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The Power of Asset Framing: A Conversation with Trabian Shorters (Skillman Foundation)

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The Power of Asset Framing: A Conversation with Trabian Shorters (Skillman Foundation)

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"How do we create equitable outcomes for all members of our community? We can start by defining people by their aspirations, not their challenges."

This method of thinking, commonly known as "asset-framing," has become an essential part of the way Trabian Shorters views his work as the founder & CEO of BMe Community. The Miami-based organization has developed a network of innovators, leaders, and champions who invest in aspiring communities across the country and help develop positive change. For Shorters, recognizing people as assets to their community has helped drive his organization's impact and tell a more accurate story of the groups they serve.

To learn more about asset-framing and how it can be used in our own work for Detroit children, we recently invited Trabian to speak with our Board of Trustees and staff. Following the conversation, we sat down with him to capture some of his thoughts around the subject and how it can be applied to help strengthen an organization's focus on equity.

Defining "Asset-Framing" and How It Can Be Applied

Trabian explained asset-framing and describes how it can be applied in philanthropy and throughout our daily lives.

Narrative Is A Key Part in How We Frame Our Lives

Next, Trabian identified the important role narrative plays in our life and how it influences our understanding of identity, decision making, and the people around us.

It's Our Responsibility to Care About Each Other

In order to create a more caring society, Trabian thinks philanthropy needs to do a better job of bringing people together under a common cause.

The Dangers of Using a Stigmatizing Narrative

Trabian also explained the dangers of philanthropic organizations using stigmatizing or negative narratives in their work. While on the surface these tales of deficit and despair seem effective in inciting action from stakeholders and gaining sympathy from the larger public, they can also stigmatize the communities they intend to serve.

The Power of Sharing Truthful Narratives

Finally, Trabian shares the importance of telling truthful narratives that will positively influence future generations and inspire people to work toward a common goal.

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The Power of Asset Framing: A Conversation with Trabian Shorters | Skillman Foundation

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"How do we create equitable outcomes for all members of our community? We can start by defining people by their aspirations, not their challenges." This method of thinking, commonly known as "asset-framing," has become an essential part of the way Trabian Shorters views his work as the founder & CEO of BMe Community.

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Elephant In The Zoom by Ryan Grim (The Intercept)

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Elephant In The Zoom by Ryan Grim (The Intercept)

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E veryone acknowledged that Zoom was less than ideal as a forum for a heartfelt conversation on systemic racism and policing. But the meeting was urgent, and, a little more than two months into the Covid-19 lockdown, it would have to do.

During the first week of June 2020, teams of workers and their managers came together across the country to share how they were responding to the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis and to chart out what - if anything - their own company or nonprofit could do to contribute toward the reckoning with racial injustice that was rapidly taking shape.

On June 2, one such huddle was organized by the Washington, D.C., office of the Guttmacher Institute, the abortion rights movement's premier research organization.

Heather Boonstra, vice president of public policy, began by asking how people were "finding equilibrium" - one of the details we know because it was later shared by staff with Prism, an outlet that covers social justice advocacy and the impacts of injustice.

She talked about the role systemic racism plays in society and the ways that Guttmacher's work could counter it. Staff suggestions, though, turned inward, Prism reported, "including loosening deadlines and implementing more proactive and explicit policies for leave without penalty." Staffers suggested additional racial equity trainings, noting that a previous facilitator had said that the last round had not included sufficient time "to cover everything." With no Black staff in the D.C. unit, it was suggested that "Guttmacher do something tangible for Black employees in other divisions."

Behind Boonstra's and the staff's responses to the killing was a fundamentally different understanding of the moment. For Boonstra and others of her generation, the focus should have been on the work of the nonprofit: What could Guttmacher, with an annual budget of nearly $30 million, do now to make the world a better place? For her staff, that question had to be answered at home first: What could they do to make Guttmacher a better place? Too often, they believed, managers exploited the moral commitment staff felt toward their mission, allowing workplace abuses to go unchecked.

The belief was widespread. In the eyes of group leaders dealing with similar moments, staff were ignoring the mission and focusing only on themselves, using a moment of public awakening to smuggle through standard grievances cloaked in the language of social justice. Often, as was the case at Guttmacher, they played into the very dynamics they were fighting against, directing their complaints at leaders of color. Guttmacher was run at the time, and still is today, by an Afro Latina woman, Dr. Herminia Palacio. "The most zealous ones at my organization when it comes to race are white," said one Black executive director at a different organization, asking for anonymity so as not to provoke a response from that staff.

These starkly divergent views would produce dramatic schisms throughout the progressive world in the coming year. At Guttmacher, this process would rip the organization apart. Boonstra, unlike many managers at the time, didn't sugarcoat how she felt about the staff's response to the killing.

"I'm here to talk about George Floyd and the other African American men who have been beaten up by society," she told her staff, not "workplace problems." Boonstra told them she was "disappointed," that they were being "self-centered." The staff was appalled enough by the exchange to relay it to Prism.

The human resources department and board of directors, in consultation with outside counsel, were brought in to investigate complaints that flowed from the meeting, including accusations that certain staff members had been tokenized, promoted, and then demoted on the basis of race. The resulting report was unsatisfying to many of the staff.

"What we have learned is that there is a group of people with strong opinions about a particular supervisor, the new leadership, and a change in strategic priorities," said a Guttmacher statement summarizing the findings. "Those staff have a point of view. Complaints were duly investigated and nothing raised to the level of abuse or discrimination. Rather, what we saw was distrust, disagreement, and discontent with management decisions they simply did not like."

A Prism reporter reached a widely respected Guttmacher board member, Pamela Merritt, a Black woman and a leading reproductive justice activist, while the Supreme Court oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization were going on last December, a year and a half after the Floyd meeting. She offered the most delicate rebuttal of the staff complaints possible.

"I have been in this movement space long enough to respect how people choose to describe their personal experience and validate that experience, even if I don't necessarily agree that that's what they experienced," Merritt said. "It seems like there's a conflation between not reaching the conclusion that people want and not doing due diligence on the allegations, which simply is not true." Boonstra did not respond to a request to talk from either Prism or The Intercept.

The six months since then have only seen a ratcheting up of the tension, with more internal disputes spilling into public and amplified by a well-funded, anonymous operation called ReproJobs, whose Twitter and Instagram feeds have pounded away at the organization's management. "If your reproductive justice organization isn't Black and brown it's white supremacy in heels co-opting a WOC movement," blared a typical missive submitted to and republished on one of its Instagram stories. The news, in May 2022, that Roe v. Wade would almost certainly be overturned did nothing to temper the raging battle. (ReproJobs told The Intercept its current budget is around $275,000.)

That the institute has spent the course of the Biden administration paralyzed makes it typical of not just the abortion rights community - Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and other reproductive health organizations had similarly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations, most often breaking down along staff-versus-management lines. It's also true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function. The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time's Up, the Sunrise Movement, and many other organizations have seen wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years.

In fact, it's hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn't been in tumult, or isn't currently in tumult. It even reached the National Audubon Society, as Politico reported in August 2021:

Following a botched diversity meeting, a highly critical employee survey and the resignations of two top diversity and inclusion officials, the 600,000-member National Audubon Society is confronting allegations that it maintains a culture of retaliation, fear and antagonism toward women and people of color, according to interviews with 13 current and former staff members.

Twitter, as the saying goes, may not be real life, but in a world of remote work, Slack very much is. And Twitter, Slack, Zoom, and the office space, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former executive directors of advocacy organizations, are now mixing in a way that is no longer able to be ignored by a progressive movement that wants organizations to be able to function. The executive directors largely spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of angering staff or donors.

"To be honest with you, this is the biggest problem on the left over the last six years," one concluded. "This is so big. And it's like abuse in the family - it's the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. And you have to be super sensitive about who the messengers are."

For a number of obvious and intersecting reasons - my race, gender, and generation - I am not the perfect messenger. But here it goes anyway.

F or progressive movement organizations, 2021 promised to be the year they turned power into policy, with a Democratic trifecta and the Biden administration broadcasting a bold vision of "transformational change." Out of the gate, Democrats pushed ahead with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, funding everything from expanded health care to a new monthly child tax credit. Republican efforts to slow-walk the process with disingenuous counteroffers were simply dismissed.

And then, sometime in the summer, the forward momentum stalled, and many of the progressive gains lapsed or were reversed. Instead of fueling a groundswell of public support to reinvigorate the party's ambitious agenda, most of the foundation-backed organizations that make up the backbone of the party's ideological infrastructure were still spending their time locked in virtual retreats, Slack wars, and healing sessions, grappling with tensions over hierarchy, patriarchy, race, gender, and power.

"So much energy has been devoted to the internal strife and internal bullshit that it's had a real impact on the ability for groups to deliver," said one organization leader who departed his position. "It's been huge, particularly over the last year and a half or so, the ability for groups to focus on their mission, whether it's reproductive justice, or jobs, or fighting climate change."

"My last nine months, I was spending 90 to 95 percent of my time on internal strife."

This is, of course, a caricature of the left: that socialists and communists spend more time in meetings and fighting with each other than changing the world. But in the wake of Donald Trump's presidential election, and then Joe Biden's, it has become nearly all-consuming for some organizations, spreading beyond subcultures of the left and into major liberal institutions. "My last nine months, I was spending 90 to 95 percent of my time on internal strife. Whereas [before] that would have been 25-30 percent tops," the former executive director said. He added that the same portion of his deputies' time was similarly spent on internal reckonings.

"Most people thought that their worst critics were their competitors, and they're finding out that their worst critics are on their own payroll," said Loretta Ross, an author and activist who has been prominent in the movement for decades, having founded the reproductive justice collective SisterSong.

"We're dealing with a workforce that's becoming younger, more female, more people of color, more politically woke - I hate to use that term in a way it shouldn't be used - and less loyal in the traditional way to a job, because the whole economic rationale for keeping a job or having a job has changed." That lack of loyalty is not the fault of employees, Ross said, but was foisted on them by a precarious economy that broke the professional-social contract. That has left workers with less patience for inequities in the workplace.

"All my ED [executive director] friends, everybody's going through some shit, nobody's immune," said one who has yet to depart.

One senior progressive congressional staffer said that when groups don't disappear entirely to deal with internal strife, the discord is still noticeable on the other end. "I've noticed a real erosion of the number of groups who are effective at leveraging progressive power in Congress. Some of that is these groups have these organizational culture things that are affecting them," the staffer said. "Because of the organizational culture of some of the real movement groups that have lots of chapters, what they're lobbying on isn't relevant to the actual fights in Congress. Some of these groups are in Overton mode when we have a trifecta."

The idea, in theory, is that pushing their public policy demands further and further left widens the so-called Overton window of what's considered possible, thereby facilitating the future passage of ambitious legislation. Those maximalist political demands can also be a byproduct of internal strife, as organization leaders fend off charges of not internally embodying progressive values by pushing external rhetoric further left.

"There are wins to be had between now and the next couple months that could change the country forever, and folks are focused on stuff that has no theory of change for even getting to the House floor for a vote."

But, the aide pointed out, there is legislative potential now. "There are wins to be had between now and the next couple months that could change the country forever, and folks are focused on stuff that has no theory of change for even getting to the House floor for a vote."

"Sunrise is doing their Green New Deal pledge," the aide continued, describing the Sunrise Movement-led effort to get elected officials and candidates to sign on to an ambitious climate commitment. "The climate bill is still on the table. ... There's a universe where people are on the outside, focused on power and leveraging power for progressives in Congress. Instead, they're spending resources on stuff that is totally unrelated to governing. Nobody says, 'Hey guys, could you maybe come and maybe focus on this?'"

The silence stems partly, one senior leader in an organization said, from a fear of feeding right-wing trolls who are working to undermine the left. Adopting their language and framing feels like surrendering to malign forces, but ignoring it has only allowed the issues to fester. "The right has labeled it 'cancel culture' or 'callout culture,'" he said, "so when we talk about our own movement, it's hard because we're using the frame of the right. It's very hard because there's all these associations and analysis that we disagree with, when we're using their frame. So it's like, 'How do we talk about it?'"

For years, recruiting young people into the movement felt like a win-win, he said: new energy for the movement and the chance to give a person a lease on a newly liberated life, dedicated to the pursuit of justice. But that's no longer the case. "I got to a point like three years ago where I had a crisis of faith, like, I don't even know, most of these spaces on the left are just not - they're not healthy. Like all these people are just not - they're not doing well," he said. "The dynamic, the toxic dynamic of whatever you want to call it - callout culture, cancel culture, whatever - is creating this really intense thing, and no one is able to acknowledge it, no one's able to talk about it, no one's able to say how bad it is."

The environment has pushed expectations far beyond what workplaces previously offered to employees. "A lot of staff that work for me, they expect the organization to be all the things: a movement, OK, get out the vote, OK, healing, OK, take care of you when you're sick, OK. It's all the things," said one executive director. "Can you get your love and healing at home, please? But I can't say that, they would crucify me."

W hat's driving the upheaval can't be disentangled from the broader cultural debates about speech, power, race, sexuality, and gender that have shaken institutions in recent years. Netflix, for instance, made news recently by laying off 290 staffers - a move described by the tabloid press as targeting the "wokest" workers - in the midst of roiling tensions at the streaming company.

"It's not just the nonprofit world, though, so let's be clear," said Ross. "I started a for-profit consulting firm last year with three other partners, because every C-suite that's trying to be progressive is undergoing the same kind of callout culture. And so it's happening societywide." Business, she said, is booming, but the implications have been especially pronounced within progressive institutions, given their explicit embrace of progressive values.

Sooner or later, each interview for this story landed on the election of Trump in 2016 as a catalyst. Whatever internal tension had been pulling at the seams of organizations in the years prior, Trump's shock victory sharpened the focus of activists and regular people alike. The institutional progressive world based in Washington, D.C., reacted slowly, shell-shocked and unsure of its place, but people outside those institutions raced ahead of them. A period of mourning turned into fierce determination to resist. Spontaneous women's marches were called in scores of cities, drawing as many as 5 million people, a shocking display of force. (Their collapse in a heap of identitarian recriminations is its own parable for this moment.)

New grassroots organizations like Indivisible sprang up, and old ones were rejuvenated with new volunteers and hundreds of millions of dollars from small donors across the country. The ACLU alone collected almost $1 million within 24 hours of Trump's election and tens of millions more over the next year. Airports were flooded with protesters when Trump announced his so-called Muslim ban. Fueled by that anger, Democrats stormed back into control of the House in 2018, with a vibrant insurgent wing toppling the would-be speaker, Rep. Joe Crowley, and electing the most progressive freshman class ever.

After that election, incoming Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez teamed with the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats to occupy House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's congressional office to demand a Green New Deal. The protest put the issue on the map, and soon nearly every Democratic candidate for president was embracing it. But it was one of the only examples over the past five years of an organized, intentional intervention into the political conversation, which otherwise has been relatively leaderless and without focus. Presidential campaigns, particularly those of Sen. Bernie Sanders for the left, and midterms provide a natural funnel for activist energy, but once they're over, the demobilization comes quickly. That emptiness has been filled by infighting, and the fissures that are now engulfing everything in sight began to form early.

In August 2017, when a rising "alt-right" organized a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the ACLU went to court to defend the right to march on First Amendment grounds, as it had famously done for generations. When a right-wing demonstrator plowed his car into a crowd, he killed counterprotester Heather Heyer and wounded dozens of others.

Internally, staff at the ACLU, concentrated among the younger people there, condemned the decision to defend the rally. Veteran lawyers at the ACLU complained to the New York Times that the new generation "placed less value on free speech, making it uncomfortable for them to express views internally that diverged from progressive orthodoxy."

Alejandro Agustín Ortiz, a lawyer with the organization's racial justice project, told the Times that "a dogmatism descends sometimes."

"You hesitate before you question a belief that is ascendant among your peer group," he said.

National Legal Director David Cole stood by the decision to defend the rally in a New York Review of Books essay. "We protect the First Amendment not only because it is the lifeblood of democracy and an indispensable element of freedom, but because it is the guarantor of civil society itself," he wrote.

