to take orders from Washington.

The nation delivered on the promise of Brown only because men and women like Ferguson forced it to, and to have the nation renege on that promise has been crushing. Ferguson is a civil leader in Charlotte, a power broker, and the sadness haunts him; he thought he'd won a battle, when it turns out he lost. "There is no core of people who are actively pushing for school desegregation," he laments. "We're almost back to where we started from."

We, in this case, could mean the entire United States. We came closest to integration in 1988, when nearly half of all African-American children attended majority white schools. Since then, districts have been casting off federal court orders like rusted shackles. The result, a Government Accountability Office report found in the spring of 2016, the number of African-American and Hispanic students attending segregated schools is rapidly growing.

Charlotte was never supposed to be among those districts, though. That was the promise of Charlotte. For many decades, it was a promise realized.

Frightened, White and Middle-Class

The bus may well be the most potent symbol of African-Americans' struggle for racial equality in the 20th century. In Montgomery, Alabama, a squat yellow-and-lime bus, numbered 2857, became the epicenter of the civil rights movement on December 1, 1955, when seamstress Rosa Parks refused to move toward the back, where blacks were forced to sit. About a decade later, as the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson took up the work of actually enforcing the Brown decision, it was the yellow school bus that became a vehicle of both social progress and deep-seated fears that made that progress so difficult.

Matthew Delmont, the author of Why Busing Failed, has concluded that the first protest by white parents against the use of busing to redress racial imbalances in public schools took place in New York City in 1957. New York was exempt from Brown because its schools were not segregated by law, like those in the Deep South. That made white residents all the more furious, because they felt they had done nothing to segregate schools and should therefore not be forced to integrate them.

Journalists were aware of these fears, and some played to them. A Wall Street Journal article warned that the city's Board of Education "proposes extensive use of city-financed buses to create racially balanced schools." Delmont believes this was the first time a national outlet deployed the specter of "busing" to frighten middle-class whites. (Buses had been transporting children for decades, and plenty of districts were already using racial criteria in zoning decisions to keep schools segregated.)

The fearmongering worked, and it encouraged newspapers and television stations to report with greater avidity on what came to be known as "forced busing." Opponents of busing predictably directed their anger at education bureaucrats, whom they accused of social engineering. As one letter to New York's central schools administration put it, "The Negro is emerging from ignorance, savagery, disease and total lack of any culture. Is it necessary to foist the Negro on the White Americans for fair play?"

Despite a halting effort at integration that began in 1957, little changed in Charlotte during the 1960s. Busing came to the city only after a 1969 federal district court ruling in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Board of Education, a suit brought by an African-American preacher who didn't understand why his son had to attend effectively segregated schools. The judge in the case was a white Southerner without especially strong liberal convictions. But he also understood that there was no legal standing for those who resisted integration. "When racial segregation was required by law, nobody evoked the neighborhood school theory to permit black children to attend white schools closer to where they lived," he wrote. "There is no reason except emotion...why school buses can not be used...to desegregate the schools."

And so busing began in Charlotte on September 9, 1970, with 525 buses serving as the army of integration. White parents protested, and Charlotte, which claimed to be a city of the "New South," anxiously waited to discover whether its claim was anything more than a clever marketing pitch.

Goodbye, White Flight

Integration turned out to look a lot like war. Mobs welcomed buses carrying black children into white neighborhoods. Whites threw rocks and hurled racial taunts. White children stayed away from schools. On the television sets that now graced nearly every home in the nation, Americans watched and wondered if racial reconciliation would ever be possible.

The year was 1974, and the city was Boston, not Charlotte. There, a court order mandated that Irish-Americans in South Boston enter into a busing arrangement with black Roxbury. Feeling that they were being bullied into integration by judges and politicians, aggrieved residents of Southie reacted with shows of violence and rage more associated with the Deep South than this city of patricians and academics.

Meanwhile, 840 miles to the south, things were going just fine in Charlotte, now in its fourth year of integrated schooling. Watching the reports from Boston with confusion and dismay, students at West Charlotte High School, which had quickly become the centerpiece of Charlotte's success, decided to do something novel: They invited students from Boston to come down South, to see that integration could be done peacefully, to the benefit of all students. Five high schools students traveled to Charlotte that November. "I think every KKK member in the South wrote me a personal letter calling me a nigger-lover and threatening me," recalled West Charlotte Principal Sam Haywood to historian Pamela Grundy many years later. He added, "You know, if adults had got out of the way, kids could solve most of the problems."

But adults had helped solve the problem in Charlotte. Specifically, well-off white adults who seemingly had the least to gain from integration. Some of the city's leading families decided they would send their children to West Charlotte High School, a sign that they were invested in the integration experiment. Maybe there was something selfish in this, too-a desire to separate Charlotte from symbols of racial strife like Birmingham and Montgomery. Even so, they put their own children on school buses instead of merely watching as middle- and working-class whites did.

Everyone was uneasy about the experiment. As one African-American student recalled years later, "[People] thought it was going to be racial tension every day. 'Here we go again. Six o'clock news. A riot at West Charlotte again.' Never happened." Whites and blacks made the requisite effort. It wasn't a seamless union, but the rivets held.

Eventually, integration became a normal part of life in Charlotte, which made the city exceptional in the eyes of the nation. During his eight years in the White House, Reagan had appointed 364 judges to the federal bench, many of whom could be expected to execute his conservative, anti-government agenda, which included opposition to busing; his successor, George H.W. Bush, ran a racially divisive campaign predicated on raw fears about black criminality. In March 1991, the video of white police officers beating a black resident of Los Angeles named Rodney King confirmed a new mood of racial hostility-or, even worse, that racial hostility had never gone away.

Two months after Americans learned of King's plight, The Wall Street Journal reported on the goings-on at West Charlotte. In a front-page article, the paper praised the school as a "warm picture of integrated young America," a hazy but hopeful vision of the type of society we have been trying to realize for half a century. "Particularly in a city with a history of racial confrontation," the article said, "it does seem extraordinary. In many urban centers, white flight has left school districts overwhelmingly black.... Not Charlotte. Its school board has steadfastly rejected any proposals to end its forced busing program."

But by the time that article was published, some were already trying to undo the experiment.

'Race Is Not The Issue'

In the early morning of January 17, 1994, a massive earthquake shook Los Angeles. After that, Bill Capacchione remembers, his wife said it was time to leave. She was a native of Southern California, and the quake had rattled her. "If this is not the big one, I don't want to be around for it," Capacchione recalls her saying. He offered Phoenix as a relatively close alternative. Too hot, she countered. Capacchione had gone to college in North Carolina, at Campbell University, so he suggested a city 130 miles due west of that school: Charlotte.

Around that time, a lot of people were thinking of moving to Charlotte; it had recently become the third-biggest banking center in the nation, after New York and San Francisco. The same year that Capacchione arrived, The New York Times wrote of Charlotte's "relentlessly upbeat, look-at-me corporate culture." The city's "downtown, which goes by the appropriately cheery appellation of Uptown, is a vital business center, and its green geography and relaxed, friendly style make it an inviting place," the article said.

The new arrivals may have worked in downtown, but they didn't live there. For the most part, they moved to suburbs to the north and south of the city, where subdivisions seemed to rise overnight. One recent study of land use in the county found that while only 12.5 percent of land in Mecklenburg County had been developed in 1976, 40 years later, that number had nearly quintupled, to 57.6 percent. Even as Charlotte thrived, it was Mecklenburg that grew.

The newcomers, like the Capacchiones, came from the West and Northeast, where schools were severely segregated, but few blamed racism; the segregation of a city like New York seemed to many like nothing more than a historical accident. There was, in fact, nothing even remotely accidental about the forces that turned Brownsville, Brooklyn, or the South Side of Chicago, into ghettos. But because police there hadn't disbanded protesters with water cannons, that segregation was easier to ignore.

Charlotte had confronted its segregationist past, and that confrontation resulted in a remarkably successful school system. But to those who hadn't lived through the early, uncertain years of integration in the 1970s, the busing plan was confounding and not especially welcome. In the suburbs, especially, resistance grew. As early as 1988, a parent complained that Charlotte was "a model for shifting children from one end of the county to the other and not a model for educational excellence by any means."

School officials in Charlotte had sensed a growing resentment toward their integration plan. To fight off the criticisms of whites in the suburbs, they created a number of magnet schools throughout the 1990s, which would draw students from all over the county. (Magnet schools are an attractive solution, promising both academic excellence and integration. But the solution doesn't scale especially well.)

One of the popular new magnet programs in Charlotte was Olde Providence Elementary School, to the southeast of the city's center, which had undergone an expansion in 1992. This was where Capacchione tried to enroll his 6-year-old daughter, Cristina. She was denied admission. Capacchione tried again. But she still didn't get a spot. On September 5, 1997, Capacchione filed a suit against Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, alleging that his white daughter was discriminated against on the basis of her race and, as he explained from the stand, "felt she wasn't smart enough to get into Olde Providence."

Five other families joined the suit. They argued that Charlotte had spent 30 years integrating its schools. The work had been so well done, they claimed, it didn't need to continue any longer. Larry Gauvreau, another recent transplant to Charlotte who joined the suit, judged the school system "fully desegregated" and any suggestion to the contrary "absurd."

On September 9, 1999-29 years to the day since busing began-federal Judge Robert Potter issued his ruling in the Capacchione case. As a private citizen, Potter had opposed the initial 1970 desegregation plan. And he was an ally of Jesse Helms, the state's segregationist U.S. senator. Appointed to the federal bench by Reagan, Potter earned the nickname "Maximum Bob" for his tough sentences. He agreed with Capacchione, writing that, "the Court is convinced that CMS, to the extent reasonably practicable, has complied with the thirty-year-old desegregation order in good faith; that racial imbalances existing in schools today are no longer vestiges of the dual system; and that it is unlikely that the school board will return to an intentionally-segregative system."

With that, Charlotte's experiment with integration had ended, and the city was ordered to wind down its busing program. "The decision," observed The New York Times, "which affects about 28,000 students who now ride buses past their neighborhood schools in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District, has enormous symbolic significance for the lingering institution of court-ordered busing."

Kids were now much more likely to go to their neighborhood schools. And since the neighborhoods themselves remained segregated, that means they were much more likely to go school with kids who looked like them. This was to some a problem and to others, who cheered the Potter decision, the whole point.

Capacchione was not in Charlotte to celebrate the Potter decision. His wife missed her family, and the Capacchiones had moved back to Southern California. They live there still, down the coast from Los Angeles, in a city called Torrance. Capacchione says his daughter, Cristina, "went to neighborhood schools," to which she was always able to walk. "To me, race is not the issue," Capacchione says dispassionately, decisively. "I didn't think any child should have his or her opportunities limited by race or by where they live."