Around 200 staff members responded with a letter slamming the essay as "'oblivious' to the ACLU's institutional racism," the New York Times reported, noting that 12 of the organization's top 21 leaders were Black, Latino, or Asian and 14 were women.

Under pressure, the ACLU said it would dial back its defense of free speech. Wrote the Times: "Revulsion swelled within the A.C.L.U., and many assailed its executive director, Anthony Romero, and legal director, Mr. Cole, as privileged and clueless. The A.C.L.U. unfurled new guidelines that suggested lawyers should balance taking a free speech case representing right-wing groups whose 'values are contrary to our values' against the potential such a case might give 'offense to marginalized groups.'"

An internal dispute over the organization's absolutist commitment to free speech is to be expected after such a tragedy. But the conflict mushroomed; instead of finding common ground on the question, it became fodder for endless and sprawling internal microbattles.

The Times article on the ACLU infighting was published in September 2021, more than four years after the event that triggered it, and there's no sign of the tensions easing. Such prolonged combat has become standard, whether the triggering event is a cataclysmic one like Charlottesville or more prosaic, like a retweet of an offensive joke by a Washington Post reporter. The initial event prompts a response from staff, which is met by management with a memo or a town hall; in either case, the meeting or the organizationwide message often produces its own cause for new offense, a self-reproducing cycle that sucks in more and more people within the organization, who have either been offended, accused of giving offense, or both, along with their colleagues who are required to pick a side.

At the ACLU, as at many organizations, the controversy quickly evolved to include charges that senior leaders were hostile to staff from marginalized communities. Each accusation is unique; some have obvious merit, while others don't withstand scrutiny. What emerges by zooming out is the striking similarity of their trajectories. One foundation official who has funded many of the groups entangled in turmoil said that having a panoramic view allowed her to see those common threads. "It's the kind of thing that looks very context-specific, until you see a larger pattern," she said.

Things get very ugly, she noted, and the overlapping crises of Trump, Covid, and looming climate collapse have produced extreme anxiety. Under siege, many leaders cling more tightly to their hold on power, she said, "taking shelter in professional nonprofit spaces because they think clinging to a sinking ship and hanging on as long and strongly as possible is the best bet they can make for their own personal survival."

T hree years of post-Trump tensions crashed head-on into a pandemic lockdown and the uprising following the police murder of Floyd.

Progressive organizations convened meetings to work through their response, and, like at Guttmacher, many of them left staff extremely unsatisfied. A looming sense of powerlessness on the left nudged the focus away from structural or wide-reaching change, which felt out of reach, and replaced it with an internal target that was more achievable. "Maybe I can't end racism by myself, but I can get my manager fired, or I can get so and so removed, or I can hold somebody accountable," one former executive director said. "People found power where they could, and often that's where you work, sometimes where you live, or where you study, but someplace close to home."

Too much hype about what was possible electorally also played a role, said another leader. "Unrealistic expectations about what could be achieved through the electoral and legislative process has led us to give up on persuasion and believe convenient myths that we can change everything by 'mobilizing' a mythological 'base,'" he said. "This has led to navel-gazing and constant rehashing of internal culture debates, because the progressive movement is no longer convinced it can have an impact on the external world."

Things were also tense because of Covid. Jonathan Smucker is the author of the book "Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals" and trains and advises activists across the movement spectrum. After the pandemic forced people into quarantine in March 2020, he noted, many workplaces turned into pressure cookers. "COVID has severely limited in-person tactical options, and in-person face-to-face activities are absolutely vital to volunteer-driven efforts," he wrote to The Intercept. "Without these spaces, staff are more likely to become insular - a tendency that's hard enough to combat even without this shift. Moreover, the virtual environment (zoom meetings) may be convenient for all kinds of reasons, but it's a pretty lousy medium once there's conflict in an organization. In-person face-to-face time, in my experience, is irreplaceable when it comes to moving constructively through conflict. I know this is not the full picture and probably not even the root of these problems or conflicts, but it's almost certainly exacerbating them."

The histories of the organizations were scoured for evidence of white supremacy, and nobody had to look very hard. The founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was posthumously rebuked for her dalliance with eugenics, and her name was stripped in July 2020 from the headquarters of its New York affiliate. (In 2011, I won a "Planned Parenthood Maggie Award for Online Reporting," which I still have.)

At the Sierra Club, then-Executive Director Michael Brune published a statement headlined "Pulling Down Our Monuments," calling out founder John Muir for his association with eugenicists. "Muir was not immune to the racism peddled by many in the early conservation movement. He made derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes, though his views evolved later in his life," Brune wrote that July, adding:

For all the harms the Sierra Club has caused, and continues to cause, to Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color, I am deeply sorry. I know that apologies are empty unless accompanied by a commitment to change. I am making that commitment, publicly, right now. And I invite you to hold me and other Sierra Club leaders, staff, and volunteers accountable whenever we don't live up to our commitment to becoming an actively anti-racist organization.

Brune came to the Sierra Club, the environmental group founded in 1892, from Greenpeace and the anarchist-influenced Rainforest Action Network in 2010. He was considered at the time a radical choice to run the staid organization. Brune didn't last the summer.

The progressive congressional aide said the Sierra Club infighting that led to his departure was evident from the outside. "It caused so much internal churn that they stopped being engaged in any serious way at a really critical moment during Build Back Better," the aide said.

Then the Sierra Club's structure, which has relied on thousands of volunteers, many empowered with significant responsibility, also came under scrutiny after a volunteer was accused of rape. The consulting firm Ramona Strategies was brought in for an extensive "restorative accountability process" that The Intercept described last summer as an "internal reckoning around race, gender, and sexual as well as other abuse allegations."

"Being a 'volunteer-led' organization cannot stand for volunteers having carte blanche to ignore legal requirements or organizational values around equity and inclusivity - or basic human decency," the consultant's report stated. "All employees should be managed by and subject to the oversight of individuals also under the organization's clear control and direction as employees. There is no other way we can see."

The recommendation was the logical dead-end point of the inward focus. Having only employees and no volunteers - or, in the case of Everytown for Gun Safety, asking volunteers to sign nondisclosure agreements - would render moot the structure of most major movement groups, such as Indivisible, Sunrise, MoveOn, the NAACP, and so on.

The reckoning was in many ways long overdue, forcing organizations to deal with persistent problems of inclusion, equity, and poor management. "Progressive organizations are run like shit," acknowledged one executive director, arguing that the movement puts emphasis on leadership - more often called "servant leadership" now - but not enough on basic management. "I have all the degrees, but I don't have a management degree."

In the long term, the organizations may become better versions of themselves while finally living the values they've long fought for. In the short term, the battles between staff and organizational leadership have effectively sidelined major progressive institutions at a critical moment in U.S. and world history. "We used to want to make the world a better place," said one leader of a progressive organization. "Now we just make our organizations more miserable to work at."

T heorists have developed sophisticated ways to understand how political movements evolve over time. Bill Moyer, a former organizer with Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign who went on to lead the anti-nuclear movement, famously documented eight stages in his "Movement Action Plan." (Others have subsequently simplified it to four seasons that roughly map to the same waves.)

Stage one he called normal times, the period before the public is paying much attention to an issue, while only a few activists are working to develop solutions and tactics. Stage two is failure of institutions, as the public and activists more generally become aware of a problem and the need for change. This is early spring, which then evolves into stage three, ripening conditions. To take the civil rights movement as an example, Brown v. Board of Education helped ripen conditions, as did a rising Black college student population after World War II and the return of Black veterans from the war more generally, along with a surge in anti-colonial freedom struggles across Africa. The conditions are set.

Next comes a trigger event that shocks the conscience of the public, allowing the movement activists who've been at work on an issue to seize the moment, creating stage four, when social movements really take off. Rosa Parks was by no means the first Black woman arrested for refusing to go to the back of the bus, nor was Trayvon Martin the first Black teen to be shot by a vigilante, nor was Michael Brown the first Black teen to be killed by a police officer. But the events came at a time when the public was primed to see them as symptomatic of a broader social ill that needed to be confronted. Springtime for social movements is a time of great promise, optimism, and surging momentum, when the previously unthinkable comes within grasp. In 1957, Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act since Reconstruction.

But before it passed the Senate, it was stripped of its enforcement mechanisms, leaving much of the South still ruled by Jim Crow, helping produce the fifth stage, in which activists confront powerful obstacles and despair sets in. "After a year or two, the high hopes of movement take-off seems inevitably to turn into despair," Moyer wrote. "Most activists lose their faith that success is just around the corner and come to believe that it is never going to happen. They perceive that the powerholders are too strong, their movement has failed, and their own efforts have been futile. Most surprising is the fact that this identity crisis of powerlessness and failure happens when the movement is outrageously successful-when the movement has just achieved all of the goals of the take-off stage within two years."

Stage five happens coincidentally - and paradoxically - with stage six: majority public support. This is the period of time during which the movement has won over the public, with surveys showing two-thirds or more of the public siding with it on its question. Some elements of the movement adapt to this new environment and craft strategy to lock in gains, while other elements misread the moment and continue fighting as insurgents and outsiders.

This is the summer and fall period for a movement, followed inevitably by winter. Moyer calls stage seven success and stage eight "continuing the struggle," but activists have wildly different ideas about the meaning of success, with most seeing nothing but failure, even as they might acknowledge that, say, life was far more free for a Black American in 1977 than 1957.

Where does that put us today? The period since Occupy Wall Street represents the single largest mass mobilization since the 1960s and encompassed the Movement for Black Lives; the Women's March, #MeToo, and the broader resistance to the Trump administration; climate activism, the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline and for the Green New Deal; Sandy Hook, Parkland, and March for Our Lives; the presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020 of Sanders, topped off by global mass protests in the wake of the murder of Floyd.

But summer has turned to fall. Or is it winter? The seizing of a trifecta in Washington by Democrats has coincided with a mass social movement demobilization. Those activated by Trump have stepped back. Democratic leaders spent more energy attacking the phrase "defund the police" than they invested in police reform, which died in the Senate without a vote. Johnny Depp rode the backlash to a $15 million defamation verdict.

In moments of political winter, turning inward or simply stepping out of the movement is common. The year 1968 saw an explosion of activism, capping more than a decade of progress that had been made in fits and starts. The Civil Rights Act of 1968, known as the Fair Housing Act, was signed into law during the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago turned into a police riot, and protests against the Vietnam War surged. The November election of Richard Nixon as president shifted the landscape. Demonstrations against the war continued, but they were never as large as those in the mid-'60s and included more radical elements advocating violent insurrection, further self-marginalizing. In 1969, a faction of activists took over Students for a Democratic Society, shut it down, and launched the Weather Underground in its place, declaring war on the United States and carrying out multiple attacks. The "back-to-the-land" movement saw young people dropping out of society and joining communes. The Black Panther Party was crushed and collapsed.

Mark Rudd, an early member of SDS, helped convert it to the Weather Underground, a role he now regrets. "After the war was over, a lot of the left went on a complete and total dead end," he said. "We don't want power. We're allergic to it. It's not in our DNA. We don't like coercion. We don't like hegemony."

Winning power requires working in coalition with people who, by definition, do not agree with you on everything; otherwise they'd be part of your organization and not a separate organization working with you in coalition. Winning power requires unity in the face of a greater opposition, which runs counter to a desire to live a just life in each moment.

"People want justice, and they want their pain acknowledged," Rudd said. "But on the other hand, if acknowledging their pain causes organizations to die, or erodes the solidarity and the coalition-building that's needed for power, it's probably not a good thing. In other words, it can lead to the opposite, more power for the fascists."

Rudd spent seven years as a fugitive after the Weather Underground began to fall apart and later served a prison sentence. ("I was a total nutcase," he said of his previous politics.) He has since returned to activism, but no amount of history in the movement can immunize anyone from a callout. Asked about the turmoil engulfing left-wing organizations, he said he had personal experience. "I have myself encountered it multiple times in the last years. And in fact, I was thrown out of an organization that I founded because of my 'racism,'" he said. "What was my racism? When I tell people things that they didn't want to hear," he added, saying the disputes were over things like criticism he leveled at a young, nonwhite activist around the organizing of a demonstration. "I mean, it's normal. It's what's happening everywhere."

What's new is that it's now happening everywhere, whereas in previous decades it had yet to migrate out of more radical spaces. "We used to call it 'trashing,'" said Ross, the reproductive justice activist. The 1970s were a brutal period in activist spaces, documented most famously in a 1976 Ms. Magazine article and a subsequent book by feminist Jo Freeman, both called " Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood." "What is 'trashing,'" she asks, "this colloquial term that expresses so much, yet explains so little?"

It is not disagreement; it is not conflict; it is not opposition. These are perfectly ordinary phenomena which, when engaged in mutually, honestly, and not excessively, are necessary to keep an organism or organization healthy and active. Trashing is a particularly vicious form of character assassination which amounts to psychological rape. It is manipulative, dishonest, and excessive. It is occasionally disguised by the rhetoric of honest conflict, or covered up by denying that any disapproval exists at all. But it is not done to expose disagreements or resolve differences. It is done to disparage and destroy.

Ross, a Smith College professor who helped coin both the terms "reproductive justice" and, in 1977, " women of color, " said that she often hears from people skeptical of her critique of callout culture. "The No. 1 thing people fear is that I'm giving a pass to white people to continue to be racist," she said. "Most Black people say, 'I am not ready to call in the racist white boy, I just ain't gonna do it.' They think it's a kindness lesson or a civility lesson, when it's really an organizing lesson that we're offering, because if someone knows if someone has made a mistake, and they know they're going to face a firing squad for having made that mistake, they're not gonna wanna come to you and be accountable to you. It is not gonna happen that way. And so the whole callout culture contradicts itself because it thwarts its own goal."

T he tired online debate over the question of cancel culture has been spinning for years. The question of its existence, however, has become a luxury reserved only for commentators not involved with any organization pursuing social justice. For those actively involved in the collective pursuit of a better world, the question is what to do about it, how to channel it toward its original end. "We must learn to do this before there is no one left to call out, or call we, or call us," wrote adrienne maree brown, a veteran activist in the harm reduction and abolition space, in an influential 2020 essay. The collapse of progressive institutions is forcing a question most in the movement would rather avoid answering.

It's become hard to hire leaders of unmanageable organizations. A recent article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy noted that nonprofits were having an extraordinarily hard time finding new leaders amid unprecedented levels of departures among senior officials. "We've been around for 26 years, and I haven't seen anything like this," Gayle Brandel, CEO of PNP Staffing Group, a nonprofit executive search firm, told the trade publication, explaining the difficulty in finding executives to fill the vacancies.

"The protests for racial equity in 2020 also changed many groups' and employees' perspectives and expectations," the Chronicle reported. "In some ways, it's an incredibly healthy response to both an opportunity and a set of challenges," Dan Cardinali, the outgoing CEO of Independent Sector, told the publication. "It is disruptive and, in the short term, inefficient. In the middle and long term, I'm hopeful that it will be actually a profound accelerator in our ability to be a force for the common good, for a thriving and healthy country."

Executive directors across the space said they too have tried to organize their hiring process to filter out the most disruptive potential staff. "I'm now at a point where the first thing I wonder about a job applicant is, 'How likely is this person to blow up my organization from the inside?'" said one, echoing a refrain heard repeatedly during interviews for this story. (One executive director noted that their group's high-profile association with a figure considered in social justice spaces to be problematic had gone from a burden to a boon, as the man now serves as an accidental screen, filtering out activists who'd be most likely to focus their energy on internal fights rather than the organization's mission.)

"Everyone is scared, and fear creates the inaction that the right wing needs to succeed in cementing a deeply unpopular agenda."

Another leader said the strife has become so destructive that it feels like an op. "I'm not saying it's a right-wing plot, because we are incredibly good at doing ourselves in, but - if you tried - you couldn't conceive of a better right-wing plot to paralyze progressive leaders by catalyzing the existing culture where internal turmoil and microcampaigns are mistaken for strategic advancement of social impact for the millions of people depending on these organizations to stave off the crushing injustices coming our way," said another longtime organization head. "Progressive leaders cannot do anything but fight inside the orgs, thereby rendering the orgs completely toothless for the external battles in play. ... Everyone is scared, and fear creates the inaction that the right wing needs to succeed in cementing a deeply unpopular agenda."