On the first point, few Americans would disagree, at least in principle. The second assertion is more complex. The entire point of busing was to avoid relegating poor black children to inner-city schools. That couldn't happen unless parents like Capacchione were willing to give up their own access to superior suburban schools. But they had come to expect their own schools-"neighborhood schools," a phrase rich with Rockwellian intimations-as a kind of constitutional right. There is no such right, however, any more than there is an inherent right to traffic lights instead of stop signs.

Capacchione seemed confused about why anyone would want to talk about the court's decision. To him, it was old news. "I probably would do it again," he says of his lawsuit. This isn't bravado. You can hear it in his voice: He has no regrets.

The Cost of Segregation

Keith Lamont Scott sat in his truck, waiting for his son to arrive on a school bus. The truck was parked in a lot at an apartment complex northeast of downtown Charlotte, in an area that's largely poor and the schools are mostly black and Latino. It was September 20, 2016, just a little before 4 p.m. Within moments, Scott would be dead.

Members of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department were in the complex looking for someone else. They said they saw Scott in his vehicle, with a gun. His family insists he was reading. His wife, Rakeyia Scott, took video of what followed. You can see her approaching the several officers who have drawn their guns and surrounded her husband. "Don't shoot him," she says.

But they do. No book was ever found. A gun was. The officer who shot and killed him-Brentley Vinson, a young, black man-was cleared of all charges. Black Lives Matter and other activist groups launched protests that consumed the city for days, as officers in riot gear took to Charlotte's streets like an invading army. The gleaming jewel of the New South suddenly seemed like its sullied Old South counterparts.

The part of Charlotte where Scott was killed makes up what is locally known as a "crescent" of poverty that circles downtown. Several blocks from where Scott was shot is Newell Elementary School, which is 90 percent black or Hispanic; 99.6 of its students are on free or reduced lunch, meaning they live in poverty. Down the road is the Zebulon B. Vance High School, which is 90.7 percent black or Hispanic; 99.8 percent of its population qualifies for free or reduced lunch. The gap in the crescent is to the southeast of Charlotte, where "the wedge" - a cluster of affluent suburbs - grows wider the further into Mecklenburg County it pushes, away from the inner city, into the verdant suburbs where poverty and violence are only the stuff of news reports Scott was killed by two bullets; he was condemned by history and demography, impersonal forces that converged on him on a Friday afternoon.

Those same forces also did their work on Anthony Foxx, only they did so to far more auspicious effect than in Scott's case. Foxx is 46 today, which means he's a few years older than Scott when he was killed. He grew up in Charlotte, attending integrated schools there, including West Charlotte High. He went on to Davidson College, one of the best liberal arts schools in the South, and then to New York University for law school. In 2009, he was elected mayor of Charlotte, the youngest person to ever hold that office, and only the second African-American to do so. Four years later, President Barack Obama selected him to serve as head of the federal Transportation Department.

"I think many of the white kids who went to West Charlotte got as much of a taste of the black experience as any white person was likely to get at that time," he says. "Black kids like me, we saw whites as our counterparts. It was as equal a position as I've been in at any time of my life, even since."

Foxx warns against mythologizing Charlotte's integrated past. He remembers, for instance, that there were few African-American students in advanced classes. Still, the impact of the integrated experience has stayed with him. "I think that whites and blacks and others whom I went to school with in those years are certainly more well rounded and understand American culture in a more true light than most of us do," he says. "Because they saw, even for a brief period of time, the tapestry that the country has."

By the time Foxx became mayor, the Capacchione v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools decision had largely resegregated schools in Charlotte. "Neighborhoods became more segregated following the declaration of unitary status," says Amy Hawn Nelson, a University of Pennsylvania education researcher who has closely studied Charlotte's demographics (a school district has reached "unitary status" when it is no longer deemed segregated). The result, Nelson says, was that real estate brokers could lure buyers by promising that their children would be guaranteed a spot in some well-regarded suburban school, since the fear of those children being bussed elsewhere was pretty much gone. And what typically burnishes a school's reputation? Racial composition, not academic achievement. "Even when you look at school quality metrics, Nelson told me, "white families are more likely to pick a white school rather than a high performing school."

There have been efforts by school Charlotte-Mecklenburg superintendents-who are independent of the mayor-to skirt the ruling by creating more magnet schools and implementing "student reassignment" plans that modestly push for reintegration. Only the countervailing push is stronger. The internet allows for subatomic analysis of each school's demographics and academics. If they can get a child into Providence, one of the best high schools in Charlotte, they will. Who wouldn't? And thanks to Capacchione, they can do so without resorting to a federal lawsuit.

Most of these people are liberals: Mecklenburg County voted for Obama twice, while Hillary Clinton nearly doubled Donald Trump's vote total in 2016. Yet it is one thing to vote in a school gymnasium for a politician you have never seen, quite another to watch your own child ascend the steps of a yellow bus. It used to be that voting and public education were seen as part of the same set of behaviors collectively called civic participation. No longer so, not when a scholarship to Stanford hangs in the balance. As the education writer Nikole Hannah-Jones has put it: "We began moving away from the 'public' in public education a long time ago. In fact, treating public schools like a business these days is largely a matter of fact in many places." Once citizens, we are now customers.

Foxx has watched the city's resegregation with dismay. What he experienced at West Charlotte should have been the start of something hopeful; instead, it was an ending. "It's been interesting to watch my friends at that time more or less revert back to the areas of town they grew up in," he says.

Interesting, yes, and in the case of Scott, tragic. School resegregation did not kill him, of course, but it contributed to the creation of a dual society. After the Scott killing, the sociologist Clint Smith wrote in The New Yorker that we "cannot disentangle the state-sanctioned school resegregation that poor black students in Charlotte experience from the police killing of a black man waiting for his son to get off the bus from elementary school."

We have known as much for a long time. After the civil unrest of the summer of 1967, President Johnson set up a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission. Written as the smoke was still clearing from riots in Newark and Detroit, the Kerner report found many reasons for the unrest, public schools among them. "The hostility of Negro parents and students toward the school system is generating increasing conflict and causing disruption within many city school districts," warned the report. It can just as readily serve as context for the rage of Black Lives Matter activists who protested in Charlotte as Scott was being laid to rest.

Our thinking is much more data-driven today, yet as far as school integration is concerned, the conclusions of scholars are not at all different from those of the Kerner Commission. Rucker Johnson, a labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley, has studied the effects of resegregation. In a forthcoming paper, he compared the life outcomes of students who'd gone to integrated schools and those who went to schools were courts had lifted integrated orders. Johnson found that resegregation "caused significant increases in the likelihood of being arrested, of being convicted of a crime, and being incarcerated in adulthood for African-Americans." They were also likely to earn less.

As for whites, who experienced no deleterious effects from integration, Johnson found that resegregation would lead them to "have no racial diversity among their friends in adulthood, to live in neighborhoods in adulthood without racial diversity, to express significantly stronger preferences for same-race partners, and were significantly less likely to have ever been in an interracial relationship."

Johnson calls resegregation a "market failure" because it leads to outcomes that are not only unfavorable but also expensive. It is, after all, much cheaper to educate a child than to incarcerate an adult.

'The Miseducation of Our Kids'

Today, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools are led by Clayton Wilcox, who came to North Carolina from suburban Maryland. Wilcox admits that the kind of muscular integration once conducted in Charlotte is no longer possible. "I don't think there's any appetite except for a very few folks," Wilcox tells me after I asked about the possibility of bringing busing back. "The methods of yesterday," he says, no longer apply. "You have to create great schools everywhere," in reference to providing adequate funding to inner-city schools. Research by Johnson of Berkeley confirms that increased spending can ameliorate some, if not all, the effects of resegregation. Then again, spending is as anathema as busing to some.

Wilcox was not yet in Charlotte during the Scott shooting or the protests that followed. He references the killing as evidence of something amiss in the city, as well as its schools. "We are all in this together," he says. "Many of the things we fear are the result of the miseducation of our kids."

But some don't share that sense of togetherness. Last year, Charlotte-Mecklenburg passed a $922 million bond measure that angered people in the northern reaches of Mecklenburg County, an area that is rapidly growing. No schools will be built there. A local county official named Jim Puckett who opposed the bond measure, believes the shortage of schools in the county's north (where not everyone is white) was intended to force residents of the suburbs to send their children to schools closer to central Charlotte, integrating them without quite having to say so.

"You've got this angst in the suburbs," says Puckett. "They're not getting the capital resources." Some of the northern suburbs have even threatened to secede from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, thus creating their own school districts. School secession has become a popular way to avoid integration, especially in states controlled by Republican legislatures that have made it easier for municipalities to cleave from larger school districts. A report published last year by the nonprofit EdBuild found that 71 districts around the nation have tried secession since 2000. More than half have been successful; invariably, these splinter districts are whiter and wealthier than the district they are leaving.

"Parents tend to be rather self-serving," says Puckett, the Mecklenburg County official. "They come to the table with certain beliefs." And the prevailing belief in Charlotte, he says, is that the public schools are not working. Whites flee for the suburbs; African-American parents, meanwhile, are choosing charter schools, which have become symbols of voluntary resegregation.

"I don't think the city of Charlotte would ever abandon at-risk kids," he says. "That's just not gonna happen."

It is more likely that kids will abandon Charlotte's schools.

'We Sold Our Soul'

There is a famous photograph that shows Dorothy Counts on the first day of school. It was taken on September 4, 1957, as she walked to Harding High School to start the ninth grade. Counts wears a plaid dress with a long white bow; to her left is her father, in a white shirt and slacks, looking grimly ahead. The two are surrounded by jeering whites. In one of the famous photographs from that morning, white hands make devil horns from behind Counts. She looks off into the distance, mouth askew. She is willfully ignorant of the bigots enveloping her like a thick cloud of mosquitoes.

Counts only wanted to be a student. But because of her race, she was, above all, an agent of integration. She did not last long in Charlotte's integrated schools. The abuse of local whites had its intended effect, and after several weeks she was shipped off to live with family in Philadelphia. She completed her schooling there. It would be more than a decade until Charlotte seriously started integrating its schools.

Today, Counts (now Dot Counts-Scoggins) lives in Charlotte again. She worked for years in early childhood education but is now retired. Once maligned, she is now celebrated. The library at Harding has been named after her. Charlotte magazine deemed her one of the city's essential citizens. "In some ways, we need her now as much as ever," the magazine said in November, lest Charlotte forget in this age of renewed animosities what it did to her all those years ago.

Counts-Scoggins has not forgotten. "Well, it's very disappointing to me when I look at what has happened in Charlotte," she says of the un-integration of the city's schools. "I tell people, 'This didn't happen in Charlotte overnight. This was something that was happening, and people just sort of ignored it."

Integration is difficult work, the work of generations. It may not be especially gratifying to those who must undertake it. Segregation, on the other hand, feels natural enough. Difficult to expel, it is always eager to return. Integration may show its benefits in 50 years, but who wants to wait that long? We are an impatient species, increasingly skeptical of things unseen.

And yet segregation takes a toll. Justin Perry was at West Charlotte High when he heard about Judge Potter's decision in 1999. He remembers leaving school and going downtown, to the courthouse, to protest.

Perry understood that the judge had exploited racial fears to destroy one of the few places where those fears were addressed, by blacks and whites alike. "In our space, we actually talked about these differences," says Perry, who is African-American. He is too young to have lived through segregation. Nevertheless, he grasps that "busing" has never been about the use of vehicles to transport children to school. "This is not about busing," he says. "It's about what the end of the ride leads to."

For Perry, who still remembers the day integration ended in West Charlotte, we are all worse off for it. After graduating from high school, he went on to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from which he received both undergraduate and graduate degrees, the latter in social work and counseling. Today, he works with young people in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. Some of them come from the wealthy white suburbs to which parents fled in the 1990s so that their children would not have to attend integrated schools. Instead, these students now attend what Perry calls "real-estate orchestrated" schools, where the pressures of achievement can lead to stress, anxiety and other psychological maladies.

"You can't have a high-quality education without diversity," says Perry. The rollback of integration efforts, Perry believes, signals a deeper social breakdown, an atomization of American society. "We sold our soul," he says, "and now we're gonna have to deal with it."

The process will likely be painful, just as it was the last time around. Last year, students from Ardrey Kell High School shouted racial slurs at a football game against William A. Hough. "Black boy, you better watch your back! Black boy, you better keep your head on a swivel!" they screamed, apparently drunk, as middle school students sat nearby.

The principal of Ardrey Kell apologized, but few were satisfied; many saw the dutiful workings of damage control. Such an incident would have been unthinkable when Perry went to West Charlotte, when it felt like a suture was about to close. Now, it is open again, and the wound is festering. Only the pain is unequally distributed. Ardrey Kell is a majority white school; only 21 percent of the student body is either black or Hispanic. It is widely regarded as one of the best schools around. Hough is mostly white, too.

West Charlotte, meanwhile, is 99 percent minority and well below state averages on both English and mathematics standardized tests. Once the pride of Charlotte, this high school is now in need of fixing. And Charlotte itself, once the beacon of something hopeful and new, has gone back to its old ways.

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School segregation in America is as bad today as it was in the 1960s

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Illustration by Gluekit (Getty [4]; AP Photo [3]) Ronald Reagan came to North Carolina on October 8, 1984, a month before American voters would decide whether to give him another four years in the White House.

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Newsela | More barriers to equality in U.S. now than 50 years ago, new study finds

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Fifty years after the Kerner Report studied racial segregation and poverty in America, a new study says those problems are worse today.

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When it comes to activism, students often feel powerless. After all, they argue, they don't have the ability to change rules, much less laws, or even influence how existing rules and laws are interpreted. Being students, which, by definition, means being in the process of learning rather than leading - they feel that few people take them seriously.

These concerns are not baseless. Most schools are hierarchical institutions, with students having relatively little formal power compared with school boards, administrators, and even teachers. At the same time, it is also true that each one of us has much more power than we might think. Here are four simple ways students can effectively contribute to the building of a racially just society.

The old joke about how many psychologists it takes to change a light bulb (just one, but only if the light bulb wants to be changed) has a lot of truth to it. For the most part, people do not change unless they want to, and they usually don't want to if someone makes them feel stupid or racist. Indeed, being called a "racist" in public is just about the most offensive insult imaginable because it carries an enormous social stigma and violates our self perception.

The reality is that few of us think of ourselves as stupid or racist, so when others even subtly suggest that we are, we tend to feel misunderstood and unfairly criticized. This, in turn, makes us want to defend our beliefs and good intentions or return the attack in some other way. Shaming, blaming and criticizing may satisfy our need to be punitive or to feel morally superior, but such actions almost never produce the kind of change in others that we claim we want.

And yet, there is no doubt that we do need to speak out against racism, because racism is maintained by our willingness to ignore it. Decades of research on conformity shows that when even a single person goes against the group norm, there is an opportunity for change. Speaking out against racism can be powerful, especially if a number of people coordinate their efforts. But, how do we do it in a way that actually accomplishes what we want and does not run the risk of increasing hostility or even breaking up a friendship?

For starters, keep away from the R-word, at least when referring to a person. Instead, speak out by sharing how something that someone did (e.g., tell a joke that pokes fun of a racial group) made you feel embarrassed or angry or hurt, so that others can recognize how their behavior might negatively impact others. Another approach to this particular situation might be to just say "that's not funny."

There is no one "right" way to handle these situations, but the idea is to not tolerate the behavior while, at the same time not rejecting or insulting the person doing it. The idea, based on principles of nonviolent communication (NVC), is to use power with, not power against. When we authentically state our needs and then make a specific request for a behavior change (for example, "please don't tell those kinds of jokes in front of me"), success is not guaranteed, but the likelihood is greatly increased.

Action #2: Use Your Spheres
At the university where I currently work, there is a large system of fraternities and sororities that is almost entirely racially segregated. Many of my students, including those in my Psychology of Race and Ethnicity classes, are part of this system. By the middle of the semester, they are likely to notice the racial segregation and lament (in their personal weekly journals, which are required for class) that it exists. Yet, few students feel sufficiently empowered to try to create change, even within their own house. Social change may not come easy, but everyone has some influence, even students. In this particular case, the students have much more influence than I do as an outsider.
Action #3: Join a Group
High school and elementary students have spheres of influence, too. These include family, friends, classmates, teammates and coworkers - even if it is at the corner McDonald's - as well as people at church, school and a variety of other institutions. And, thanks to the internet and various social network apps, our social influence has no geographic boundaries. Sure, some goals may realistically be out of reach (put them aside until your sphere of influence reaches them), but If you sit down to map your own spheres of influence, you might be surprised at how powerful you really are. So set you sights, mobilize some like-minded friends, and get to it. It may not be easy and there are no guarantees of success, but as Theodore Roosevelt aptly put it, "the credit belongs to [those] who are actually in the arena." [Image below courtesy of Ton Zijlstra]

Speaking of friends, few people like being lone wolves. Even the most extreme introverts need to connect with others. Anti-racism work, like social justice work in general, is emotionally draining. Without a good support system, it is hard to sustain the energy. Besides, working with others is much more fun and efficient.

If you want to get involved in anti-racism work, join a group that is already doing it and don't be shy about reaching out to groups whose membership is racially different than yours. It may seem intimidating at first, and it may take a little time to build up some trust, but trust-building of this sort is part of the point. Below are links to a few national youth organizations. They're not a bad place to start, but eventually you'll want to connect with a local group, where you can form face-to-face relationships and collaborate on local projects. Groups like this exist in many communities. Just ask around. But if there really isn't a local group interested in racial justice, find some kindred spirits in your social sphere and start one.

Action #4: Make Friends across Ethnic Lines

This is the advice students find most controversial. They think that I am suggesting they become friends with or date someone only because they are of a different ethnic background. I am not suggesting that at all. Friends and dating partners should be selected based on interpersonal attraction, which is influenced by a variety of different factors, including personality and shared interests.

Many of us, either deliberately or unconsciously, make choices that limit our opportunity to get to know people who we perceive as being different from us. Oftentimes, if we are White, we do not attend ethnic events or join ethnic organizations. And, if we identify with a particular ethnic group, we tend to stick to that group in a social context. We do this because we are afraid that we'd be unwelcome and uncomfortable. So, we self-segregate, sticking to our own group where we feel comfortable and understood, where our core beliefs and values and entire worldview go unchallenged.
An earlier version of this article was published by ColorsNW, which is no longer in operation. For more racial analysis of news and popular culture, follow Mikhail on Twitter.
But, what if we opened ourselves to the possibilities of developing real relationships (still based on interpersonal attraction, personality and/or shared interests) with people different from us? If we spend time with people, it just happens. And, that is really all I am advocating: put yourself in a position where you can spend time with people who are different from you and be open to connecting with them. The relationships that develop as a result may become some of the best you'll ever have.

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How To Become A Racial Justice Activist: A Primer For Young People

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When it comes to activism, students often feel powerless. After all, they argue, they don't have the ability to change laws and rules or even influence how existing ones are interpreted. Being students, which, by definition, means to be in the process of learning rather than leading - they feel that few people take them seriously.

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Racial Justice Groups Send Kids to March for Our Lives

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Racial Justice Groups Send Kids to March for Our Lives

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When the history books mention Saturday's March for Our Lives, a nationwide mobilization of teenagers protesting the prevalence of gun violence, they will have to note the display of diversity, national civil rights and racial justice leaders say.

In interviews with Mic, the NAACP, the National Urban League, the National Action Network and grassroots organizations with ties to the Black Lives Matter movement, said they are prepared to send dozens of buses packed with over 2,000 black and brown teens and young adults to the march planned in Washington, D.C. Much of their efforts are independent of the scholarship programs helping less fortunate youths travel to the nation's capital that have been spearheaded by #NeverAgain movement leaders and survivors of the Feb. 14 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

"For me, it was painful as a young black woman to see the binaries of the nation's response to violence in Parkland and the violence in black communities," Tiffany Dena Loftin, national director of the NAACP's Youth and College Division, said in a phone interview on Thursday. "Our student members find this march to be in line with the work they've been doing for years."

The NAACP has announced a partnership with MTV and Everytown for Gun Safety, to cosponsor 17 busloads of young NAACP members from various cities across the country. More than 900 people from Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City, among other cities, will receive messages of support from musical artists The Roots and Pusha T.

The 17 buses are symbolic of the 17 lives taken in the Parkland shooting, Loftin said.

"We want to be clear: Don't let this be a march to which we just want black faces to show up," Loftin added. "This rally is not going to end gun violence. It's not going to bring about legislation. This is about making sure the agenda is completely representative."

Since the Stoneman Douglas shooting, black civil rights activists and victims of street violence have criticized the ongoing national debate about gun violence and gun control for seeming to sideline the voices of minority youths. Black and brown teenage activists in neglected neighborhoods of Chicago and Washington, D.C., have for decades sought solutions to violence that stems from inadequate gun laws, as well as from police patrolling their neighborhoods and schoolyards. So, while they applaud the efforts of predominantly white and affluent students leading the fight from Parkland, civil rights leaders want their teens to have a seat at the table, too.