During the 2020 presidential campaign, as entry-level staffers for Sanders repeatedly agitated over internal dynamics, despite having already formed a staff union, the senator issued a directive to his campaign leadership: "Stop hiring activists." Instead, Sanders implored, according to multiple campaign sources, the campaign should focus on bringing on people interested first and foremost in doing the job they're hired to do.

There are obvious difficulties for the leadership of progressive organizations when it comes to pushing back against staff insurrections. The insurrections are done in the name of justice, and there are very real injustices at these organizations that need to be grappled with. Failing to give voice to that reality can leave the impression that group leaders are only interested in papering over internal problems and trying to hide their own failings behind the mission of the organization. And in an atmosphere of distrust, the worst intentions are assumed. Critics of this article will claim that its intention is to tell workers to sit down and shut up and suck up whatever indignities are doled out in the name of progress.

The reckoning has coincided with an awakened and belated appreciation for diversity in the upper ranks of progressive organizations. The mid-2010s saw an influx of women into top roles for the first time, many of them white, followed more recently by a slew of Black and brown leaders at most major organizations. One compared the collision of the belated respect for Black leaders and the upswell of turmoil inside institutions with the "hollow prize" thesis. The most common example of the hollow prize is the victory in the 1970s and '80s of Black mayors across the country, just as cities were being hollowed out and disempowered. Or, for instance, salaries in the medical field collapsed just as women began graduating into the field.

"I just got the keys and y'all are gonna come after me on this shit?" one executive director who said he felt like a version of those '70s-era mayors told The Intercept. "'It's white supremacy culture! It's urgent!' No motherfucker, it's Election Day. We can't move that day. Just do your job or go somewhere else."

Being Black has by no means shielded executive directors or their deputies from charges of facilitating white supremacy culture. "It's hard to have a conversation about performance," said the manager. "I'm as woke as they come, but they'll say, 'He's Black, but he's anti-Black because he fired these Black people.'" The solution, he said: "I buy them to leave, I just pay them to leave."

Inner turmoil can often begin, the managers said, with performance-based disputes that spiral into moral questions. "I also see a pattern of ... people who are not competent in their orgs getting ahead of the game by declaring that others have engaged in some kind of -ism, thereby triggering a process that protects them in that job while there's an investigation or turmoil over it," the foundation official added. Such disputes then trigger broader cultural conversations, with battle lines being drawn on each side.

The same is true on campaigns. Dianne Morales, a woman of color, saw her New York mayoral campaign blown up by a staff uprising, which included complaints of mistreatment, misogyny, and racism as well as a demand that workers be paid while on strike, which Morales noted was illegal given the campaign's use of public financing. In other cases, staff have approached local chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America to level complaints against candidates they worked or had worked for, including Ihssane Leckey, a Muslim immigrant from Morocco running for a congressional seat outside Boston; Brandy Brooks, a Black woman running for Montgomery County Council in Maryland; and Shahid Buttar, an Ahmadiyya Muslim immigrant running for Congress in San Francisco. When the chapters move to unendorse, citing toxicity inside the workplace, the campaigns are crippled.

The reliance of so many organizations on foundation funding rather than member donations is central to the upheavals the groups have seen in recent years, one group leader said, because the groups aren't accountable to the public for failing to accomplish anything, as long as the foundation flows continue. "Unlike labor unions, church groups, membership organizations, or even business lobbies, large foundations and grant-funded nonprofits aren't accountable to the people whose interests they claim to represent and have no concrete incentive to win elections or secure policy gains," they said. "The fundamental disconnect of organizations to the communities they purport to serve has led to endless 'strategic refreshes' and 'organizational resets' that have even further disconnected movements from the actual goals."

Beyond not producing incentives to function, foundations generally exacerbate the internal turmoil by reflexively siding with staff uprisings and encouraging endless concessions, said multiple executive directors who rely on foundation support. "It happens every time," said one. "They're afraid of their own staffs."

Organizations that start out by making significant concessions to staff often get run over in short order, said multiple organization heads who watched the process unfold. "You see it on the micro scale too," said one former executive director who plans to hunker down in the world of consulting for the next several years, "like when there's an individual manager who gives up her or his power and just goes belly up and says, 'Oh, yes, I have to apologize for thousands of years of oppression and I will never be able to make it up to you, but I will try.' People will just roll all over them."

T he pendulum may be swinging back. "I have been a part of a bunch of conversations among progressives who have documented the pain that all the progressive groups are under. And there has been some organizing to push back against that," said one former group leader, saying that a letter - akin to the " Harper's letter " - was being drafted and organized, "documenting how people are using race or gender, or some combination of issues, as weapons and using it to distract from the mission of many organizations or to fight internal battles, the kind of stuff that you've seen, while legitimizing the work that needs to be done in different institutions and across society on race and gender."

"They don't think what we've been doing for decades has worked. Wanting to burn it down is not irrational."

The pushback against callout culture, which might be surprising on a surface level, is bubbling up in Black movement spaces. "In the movement for Black lives, there is a lot of the top leaders saying, 'This is out of control. No one can be a leader in this culture. It's not sustainable. We're constantly being called out from the bottom,'" said one white movement leader who works closely with Black Lives Matter leaders. "Nowadays, there's an open conversation - not open, there is a large conversation - about the problems of this, and it's being led by people within the movement for Black lives," he said. "We didn't have that three years ago, and if we did, they were a minority and were totally isolated. Now it's so bad that there's now a growing backlash within our own movements."

Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, called the phenomenon out in the book " How We Fight White Supremacy," writing, "People don't understand that organizing isn't going online and cussing people out or going to a protest and calling something out."

adrienne maree brown, an author and the former executive director of the radical direct action-oriented group the Ruckus Society, penned the widely read essay "unthinkable thoughts: call out culture in the age of covid-19" in July 2020. She raised the provocative question of whether collectively we as a people still have a will to fight, or even to live. Indeed, oftentimes, according to multiple group leaders, when they have warned staff that the endless turmoil is destroying their organization, the argument doesn't land. "They don't think what we've been doing for decades has worked," said one. "Wanting to burn it down is not irrational." Brown's essay is a plea to live again, to care again about the movement as a whole. Capitalization and bold in the original:

the kind of callouts we are currently engaging in do not necessarily think about movements' needs as a whole. movements need to grow and deepen, we need to 'transform ourselves to transform the world'*, to 'be transformed in the service of the work'**. movements need to become the practice ground for what we are healing towards, co-creating. movements are responsible for embodying what we are inviting our people into. we need the people within our movements, all socialized into and by unjust systems, to be on liberation paths. not already free, but practicing freedom every day. not already beyond harm, but accountable for doing our individual and internal work to end harm, which includes actively working to gain awareness of the ways we can and have harmed each other, and ending those cycles in ourselves and our communities.

knee jerk call outs say: those who cause harm cannot change. they must be eradicated. the bad things in the world cannot change, we must disappear the bad until there is only good left.

but one layer under that, what i hear is:

we cannot change.

we do not believe we can create compelling pathways from being harm doers to being healed, to growing.

we do not believe we can hold the complexity of a gray situation.

we do not believe in our own complexity.

we can only handle binary thinking: good/bad, innocent/guilty, angel/abuser, black/white, etc.

it is a different kind of suicide, to attack one part of ourselves at a time. cancer does this, i have seen it - oh it's in the throat, now it's in the lungs, now it's in the bones. when we engage in knee jerk call outs and instant consequences with no process, we become a cancer unto ourselves, unto movements and communities. we become the toxicity we long to heal. we become a tool of harm when we are trying to be, and i think meant to be, a balm.

we must learn to do this before there is no one left to call out, or call we, or call us.

Ross, in an essay for the New York Times, ends with a call for grace, pointing to the suppressed nature of the conversation. "I say to people today, as a survivor of COINTELPRO," she told me, referring to the FBI scheme to infiltrate and disrupt leftist movements by sowing internal dissension, "if you're more wedded to destabilizing an organization than unifying it, part of me is gonna think you're naïve, and the other part of me is gonna think you're a plant. And neither one of those is going to look good on you."

In early June 2021, at the height of the battle over the climate provisions in Build Back Better, Fox News went for one such jiujitsu move, running a story headlined "Left-wing climate group Sunrise Movement torn by internal division."

The creative director at the left-wing Sunrise Movement claimed Tuesday that he was fired after accusing leadership of ignoring Black members' demands, generating internal conflict within the group dedicated to youth activism against climate change.

Alex O'Keefe said he was terminated after sending a letter with demands from the "Sunrise Black Caucus" calling on Sunrise Movement to "publicly reckon with the movement-wide crisis we are in [and] dismantle our white, owning-class culture."

Sunrise has had its share of internal crises, but this one didn't pan out the way Fox News had hoped. Varshini Prakash, the group's co-founder, quickly responded to O'Keefe on Twitter:

Alex, I love you and you've done incredible work for our movement, but this isn't what happened.

You haven't shown up for work in months. Multiple friends and colleagues reached out repeatedly to figure out when you were coming back, and you didn't engage.

In a movement powered by so many volunteers, we take really seriously the responsibility of being a paid staff member.

I'm not going to say anything else publicly, but I'm always here if you decide you want to talk.

Key to the organization's ability to move forward, though, was what happened next. The organization's Black staff unanimously agreed to put out a public statement squashing the situation.

Updates, feelings and solidarity within @sunrisemvmt from Black staff pic.twitter.com/quz8Qa4XtP

- Nakia Stephens ? (@nsteps_) June 9, 2021

Callouts have always been and will always be a part of any healthy culture. It's how the community responds to the callout that answers the question of whether it can continue to be a community. If every callout leads a mob to shoot first and ask questions later, we get what we have today. If the callout is examined soberly and judiciously, only those with merit get a hearing.

"When people do this callout stuff, one of the regulatory forces is people around them that they care about saying, 'Dude, don't blow this shit up.' They can't get that from the front of the room, they can't get that from the authority in the room. They have to get it through the people that they care about," said a leading organizer. "The best thing is just saying well, you need to be an organization, and organizations naturally have rank and authority that is respected. It has to function. So you're leaning on the regulatory forces that are already inherent in community and in organization to limit the opportunity of people to act that stuff out in certain environments."

If every callout leads a mob to shoot first and ask questions later, we get what we have today. If the callout is examined soberly and judiciously, only those with merit get a hearing.

Priming those regulatory forces requires confident management, backed up by supportive funders, aligned with at least a faction of the staff. "Clarity and strength on both sides seems to work the best. So clarity and strength in saying, yeah, this institution or this movement, or across society, we have work to be done on racial justice, gender justice, economic justice, climate, and so on, and to try to not throw platitudes at that, but to be as specific and insightful as possible," one former executive director said. "And then to say also: Here's the mission of our organization, here's what we're doing at our institution, company, university, whatever, here's what we're focused on, and this - calling folks on whatever bullshit might be happening - is not what we're doing. To be really clear about the work that needs to be done or the behaviors that are acceptable and not."

W hen pressed, even those who were most optimistic about a potential resolution of the crisis acknowledged that the pushback is at best in its embryonic phase. The pendulum is still carrying a wrecking ball through the headquarters of Guttmacher. The post-Floyd probe was the second such investigation in recent years. In 2017, Guttmacher surveyed its state affiliates and found dissatisfaction with the nature of its legislative coalition, with particular complaints directed at its alliance with the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. In the wake of the deadly white nationalist march in Charlottesville, which the ACLU had defended ahead of time in court, progressive staff wanted distance from the organization, while Planned Parenthood was seen as a stand-in for what Prism derided as "white feminism."

"There were questions about why the group was so abortion-focused and why reproductive justice organizations weren't at the table," one staffer recounted to Prism. "We were looking at abortion as a single issue and without making space for the handful of women of color in the room, let alone reproductive justice organizations."

The resulting report, delivered in 2019, was based in part on extensive interviews with staff and managers, including a survey of 107 staffers, and found a "white dominant culture" that the organization pledged to diversify.

The notion that Guttmacher is too abortion-focused, and ought to be more inclusive of the reproductive justice movement, risks "mission drift," Ross told The Intercept. "What are they talking about?"

"I would say that Guttmacher is a data collector, a research organization. They play that role very well, in my opinion. I'm not quite sure how Guttmacher could be more reproductive justice-focused," she said. "Guttmacher's great in the lane that it's in."

Different organizations, and different people, play different roles in the movement, she said, and people should be OK with that. "Guttmacher is good at detailing the biological factors around reproductive oppression," Ross said. "I would not want Guttmacher to lose its ability to give me the researchable, quotable data that I need to do my activist work. So I don't necessarily need them trying to redirect themselves into meeting whatever somebody else's definition of reproductive justice is."

On the morning of May 2, 2022, employees of Guttmacher announced on social media - Twitter, specifically - the result of an effort that had stretched back months: They had sent a letter to management urging voluntary recognition of a new union.

That very night, a story in Politico rocked the abortion rights world by revealing that the Supreme Court had decided to overturn Roe v. Wade, publishing a devastating draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by four others. It was the moment the reproductive justice movement had been anticipating for years, and protesters immediately flooded the steps of the Supreme Court.

The next morning, the staff, however, was back at work on its union drive, with its first post thanking the public for its support of the effort: "Seeing your messages, likes, follows, and retweets reaffirms our determination as we wait to hear from Guttmacher leadership."

Reading the room, a follow-up post added that they were "still reeling from last night's leaked draft of the #SCOTUS decision to overturn Roe," expressing "solidarity with abortion workers."

Throughout May, Guttmacher's staff regularly updated the public on its battle with management over voluntary recognition. In mid-May, workers at the Groundswell Fund, one of the largest funders of reproductive justice organizations, announced that their five-month struggle with management over unionizing had resulted in voluntary recognition.

Such recognition wouldn't come for Guttmacher's staff. On June 1, the workers said they'd rejected management's offer because it demanded " months of no strike and non-disparagement clauses." Instead, they would seek an election, they announced.

"It's a symptom of poor threat assessment," said Ross. "They can't identify the main threat."
Correction: June 13, 2022, 9:20 p.m. ET The Brandy Brooks campaign was erroneously included in a list of cases in which mostly white staff approached DSA chapters to seek the revocation of an endorsement. Her staff was not mostly white. The piece also misattributed a quote to Loretta Ross, and it has been removed. Update: June 14, 2022
The piece has been updated with ReproJobs's budget. The story has also been tweaked to clarify the quote on its Instagram story was submitted to and republished by ReproJobs.

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Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History

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Locked in a cycle of Slack callouts and healing retreats, progressive groups have brought themselves to a grinding halt.

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Resources for better, more inclusive design

You can find color management tools, typography guidelines, image use guidelines, and an accessibility checklist here. We’ve also gathered videos and courses that can help you dive deeper into accessible and inclusive design.

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The National Council of Nonprofits is a trusted resource and proven advocate for America’s charitable nonprofits. Connecting the policy dots across all levels and branches of governments, the Council of Nonprofits keeps nonprofits informed and empowered to create a positive public policy environment that best supports nonprofits in advancing their missions. Working with and through the nation’s largest network of nonprofits – with 25,000-plus organizational members - we identify emerging trends, share proven practices, and promote solutions that benefit charitable nonprofits and the communities they serve.

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The National Council of Nonprofits stands with others for equity and justice and in denouncing racism, intolerance, and exclusion. Yet taking a stand is not enough. We, along with many other charitable nonprofits, have been on a path of exploration to identify how to build the core values of diversity, equity, and inclusion into all our nonprofit's operations, as well as model those values as we advance our mission.

We believe that embracing these organizational values is a way to intentionally make space for positive outcomes to flourish, whether in direct services or in the nonprofit capacity-building or public policy spheres. We urge each nonprofit to examine and articulate its own values and be guided by them. How will our nonprofits apply those values in their daily operations?