"I feel very strongly that black and brown kids should not be left out of a very important moment," Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, said in a phone interview with Mic. "The excitement is that this is youth-generated. But after Saturday, we have to ensure that there is follow-through."

The Urban League is sponsoring nearly 700 youth from more than a dozen of its affiliates, many from as far away as Seattle and Portland, Oregon, according to a spokesperson. On Saturday, the organization will host a pre-march rally and breakfast in Washington, where participants will receive a short presentation on social activism from Don Cravins, Jr., who heads up the Urban League's D.C. bureau.

A spokesperson for the National Action Network, founded by the civil rights leader and Rev. Al Sharpton, said the organization would also be sending a few buses to Washington. More than 100 students from NAN's chapters near D.C. are expected to participate.

Pre-march programs have been taking place well in advance of Saturday. Before they boarded buses to Washington, dozens of youth from the South met on Thursday evening for a town hall on urban gun violence with the newly-formed National Black and Brown Gun Violence Prevention Consortium. The event was held in Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, the home church of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

On Thursday morning, well-known Parkland students Emma Gonzalez, Cameron Kasky, Alex Wind and David Hogg appeared at Thurgood Marshall Academy, a charter school in Southeast D.C., where students lost at least two classmates to street violence within the last year. One local organizer said she'd pushed for the Parkland students' visit with black students, to expand the narrative about gun violence.

"Not including and intentionally centering black and brown youth, from the outset of [the gun violence] discussion and in the planning of the march, perpetuates a deadly lie," April Goggans, the core organizer of the Black Lives Matter Global Network chapter in D.C., said in an email to Mic. "The lie that some deaths are more tragic than others, or that some victims are worthy of action even if that action results in the state sanctioned murders of others."

BLM DC worked with March for Our Lives organizers to pay for transportation and boxed lunches for kids from majority black neighborhoods, Goggans said. The chapter has also invited people to march with their contingent on Saturday.

According to news reports, an estimated 500,000 participants are expected for the Washington march alone. As of Thursday afternoon, the official website for the march showed more than 830 sibling marches had been planned in communities that ranged from Hawaii to cities in Europe. Sandy Hook Promise, an organization created after the mass shooting that left 27 elementary school children and staff dead in 2012, has promised to reimburse selected groups up to $3,000 for transportation and hotel arrangements.

Through a GoFundMe page, the March for Our Lives Action Fund has raised well over $3.3 million to support the march and Parkland shooting victims' families.

When the marching is done on Saturday, some civil rights groups are preparing to send participants home with to spur more nuanced conversations about gun violence, policing and education. In the wake of the Parkland shooting, Florida's governor proposed increasing the level of police presence in public schools - one officer for every 1,000 students - while President Donald Trump called for arming classroom teachers.

Police presence on campus created the school-to-prison pipeline, a term often used among activists to point out the criminalization of youths in an educational setting. These policies can make campuses resemble prisons, while also pushing a disproportionate number of black and brown students out of the classroom and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.

"We will be engaging people on these issues, while out at the march," Kaitlin Banner, senior attorney for the Advancement Project, a national civil rights group that has been at the forefront of school discipline issues, said in a phone interview. "It's about saying we don't need more cops, more criminalization or more guns in our schools."

The Parkland students have shown that they have a sharp analysis on the influence of the National Rifle Association and gun control, according to Rachel Gilmer, co-director of Florida-based racial justice group Dream Defenders that is part of the Movement for Black Lives coalition. The Dream Defenders and its partners are sending two buses to Washington - nearly 60 people in each bus, Gilmer said.

Saturday's march should be an opportunity to expand that analysis and join forces with black and brown youths, Gilmer said in a phone interview.

"What has created the condition for the Parkland movement to happen is the fact that they've grown up in the age of Black Lives Matter," she said. "So, it's not like this movement is happening in a silo. They're actually joining our movement and that should be something that's seen as progress and not in competition with the other.

"This actually means that we're winning," Gilmer added. "We're winning the moral argument. We're seeing a real united front forming."

March 24, 2018, 10:11 a.m. Eastern: This story has been updated.

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Racial justice groups are sending thousands of black and brown kids to the March for Our Lives rally

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When the history books mention Saturday's March for Our Lives, a nationwide mobilization of teenagers protesting the prevalence of gun violence, they will have to note the display of diversity, national civil rights and racial justice leaders say.

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When Ziad Ahmed founded the organization Redefy to help teenagers recognize and remove cultural stereotypes, he never imagined that just two years later he would be dining with President Obama at the White House. But on June 22, that is exactly where the 16-year-old Princeton Day School (PDS) student found himself - and not just at any table. At the annual White House Iftar, which marks the traditional breaking of the fast observed by Muslims during Ramadan, the president chose to sit with Ziad and seven other young people and engage them in conversation. As if that wasn't enough, Mr. Obama singled Ziad out in his speech.

"They're Muslim Americans like Ziad Ahmed," he said. "As a Bangladeshi-American growing up in New Jersey, he saw early on that there was not enough understanding in the world. So two years ago, he founded Redefy, a website to push back against harmful stereotypes by encouraging teens like him - he's only 16; I think our youngest guest tonight - to share their stories. Because, in Ziad's words, 'ignorance can be defeated through education.' He wants to do his part to make sure that 'Muslims can be equal members of society and still hold onto their faith and identity.' So we're very proud of you, Ziad."

"The whole thing was just mind-blowing," Ziad said this week. "It's the most prestigious event Muslim Americans get invited to. I just thought I'd be at some table, but Obama sat with us for an hour. And I was with the most amazing people, who had incredible stories to tell."

The invitation to the White House came after MTV News profiled Ziad's work with Redefy, as well as later efforts to inspire teen forums on racial profiling. Last April, the organization launched #PrincetonAgainstRacism, a social media campaign in which 125 portraits of people were taken at PDS and the Communiversity street fair, asking them to finish the prompt "I stand against racism because ..." The goal was to use social media platforms to inspire teens everywhere to take a stand against racism. Redefy led the initiative in partnership with Princeton CHOOSE and Not in Our Town in recognition of the YWCA's Stand Against Racism campaign.

The son of a hedge fund manager and a stay-at-home mom who does property management, Ziad was first inspired to take action the summer before ninth grade. "That summer, when I was 14, I noticed that in the community, people needed a platform by which they could be educated about minority experience," he said. "I found a lot of ignorance - not malicious hate, just innocent ignorance. I wanted to initiate positive change at school, so I decided to create Redefy."

The organization was officially launched that September. Today the leadership team has six people and representatives as far as Brazil and Pakistan, whom Ziad met through summer programs he has attended. "But due to recent publicity, now we have people I don't know," he said. "So that's new."

The idea is to produce "measurable change," Ziad said. "Our mission in 2014 was to promote integration. For this year, it is to reduce racial prejudice and hate." A blog posted every three days includes personal stories that anyone can submit. "When you read these intimate stories of issues people deal with, you get a soft spot in your heart," he said "You make more educated, thoughtful decisions. It's hard to hate somebody you know."

Key to Redefy's mission is equality for everyone. "All any of us want is a world that's safe and accepting for our children," Ziad said. "The only way that's possible is if we're willing to advocate for everyone, not just for our own minorities. You can't just believe in selective equality. So on our stories page, we try to encompass that."

Ziad and his team do workshops at local schools and hold bi-monthly conversations about current events. Media coverage led to the story by MTV News, "the most exciting thing that ever happened to me," he said. "To get that coverage on national news was mind-blowing." The invitation to The White House came just before Ziad was leaving for a service trip to Morocco. While he was on the trip, he got an email from one of Mr. Obama's speechwriters saying the president wanted to include his story.

"The next day I got an email saying I was at the president's table," Ziad recalled. "I was with all of these really impressive people. I couldn't believe it. I'm just some kid from New Jersey sitting with these people who have done so much."

Among Ziad's table-mates were Samantha Elauf, who won a Supreme Court case against the Abercrombie company after she was denied employment because she wore a traditional head scarf; Munir Khalif, the child of Somali immigrants who was accepted into all eight Ivy League schools and created an organization to help children in East Africa get an education; and Wai Wai Nu, a former political prisoner and the co-founder of Justice for Women.

Mr. Obama spoke with all of them. "I answered some of his questions and I asked him some, to which he responded eloquently and respectfully," Ziad said. "He had read about me, and he told me to keep doing the work I'm doing. I was thrilled. A lot of people wanted to speak with him about different things, and he was so articulate, kind, and witty."

Not surprisingly, the experience was an inspiration for Ziad to expand his work with Redefy. His mission is to include teens who might not feel as committed to the issues that are the organization's focus, but might have skills and interests through which they can contribute.

"I was up till 4 a.m. thinking about this," he said. "I want all kids in Princeton to get involved. Because one of my biggest obstacles has been trying to engage kids who aren't particularly passionate about social justice. I'm super motivated now to engage people of all interests, not just the ones interested in social justice. Anyone can get involved, and use their particular skills. If we engage people in that way, we can get a wide variety and become a better organization."

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A Young Activist Who Is Fighting Racism Has Dinner With the President at the White House | Town Topics

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When Ziad Ahmed founded the organization Redefy to help teenagers recognize and remove cultural stereotypes, he never imagined that just two years later he would be dining with President Obama at the White House. But on June 22, that is exactly where the 16-year-old Princeton Day School (PDS) student found himself - and not just at any table.

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He is the CEO/Co-Founder of JUV Consulting ( ), a purpose-driven Generation Z consultancy that works with clients to help them reach young people. The company has worked with over 20 Fortune 500 companies, has been profiled by the New York Times, and has established full-time offices.

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Parkland sparks different conversation about race

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Parkland sparks different conversation about race

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For more than a week, the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have held the country's attention as they join with peers across the country to demand a change in America's gun laws.

Their acts of protest - and their cutting statements topoliticians- have made them a powerful force, drawing considerable media coverage and the backing of multiple celebrities. And their organizing is just beginning: Students have planned two national events in March, theNational School Walkout and the March for Our Lives.

Several celebrities have donated cash toward the students' goals, including Steven Spielberg and George Clooney. When announcing her $500,000 donation to the March for Our Lives, Oprah Winfrey tweeted that "these inspiring young people remind me of the Freedom Riders of the '60s who also said we've had ENOUGH and our voices will be heard."

Over at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick also noted the power of the students' activism, writing that "with each spin of the news cycle, these students are offering a lesson for all of us about what protests can look like, and how we can reimagine social justice, in the Trump era."

But for some black racial justice activists, organizers, and public figures, the reaction to the students of Stoneman Douglas has also led to another truth: Organizing around Black Lives Matter and the larger Movement for Black Lives, another youth-led movement demanding policy change in the wake of trauma, was not and has not been as readily embraced.

Gosh. This is amazing. And a I'm not being sarcastic. I have to be honest and say that I'm a bit taken aback (and a bit hurt) that those of us who were in the streets in the past five years for Black lives didn't receive this type of reception or public support. https://t.co/HLYXTcVdfL
- Charlene Carruthers (@CharleneCac) February 21, 2018

It is interesting to note the difference in support for the kids in FL versus the kids in Black Lives Matter. I say that with full admiration for the kids in FL, to survive such a trauma and fight for everyone to be safer. But that's also what was happening in Ferguson and beyond
- roxane gay (@rgay) February 21, 2018

We it's clear - the things BYP, Dream Defenders, Million Hoodies and such were & are fighting for aren't seen as "valuable" or "worthy" of support.
- LeslieMac (@LeslieMac) February 21, 2018

The difference was noticeable as student anger began bubbling to the surface in the aftermath of the Florida school shooting. In Parkland, "while the students and parents speaking up were no more passionate than the young people of, say, the Black Lives Matter movement, it was clear that the political establishment was going to receive them a different way," New Yorker contributor Emily Witt noted last week.

It opens up a complicated discussion about who gets empathy in America, what issues are deemed important, and the types of activism and activists that the public responds to. And while there are no easy answers, that doesn't make the conversation any less necessary.

Parkland, Trayvon Martin, and how America responds to black communities versus white ones

When highlighting the disparity in public reaction, activists and organizers have noted that their words should not be taken as an attack on the students, but rather as a challenge to how the trauma of certain groups is perceived.

"White people get to be everything. They get to victims, they get to be heroes. And black people, unfortunately, continue to be criminalized for our moments of courage, for our moments of mourning and grieving," Black Lives Matter Network co-founder Patrisse Cullors said when asked about the differing reactions to Parkland and black racial justice organizing during a HuffPost Black History Month panel earlier this week. "And that often looks like when we go out into the streets, when we protest, when we demand for our lives to matter, we're given heavy police repression."

"Why don't black people get to be victims? That's the question we have to ask ourselves," she added.

This isn't to say that the Parkland students haven't received criticism. Conspiracy theorists have claimed they're "crisis actors" and that the students are being manipulated by liberal groups and Democratic billionaire George Soros. But it's hard to imagine students from the largely white, solidly middle-class Florida suburb being painted as "thugs" or "extremists" for their actions.

And the speed with which the students have forced a conversation - and the changes that conversation has already brought about - are considerably different.

As writer Janaya Khan explains at the Root:

And it saddens me to say that this moment serves to remind black youths that the world cares less about them than it does other children. The rush of support for the Parkland youths from mainstream-media spots, to sizable financial contributions from celebrities, to high-powered activists helping to organize their march and amplify their work, is exactly what young people deserve-and it's why the drastic difference in how Black Lives Matter was received is all the more apparent.

"The way people are responding to predominantly white communities is notable: Whose movement is more valuable to support?" Dante Barry, co-founder of the racial justice group Million Hoodies, tells the Huffington Post. "Other communities that have been devastated by gun violence are still fighting for crumbs."

"Young black people have been fighting to save lives through gun reform laws for years without the support and energy given to the Stoneman Douglas students," Lincoln Anthony Blades writes for Teen Vogue. "In fact, black youth, who've been passionately advocating for gun control measures, have been demonized, obfuscated, and overlooked."

There's a counterargument that this difference is less about race and class and more about the demands of the groups.Some make the case that unlike the Parkland students, Black Lives Matter and its affiliates don't have a specific policy ask that could be easily achieved. But given that several individual racial justice groups, as well as larger collectives like the Movement for Black Lives and the police-reform oriented Campaign Zero initiative, have all come out with various policy agendas targeting specific issues, this doesn't really hold up.

Those calling attention to the disparity in reactions have also highlighted the work of the Dream Defenders, a Florida-based group founded after the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012, arguing that it helped pave the way for the current student movement for gun control. The Dream Defenders have several policy objectives aimed at helping marginalized people, but one of its larger efforts revolves around gun violence and ending Florida's "stand your ground" law. The youth-led group took a number of actions in an effort to force a debate on the law, even occupying the state capitol for several weeks in 2013, only to be rebuffed. In the following years, state legislators would actually push to expand the law.

For the record: the movement for Black lives (inclusive of all the various national & local orgs & grassroots movements) was accused of not having clear policy initiatives. It does. It did. It always has. 1/
- Bree Newsome (@BreeNewsome) February 21, 2018

The Dream Defenders staged an occupation of the FL statehouse for weeks protesting not only Trayvon Martin's murder but also "stand your ground" gun laws & ALEC, the shadowy lobby group responsible for pushing stand your ground laws in several states 2/
- Bree Newsome (@BreeNewsome) February 21, 2018

I remember another time when students transformed grief into action by demanding change from FL lawmakers when they were devastated by senseless killing of their unarmed peers. @Dreamdefenders rarely received national media attn & support but they laid the groundwork. Thank you.
- Melissa Harris-Perry (@MHarrisPerry) February 20, 2018

Similar efforts around various policy initiatives have taken place in recent years only for black activists to be ignored or become the targets of new laws outlining how and where protests should occur.

When Black Lives Matter started in 2012, the oldest students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High were just about to hit their teenage years. With Sanford, Florida, the site of Martin's killing, just three hours away from their town and Jacksonville, where a black teenager named Jordan Davis was shot and killed in 2012, just six hours away, it is likely that discussions of Black Lives Matter have been a part of their formative years.

"Without the young black protesters who put their bodies on the line for justice and equality, we may not have heard from the women who said #MeToo, and we wouldn't be hearing from the students who are emphatically saying #NeverAgain," Khanya Khondlo Mtshali writes in the Guardian.

If recent reports are any indication, the Parkland students are eager to build coalitions. The Stoneman Douglas survivors recently met with the survivors of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting. And groups like the Dream Defenders are also looking to connect.

But in a country that still struggles to confront its racial demons, addressing the larger rift in who gets attention and who doesn't will require much more.

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Parkland is sparking a difficult conversation about race, trauma, and public support

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For more than a week, the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have held the country's attention as they join with peers across the country to demand a change in America's gun laws. Their acts of protest - and their cutting statements topoliticians- have made them a powerful force, drawing considerable media coverage and the backing of multiple celebrities.

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Jim Vondruska/Xinhua/Eyevine/Redux

In 1966, Newsweek published a landmark cover story, "The Teen-Agers: A Newsweek Survey of What They're Really Like," investigating everything from politics and pop culture to teens' views on their parents, their future and the world. The article was based on an extensive survey of nearly 800 teens across the country, and it also profiled six teens in depth, including a black teen growing up in Chicago, a Malibu girl, and a farm boy in Iowa. Fifty years later, Newsweek set out to discover what's changed and what's stayed the same for American teens. The result, "The State of the American Teenager," offers fascinating and sometimes disturbing insights into a generation that's plugged in, politically aware, and optimistic about their futures, yet anxious about their country.

Growing up in the projects of Chicago's South Side in the 1960s, Tommy Brewer used to watch ABC's The FBI on Sunday nights with his father. "I said one day, out of excitement, 'I wanna be an FBI agent!'" recalls Brewer. "And my father said, 'You're not allowed in the FBI. They don't allow blacks to be FBI agents.'" Brewer's father was a steelworker with a sixth-grade education, and his mother didn't make it past the fifth grade. But Brewer, surrounded by gangs and violence, was convinced an education would get him wherever he wanted to go in life. So each morning, he took two buses and an L train to Lindblom Technical High School, where he got A's (and one B) and took honors courses. He dreamed of going to college and studying architectural engineering.

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"If teenagers have the right education, they won't have any problems," he told Newsweek in 1966, when he was 15. "The gang members were taught this, but it just didn't sink in.... When they get to be 18 and it's time to get a job, then they find out that they need a good high school education to land one. So crime is the easiest way out. There's no pressure like there is in school."

Brewer's story was part of a landmark 1966 cover story, "The Teen-Agers: A Newsweek Survey of What They're Really Like." The 18-page spread investigated the teen world in fine detail: their heroes, politics, spending habits, sexual proclivities and exercise habits, as well as what they thought about the world, their parents and their future. The article was old-school journalism at its best: Correspondents in Newsweek bureaus fanned out to cities and small towns across the country, interviewing hundreds of teens as well as parents, psychologists, principals and other experts, while the famous pollster Louis Harris and Associates conducted an extensive survey of 775 girls and boys. Newsweek also profiled six teens in depth: a farm boy from Iowa, a California girl, a Manhattan prepster, a free spirit from Berkeley, a middle-school girl in Houston and Brewer.

This past fall, in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of "The Teen-Agers," Newsweek enlisted Harris Poll to conduct an online survey replicating key questions in the original work and to expand on it. We asked 2,057 teens, ages 13 to 17, from diverse backgrounds and geographic areas, about everything from politics and education to parents, sex, mental health and pop culture. The result, "The State of the American Teenager," offers fascinating and sometimes disturbing insights into a generation of teens who are plugged in, politically aware, and optimistic about their futures yet anxious about their country.
[RELATED: The State of the American Teenager: 1966 vs. Now]
Two-thirds of teens (68 percent), for example, believe the United States is on the wrong track, and 59 percent think pop culture keeps the country from talking about the news that really matters. Faith in God or some other divine being dropped from 96 percent in 1966 to 83 percent. Twice as many teens today feel their parents have tried to run their lives too much (24 percent, up from 12 percent in 1966). Fifty years ago, the five most admired famous people were John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Lyndon B. Johnson and Helen Keller, in that order. Today, pop culture rules, as President Barack Obama, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé top the list, with Selena Gomez tying Lincoln for fourth place.

More than half of teens support gun control (55 percent), the death penalty (52 percent), abortion rights (50 percent) and gay marriage (62 percent). (On her support of gay marriage, Allison Moseley, 16, of Cudahy, Wisconsin, says, "Love is love.")

The most compelling findings show that race and discrimination are crucial issues for teens today. In 1966, 44 percent of American teens thought racial discrimination would be a problem for their generation. Now nearly twice as many-82 percent-feel the same way. The outlook is more alarming among black teens: Ninety-one percent think discrimination is here to stay, up from 33 percent in 1966.