The National Council of Nonprofits is asking these questions and will continue to highlight resources such as those below that nonprofits can use to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in their work, in their employment practices, in their board rooms, and in their communications.

We started - and continue - with honest internal dialogue that encourages our staff and board members to reflect, listen to each other, and learn from one another's experiences. We're also engaged in a multi-year dialogue with state networks of nonprofits to explore how our members can best advance this work throughout the sector. We have learned from other nonprofits how they are incorporating these values while advancing their missions, and we're eager to share.

For some organizations, simply doing what is right may be enough to spur action. Others may be moved by data showing that diversity can boost the quality of decision-making and that a diverse workforce is smarter and higher-performing and fosters enhanced innovation. And when board members, employees, donors, and others who shape the values and activities of a nonprofit come from a wide array of backgrounds, they bring unique perspectives that influence how the nonprofit approaches its mission in more inclusive and innovative ways.

At the National Council of Nonprofits, we have been on an intentional journey to assess how our organization can champion diversity, equity, and inclusion as values for our sector. On this page, we've curated resources that we have found helpful in this work for ourselves as individuals, for our organization, and for our network.

We hope the following practice pointers, questions to consider, and resources will offer inspiration and guidance about how to embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion as fundamental values - and how to integrate these values throughout the operations and activities of your nonprofit.

Practice Pointers

Many organizations find that it's helpful to begin with an exploration of terms and definitions. This can help spark deep conversations about how we individually interpret and experience discrimination of whatever nature. This Social Justice Glossary from the YWCA offers a common vocabulary for difficult conversations.

Understanding your own and your team's implicit/unconscious biases is key to opening doors to equity. Project Implicit offers a tool to test your implicit associations about race, gender, sexual orientation, and other identities.

As one starting point, you may find Americans for the Arts' Statement of Cultural Equity to be of interest. Remember, though, that values written on a page are only a start: they must be woven throughout programs and policies and demonstrated by your organization's actions.

There are many skilled practitioners and consultants in the sector that can assist your nonprofit in navigating the internal work to create more awareness about and take action on diversity, inclusion, and equity. See below under "Resources" and "Practitioners" to find help, some low- or no-cost and some paid.

Diversity without inclusion doesn't necessarily advance equity. See Equity in the Center President Kerrien Suarez's February 2023 post for a thoughtful discussion of shifting from "transactional" DEI work to "transformational" race equity work.

Questions to Consider when Creating a DE&I Action Plan for Your Nonprofit

How transparent does your organization wish to be about the steps it is taking to become more diverse and encourage inclusive practices? How does your organization communicate its values to the public, to paid staff, and to volunteers?

Are organizational values published on the nonprofit's website or otherwise shared publicly? Does it make sense for your DE&I commitments to be inward-facing, outward-facing, or a combination of both?

Do community, grassroots, or young leaders in low-income, under-served and/or marginalized populations within your nonprofit's community have a voice in your organization? Do they have authentic influence?

How can your nonprofit open its board recruitment and staff hiring pipeline to talented candidates from among underrepresented groups?

Is your organization's commitment to diversity, inclusion, and equity part of the orientation message for new board members and incorporated into onboarding new teammates and volunteers?

Does your organization expect its collaborative and community partners to uphold its own values?

How will your nonprofit assess the progress you are making towards your goals of diversity, inclusion, and equity? What will success look and feel like?

Resources for Your Nonprofit's Learning Journey

Awake to Woke to Work, from Equity in the Center, includes a glossary, a comprehensive list of resources, and a framework for how to look at the levers that influence and support a nonprofit's race equity culture.

The Race to Lead report series explores the results of surveys conducted in 2016, 2019, and soon 2022, and challenges the way the nonprofit sector has been approaching the racial leadership gap. Other reports in the series address LGBTQ nonprofit staff and women of color in the nonprofit sector.

Nonprofits with limited resources may want to check out USC's Diversity Toolkit: A Guide to Discussing Identity, Power and Privilege with ideas for "DIY" facilitation that can stimulate conversation and learning. See also How to Begin Equity Work in Your Organization with Little or No Money from the North Carolina Center for Nonprofits and Embracing Equity: Race Equity and Inclusion Action Guide from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

The Michigan Nonprofit Association offers an affordable Diversity, Inclusion & Equity Assessment Tool designed to help nonprofit organizations assess their current status and future progress on the journey to put these values into practice. (Level 1 Individual Assessment is free to MNA members.)

RespectAbility offers a series of free resources for creating an inclusive culture for people with disabilities, from recruiting, accommodating, and promoting employees with disabilities to ensuring that events are accessible and language is welcoming.

Racial equity tools is a library of resources designed to support individuals and groups working to achieve racial equity.

After Americans for the Arts created its new Statement on Cultural Equity in 2016, the organization shared its process so that others could learn from its example: 10 Steps We Took to Create The Americans for the Arts Statement on Cultural Equity.

Learn about Trabian Shorters' work on Asset-Framing in this series of videos from the Skillman Foundation, or read Trabian's article 'You Can't Lift People Up by Putting Them Down': How to Talk About Tough Issues of Race, Poverty, and More in the Chronicle of Philanthropy (paywall).

Resources for Nonprofit Boards and Employers: Building Values into Actions

It's becoming standard to disclose salary ranges in job postings, a practice that helps to promote equitable hiring practices (Nonprofit AF), especially for women and people of color. Our article Can New Laws and Practices Address Pay Disparities? from February 2022 rounds up recent data and legislation supporting salary transparency.

The article Black Women in Nonprofits Matter by Dr. Danielle Moss Lee in Nonprofit Quarterly offers pointers for hiring and elevating Black women to leadership positions.

To correct for systemic inequities in the sector and beyond, many nonprofits seek to hire or promote leaders of color. Yet, nonprofits often do not have the expertise or supports in place to make these transitions successful. The Building Movement Project's (BMP) report Trading Glass Ceilings for Glass Cliffs: A Race to Lead Report on Nonprofit Executives of Color focuses on the experiences and challenges of nonprofit leaders of color who have attained the top position in their organizations. An additional BMP report, Making (Or Taking) Space: Initial Themes on Nonprofit Transitions from White to BIPOC Leaders, asks, "What is the responsibility of organizations with white leaders transitioning out of these roles to support incoming leaders of color?" Make sure you are familiar with BMP's research and recommendations before conducting a search, hiring, or onboarding a leader of color.

Nonprofit HR conducts a regular survey of nonprofits regarding their diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice practices. Read the 2022 Nonprofit Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Justice Survey Results to gain insights, benchmarking data, and links to additional resources.

Conventional nonprofit capacity-building has often been designed by white consultants for white-led, mainstream nonprofits. Transformational Capacity Building shares seven practices needed to "support the growth, self-determination, and resiliency of nonprofits of color by creating the conditions for organizations and the communities they serve to thrive." (Stanford Social Innovation Review, Fall 2020)

In their article A Turning Point, Eden Stiffman and Jim Rendon explored how some nonprofits were finding equitable and inclusive ways to navigate shrinking resources in the age of coronavirus and the George Floyd protests. Their insights can be applied to nonprofits in any situation (Chronicle of Philanthropy, no paywall).

Also precipitated by the COVID-19 crisis but applicable to any time of constrained resources, the webinar Personnel Strategies in the Face of Impossible Choices (with Curt Klotz) considered how nonprofits can develop financially effective and equitable personnel strategies that uphold their values during an economic crisis. Curt's blog post Building Equity into Nonprofit Finance explores how values are evident in financial statements.

Michele Berger of NEO Law Group identifies ways to embed aspirational ideas into the organization's Bylaws and other institutional structures: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Nonprofit Bylaws (Nonprofit Law Blog).

Equity & Inclusion Lens Guide (Nonprofit Association of Oregon)

Practitioners with Whom We Have Worked Directly (and from Whom We Have Learned Much)

Additional Resources on Diversity for Boards of Directors

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Why Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Matter for Nonprofits

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Curated resources that can help nonprofits embed values of diversity, equity, and inclusion into their board rooms, communications, employment and hiring practices, and programs.

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White Women doing White Supremacy in Nonprofit Culture by Heather Laine Talley

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White Women doing White Supremacy in Nonprofit Culture by Heather Laine Talley

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White Women Doing White Supremacy in Nonprofit Culture

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Naming these patterns is not about calling out other white women or distancing myself from whiteness. My own behavior reflects these patterns and has perpetrated harm in ways I did not comprehend in the moment. I have been called on these practices. Sometimes, I heard what folks were trying to tell…

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How White Feminists Oppress Black Women: When Feminism Functions as White Supremacy by Monnica T. Williams

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How White Feminists Oppress Black Women: When Feminism Functions as White Supremacy by Monnica T. Williams

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How White Feminists Oppress Black Women: When Feminism Functions as White Supremacy

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In November, I participated in a panel discussion at a psychological conference in Washington DC. The name of the panel was Being a Mentor in the Era of #Metoo, which

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The Hidden Privilege in Design - Human-Centered Design should consider *all* humans by Hareem Mannan

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The Hidden Privilege in Design - Human-Centered Design should consider *all* humans by Hareem Mannan

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I remember listening carefully to the presentation on the redesign, trying hard to bite my tongue and keep my comments until the end. I was still shy, I still felt new, and I was battling a serious case of imposter syndrome. It was probably a dumb question, anyway. I shouldn't ask it.

Easier said than done. I felt the question permeating through every fiber of my being, reverberating in my mind until it was the only thought I had.

"Did you get anyone else's insight on this project? Was it just you all? Have you considered how that might be limiting at all?"

For about three seconds, I was relieved that someone asked this question. Then, I realized that person was me. Six white faces turned to look at me inquisitively. One woman, who looked extra offended, spoke next. She said a lot of things, but the crux of it was a lesson in what it means to be a designer.

"Design is about putting yourself in the shoes of your user... that's what being a designer is all about - human-centered design."

Some context - this very homogeneous team of designers was working to solve one of the most significant challenges of our era: redesigning the online immigration system, namely the process by which people apply to become citizens of the United States. I can't overstate how important it is to design this properly: it can singlehandedly skew one's ability to be successful in this world.

Because their users? Terrified, non-English speaking immigrants with everything on the line. Families who don't know the difference between a usability test and an interrogation. Mostly brown people. Mostly Spanish speakers. And many haunted with stories of separation, deportation, and devastation. I don't need to remind you of the demographics of the designers in the room.

How could this group possibly believe the idea of human-centered design was enough of a qualification for them to design for a demographic so far removed from their own experiences without at least acknowledging this massive gap?

Especially for a demographic whose fate depended on it?

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Human-Centered Design Should Consider All Humans

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As designers, we have the privilege of being able to help facilitate people's lives the way we do. How can we use that privilege responsibly and inclusively?

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The Difference Between Us

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

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

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Race: The House We Live In, PBS (6 mins)

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Race: The House We Live In, PBS (6 mins)

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Why White People Have a Hard Time Talking About Race, New York Times  (5 min)

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Why White People Have a Hard Time Talking About Race, New York Times  (5 min)

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A Conversation With White People On Race | Op-Docs | The New York Times

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Deconstructing White Privilege, Robin DiAngelo (22 min video)

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Deconstructing White Privilege, Robin DiAngelo (22 min video)

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Deconstructing White Privilege with Dr. Robin Di Angelo

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Dr. Robin DiAngelo is the author of What Does it Mean to Be White? Developing White Racial Literacy and has been an anti-racist educator, and has heard justifications of racism by white men and women in her workshops for over two decades. This justification, which she calls “white fragility,” is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation.

This video is part of the Vital Conversations 1 video series.

For more information on this series, click here:
http://www.gcorr.org/video/vital-conversations-racism-dr-robin-diangelo/

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DEI- Glossary of Terms - Columbia University School of Social Work

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DEI- Glossary of Terms - Columbia University School of Social Work

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Columbia School of Social Work | Graduate & MSW Programs in NYC

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Pursue a career in social work with the Columbia School of Social Work. We offer online and residential programs to help you become an agent of change.

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From the bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns:

The Origins of Our Discontents

"Wilkerson's work is the missing puzzle piece of our country's history."

- The American Prospect

Caste

The Origins of Our Discontents

Poetically written and brilliantly researched, Caste invites us to discover the inner workings of an American hierarchy that goes far beyond the confines of race, class, or gender.

A book steeped in empathy and insight, Caste explores, through layered analysis and stories of real people, the structure of an unspoken system of human ranking and reveals how our lives are still restricted by what divided us centuries ago.

"Modern-day caste protocols," Wilkerson writes, "are often less about overt attacks or conscious hostility. They are like the wind, powerful enough to knock you down but invisible as they go about their work."

Wilkerson rigorously defines eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, heredity, and dehumanization. She documents the parallels with two other hierarchies in history, those of India and of Nazi Germany, and no reader will be left without a greater understanding of the price we all pay in a society torn by artificial divisions.

"The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality," Wilkerson writes. "It is about power - which groups have it and which do not."

Before its release, the Chicago Tribune declared that Caste "should be at the top of every American's reading list." Dwight Garner, the chief critic of The New York Times, called Caste "an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far."

Upon publication, Oprah Winfrey announced that Caste was her Summer 2020 pick for Oprah's Book Club and proclaimed it "the most essential...the most necessary-for-all-humanity book that I have chosen."

The Warmth of Other Suns

The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

In this critically acclaimed, modern classic of narrative nonfiction, three young people set out on a perilous journey out of the Jim Crow South to the North and West in search of what the novelist Richard Wright called "the warmth of other suns."

"They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.
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- Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns

An intimate epic that puts in perspective our current era, The Warmth Of Other Suns follows Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster over the tumultuous decades of the 20th century as they join the six million African-Americans fleeing southern repression in what would come to be known as the Great Migration, a watershed in American history.

This deeply researched book interweaves their stories with the larger forces that triggered one of the largest migrations within the borders of this country.

"Absolutely revolutionary," Ta-Nehisi Coates said of The Warmth of Other Suns. "I always felt like it was the spiritual mother of 'The Case for Reparations.'"

The Great Migration was a leaderless quest for freedom, lasting from World War I to the 1970s, and became one of the biggest underrecognized stories of the 20th Century. It changed the country, North and South. It brought us John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Toni Morrison, August Wilson, Bill Russell, Motown, Denzel Washington, Michelle Obama -- all children or grandchildren of the Great Migration. It changed the social, cultural and political landscape of the United States, with consequences that persist to the current day.

The Warmth of Other Suns became an instant New York Times bestseller upon publication and has reappeared multiple times since its release. It has been named to TIME's 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade and to The New York Times Magazine 's Best Nonfiction of All Time.
Visit The Warmth of Other Suns website ▷

About Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, has become a leading figure in narrative nonfiction, an interpreter of the human condition, and an impassioned voice for demonstrating how history can help us understand ourselves, our country, and our current era of upheaval.

Through her writing, Wilkerson brings the invisible and the marginalized into the light and into our hearts. Through her lectures, she explores with authority the need to reconcile America's karmic inheritance and the origins of both our divisions and our shared commonality.

Her debut work, The Warmth of Other Suns, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia universities, and the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize and was shortlisted for both the Pen-Galbraith Literary Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

She is a native of Washington, D.C., and a daughter of the Great Migration, the mass movement that she would go on to write about. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1994, as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times, making her the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism. She then devoted fifteen years and interviewed more than 1,200 people to tell the story of the six million people, among them her parents, who defected from the Jim Crow South.

As for her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the venerable U.K. bookseller, Waterstone's calls it an "expansive, lyrical and stirring account of the unspoken system of divisions that govern our world."

"Wilkerson combines impressive research ... with great narrative and literary power.... She humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth.
"

- John Stauffer, The Wall Street Journal

News, Reviews & Interviews

Reviews

"Caste: The Lies That Divide Us by Isabel Wilkerson - review," Ashish Ghadiali, The Observer: Culture: Society books, The Guardian, August 31, 2020.

" Oprah's New Book Club Pick: Caste by Isabel Wilkerson," Oprah.com, August 4, 2020.

" Isabel Wilkerson's 'Caste' Is an 'Instant American Classic' About Our Abiding Sin," Dwight Garner, New York Times, July 31, 2020.