Recent headlines-police-involved shootings of unarmed black men, the Black Lives Matter movement, Donald Trump's xenophobic politics-reveal a country deeply divided on race, with seemingly little hope for reconciliation. For many black Americans, the entire casino is stacked against them: They're disproportionately affected by unemployment, poverty and a lack of educational opportunities. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and while blacks and Latinos make up 30 percent of the population, they account for 58 percent of the prison population. In 2013, the wealth gap between whites and blacks reached its highest point since 1989, according to the Pew Research Center: The wealth of white households was 13 times that of black households, and 10 times that of Hispanic households.

Newsweek found that black teens today are more likely than white or Hispanic teens to be aware of gun violence and of police officers accused of killing innocent people. They're also more likely to worry that they'll be the victims of shootings-at school, by police or in places of worship. And m any teens, regardless of race or ethnicity, perceive that black Americans are discriminated against at higher rates than others, including the way they're treated by police (62 percent) and their ability to access decent jobs (39 percent).

And what's happened to Brewer's seemingly indomitable optimism over the past 50 years, his unwavering faith in education? "I wouldn't want to be growin' up now," he says. "It was simpler back then. The choices you had were limited, but they were good and positive. You had to work for what you wanted, and if you were black, you had to work doubly hard....

"To wake up every day knowing for the rest of your life you're gonna be broke, what's a person to do? You're not vested in America. We were vested."

The supportive environment Brewer came of age in was marked by family, community and the belief that hard work would pay off. For many Americans today, those pillars have been toppled. "Back in the '60s, we had black poverty, but we also had black jobs," says Kirkland Vaughans, a psychologist who teaches at Adelphi University and co-authored The Psychology of Black Boys and Adolescents with Warren Spielberg. "You can be poor, but as long as you have someplace to go, you have hope. Joblessness has grown, and the criminal-industrial complex has grown."

At the same time, the U.S. population is on track to be a minority majority by 2060: Minorities will make up 56 percent of the country, up from 38 percent in 2014, and in just four years, more than half of all children in the U.S. will be part of a minority group. What does the future look like for a country that's still wracked by racism, where four of five teens believe discrimination will be a fixture in their lives?

1966: The Illusion of Carefree

In March 1966, Newsweek 's "The Teen-Agers" issue hit newsstands with a young blonde on its cover-a California girl in white Wranglers and a yellow sweater, sitting on the back of a motorcycle, clutching a guy and flashing a spectacular smile. The scene encapsulated the stereotypical 1960s teenage experience: fast-paced, forward-thinking, titillating, seemingly carefree.

Newsweek 's original survey found that teens were generally happy, liked school and felt extraordinary pressure to attend college ("Which is more important, the morality of cheating or getting into college?" a 17-year-old girl asked). They owned records, transistor radios and encyclopedias (today, smartphones, laptops and tablets dominate). It isn't until the fifth page-after sections labeled "The Group," "They're Spoiled," "Living in School," "The Place of Sex" and "Freedom on Wheels"-that the article admits, "There are also the Negroes," before delving into a section called "Hopeful Outsiders." We learned about the aspirations of black teens in 1966: Forty-one percent were "certain" they'd go to college; their mood: 22 percent said they were less happy than at 8 or 9, compared with 8 percent of the survey sample; their family dynamics: 38 percent said parents exerted "a lot of pressure" on them, compared with 18 percent of the entire group. And we heard about their fears: Thirty-one percent thought life would be worse when they reached 21, compared with 25 percent of all teens.

We also met a 16-year-old black teen from Los Angeles's Watts ("Yeah, I was in [the riot]. I didn't do none of the burnin', but I was lootin'.") who attended an almost entirely black high school, wasn't sure he could get into college and felt "scared" of the future. Yet his optimism prevailed: "He still believes white employers will treat him fairly if he is 'qualified.' He is not bitter. 'I'm not gonna drop out. If I can't get into college, I'll probably go out and get a job."

One of the most positive notes on race came from Brewer, who even had some sly thoughts on desegregation. "Most of the reason for prejudice is because we know very little about each other," he told Newsweek in 1966. "Our neighborhoods are different, and so we have little contact. Every time some of us move into an area, they move out. Eventually we have to communicate because they are running out of places to move to."

"The Teen-Agers" presented a generation optimistic about the future (even as its members sometimes feared it). And that's not so surprising, since the civil rights movement was celebrating some major triumphs at the time. Segregation in public schools had been declared unconstitutional in 1954 with the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. By the early 1960s, black Americans were staging sit-ins and freedom rides in the South, challenging whites-only lunch counters and segregated transportation. In 1963, more than 200,000 Americans attended the March on Washington, which concluded with the Reverend Martin Luther King's transcendent "I Have a Dream" speech. (He did not, however, make the list of 13 famous people teens admired most in '66.) The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law by President Johnson, banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

School integration lurched forward. The Black Panther movement rose. Yet segregation persisted. In 1965, Alabama state troopers and local police assaulted 525 civil rights demonstrators as they marched peacefully from Selma to Montgomery. Officers charged into the crowd, some on horseback wielding nightsticks and firing tear gas, leaving more than 50 people injured on what became known as Bloody Sunday. Soon after, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited discriminatory voting laws. That same year, the Immigration and Nationality Act meant immigrants of all nationalities could come to the U.S. on an (almost) equal basis.

"There was a sense of hopefulness-not just with African-Americans but with all people-that the country was generally on the right track," says Arun Venugopal, host of Micropolis, WNYC's semi-regular show on race and identity. "Economically, the country was doing really well. A lot of jobs were being created. If you were young, there was a sense that you had a good chance of being gainfully employed. Minimum wage took you a lot further then than it does today."

As a teen, Brewer had a concrete vision of his future: a career, not just a job; marriage, but not before his mid-20s; a family, but not until he could support one financially. It has all come to pass. He earned a scholarship to Williams College, got his law degree at Northwestern and, a couple of years later, joined the FBI. "At the time, there were 118 black agents out of almost 9,000. Me and another guy were one of the few from the North, both from public housing, and that was unheard of in the bureau," he says. He got married at 30 (then married two more times; he has two daughters, ages 32 and 26, and a 3-year-old son). Today, he's a judge of the Cook County Circuit Court in Chicago, where he estimates that of the 480 people he has sentenced, only 5 percent graduated from high school, and 99 percent of the men were unemployed or underemployed.

Brewer credits his success to his parents, his community and something impossible to replicate: the '60s. "There was a big buzz about the possibilities for blacks at the time. We saw black stars on TV. We knew changes were coming: Opportunities that weren't available before would be. The FBI would be available. We didn't know how or when, but it was like, Be prepared! Education was a key," he says. "It was almost like a big candy factory was gonna open up for us. Today, the factory is open, but there's not much candy."

2016: Civil Rights and Wrongs

Many children growing up in America have access to life-changing opportunities-like earning a college scholarship or watching an older brother marry his boyfriend-and minor privileges, like getting the answer to literally any question in recorded human history from the Google search box on a smartphone and streaming Game of Thrones on lightning fast LTE during a math quiz. They can also watch video footage of 12-year-old Tamir Rice playing with a pellet gun outside a recreation center-then getting shot dead a moment later by a police officer. They can hear Eric Garner, 43, gasp "I can't breathe" as police officers place him in an apparent chokehold during an arrest for allegedly selling loose cigarettes, and they know that he'll be dead in less than an hour. And they can witness massive protests erupt in Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager shot at least six times, including twice in the head, by former police officer Darren Wilson, who's white.

A Guardian study found that, last year, young black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police. The Washington Post reported refinements on the same depressing point: Unarmed black men were seven times more likely than whites to die from police shootings last year. According to a ProPublica analysis, between 2010 and 2012, black teens were 21 times more likely to be shot dead than white teens.

Discrimination has always been an American battleground, but teens today are growing up in a world where it seeps into the crevices of everyday life in new and sinister ways. While the country's first black president is finishing his second term, Trump has become the Republican front-runner in the upcoming presidential election, energizing a base the describes as middle-aged white men without college degrees who don't think they have a voice, fear outsiders and hail from areas rife with racism. Last December, during an affirmative action case, Justice Antonin Scalia asked from the bench whether black students might do better at "a slower-track school" than at the more competitive colleges and universities. In September, Governor Paul R. LePage (R-Maine) blamed local drug use on "guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty" who bring heroin to Maine and "impregnate a young white girl before they leave." LePage's head of communications, Peter Steele, defended his boss by explaining, "The governor is not making comments about race. Race is irrelevant."

Racism has roiled pop culture too. When not a single person of color was nominated for best actor, best actress, best supporting actor or best supporting actress at the 2016 Academy Awards, and no films featuring black actors got best picture nods, prominent black celebrities, including Spike Lee and Jada Pinkett Smith, boycotted the show. The controversy spawned the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, and while the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences vowed to double the number of minorities and women by 2020, host Chris Rock said in his opening, " You're damn right Hollywood's racist." At this year's Super Bowl halftime show, Beyoncé turned her performance of a new song into a political statement on police brutality, racism and Hurricane Katrina. The conservative right was outraged: She and her backup dancers were dressed like the Black Panthers! " You're talking to middle America when you have the Super Bowl," former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said. "Let's have, you know, decent, wholesome entertainment and not use it as a platform to attack the people who, you know, put their lives at risk to save us."

"Teenagers are growing up under this black president, yet at the end of his presidency we are seeing a constant stream of police killings and a new civil rights movement that's really turning the narrative on its head," says Nikole Hannah-Jones, an award-winning reporter who covers civil rights and racial injustice for The New York Times. "But I don't know our kids are getting the tools to deal with that. Research shows millennials are no better at race than our generation because these kids still are not being educated together. Even when they are in the same school buildings, they are not educated together. White and Asian kids are tracked into higher-level classes, and black and Latino kids are tracked lower.... Someone has to give up something so someone else can get equality."

But that's not happening, and black Americans still face inordinate disadvantages. "A black male with a college degree looking for a job will not do as well as a white male with a high school diploma looking for a job," says Vaughans. "A black male without a criminal record will not do as well as a white male with a criminal record if they get to an interview. If you are a black male with a name like Jujuan, or if you are a black male and went to Howard, hang it up."

Brewer's success was exceptional-a product of not just his staunch optimism and determination but also his community. Despite the tangle of violence and adversity in public housing in the 1960s, "there were mothers and fathers-whole families," he says. He grew up eating dinner every night with his parents and five siblings. No TV. No fast food. Just home-cooked meals, family and conversation. "I didn't know anyone who was chronically unemployed. And most fathers, if the son became 17 or 18, they could take them to their job and put 'em on. 'You're hired.' They raised families on the money they made. But all those jobs changed," he adds. "Now you have families disintegrated.... We all looked at public housing as being upward-bound, not as a decline. It's a different world today."