Interviews

" Isabel Wilkerson: Writer" in "You Said Hope," essay By Jacqueline Woodson, interview by Justine Goode, Vanity Fair, September 2020.

" Isabel Wilkerson, 'Caste' (with Bryan Stevenson)," Politics and Prose, August 20, 2020.

"'Racism' Did Not Seem Sufficient: Author Isabel Wilkerson on the American Caste System," Justin Worland, TIME, July 23, 2020.

" Isabel Wilkerson This History is Long; This History Is Deep," On Being with Krista Tippett, November 17, 2016.

" Race And 2016: Isabel Wilkerson Weighs In," The Last Word, MSNBC, 2016.

Q&A with Isabel Wilkerson, C-Span, 2010.

" Great Migration: The African-American Exodus North," Fresh Air with Terry Gross, 2010.

Articles by Isabel

" America's 'untouchables': the silent power of the caste system," Isabel Wilkerson, The Guardian, July 28, 2020.

" America's Enduring Caste System," Isabel Wilkerson, New York Times Magazine, July 1, 2020.

Talks & Media Appearances

" There's No Place Like Home: Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson in conversation with Isabel Wilkerson," Obama Foundation, Oct 29, 2019.

" Isabel Wilkerson, J.D. Vance, Diane Guerrero," Face the Nation, 2017.

" Isabel Wilkerson: 2011 National Book Festival," Library of Congress, September 24, 2011.

" A Conversation with Isabel Wilkerson," The Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale University, 2011.

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Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson is the author of the New York Times' bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns. Her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, is available for pre-order now and will be published Aug 4, 2020.

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The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee

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The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee

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The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee: 9780525509585 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • One of today’s most insightful and influential thinkers offers a powerful exploration of inequality and the lesson that…

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The Influence of Race and Racial Identity in Psychotherapy: Toward a Racially Inclusive Model  by Robert T. Carter

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The Influence of Race and Racial Identity in Psychotherapy: Toward a Racially Inclusive Model  by Robert T. Carter

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The Influence of Race and Racial Identity in Psychotherapy: Toward a Racially Inclusive Model

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Amazon.com: The Influence of Race and Racial Identity in Psychotherapy: Toward a Racially Inclusive Model: 9780471245339: Carter, Robert T.: Books

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So You Want To Talk About Race and Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America by Ijeoma Oluo

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So You Want To Talk About Race and Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America by Ijeoma Oluo

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Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

From the author of the New York Times bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race, a subversive history of white male American identity.

​

What happens to a country that tells generation after generation of white men that they deserve power? What happens when success is defined by status over women and people of color, instead of by actual accomplishments?

Through the last 150 years of American history - from the post-reconstruction South and the mythic stories of cowboys in the West, to the present-day controversy over NFL protests and the backlash against the rise of women in politics - Ijeoma Oluo exposes the devastating consequences of white male supremacy on women, people of color, and white men themselves. Mediocre investigates the real costs of this phenomenon in order to imagine a new white male identity, one free from racism and sexism.

As provocative as it is essential, this book will upend everything you thought you knew about American identity and offers a bold new vision of American greatness.

So You Want To Talk About Race

In this New York Times bestseller, Ijeoma Oluo offers a hard-hitting but user-friendly examination of race in America

​

Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy - from police brutality to the mass incarceration of Black Americans - has put a media spotlight on racism in our society. Still, it is a difficult subject to talk about. How do you tell your roommate her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law take umbrage when you asked to touch her hair - and how do you make it right? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend?

In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from intersectionality and affirmative action to "model minorities" in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race and racism, and how they infect almost every aspect of American life.

"Oluo gives us - both white people and people of color - that language to engage in clear, constructive, and confident dialogue with each other about how to deal with racial prejudices and biases." - National Book Review

"Generous and empathetic, yet usefully blunt . . . it's for anyone who wants to be smarter and more empathetic about matters of race and engage in more productive anti-racist action." - Salon (Required Reading)

So You Want To Talk...

"Oluo masterfully diagnoses the pervasive plague of white mediocrity. Mediocre serves as a call to action for every person, regardless of race or gender, to actively resist white male mediocrity's hold. "

- Kimberlé Crenshaw, executive director, African American Policy Forum, and professor, UCLA and Columbia Law Schools

- JENNY YANG, comedian, writer, and co-founder and

co-producer of Dis/orient/ed Comedy

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Books | Ijeoma Oluo | Writer, Speaker, Internet Yeller

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Ijeoma Oluo is a writer, speaker and internet yeller. She is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race and most recently, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. Her work on race has been featured in The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post, among many..

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An illustrated edition of The 1619 Project, with newly commissioned artwork and archival images, The New York Times Magazine's award-winning reframing of the American founding and its contemporary echoes, placing slavery and resistance at the center of the American story. Here, in these pages, Black art provides refuge. The marriage of beautiful, haunting and profound words and imagery creates an experience for the reader, a wanting to reflect, to sit in both the discomfort and the joy, to contemplate what a nation owes a people who have contributed so much and yet received so little, and maybe even, to act. --Nikole Hannah-Jones, from the Preface
Curated by the editors of The New York Times Magazine, led by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, this illustrated edition of The 1619 Project features seven chapters from the original book that lend themselves to beautiful, engaging visuals, deepening the experience of the content. The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience offers the same revolutionary idea as the original book, an argument for a new national origin story that begins in late August of 1619, when a cargo ship of enslaved people from Africa arrived on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia. Only by reckoning with this difficult history and understanding its powerful influence on our present can we prepare ourselves for a more just future.

Filled with original art by thirteen Black artists like Carrie Mae Weems, Calida Rawles, Vitus Shell, Xaviera Simmons, on the themes of resistance and freedom, a brand-new photo essay about slave auction sites, vivid photos of Black Americans celebrating their own forms of patriotism, and a collection of archival images of Black families by Black photographers, this gorgeous volume offers readers a dynamic new way of experiencing the impact of The 1619 Project.

Complete with many of the powerful essays and vignettes from the original edition, written by some of the most brilliant journalists, scholars, and thinkers of our time, The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience brings to life a fuller, more comprehensive understanding of American history and culture.

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The 1619 Project is The New York Times Magazine's award-winning reframing of American history that placed slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative.

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A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR * NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE NOMINEE * New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of the Year * One of The Washington Posts 50 Notable Works of Fiction of the Year * TIME Magazine 100 Must Read Books of the Year * One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, Slate, Boston Globe, Town & Country, Vulture, and more * One of President Obama's Favorite Books of the Year * One of The New York Times Critics' Best Books of the Year

"A rich, wild book that could pass for genre fiction. It's much more, but the entertainment value alone should ensure it the same kind of popular success that greeted his last two novels, The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys."
-Janet Maslin, The New York Times

One of the Ten Best Books of 2021
-Laura Miller,
"Colson Whitehead has a couple of Pulitzers under his belt, along with several other awards celebrating his outstanding novels. Harlem Shuffle is a suspenseful crime thriller that's sure to add to the tally - it's a fabulous novel you must read."

"A warm, involving novel"
-The Wall Street Journal

"A a fiendishly clever romp, a heist novel that's also a morality play about respectability politics, a family comedy disguised as a noir...Harlem Shuffle reads like a book whose author had enormous fun writing it. The dialogue crackles and sparks; the zippy heist plot twists itself in one showy misdirection after another. Most impressive of all is lovable family-man Ray, whose relentless ambition drives the plot forward while his glib salesman's patter keeps you guessing about his true intentions. This book is a blast that will make you think, and what could be better than that?" -Vox
"Another triumph from Pulitzer winner Whitehead"
-People Magazine

"Fast-paced, keen-eyed and very funny, "Harlem Shuffle" is a novel about race, power and the history of Harlem all disguised as a thrill-ride crime novel."
-San Francisco Chronicle

"Enthralling, cinematic...Whitehead's evocation of early 1960s Harlem - strewn with double-crosses and double standards, broken glass and broken dreams - is irresistible...a valentine to a time and place."
-Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Dazzling...exciting and wise."
-Walton Muyumba, The Boston Globe

"A spectacularly pleasurable read, and while it is, of course, literary, it's also a pure, unapologetic crime-fiction page-turner."

" Harlem Shuffle is a wildly entertaining romp. But as you might expect with this two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur genius, Whitehead also delivers a devastating, historically grounded indictment of the separate and unequal lives of Blacks and whites in mid-20th century New York."
-Associated Press

"An American master"
-New York Times Book Review

"Two-time Pulitzer winner Whitehead ( The Nickel Boys) returns with a sizzling heist novel set in civil rights-era Harlem. It's 1959 and Ray Carney has built an 'unlikely kingdom' selling used furniture. A husband, a father, and the son of a man who once worked as muscle for a local crime boss, Carney is 'only slightly bent when it [comes] to being crooked.' But when his cousin Freddie-whose stolen goods Carney occasionally fences through his furniture store-decides to rob the historic Hotel Theresa, a lethal cast of underworld figures enter Carney's life, among them the mobster Chink Montague, "known for his facility with a straight razor"; WWII veteran Pepper; and the murderous, purple-suited Miami Joe, Whitehead's answer to No Country for Old Men's Anton Chigurh. These and other characters force Carney to decide just how bent he wants to be. It's a superlative story, but the most impressive achievement is Whitehead's loving depiction of a Harlem 60 years gone-'that rustling, keening thing of people and concrete'-which lands as detailed and vivid as Joyce's Dublin. Don't be surprised if this one wins Whitehead another major award."
-Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"Whitehead adds another genre to an ever-diversifying portfolio with his first crime novel, and it's a corker. Ray Carney owns a furniture store in Harlem. When the novel begins in 1959, he's selling mostly used furniture, struggling to escape the legacy of his criminal father. 'Living taught you,' Ray believes, 'that you didn't have to live the way you'd been taught.' Almost. Ray's ne'erdo-well cousin, Freddie, who's been luring Ray into hot water since childhood ('I didn't mean to get you in trouble,' is Freddie's constant refrain) regularly brings Ray the odd piece of jewelry, provenance unknown, which Ray peddles to a dealer downtown, building a stake to invest in his business. 'There was a natural flow of goods in and out and through people's lives . . . a churn of property, and Ray facilitated that churn.' It works until Freddie suggests Ray as a fence for a jewel heist at the Hotel Theresa ('the Waldorf of Harlem'), and suddenly the churn produces a potentially disastrous backwash. Following Ray as his business grows and he delicately balances the crooked and straight sides of his life, Whitehead delivers a portrait of Harlem in the early '60s, culminating with the Harlem Riot of 1964, that is brushed with lovingly etched detail and features a wonderful panoply of characters who spring to full-bodied life, blending joy, humor, and tragedy. A triumph on every level."

Kirkus Prize for Fiction FINALIST 2021

National Book Critics Circle Awards FINALIST 2021

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Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead: 9780525567271 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, this gloriously entertaining novel is "fast-paced, keen-eyed and...

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R E V I E W S:
Learning to love your homeland, even when it's complicated By Anri Wheeler Globe Correspondent, Updated December 30, 2021
Honor, Thrity Umrigar's ninth novel, opens with a newspaper clipping detailing the fate of Meena, a woman who becomes disabled after surviving a fire set by her Hindu brothers with the intention of killing her and her Muslim husband. Abdul, Meena's husband, does not survive the blaze. Spurred on by a lawyer who'll work pro bono, Meena is taking her brothers to court, an act unheard of in the rural community where they live. To many around her, Meena is seen to have dishonored her family by defying her brothers and entering into an interfaith marriage they had forbidden.

This article is written by Shannon, a white American foreign correspondent (as Umrigar reveals in the acknowledgments, the character was inspired by the real life work of Ellen Barry for The New York Times). It's also a microcosm of the book's central tensions, from the power dynamics inherent in who is telling a story; to the privilege wielded by men, Americans, Hindus, members of the upper caste, the educated, and urban dwellers; and the intersectionality of the two women around whom "Honor" is centered.

No doubt informed by Umrigar's own experience as a journalist, the novel starts and ends with Smita, an Indian American journalist, at the Mumbai airport. Smita is returning to the city of her birth, a place she had vowed to leave behind forever. Invited by Shannon, who has injured her hip and needs someone to take over covering Meena's story, Smita reluctantly agrees, traveling to meet Meena with the help of Mohan, another friend of Shannon's.

The longer she spends there, and despite flashes of nostalgia for her childhood self, Smita's distaste for India deepens. So too does the reader's understanding of the traumatic events that led Smita's family to flee to the US. Through Smita's story, another central theme emerges: feeling rooted versus uprooted. Although exiled by the circumstances of her childhood departure from Mumbai, Smita also acknowledges the privileges she's gained. "How American she had become to not see America for what it had been for her family - a harbor, a shelter, a refuge."

Mohan, an upper caste man from Mumbai, acts as the ultimate foil for Meena's brothers. He comes to represent a version of India that could be home to Smita. Of loving Mumbai, Mohan says, "I do. ... But you don't love something because you're blind to its faults, right? You love it despite its flaws."

As with the fictional article that begins the book, Umrigar's strength as a writer is most potent in individual scenes that distill these tensions. Just as the arc of the story builds to a crescendo, both in its hastening action surrounding the trial of Meena's brothers and the reader's understanding of Smita's history, so do smaller moments. In one, Smita goes from looking out her car window in rural India to thinking about Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," to the understanding, "Like it or not, this, too, was her land and she felt implicated and ensnared in its twisted morality and contradictions."

One contradiction is highlighted by Anjali, the lawyer representing Meena. Meena is the bravest woman she knows, Anjali says, because Meena's aware her case is being put forth to try to set a precedent, and will in no way improve her own life. As a journalist, Smita understands all too well how the media often try to individualize systemic problems - from violence against woman in India to mass shooters and police killings of Black men in America - without contextualizing them within "the culture from which they bubbled up." Smita, who covers gender issues, wants to make clear such actions are enabled by the powerful forces and institutions that undergird them. "Sometimes, it seemed to Smita that the history of the world was written in female blood," Umrigar writes.

Two-thirds into Honor the full story of what happened to Smita and her family is revealed, in ways that will help readers understand how Smita has come to define honor, in contrast to the conflicting ways it has been defined by others. In what feels like an epilogue, the final chapter of the book brings our understanding of honor full circle.

The many layers that comprise Honor unfurl like a peak season peony. Toward the book's end, Smita is back in the liminal space of the airport, but changed. What has evolved: her ability to see India, her understanding of home, of love, of what is worth a sacrifice. She has stitched together what she once saw as desperate pieces of herself into a more present whole. She has done what she proclaimed was not possible at the outset of the book: found her way home again. Her experiences culminate in the precipice on which she stands as the book comes to its beautiful conclusion. Smita understands, "Maybe, in the end, that's all that love was - doing the hard thing."
A reporter returns to India to write about a grisly crime. By Anjali Enjeti, Special to the Star Tribune
DECEMBER 31, 2021
Thrity Umrigar's latest novel, Honor, begins with a vacation cut short when Smita Agarwal, a foreign correspondent from Brooklyn, is forced to abandon the sunny beaches of the Maldives for an unexpected detour to bustling Mumbai. She is rushing to the bedside of her colleague Shannon Carpenter, a South Asian correspondent, who is facing imminent surgery. Before she's wheeled into the operating room, Shannon begs Smita to travel to Birwad, an all-Muslim village near the Gujarat-Maharashtra border, to report on a groundbreaking legal case in her place.

The complainant, Meena, a low-caste Hindu, goes against her community and religion to elope with her beloved, Abdul Mustafa, a Muslim. Meena's brothers, hellbent on exacting revenge on the couple for their interfaith marriage and the dishonor it has brought, set fire to the newlyweds' hut while they are inside. Abdul perishes instantly. Meena, pregnant and severely injured, barely survives. She eventually gives birth to their daughter.

Smita's hesitation to take on the assignment goes beyond her rusty Hindi and the uncharitable assumption of Mohan, Shannon's friend, who deems Smita a spoiled Indian American thumbing her nose at her country of origin. Smita's return to Mumbai triggers memories of an unspeakable act of violence and betrayal she experienced as a teenager before she and her family fled to Ohio. Though she wears her U.S. citizenship like armor, she knows spending time in a "city she'd spent the last twenty years trying to forget" will force her to confront her past.

Umrigar aptly tackles honor killings in rural India and paints Meena with agency and depth. Before her marriage to Abdul, Meena was a trailblazer who, along with her sister, defied her brothers' wishes and got a job at a sewing factory to help support their family. She believes that speaking out will empower other women who endure such horrors and that she must do her part to challenge a corrupt legal system that readily dismisses violence against women.

Honor is also a stirring critique of individual agendas surrounding Meena's high-profile case. This includes Smita, who, though a seasoned reporter, remains naïve to many of the forces at play, as well as Anjali, Meena's well-meaning but overeager feminist lawyer who, at times, seems to care more about sticking it to the patriarchy than about her client's well-being.

In her years of reporting on gender violence around the world, Smita takes care to avoid the kind of "trauma porn" typical of such articles. Curiously, in the book, Umrigar pens a gruesome scene that feels close to fetishizing female victimization. It neither fortifies the narrative nor deepens the reader's understanding of the cultural context of such violence. Less would have definitely been more.

Nevertheless, Honor boldly examines a system that continues to greenlight brutality and serves as a poignant reminder that despite all odds, "in every country, in every crisis, there are a handful of people who will stand against the tide."
Anjali Enjeti is the author of "Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change" and "The Parted Earth."
The Washington Post [read...]
Honor was selected as one of the "10 Noteworthy Books for January 2022". Check it out here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2021/12/28/january-books/ By Bethanne Patrick, January 5, 2022
Thrity Umrigar wants to talk about megachurches, which seems both apropos and slightly incongruous. Her new novel, "Honor," turns on India's two major faiths, Hinduism and Islam, and the violence that can erupt when an extremist faction holds sway.

Honor, which was announced this week as a Reese's Book Club pick, involves - among many other events - a deadly clash between two brothers who believe India should be a Hindu theocracy and their sister's husband, a Muslim from a nearby village. But Umrigar, whose eight previous novels have been set in both the United States and India, knows fundamentalism can spring from any faith.

"A thing for Western readers to realize about India is, guess what? We [Americans] have people doing crazy things, too. Maybe a few fundamentalist Christians pick up 'Honor' and think, 'Wow, why do I believe what my pastor says when he's saying the kinds of things that sound nutty coming from one of my characters' mouths?'"

If this kind of secular awakening is unlikely, Umrigar thinks she might know why. "The follow-up question to why we have these megachurches, I think, should be what is the secular equivalent? What do we have that gives people the same sense of community and belonging, which I think is essential to the human spirit?"

She anticipates the answer, then flicks it away: "You can talk about libraries and books and museums, but those are almost by definition, sadly, becoming elitist. What provides the same sense of solace and neighborliness that a church does?"

Perhaps a writer? Umrigar is speaking from her home in Cleveland, Ohio, where she has lived since the age of 21 and works as a professor at Case Western Reserve University. Her elegant demeanor, literary references and Zoom backdrop - bookshelves, art objects - could be considered, objectively, elitist. But Umrigar possesses a level of curiosity and compassion I rarely encounter in other human beings, even the many curious and compassionate authors I've interviewed.

A clue to her perspective comes from Sarah Willis, a novelist and the fiction buyer at Loganberry Books in Cleveland who has known Umrigar for nearly 20 years. They meet regularly for lunch with a group informally known as "The Pen Women" to talk writing - but not always.

"Sometimes we talk about shoes!" Willis says. "But Thrity would never talk about shoes. She'll bring up politics. She says she writes her books to understand the world, but one of the things she's writing about is how people treat each other...

"She believes that words can change people - that the words themselves have power, not her. Her books are always about someone trying to change and become a better person."

In Honor, that person is an Indian American journalist, Smita Agarwal, who reluctantly flies to India to help Shannon, a colleague sidelined with a broken hip. Shannon has been covering a powerful story about a young widow whose brothers killed her husband, Abdul, and disfigured her. The widow, Meena Mustafa, has decided to take her brothers to court, an almost unprecedented move in the realm of honor killings. Shannon pleads with Smita to travel to the remote village of Birwad and interview Meena before the trial.

When I tell Umrigar this book, with its strong romantic elements, seems like a slight departure from her other work, she smiles. "I'm delighted to hear you say so, because maybe that will attract other readers! But yes, OK, there are two parallel love stories in this book and maybe that's a little different." Nonetheless, she maintains, "I'm still writing about issues that haunt me, about power and power differentials."

A cursory look at the summary above might suggest the plot turns on Smita's power in the situation. Instead, "It's Meena who ends up being the teacher," Umrigar says. "She's more radical and courageous than any of the characters who hold what we currently call privilege in the developed world. Meena actually does something," first by defying deep taboos and then by defending her rights. "These are radical transgressions for which she pays a very, very heavy price. Yet she still manages to teach Smita and her companion Mohan" - an Indian executive she meets during the assignment - "a great deal about love and, yes, honor."

Honor is the first of Umrigar's novels to be published by Algonquin Books; Executive Editor Kathy Pories says it was "the simplicity of the title," with its many connotations, that first struck her. "You don't know what it means until you read the book." But it was the author's "effortless writing" that made her want to work with her. "You trust her. You can tell that she has so much affection for India, through dark moments and beautiful moments both."

For Umrigar, "India" is another word with many valences. "One of the things Smita winds up telling Mohan is 'My India is not your India.' She's trying to tell him that the India he sees as developed and progressive is not the one in which she grew up, but her statement has a deeper meaning. India is multivarious, even for individual people."

Mohan is perhaps the character most like the author. His India was once Umrigar's too. She grew up there during the '60s and '70s, and "one of the joys of living in India at that time, at least in Bombay as it was called then, is that it was cosmopolitan and a genuinely secular city... But there has clearly been a backlash to all of that, with deep roots that are not simple. Remember, Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu fundamentalist." Decades later, she believes "the Hindu right wing realized there was political gain to be made from wielding power."

Once again, Umrigar invokes a comparison closer to her present home.

"You have to understand that I wrote Honor during the Trump years," she says. "I was writing about India, but I was also writing about my own adopted country. This othering of others is not a phenomena you can assign to any one country. The trend winds are blowing across the world's two largest democracies, India and the United States. I am sometimes appalled and bewildered and dismayed by the parallels."

Trying to make sense of it, and perhaps to explain the role of a writer and her words, Umrigar invokes the playwright Tony Kushner, "who is one of my heroes. He says something to the effect of: Hope is not a choice. Hope is a moral obligation. I try and live by those words. I may sometimes not feel hopeful about my own personal circumstances, which is absurd because I've had every opportunity and privilege in the world. But I always feel hopeful about humanity."
By Anne Nickloff, January 6, 2022
CLEVELAND, Ohio - Thrity Umrigar's latest novel revolves around the concept of "honor." It's where the book gets its name, and it's also the force around which the book's plot finds itself.

Honor arrived on Tuesday, Jan. 4, immediately earning attention around the globe for its powerful story about injustices in rural India. The novel even earned a pick in Reese Witherspoon's book club for January 2022.

But what does "honor" mean in these 336 pages?

"What you see in the novel is instance after instance about how this beautiful word - one of the most beautiful words in any language - has been twisted and misrepresented," Umrigar said.

In this story, "honor" is the supposed reasoning behind an attack on a couple - Abdul, a Muslim and Meena, a Hindu - which married despite their religious differences in rural India. Meena's brothers set fire to the couple's home, which kills Abdul and leaves Meena, who is pregnant, maimed.

"Human beings could apparently be turned into killers as effortlessly as turning a key," Umrigar writes in the novel. "All one had to do was use a few buzzwords: God. Country, Religion, Honor."

After the fact, Meena pursues a lawsuit to gain justice for her husband and push for societal change for their daughter, Abru.

That's not where the story ends - the book follows Smita, a journalist reporting on Meena's lawsuit. Smita must also confront her own past as she returns to India, a country she left behind as a teenager with her family due to their own harrowing experience there.

Though difficult and sometimes devastating moments take place in "Honor," the book also follows threads of love.

"Once [Smita's] there, a kind of parallel love story appears," Umrigar said. "Once we hear about Meena and her affair and marriage with her husband Abdul, Smita, too, begins to see both the good and the bad about India, and has to navigate through her own conflicted feelings."

Umrigar, who grew up in Bombay and moved to the United States when she was 21, said she was first inspired to write about conditions in rural India after following New York Times reporter Ellen Barry's coverage while she served as the paper's South Asian Bureau Chief. She also has regularly followed reporting centered on religious tension in the country.

"I have been struck about the growing resentment of the Muslim minority population in India," Umrigar said. "Some of the changes in the law, and just this official act of marginalizing a group that has called India home for literally hundreds of years - I'm disturbed by that."

Honor follows a string of other best-selling novels from Umrigar, including The Space Between Us, The Secrets Between Us and The Weight of Heaven, along with children's books like Binny's Diwali, Sugar in Milk and When I Carried You In My Belly. " Umrigar is an English professor at Case Western Reserve University.

Umrigar said she started officially writing "Honor" in 2017 or 2018, while Donald Trump was president of the United States.

"Some of the issues I was writing about - the demonizing of minority groups, that was very much in the air here, in our own country, at the time," Umrigar said. "Even though I was writing about a country far away, I was definitely breathing all that in and having that come out on the page, with the kind of xenophobia that we saw here."

Umrigar said she hopes readers can find moments of reflection and resonance through the story - wherever they happen to be.

"I don't want American readers to read this and dismiss what I'm writing about as things that happen over there, across the ocean," she said. "My hope would be that people could just ask themselves, 'Ok, here we are, reading about the cultural blind spots or the prejudices of a certain society that's not mine - but what lessons can be transferred from that, and how do we examine our own society based on what I just read?'"

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Learning to love your homeland, even when it's complicated By Anri Wheeler Globe Correspondent, Updated December 30, 2021 Honor, Thrity Umrigar's ninth novel, opens with a newspaper clipping detailing the fate of Meena, a woman who becomes disabled after surviving a fire set by her Hindu brothers with the intention of killing her and her Muslim husband.

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A GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick! From The New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white.
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

As with her New York Times-bestselling debut The Mothers, Brit Bennett offers an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate and wise.

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A GOOD MORNING AMERICA Book Club Pick! From The New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white. The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical.

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Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot a book by Mikki Kendall

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A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “The fights against hunger, homelessness, poverty, health disparities, poor schools, homophobia, transphobia, and domestic violence are feminist fights. Kendall offers a feminism rooted in the livelihood of everyday women.” --Ibram X. Kendi, #1 New York Times-bestselling…

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Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong: 9781984820389 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • ONE OF TIME’S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE • A ruthlessly honest, emotionally…

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Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob

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Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob

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On Sale Now
A bold, wry, and intimate graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing. "By turns hilarious and heart-rending, it's exactly the book America needs at this moment."-Celeste Ng
"Who taught Michael Jackson to dance?"
"Is that how people really walk on the moon?"
"Is it bad to be brown?"
"Are white people afraid of brown people?"

Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob's half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about everything. At first they are innocuous enough, but as tensions from the 2016 election spread from the media into his own family, they become much, much more complicated. Trying to answer him honestly, Mira has to think back to where she's gotten her own answers: her most formative conversations about race, color, sexuality, and, of course, love.

How brown is too brown?
Can Indians be racist?
What does real love between really different people look like?

Written with humor and vulnerability, this deeply relatable graphic memoir is a love letter to the art of conversation-and to the hope that hovers in our most difficult questions.

Advance Praise

"Mira Jacob just made me toss everything I thought was possible in a book as art object in the garbage. Her new book changes everything." -Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy

" Good Talk illuminates the increasingly fractured world we live in. By turns hilarious and heart-rending, it plunges fearlessly into the murky gray areas of race and family, of struggling to find common ground, of trying to talk to our children and help them make sense of it all." -Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere

"A beautiful and eye-opening account of what it means to mother a brown boy and what it means to live in this country post-9/11, as a person of color, as a woman, as an artist . . . In Jacob's brilliant hands, we are gifted with a narrative that is sometimes hysterical, always honest, and ultimately healing." -Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award-winning author of Another Brooklyn

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A bold, wry, and intimate graphic memoir about American identity, interracial families, and the realities that divide us, from the acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing. "By turns hilarious and heart-rending, it's exactly the book America needs at this moment."-Celeste Ng "Who taught Michael Jackson to dance?"

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Inclusion on Purpose  by Ruchika Tulshyan

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Inclusion on Purpose  by Ruchika Tulshyan

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How organizations can foster diversity, equity, and inclusion: taking action to address and prevent workplace bias while centering women of color.Few would d...

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Change Your Questions, Change Your Life by Marilee Adams 

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Change Your Questions, Change Your Life by Marilee Adams 

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Dr. Marilee Adams, the founder of Question Thinking™, has written four books that provide invaluable road maps for helping you truly understand the best way to get to the core of the issues you face.

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Dr. Marilee Adams, the founder of Question Thinking™, has written four books that provide invaluable road maps for helping you truly understand the best way to get to the core of the issues you face.

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The Four Pivots by Shawn A. Ginwright, PhD

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The Four Pivots by Shawn A. Ginwright, PhD

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The Four Pivots by Shawn A. Ginwright, PhD: 9781623175429 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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“Reading this courageous book feels like the beginning of a social and personal awakening...I can’t stop thinking about it.”—Brené Brown, PhD, author of Atlas of the Heart…

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What The Buddha Taught  by Bhante Walpola Rahula

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What The Buddha Taught  by Bhante Walpola Rahula

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Darcy McKinnon

Darcy McKinnon is a documentary filmmaker based in New Orleans. McKinnon's work in documentaries includes the films Maquilapolis, Live, Nude, Girls, UNITE!, "Animals" and with CJ Hunt. With a background in education and arts organization leadership, she produces documentary work that focuses on the American South, and is currently in mid-production on with Nailah Jefferson, and Katie Mathews' , a hybrid play/documentary about student artist responses to campus sexual assault. She also co-directed a doc short, "A Fine Girl," with support from If/Then. McKinnon's work has been broadcast on POV, LPB and Cinemax, and her current projects have received support from SFFILM, CAAM, Chicken and Egg, Firelight Media, ITVS, Black Public Media, Sundance and Tribeca. Darcy is a co-founder of , with Elaine McMillion Sheldon, an alum of the Impact Partners Producing Fellowship, and one of Filmmaker Magazine's 2020 25 new faces in independent film.

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The Neutral Ground documents New Orleans' fight over monuments and America's troubled romance with the Lost Cause.

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jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy - Netflix series

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jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy - Netflix series

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Watch jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy | Netflix Official Site

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The lives of an emerging superstar and a filmmaker intertwine in this intense, intimate docuseries charting Kanye West's career, filmed over two decades. Watch trailers & learn more.

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His name built an empire. His style defined an era. American fashion designer Halston skyrockets to fame before his life starts to spin out of control. Watch trailers & learn more.

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The Andy Warhol Diaries - Netflix series

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The Andy Warhol Diaries - Netflix series

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Watch The Andy Warhol Diaries | Netflix Official Site

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After he's shot in 1968, Andy Warhol begins documenting his life and feelings. Those diaries, and this series, reveal the secrets behind his persona. Watch trailers & learn more.

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The past is never past. Every headline has a history. Join us every week as we go back in time to understand the present. These are stories you can feel and sounds you can see from the moments that shaped our world.Subscribe to Throughline+.

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What's CODE SWITCH? It's the fearless conversations about race that you've been waiting for. Hosted by journalists of color, our podcast tackles the subject of race with empathy and humor. We explore how race affects every part of society - from politics and pop culture to history, food and everything in between.

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Stay Tuned with Preet: Episodes | WNYC Studios | Podcasts

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Join former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara for a podcast about justice and fairness.

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Introducing: Nice White Parents (Published 2020)

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A new five-part series about building a better school system, and what gets in the way. New episodes of “Nice White Parents” are available here, brought to you by Serial Productions and The New York Times.