Osariemen, 15, from Brooklyn, New York: "The most challenging thing in my life is hearing bigots in my school voice their opinion like no one will be offended, like they shouldn't be held accountable."

Andrew, 17, from Ridgewood, New Jersey: "Blacks and whites are too confrontational about everything. I regard myself as being liberal and progressive, but there's no need for confrontation. Black people now, so many of them, they've got this idea that everybody is attacking them. We've gotta love each other. It's not 'them' against 'us.' It's all 'us.' Black Lives Matter. Well, all lives matter."

Jorge, 13, from Las Vegas: "Race is a problem in my life. In my school, I hear a lot of racist words. The black teenagers say the N-word. They call Mexicans and Asians in a negative way. It feels bad."

Shylee, 16, Tampa, Florida: "Black people try to separate themselves. They even have their own TV network. If you're trying to all be equal, why are you separating yourself from everyone? I'm not racist. I have nothing against them. I think there's definitely bad white people who don't like black people, but there's also bad black people who don't like white people."

Sophie, 16, Greensboro, North Carolina: "My dad makes an extraordinary amount of money, and we live in a very nice part of town.... We have a lot of very expensive things. I try to think about my privilege as much as I can, because I know a lot of people really don't have the race and class privilege that I do. It's definitely not something I deserve or another person doesn't deserve."

Rissa, 16, Indianapolis: "Everybody has to realize that skin color is nothing more than someone having more pigment than someone else. Until people realize that, we'll still have those people who are extremely racist.... We're programmed to find flaws in others and extort them."

The Great Transformation

Teens know racism is the issue of their generation, and many of them are working hard to understand it, confront it, change it. For some, this is a quiet, personal battle.

"One time, I was sitting in my room wearing a T-shirt, and my grandma came in and she thought the reason my skin is the way it is is because I don't take enough showers. Or I'm dirty. She thought if I cleanse myself harder, I'll have lighter skin," says Leuna Rahman, 17, of Queens, who identifies as South Asian (her parents are from Bangladesh). "That's not how it is. I was born this way."

Asked what she tells her grandmother, Rahman says, "I ignore it. You hear it so often, you just give up on fighting back. But I don't let it get to me, because I learned to love myself."

She's sitting in the basement of a brick church in Elmhurst, Queens, which moonlights as the headquarters for South Asian Youth Action, a youth development organization for 2,000 elementary, middle and high school students in New York City, focusing on academics, college prep and leadership skills.

"I did not want to be black," says her friend, Loretta Eboigbe, 18. "There's this notion that if you're light-skin, it's the right skin, or you're prettier.... At one point I went to the bathroom and tried to get rid of my skin color because I wanted to be white. I was around 7 or 8. I took a sponge and tried to scrub off my skin."

Eboigbe was born in Verona, Italy, and moved to the U.S. in 2008 because her parents, both Nigerian, wanted to live in a less homogenous environment. "I thought I'd be surrounded by diversity and people wouldn't judge me based on how I looked. But people made fun of my hair and accent. If people are constantly throwing racist comments at you, especially at a young age, there's no way to stand tall and be proud of who you are," she says.

Rahman nods. "During the Paris attack, a friend sat down and said, 'Can you tell your family not to kill my family? I heard Bengali people are also part of ISIS.'" She looks up with big, quizzical eyes. "Why would you just assume my family is a part of ISIS?"

"I was always hoping that once I got to college it would stop, and I'd find people like me. But now I'm transitioning into a world that might be the same," says Eboigbe, who's going to Brown this fall. "To see racism happening on college campuses, people being victimized, it's scary."

It's a grim outlook: Nearly twice as many teens-and nearly three times as many black teens-think racial discrimination is here to stay, compared with 50 years ago. The internet has given them a front-row seat to some of the greatest civil rights moments of their young lives. They've witnessed injustice (Ferguson), outright racism against their president ( 61 percent of Trump supporters don't believe Obama was born in the U.S.) and too little change coming too late (the Oscars). "Young people who otherwise couldn't participate in robust conversations like this all of a sudden now can participate as fully as anyone else. That is a powerful thing. We can't fix what we don't address," says DeRay Mckesson, the Black Lives Matter activist running for mayor of Baltimore.

"It's not only that teens can go to 1,000 websites but they can take to Twitter and Instagram and record their reactions about what's happening to them as they experience it," says Cornell William Brooks, president of the NAACP. "That represents a tectonic shift in the way young people process the social justice challenges of their time. This is not a graceful shift; it's a massive shift."

Racism may not look as it did 50 years ago-"It's not formally entrenched," Venugopal says-but it's endemic in our politics, economy, education system, popular culture, sports, health care and more. Changing one person's mind is difficult enough, much less overhauling society. Hannah-Jones lets out a long, forceful sigh when asked what advice she'd give teens. "Oh man! That's hard. Be better than your parents. Every generation, we think that as the old generation dies out, things will be better. But the new generation becomes the old generation, so I think if teens really want to see a day where there is real equality, they're gonna have to do a lot better job than we've done, our parents have done and our grandparents did. It's not inevitable but pretty damn close to inevitable that this generation will repeat our mistakes."

But what's the point of being a teenager if you can't make mistakes, and you can't change?

Moseley, the 16-year-old from Wisconsin-who's into the internet, model U.N. and, like many teens interviewed for this story, Bernie Sanders-is candid about her transformation on racism. "You have to be in a certain environment to change and learn that things are wrong," she says. Moseley wants to go to Yale or Harvard, and says the popular blogging platform Tumblr changed her. " Before I went on Tumblr, I was very racist and discriminatory, and after I went on Tumblr, I saw how people were struggling and how the things I was doing were wrong," she says. "Before, I wouldn't want to be around anyone of color. I'd be like, Oh my gosh, they're gonna mug me....

"Now I'm just like, He's a person. I've learned that you cannot judge a person. You cannot stereotype. It's incredibly wrong to do."

In 1966, the 15-year-old Tommy Brewer wasn't particularly concerned with civil rights. "Most young people don't feel racial prejudice," he told Newsweek then. "We don't see the importance of civil rights yet. We believe in what Martin Luther King does, but we don't idolize him the way we do a baseball player."

Teens today may look up to Selena Gomez (as well as LeBron James, Jennifer Lawrence and Nicki Minaj), but they also idolize Beyoncé in part because she injected race, police brutality and civil rights into one of the largest, most American moments of the year. Brooks points out that in the past two years the NAACP has witnessed more racial conflict and challenges "than we've seen in nearly a generation," and has had 28 percent more young people join the organization online. "At a moment of conflict, crisis and challenge, rather than sliding into a civic and depressive funk, what do teens do? They join organizations. They take to Twitter. They do something about it," he says. Today, 75 percent of teens own smartphones. "And that's not because they can watch cat videos all day. But because they can engage in the world. And that says a lot about their character and morality."

Asked about the acute awareness teens today have about racism, Brewer sees cause for hope. "Race was and always will be a constant that black teens have to address, and to overcome that, you need to be qualified and equipped," he says. "The primary thing you need is education. We've got a black president now. Back then, we didn't have black mayors! But we had hope and belief, and we knew that all we needed was opportunity. Now you have more opportunity, but the preparation for it is just gone. It's hard to confront racism if you don't have education.... Children need training.

"There's so much freedom today. What do you do with it? Those things I learned as a kid [from my parents] served me better than what I learned in law school or in being a judge: Just being a decent human being, not being selfish and thinking outside yourself."

Obama, who knows a thing or two about breaking boundaries, rising above racism and raising teenagers, said in his commencement address at Howard University earlier this month, "If you had to choose a time to be, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, 'young, gifted, and black' in America, you would choose right now."

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What American teens really want: Less racism

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Jim Vondruska/Xinhua/Eyevine/Redux In 1966, Newsweek published a landmark cover story, "The Teen-Agers: A Newsweek Survey of What They're Really Like," investigating everything from politics and pop culture to teens' views on their parents, their future and the world.

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Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

The media and the public have tended to offer support for the teen protesters from Parkland, Florida, and other predominantly white communities. It's been a different story for youth of color.

In the spring of 2016, African-American children as young as 11 marched in protest against the gun violence in their Miami neighborhood of Liberty City. The low-income area had lost 13 teens and children so far that year to guns. The kids demanded the right to play outside safely; they held signs and chanted slogans like "We want to live" and "We want to see another day." Phillip Agnew, leader of the Florida-based Dream Defenders, a youth-led group fighting for racial justice, said the demonstration didn't get much attention from the national media at the time.

Liberty City is about 40 miles from Parkland, Florida, site of the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School two weeks ago. But it's been hard not to notice the difference between how youth-led protests against gun violence in these two communities were received. Since the Parkland tragedy, the national news has been filled with the school's student survivors, who rose up to protest school shootings and demand-in eloquent and defiant terms-tighter gun legislation. Across the country, teens have been walking out of class in solidarity, often standing together in silence for 17 minutes, one for each of Parkland's victims. National walkouts are planned for March 14, the one-month anniversary of the shooting, and April 20, which will mark 19 years since the Columbine High School massacre.

Though some of the response to the young activists has been hostile-several Parkland students have received online death threats, and right-wing conspiracy theorists have accused them of being fake "crisis actors"-many other op-eds and think pieces have praised the student-led movement as a heroic moment of moral reckoning for a generation. Celebrities such as George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey have pledged to back the protesters, donating $500,000 each to help pay for the student-led March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., on March 24.

Many school districts have also been supportive of the student efforts: At Missoula, Montana's Hellgate High School, for example, principal Judson Miller stopped short of openly endorsing a walkout on February 21 by hundreds of students, but told staffers to use the protest as a " teachable moment." In Wake County, North Carolina, where several high schools have seen student walkouts, schools communications director Lisa Luten told CityLab, "We respect the students' right to protest. Our priority is supporting them and making sure they are safe."

And for those schools that are threatening to punish student protesters, lawyers such as Jay Urban of Milwaukee are offering their services pro bono. "Perhaps lawyers can be pressure on school districts to do the right thing," he said. Colleges and universities have issued statements noting that punishment for participation in peaceful protests will not affect high schoolers' chances of admission.

In contrast, teens and adults of color have often faced very different responses when protesting gun violence. Indeed, while youth of color have been confronting the issue for years, the protests and actions associated with the Movement for Black Lives have often been criminalized, greeted with police repression and public scorn, or simply ignored.

Florida Governor Rick Scott, for instance, snubbed calls from the Dream Defenders to hold a special session on the state's "stand your ground" law in 2013. The law removes the duty to retreat before using force in self-defense, and figured in the trial of George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer who was acquitted of gunning down 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, in 2012. A group of Dream Defenders peacefully occupied the Florida state capitol in Tallahassee for 31 days to pressure the governor for the meeting, to no avail.