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Hidden Brain explores the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior and questions that lie at the heart of our complex and changing world.

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Hidden Brain explores the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior and questions that lie at the heart of our complex and changing world. Our work, led by Host and Executive Editor Shankar Vedantam, is marked by a commitment to scientific and journalistic rigor, and a deep empathy for our guests and audience.

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Chanda Smith Baker

Minneapolis

Chanda Smith Baker is back with a fresh take on the award-winning Conversations with Chanda podcast. A nationally respected CEO, philanthropist, community leader and entrepreneur, Chanda continues tackling the gritty issues that communities wrestle with - race, leadership, philanthropy social justice and more - but dives even deeper into the profoundly personal stories that drive her guests to use their voice, leadership and resources to make a difference in their communities. From national luminaries like Eric Holder, Dr. Yaba Blay, Valerie Jarret and Ibram X. Kendi to local Twin Cities entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and business and community leaders making an impact, the Conversations with Chanda podcast explores, digs deeper and celebrates what's relevant in our communities NOW. Download today!

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Chanda Smith Baker is back with a fresh take on the award-winning Conversations with Chanda podcast. A nationally respected CEO, philanthropist, community leader and entrepreneur, Chanda continues tackling the gritty issues that communities wrestle with - race, leadership, philanthropy social justice and more - but dives even deeper into the profoundly personal stories that drive her guests to use their voice, leadership and resources to make a difference in their communities.

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The Access Trap: What Happens When an Élite Public School Becomes Open to All?  by Nathan Heller from The New Yorker

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The Access Trap: What Happens When an Élite Public School Becomes Open to All?  by Nathan Heller from The New Yorker

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After the legendarily competitive Lowell High School dropped selective admissions, new challenges-and new opportunities-arose.

Rebecca Johnson, a teacher for more than twenty years, approached the first day of class at Lowell High School last fall with unusual anxiety. "I am used to having my plans and procedures mostly ready to go, and I am just excited to meet a new crop of kids," she explained before the term began. "While I am still experiencing much of that excitement, I am also feeling some trepidation, and I am not sure exactly why." On the first morning of school, she dressed the way she always does: an untucked button-down shirt, this one with flowers; gray slacks; and extraordinarily sensible black shoes. On arriving, she prepared herself, as usual, a mug of milky tea. Lowell is in western San Francisco, near the ocean, and a thick, low fog was sweeping through the eucalyptus and cypress trees as students arrived for the first time since the start of the pandemic, eighteen months earlier. Shortly after 8 a. m., Johnson began walking the lower hallways, then the upper, while a tide of students lapped onto the campus as if from twenty-seven hundred different continents, all keen to see their futures made.

Upstairs, Johnson stood against the wall to guide the rush. She is both commanding and approachable, with snowy hair just past her shoulders and a big camp-counsellor voice, and people tend to come to her with their confusions. The school's campus is a sprawl of irregular buildings, semi-connected; sophomores had attended only remotely, so half the student body was a little lost. "I don't know where 270 is!" a boy cried, clawing at his hair and sprinting toward oblivion. "Can you feel the terror?" Johnson said.

Lowell, founded in 1856, is the oldest public high school in the West and a long-admired jewel of public education. A big seal on the building's façade proclaims its status as a National Blue Ribbon School. In the front entrance, glass-framed boards display smiling head shots of illustrious alumni: Stephen Breyer, Alexander Calder, Jennifer Egan, Dian Fossey, Rube Goldberg, William Hewlett-the lists go on in every field. For decades, Lowell has been one of two public high schools in San Francisco to use selective admissions, with a grade- and test-score cutoff for most applicants. "They call us nerds, and I can't refute that," Catherine Hung, a junior, told me. "Lowell students will skip class to study for their next class."

As the foot traffic intensified, Johnson pushed through a narrowing in the hallway-the Gates of Hell, she calls it, owing to the hourly bottlenecks it creates-and headed to Room 255, where desks were arranged in a double horseshoe. At 9 A.M., seniors in A.P. Economics started streaming in. "Good morning! Wow, that was weird," Johnson said. "And by 'that' I mean the last eighteen months."

In 2020, when the pandemic made universal standardized testing impossible, Lowell temporarily suspended its admissions standards in favor of a randomized, lottery-like system. This seemed a relatively minor change amid the major weirdness of conducting school online. On February 9, 2021, however, the San Francisco Board of Education voted to make the lottery admissions system permanent, and responses suggested someone with a pinkie in a pencil sharpener. Parents cried out. Alumni threatened and launched lawsuits, and a few current students protested. Lowell, once a meritocratic beacon, had become something else: a bellwether for the uncertain future of selective public education.

"I always knew Lowell had a target on its back because of the demographics of its student body," Terence Abad, a 1976 Lowell graduate who is the director of the Alumni Association and the speech-and-debate coach, told me. What he meant was that, compared with the district of San Francisco as a whole, Lowell's student body has long had disproportionately high white and Asian American representation, and low representation for Latinx, Black, and other groups. In the school board's view, some hidden bias was being amplified by its supposedly meritocratic admissions. "The school culture, alumni base, and support is strong enough to continue to carry its legacy," Faauuga Moliga, formerly the board's vice-president, told me.

Defenders of selective admissions conceded that there were inequities in the pipeline, but argued that letting people in randomly means admitting students who might not be able to handle the work, diluting the culture of achievement that lifts up underserved but brilliant students. Where's the equity in that?

Last November, a lawsuit filed by the Lowell Alumni Association and others managed to invalidate the school board's vote, on a procedural matter. Yet the judge stressed that the board was free to restore its change, and in December the superintendent of schools put through a resolution that the lottery would continue at least until next year. At a moment when many magnet schools are eying similar changes-New York City debated getting rid of the admissions test for its own selective schools three years ago; the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Virginia, altered its admissions criteria to accept a greater range of students; Boston Latin will make use of Zip Code allocations and G.P.A. scores-the future of admissions at Lowell is charged with uncertainty. Meanwhile, the first class of lottery freshmen arrived on campus like the setup for an odd experiment: What happens when you take one of the nation's proudest, most selective schools, and suddenly let anybody in?

That morning, the seniors in Johnson's A.P. Economics studied her syllabus the way a roomful of orthopedists might examine X-rays. She returned to the classroom to teach World History to freshmen, who entered slowly, looking tentative and scared. Johnson took out her seating chart and went around the room, calling out names. "You're going to get out a piece of paper and something to write with," she said. "You're going to take some notes."

A boy named Brandon, with a mop of black curls, looked around desperately for a sheet of paper. A boy named Arin, lean-built, bent over his page.

"This class is going to be hard," Johnson went on. "You didn't luck out and get the easy teacher. It's going to probably take more time, especially at the beginning, than you like. The readings are not easy.

"But you are going to get through this hard class with all these difficult readings," she said. "I'm going to give you the tools you need to do well in my class and at this school."

As the period ended, she watched Lowell's first lottery class dispersing back into the maelstrom of the hall.

"We're going to get through this together," she called after them. "It's going to be O.K."

Before the eighteen-twenties, white American boys and girls (but mostly boys) were educated through a mixture of homeschooling, tuition schooling, church schooling, and tutors. Life was largely agricultural; book learning hardly mattered. That changed during the early nineteenth century, when booming industrialism called for new specialists, and inequalities intensified across explosive growth. In 1848, Horace Mann, an early architect of the public-education system, wrote, "If one class possesses all the wealth and the education, while the residue of society is ignorant and poor, it matters not by what name the relation between them may be called; the latter, in fact and in truth, will be the servile dependents and subjects." Level the playing field of education, he thought, and a more equal society could emerge.

Lowell was established in Mann's era and remains a lodestar for his cause. "I treated my Lowell admission like, Did I get into Harvard?" Juwairya Shaikh, who graduated last year, told me. Most students begin taking college-credit classes as sophomores, and the catalogue runs deep. A physics whiz can knock off calculus and A.P. Physics 2 as a junior, while working for the school newspaper (a habitual winner of national awards), joining the debate club (ditto), or marching in the drum corps (same). An ebullient senior named Derek Duncan told me that his "proudest moment" was leading the Lowell Robotics Team to victory in the international FIRST Robotics Competition. "Whenever I'm feeling down, I listen to a recording of the announcer saying, 'These are your achievements,' " he told me.

Duncan, who, when I met him, was given to Keatsian turns about the beauty of the fog on the school fields, had lived in a long series of foster homes as a child. He came to Lowell from a magnet elementary school, and his dream is to enroll at Boston University. In that sense, he epitomizes the opportunity-equalizing work that Mann imagined, and he's not alone. Sairy Velasquez, a freshman in Johnson's World History class, is the youngest of five children and lives with her mother. (Her father is in El Salvador.) She was student-body president at her public middle school and, far from feeling helped by Lowell's lottery, had worried that it might keep her from a spot that was otherwise assured. "I was always going to get in, because my grades were good," she told me. From Lowell, she plans to go to college, while saving up to spend time in France.

According to this idea of meritocracy, an important role of education is to identify people with talent and motivation and cultivate their potential. It's good for society-you won't have to worry about the universe in which Mozart never got piano lessons-and it's good for students, providing a lift no matter where they're coming from. The lift is social and financial, but acculturative, too. "I wouldn't be honest if I said students here weren't motivated by their grades and the pedigree of the school, but they're also excited about learning," Cy Prothro, an A.P. Physics teacher who surfs before work, wears Hawaiian shirts, and explains acceleration curves with a pointer made to look like a prehistoric spear, told me. Previously, he'd taught at inner-city schools in Boston and Los Angeles, where classroom management was a struggle. At Lowell, which has a ninety-nine-per-cent graduation rate and mean SAT scores over thirteen hundred, his own talents for teaching could flourish. "I'm sure that there were students in my classes in L.A. who could have gotten the material as quickly, but there was so much else happening that they didn't have my undivided attention," he said, glancing toward project posters from a Lowell program that places students in biomedical labs at U.C.S.F.-special access granted on the premise that Lowell kids are pre-selected for smarts and bushy-tailedness.

The problem is that special access is the opposite of what public school is supposed to be about. This puzzle has been worked at like a Rubik's Cube for years. In 1961, during the so-called Battle of Lowell, the superintendent sought to make Lowell-then the only high school in the United States to have produced two Nobel laureates-mostly a neighborhood school, arguing that its citywide application process was bad for equality because it made other schools de-facto second rate. Opponents argued that assigning schools by neighborhood was unfair-also bad for equality-since different neighborhoods were privileged in different ways. In 2014, the school district eliminated honors tracking, teacher discretion about who can enroll in advanced courses, and middle-school Algebra 1 offerings; people were concerned that these things, too, worked against equality. Not everyone agreed.

"Forcing students to double up on math classes"-to catch up to peers who came from algebra-teaching private middle schools-"is, in my view, child abuse!" Mark Wenning, a biology teacher at Lowell, told me one day. Wenning, a high-strung man with clipped silvery hair and a stark blue-eyed gaze, has taught at Lowell for more than twenty-five years; he is known for running his classes by Socratic interrogation, cold-calling on startled freshmen like a professor at Harvard Law. He has protested efforts to "dumb down" the district's curriculum-a trick, he thinks, to conceal the distance between the performance floor and ceiling by forcing the ceiling down. "They're giving up on fixing the achievement gap for students who need help, and as a result they're making it hard for all the other students to succeed in life and in college," he told me.

Yet Wenning doesn't deny that help is needed. He started to tell me about some anti-racist workshops that Lowell teachers attended, and abruptly began to weep. "It was amazing and inspiring to see so many of my colleagues who I didn't know well speak so passionately about these issues-I couldn't believe it!" he said. The sentiment was unsurprising, as was the agitation. When Americans talk about "the achievement gap," they're speaking euphemistically of the same worries broached in 1961, when the board proposed different schools for different neighborhoods. They are talking about race.

"As we walk, notice the kids, and who's sitting together," Adee Horn, who leads Lowell's Peer Resources program, told me as we crossed between buildings at lunch. Asian American kids were gathered mostly with other Asian American kids; white students with other white students. "Lowell is a very diverse school, but there's a lot of segregation within that diversity." When Horn arrived at Lowell, in 2007, to head Peer Resources, which trains students in tutoring and counselling one another, she found what seemed to her a pattern.

"A lot of the issues that students were getting in arguments about, or their reasons for needing mentoring or tutoring, were connected to societal oppressions, be it racism or heterosexism or sexism," she said. Peer Resources became the front guard of Lowell's equity project. In 2019, after it grew clear that families from certain lower-income neighborhoods had trouble commuting to school, Peer Resources kids got the city's transportation agency to consider improvements to a crucial bus line. Horn herself helped organize workshops on bias and micro-aggressions. Last winter, one of these initiatives unexpectedly exploded. After screening a video about the problems with the slogan "All Lives Matter," organizers gathered responses to it on an online platform, which was soon vandalized with slurs-the N-word, the K-word-and pornography.

Lowell at that point was less than two per cent Black and twelve per cent Latinx, compared with eight and thirty-two per cent, respectively, in the district. "In most of my classes I'm the only Black student," Gabrielle Grice, a junior and the current president of the school's Black Student Union, told me. This made the vandalism seem very pointed.

The principal sent a letter to the school community denouncing the act, but some students, finding the letter insufficient, e-mailed a letter of their own to the mayor and others, condemning the "rampant, unchecked racism at Lowell." Several members of the school board shared the concern. "Why are these issues occurring at the school?" Moliga, the former vice-president, wondered. "Is it because of the diversity makeup? Does the admissions policy play into that?"

Before the lottery, Asian Americans made up half of Lowell's freshman class. The western side of San Francisco has long been a transpacific node, a place where it is easy to find a proper phở gân bò or the latest Taiwanese snacks, and one of Lowell's functions has been to serve as a diasporic merging lane. Asian immigration has been growing in the U.S. for half a century, and, since 2009, Asians have been the largest group of new arrivals yearly, so some see it as natural that the demographic should be well represented at the access-and-assimilation gates. At Lowell, though, Asian American preëminence has been perennially insecure. In 1983, selective enrollment of any "racial /ethnic" group was capped at forty per cent, ultimately raising the admissions bar only for Chinese Americans; in 1999, the practice was invalidated in a settlement agreement. Some see the lottery as the latest effort to suppress Asian American enrollment, which fell eight per cent in this year's freshman class, and at a moment of particular concern. Two Fridays ago, the judge in a federal case struck down the recent admissions changes at Virginia's Thomas Jefferson High School, where the representation of Asian American students this school year fell by nineteen percentage points, citing an uneven playing field that disadvantaged them.

In San Francisco, mistrust only intensified when, after the board's five-to-two vote to make Lowell's lottery permanent, public attention landed on a series of five-year-old tweets by its vice-president, Alison Collins, saying that Asian Americans "use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and 'get ahead.' " Collins was stripped of her committee assignments and Moliga became vice-president for a while.

"I'm for affirmative action," Oliver Chin, an author of popular children's books, told me one afternoon. Chin, who is Chinese American, has two boys: his older son graduated from Lowell; his younger son ended up as a freshman elsewhere. Chin sees the need for greater diversity, but thinks that "the lottery is a case of the cure being worse than the disease."

Lowell is one of the more middle class of the large San Francisco public high schools: thirty-three per cent of its students are eligible for free or reduced lunch, compared with sixty per cent at Balboa High School and sixty-two per cent at Galileo. It also has, by some measures, big coffers. Public schools are awarded six hundred dollars for each A.P. test taken, and Lowell offers thirty-one A.P. courses. The cash is supposed to pay for extra prep time for A.P. teachers, but what's left over supports other staffing: Peer Resources, tutoring, arts faculty, and a rich catalogue of language instruction. This produces an upward spiral. Kids who applied because Lowell had a lot to offer take the A.P. courses, and the tests bring funding to make Lowell a school with a lot to offer. To the extent that the spiral makes Lowell competitive with private prep schools, it provides appealing access both for underprivileged families and for the middle class.