Parkland students, on the other hand, traveled to Tallahassee last week to meet with Florida lawmakers, including Governor Scott, and participate in a press conference at the capitol. They also interfaced with Florida Senator Marco Rubio and two Florida legislators in a town hall on CNN. Though the Florida legislature recently rejected a ban on assault rifles and advanced legislation on arming teachers, despite appeals from Parkland students, it also moved forward on imposing a three-day waiting period on gun purchases and raising the age to buy a gun from 18 to 21.

Many black scholars and activists are drawing attention to this stark contrast, while at the same time championing the Parkland students -and seeing the rise of their movement as an opportunity. Dream Defenders, for instance, has submitted a proposal to bring the young people from Liberty City and Parkland together at a town hall to talk about their trauma. Both communities have something to gain from collaboration. "The black teens haven't been able to talk because there hasn't been anyone to listen," Agnew said. "And the students from Parkland haven't been able to grieve because the public wants them to be spokespeople."

As CityLab's Brentin Mock reported back in 2015, this isn't the first time that the "natural alliance" between largely white gun control groups and the Black Lives Matter activist community has been explored. For Agnew, the idea is both to create a larger and more formidable movement and to share with the Parkland teens and other young allies what youth of color have learned through their own activism.

"Dream Defenders trains young people to organize," he said. "We want to show them how to do it bigger and more effectively."

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In Public Support for Student Protesters, Race Matters

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The media and the public have tended to offer support for the teen protesters from Parkland, Florida, and other predominantly white communities. It's been a different story for youth of color. In the spring of 2016, African-American children as young as 11 marched in protest against the gun violence in their Miami neighborhood of Liberty City.

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United We Dream | The Largest Immigrant Youth-Led Network

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United We Dream is the largest immigrant youth-led network in the country. We fight for justice and dignity for all immigrants.

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Remember Myspace? There was the playlist feature, glittery graphic text and, of course, the highly-coveted Top 8, which pitted your most beloved buds against each other for a spot in your public friendship circle.

A lot has changed since those early days of social networking. Beyond a noticeable reduction of glittery text, one of the most salient developments of current social sites has been their ability to create and connect communities. While in the past sites like Myspace mainly centered on one person's group of friends (and the occasional Internet acquaintance), platforms like Twitter have given a tremendous amount of agency to users to connect -- and influence the rest of the world -- on important social issues.

Most impressive? A whole bunch of the people sparking modern online movements haven't even reached age 20. Not only are these teens educating others with their insightful ideas (some of which are packaged as hilarious memes; they know their audience), they're also building socially-conscious communities that extend well beyond the confines of geography or familial status, and are instead bonded by a shared sense of purpose.

Here are some social justice stars who, despite being less than two decades old, are already changing the world, one tweet at a time.
1. @queenfeminist

@queen_feminist/Instagram

Name: Sylva

Age: 17

What She's About: While she's not making riot grrl jams, she's serving fresh facts about intersectional feminism on her blog, queenfeminist.com.

"I believe that the birth of social media catalyzed the fourth wave of feminism, allowing women from all over the world to connect, share ideas and empower each other," she told MTV News. "I feel fortunate to be alive during this time, and my goal is to contribute to the Internet revolution by sharing my knowledge on feminism, LGBTQIA+ rights and everything political. Feminists of the past laid the groundwork for us today, and my goal is to pick up their torch."
2. @ziadtheactivist

Ziad Ahmed/Facebook

Name: Ziad Ahmed

Age: 16

What He's About: Ziad is the founder of Redefy, a multi-platform organization dedicated to fighting bias and stereotypes. You might recognize him from MTV's past coverage -- NBD or anything, but because of his great work, he was invited to White House's Iftar dinner this June and dined with President Obama.

"My passion for social justice is rooted in my unwavering belief that all injustices are one injustice," Ziad told MTV News. "I advocate against sexism, homophobia, racism, anti-Muslim bigotry, anti-semitism and all forms of discrimination as I believe in the power of intersectionality. I can't just pick one social justice topic that means the most to me because overwhelmingly we cannot achieve equality unless we campaign for human rights for all."
3. @dancingofpens

Camryn Garrett/Facebook

Name: Camryn Garrett

Age: 15

What She's About: Camryn is a blogger who's passionate about dismantling racism and sexism. Despite her young age, Camryn already "really passionate about racism and sexism," two issues she unpacks on her blog, " For All the Girls Who Are Half Monster."
4. @NicoleMaines

Nicole Maines/Twitter

Name: Nicole Maines

Age: 17

What She's About: Nicole is a young transgender woman whose story has been written about in the book " Becoming Nicole" by Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter Amy Ellis Nutt, set to be released on October 20.

"The social justice issues that I'm passionate about are centered around trans equality, specifically for trans youth in schools and making sure that we get the same treatment and opportunities as everyone else," she told MTV News.
5. @aliyahchavez

Aliyah Chavez/Twitter

Name: Aliyah Chavez

Age: 19

What She's About: The Stanford student is a writer for Natives In America, an online literary publication dedicated to telling the stories of Native Americans.

"There are Native people who live in extreme states of poverty," Aliyah told MTV News. "There are Native children who are subjected to high rates of domestic violence. There are people out there still dressing up as Indians for Halloween. These issues matter. Heck, they mattered 100 years ago."

"With my advocacy, I can only hope that people realize we still exist. We need to raise strong Native youth," she continued. "We need to teach them to fight the good fight. We need educated scholars to be a contradiction to people's perception of Indian."
6. @ughruwxd

@ughruwxd/Twitter

Name: Ruwaida Ibrahim

Age: 16

What She's About: The self-proclaimed "socially and political aware teen/intersectional feminist" has amassed almost 8,000 followers by frequently speaking out against Islamophobia and anti-blackness.

"I'm passionate about focusing on the oppression people of color experience," she told MTV News. "I focus on immigration, protecting black lives, protecting Muslim lives, anti-blackness."
7. @C_to_the_Cizzle

Caitlyn Cannon/Facebook

Name: Caitlyn Cannon

Age: 18

What She's About: In May, Caitlyn made national headlines when she used her spot in her school yearbook to make an important point about sexism. ICYMI:

Now, the 18-year-old is dishing out feminist realness on the Internet.

"As a feminist, I'm really passionate about gaining equality between the sexes," she told MTV News. "I also would like to see equality between all races, easier and cheaper access to higher education, and a diminishing of the gap between the poor/middle class and the rich. I believe that educating people on all of these different topics can lead to a better understanding of them, which could help bring about change."
8. @monetgrrl

@lilysoftx/Instagram

Name: Georgina Panagopoulou

Age: 19

What She's About: Georgina has built a solid Twitter following of over 15,000, and that number is growing every day. Most recently, her contribution to the #MasculinitySoFragile hashtag was retweeted over 4,000 times.

"I'm here for intersectional, inclusive feminism and body positivity because I want all women to have the same rights and opportunities as men and love themselves in a patriarchal society that has taught them otherwise," she told MTV News. "I'm here for gay pride because I want people to understand that there are more than two genders and sexual orientations and spread visibility. I'm here for social and racial justice because I want to support people of color on their way to justice and break the structures of a system that has been built on institutionalized racism and oppression. And these are just some of the things I'm here for."

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8 Inspiring Teens Who Are Using Social Media To Change The World

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Remember Myspace? There was the playlist feature, glittery graphic text and, of course, the highly-coveted Top 8, which pitted your most beloved buds against each other for a spot in your public friendship circle. A lot has changed since those early days of social networking.

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/ CBS News

She's an author, public speaker and one of Forbes' "30 under 30" this year - and she's not even in high school yet. After becoming frustrated that she wasn't reading any books in school featuring black main characters, then 10-year-old Marley Dias set out to collect books with characters who looked like her with the #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign. She ended up with more than 10 times that many. Now 13 years old, she has become an author herself with "Marley Dias Gets It Done: And So Can You!" a tale she hopes will inspire others to become activists.

Dias joined "CBS This Morning" to discuss her new book, why she launched a campaign about racial harmony and where she gets her confidence.

"In the book I talk about it where I'm kind of a perfect mix of everything, and so is everybody else. If you like reading, you are allowed to like to dance and to like to sing and to like to act. Even though I wear glasses, I'm not just a mousy person who stays in my room - even though I do sometimes stay in my room and read," Dias said.

She says she was bothered by the social structures that pushed away from the "intersectionality of being a black person and a woman and a girl."

"They're not including all of us, but they are thinking that because you're black and because you're a woman we are trying to create a system that supports you, but they're not thinking about that point of intersection between the two where I'm a mix of both and that we need to include me in both of those realities and not just one or the other," Dias said.

For the 13-year-old, who says she has a diverse group of friends, it's about making an effort to check one another.

"We try to just be open with each other about whether or not we feel like someone made a joke that was not appropriate or we feel like we were saying something that was not an educated response to a question," Dias said.

She acknowledged that while it makes her sound "really, like, PC or whatever," it's never cut into their ability to have fun.

"So at the same time we try to keep it, you know, loose because not every conversation is going to have perfect knowledge with things that we say, but we want to always stay educated on the things that are happening in our community and the communities that surround us."

In terms of advice for aspiring activists, Dias hopes to remind others that helping even one person with your full energy is just as impactful as what she's achieved.

"I think the biggest thing is that success is not measured by whether or not you're on 'CBS This Morning' or whether or not you make the local news station-" Dias said when "CBS This Morning" co-host Gayle King interrupted and joked, "Wait a second, Marley. Take that back, Marley!"

"I mean that it's not measured by the things, the places that you go.... But by the actual people that you touch and the places you're servicing," she said.

With a long list of accomplishments and a natural grace unmatched by many adults, King asked her where she got such confidence.

"I think the biggest thing, where my passionate-ness comes from, is that I love reading and it is something that I really care about. It's not like I'm talking about football or basketball or dancing - things that I enjoy but are not necessarily my favorite things. I try to say with kids you always, even if you're in the middle about things that you like, pick the stuff that you know you can go on and go on and keep going and keep going. Because it's so much more important to continue with that because you'll feel so much more joy in the things that you do."

Trending News

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How 13-year-old Marley Dias is inspiring activism in others

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CBS News She's an author, public speaker and one of Forbes' "30 under 30" this year - and she's not even in high school yet. After becoming frustrated that she wasn't reading any books in school featuring black main characters, then 10-year-old Marley Dias set out to collect books with characters who looked like her with the #1000BlackGirlBooks campaign.