"People need something to shoot for," Chin told me, and produced a matrix of notes on which he'd circled the term "white flight." Enrollment in the school district dropped by thirty-five hundred kids during the pandemic, with the largest losses among white and Filipino students. Many see the shift as evidence of middle-class fickleness: parents fed up with online learning or poor access going elsewhere. And, because the school district is subsidized by enrollment numbers, the drop helped create a hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar budget deficit. (According to the U.S. Census, San Francisco has the fourth-highest per-student funding among large school systems, but that figure plummets when you factor out funds unavailable for operational use.) In order to keep the students and the money coming, Chin thought, the district needed a great school like Lowell. And keeping Lowell selective, surely, was the way to keep it great.

"Remember, what can we say about the level of easiness on this reading?" Johnson asked one Friday early in the semester. She doesn't love the required world-history textbook, and adds her own reading-today, an article by the scholar Lynda Shaffer that had appeared in the Journal of World History, in 1994. A tall blond boy raised his hand.

"Uh-it's graduate level?" he said.

"Yeah," Johnson said. "And not graduate-from-eighth-grade level. It's hard. So-should you feel all stupid and loser-y if you don't understand everything?"

" No," the class replied in unison.

"Can you feel a little confused and frustrated?" Johnson went on. "Yeah. But then you just move on. What is your goal in reading this?"

"Just extract information," Sairy Velasquez proposed.

"That's it," Johnson said. "How do you know what information to extract? I'm going to tell you what we're looking for."

Johnson divided the students into groups to begin a seven-page section of the article, passing around a worksheet with fact-oriented questions. She walked from group to group, reviewing the students' work-an approach modelled on the now popular "flipped classroom" method, which holds that class time is for teachers to tutor students as they actively engage with material, not give lectures on what they could study at home.

"What does 'contemporary' mean again?" a girl asked as Johnson came around.

A boy inquired, "Is this going to be graded?"

Johnson noticed that Brandon, the curly-haired boy, and Arin had become friends. In some ways, they were different: Brandon's parents had come from Mexico, and worked at a restaurant in the Mission. Arin lived in the Inner Richmond, and his parents worked in tech. He had applied to Lowell along with a couple of parochial schools.

The boys had got to know each other the first week, when Johnson gave her class a "name quiz," to make sure they knew their peers. The formality of the exercise had puzzled Brandon, who simply leaned over and asked Arin, "Hey, bro, what's your name again?," and wrote it down. Arin thought that was hilarious. They discovered that they shared a lunch period, and began eating together. Brandon was shy with grownups but had a warm, joshing swagger with his peers, reliably bugging the girls around him for paper and pens (his binder was kept à la bohème), and bantering along the way. "I just talk to people," he told me. After school, he liked to go with a group past the Waymo car lot to the Stonestown mall, prancing forth in the checkered flannel pajama pants that are the cool look now. Arin was more mannerly with grownups-on our first meeting, he shook my hand three separate times-and kept a tight schedule to balance academics with basketball. ("I talked with several high-school students before coming, and they're all, like, 'Time management, time management, time management!' " he told me; his father helped him budget out his homework schedule in advance.) But the boys already had the private language of close buddies, murmuring half phrases to each other and cracking up. "He helps me," Arin said. "And I help him."

Johnson looked at Brandon's blank worksheet. "You got distracted?" she suggested. Brandon nodded and, under her gaze, slowly began to work. She moved on to study his neighbor's progress. "You've got a lot of words, my friend," she said.

It wasn't praise. Johnson doesn't let freshmen take notes in full sentences, honing a distillation skill that, she thinks, trains them to sort the important from the dross. Gradually, the bullets become paragraph responses. "I have kids writing college-level work by the end of their freshman year-I'll stand by that," she told me. "They're often not my strongest kids to begin with, but we just keep working it."

Before coming to Lowell, fourteen years ago, Johnson had taught social studies, science, and math at Wallenberg, a much smaller public high school across town. She loved it-she was also a badminton coach-and had a distaste for Lowell. "I couldn't say the name Lowell without, you know, 'I hate' in front of it," she recalled. Wallenberg kids didn't test as impressively as Lowell kids, but the school was small enough that teachers could build a rapport with students, and she saw them thrive. At a certain point, Johnson became restless at Wallenberg-there was a new administration she didn't like-and eventually applied for an opening at Lowell. But she remained deeply skeptical of the place for months.

"I just felt that everybody was breaking their arms off trying to pat themselves on the back," Johnson said. She'd been accustomed to taking kids with middling test scores and graduating them as capable students. At Lowell, students entered in the ninety-seventh percentile and left in the ninety-seventh percentile. The heavy lifting seemed to be done not in the classroom but in admissions.

Like Prothro, though, she found it hard not to enjoy teaching kids who started class with pencils poised and could be arrantly themselves. Some made a point of boning up on current events, like little senators. The My Little Pony Club was among the most vibrant there. In time, Johnson became another devoted Lowell teacher. Yet her belief in education as a funicular, boarding everyone and lifting them together, remained.

After class that Friday, Johnson told me that more kids than usual were struggling: "There are a couple of students I really worry about-because of the comprehension, but also because they give up." On Wednesday, she convened the seven other World History teachers to compare notes. They gathered in Room 255; outside, the drum corps was practicing, and the eerie music-box tinkle of a glockenspiel came through the windows as they spoke.

"I thought this would be a good meeting to talk about the number of reluctant learners," Johnson said. She was requiring each freshman to schedule a "binder check," to make one-on-one contact. The meetings were illuminating. One freshman who she'd thought was slacking off turned out to have a third-grade reading level: he wasn't truculent, just petrified. Slipping so far through the cracks was a new problem at Lowell, but she'd alerted the boy's homeroom teacher and got him connected to tutoring.

"I feel as if this year we're getting kids at a very early curve," one of her colleagues said.

"I had one kid put a 'Kick Me' sign on someone," Johnson said. "It's, like, come on, guys, this is high school!"

They wondered whether this was an effect of the pandemic's disruption, and agreed on the importance of "scaffolding"-building skills alongside the material. Later, when I spoke with freshmen, I found that they'd noticed the support. "World History is definitely a hard class, but Ms. Johnson is pushing for us to get there," a student named Calliope told me. Still, the funicular theory of education makes some people uncomfortable; it suggests that what's called "excellence" is just a term for getting the right breaks.

Early one rainy morning, before school began, I met an academic named Debbie Lee a short walk from campus. Lee graduated from Lowell in 1988. Her parents were immigrants from mainland China who spoke little English; her mom was a seamstress, and her dad was a cook. "There was definitely pressure from my parents to, you know, become a lawyer or a doctor, go to Berkeley or Stanford," she told me. "Those were the things they heard from their friends."

At Lowell, Lee enrolled in honors classes. "Then I hit a wall, and I didn't know where to find help," she said. When she struggled in math, she felt she had less recourse on account of being Chinese American. A substitute teacher told her, "You've completely ruined my stereotype of what an Asian female should be." Lee never took the SAT, because nobody at Lowell told her that she should, or how to sign up.

Instead, she went to community college, transferring to Berkeley and then to San Francisco State University, where she earned two degrees. Last year, in an op-ed that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, she wrote that Lowell's vaunted achievement culture was "toxic," a course of uneven hurdles. Lee made her career as a teacher of mathematics at the Foothill community college, where she chaired two departments and became a dean. To the extent that Lowell steered her away from math and academia, the fields in which she thrives, it had failed to give her helpful access.

Many of Lee's Lowell classmates who came from immigrant families did take the SAT, of course. But they seemed to her to have parents who were more educated, with more professional jobs, and, even back in China, they had come from different strata. Her experience shows the differences concealed by broad demographic categories-a notorious problem in private education. Between 1959 and this past fall, Black representation among admitted Harvard students increased from less than two per cent to sixteen per cent. But a Harvard Crimson survey of more than half of this year's freshmen found that more than forty per cent of Black respondents came from the top quarter of U.S. income distribution, a measure far beyond the Black population as a whole: these were pretty fancy people before they got to Harvard Yard. The stakes for public education are even higher, because public education is the first and often the last resort.

Joanna Lam, a senior in Johnson's A.P. Economics class, is the president of Lowell's student body, and one of two students in the city elected to be a school-board representative. Lam's parents are Cambodian immigrants, and for college she was drawn to an élite degree program run between Berkeley and Sciences Po. She could be a poster child for the promises of selective admissions, yet she supports the lottery.

"You can't have a merit-based system and say it's fair because, 'Oh, it's a public school, you don't have to pay to get in,' when you have students who are paying for tutoring, or who have grown up in environments where it's safe to go to school," she said. Lam was capable but, in her own view, lucky, too. And, if you had to be both things to ascend through Lowell, then surely the luck was most fairly delivered through a lottery.

Debbie Lee saw a hidden sorting mechanism at Lowell. "It's a school that assumed people knew how to navigate the educational system already," she told me, as the rain outside abated. The school flew the flag of élite access for first-generation students, but within that group it was set up to reward those at the socioeconomic top.

October is the April of San Francisco, fickle and cruel. The days are the warmest and sunniest they'll ever be, though each one brings a fresh chance of wildfire. At Lowell, the first round of grades had been filed for the freshmen, and teachers saw a big change from previous years.

"I have three times as many students as usual failing-instead of one or two, I have three to six," Wenning, the biology teacher, told me. "I have some students who have done no work the whole first grading period."

Wenning had contacted students, parents, and counsellors. He'd offered extra-credit points if kids came to see him for tutoring; when they showed up, he'd let them elect to retake one test. He tried to help organize study groups (only one student signed up) and circulated a list of Web sites, podcasts of his own creation, and other resources.

"I'm at the end of my rope in what I can offer," he told me. "I don't think some of these students would be doing well at any high school, which makes me wonder why they wanted to come to Lowell."

Johnson thought that the pandemic, rather than the lottery, might explain much of the change. "I have to keep reminding myself that these guys were halfway through seventh grade when they left school," she told me. "I notice a difference in my seniors, too."

In San Francisco, parents grew irate at the decision to keep secondary education remote for nearly three semesters. Last February, the city filed a lawsuit against its own district in an effort to force reopenings. In June, the chair of the board's parent-advisory committee stepped down and protested what she described as its indifference to "learning loss." Similar debates were escalating nationally-last year, Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the F.B.I. to investigate threats against school-board members and staff-but the mood in San Francisco was unusually sharp. In October, the city authorized a recall election for Collins, Moliga, and the board's president, Gabriela López, with some eighty thousand signatures for each. The Chronicle, in an editorial, endorsed the recall, and last month all three were removed by public votes of more than seventy per cent.

Joe Ryan Dominguez, who was hired as Lowell's principal after the upheavals of last spring, acknowledged weaker performance in the lottery class. "The students who are struggling the most in this first grading period are our ninth-grade students," he said. About ten per cent had a D or lower in at least one subject; the average freshman G.P.A.s that autumn fell ten per cent from what they had been before the pandemic.

Dominguez, a slender man in his mid-thirties who wears bow ties and roams campus with a walkie-talkie, was a math teacher before he became an administrator. He grew up in Arizona, with a single mother who did not finish high school. In middle school, he began struggling in math class, and she couldn't help. "I remember seeing the desperation in her face-she took me to the school and asked my teachers whether they could take care of me, and they did," he said.

When he accepted the principal job at Lowell, Dominguez assumed that the school board had a vision for the school's transformation. But, since starting, he'd had just one meeting with the board's president, and only after sending multiple e-mails. He booked a meeting with Moliga, the vice-president, who never showed up. (Moliga says that he has no recollection of any meeting being scheduled.) The hands-off approach confused Dominguez. Back in Tempe, Arizona, "we'd have a school-board member on campus every couple of months, just to see how the kids are doing," he told me. He supported the lottery-"I had hesitations about being at a school that was selective"-but worried that, if freshman performance continued to be a concern, he'd have full accountability and no support.

Johnson had become desperate. "I've had a lot of feelings of inadequacy and failure," she told me in mid-autumn. "Usually by now I'm getting more content or process questions-'why' or 'how'-but I'm still getting a lot of questions about what words mean."

Because nearly all Lowell freshmen take World History, there are structures of support outside the classroom. One day, I went to visit an AVID class, part of a nonprofit partner program to help students from low-access backgrounds. (The acronym stands for "advancement via individual determination.") Freshmen broke into groups and took turns presenting material. Near the windows, a girl was at work on algebra. Near the door, a boy in World History analyzed the human effects of industrialization.

"So the good things were more trade, and they created textiles and clothing and stuff like that faster," he was saying. "The bad stuff was that there were lesser jobs for the people, because machines were doing all the work."

AVID is meant to augment classroom lessons. In Johnson's course, industrialization arose at a crucial point in the curriculum, when she would begin to shape students' understanding of the modern world.

"Landed gentry," she began one afternoon. "Anyone know what that means?"

A boy's hand shot up: "Isn't that one of those guys that have no testicles?"

"No," Johnson replied. On the board, she drew two triangles resembling the food pyramid. One depicted a climb from peasants through merchants, landed gentry, and aristocrats. The other depicted an ascent from factory workers through shopkeepers, an ownership class, and a shrinking aristocracy. The layers of the old model were highly unequal, she explained, but its people shared towns and relationships of symbiotic accountability. After industrialization, the old gentry tended to marry the ownership class and disengage from feudal bonds. "These people"-she pointed to the factory workers-"don't even know people in the gentry."

Johnson's goal was to explain such narratives while reaching past them-a challenge for a class still struggling to ask those "why" questions. Her students had read a passage from their textbook outlining various reasons that industrialization began in Britain: rivers and canals, iron and coal, banks and so forth.

"But this was also happening in China," she told the class. "Also in the Islamic Empire." Modern banking began in Italy; much of Europe had coal and iron deposits. "Your textbook is making it sound like Britain is the only one with iron ore, the only one that has skilled craftsmen, the only one with banks and rivers and canals. What I would try to get you to notice is that there are other places that had these things as well. So therefore-what is the thing that makes Britain different? Dare to be wrong."

"Capitalism?" a boy suggested.

"You're right, at the beginning, but capitalism comes out of industrialism-it's about who owns the machines," Johnson said. "How about this: Do you remember what industry starts the Industrial Revolution? Talk with your neighbor. Ten seconds."

There was chattering among the students, then growing silence, as a realization crept across the classroom like a bristle up the spine.

" Cotton," someone said, very softly.

A few students leaned forward at their desks. Brandon looked up.

"Cotton," Johnson said. "Where is Britain getting its cheap cotton from? And who is growing that?"

The hands of the clock sped forward as the class glided from there. By a logical process of elimination, Johnson had overturned a standing narrative about industrialization and all it wrought, but she had also challenged certain habits of mind. History wasn't just a list of causes and effects, credits and debts; it was a flow of intersecting domino rows running around the globe. Everybody's past was implicated.

As the fall progressed, both Arin and Brandon felt their positions to be precarious. Arin was doing well in his classes, but he worried that the success wouldn't last-a common concern among Lowell students, many of whom had schedules packed like heavy suitcases and lived in fear of the zippers splitting. In December, a sleep survey conducted by the school newspaper found that fifty per cent of students had fallen asleep in class. ("Ironically, I got the least amount of sleep when we were working on that," Rae Wymer, the paper's co-editor-in-chief, told me.)

Brandon's fears were more about baseline performance. "To be honest, last unit I was just wandering off-I wasn't doing my work or nothing," he said. "Now I'm actually determined. My biology teacher told me that if I keep doing this bad I'm going to have to redo her class next year." Brandon hadn't previously been a stellar student, and had come to Lowell at his mother's urging. But it wasn't only her dream. Brandon wanted to go to college, even though it wasn't something his family had done in the past. His aspiration was to be a chef; his father had trained as one, but had to abandon the pursuit when he left Mexico. "I'm trying to follow in his footsteps," Brandon said.

Despite the stress, the friendship between Arin and Brandon flourished. They ate together. They met up on a weekend to play soccer in the Mission. Johnson noticed that, not long after she started seating the boys next to each other, Brandon began turning in his homework reliably for the first time. It was as if a rope now joined him and Arin in a lead climb, one setting the bolts while the other belayed, and both of them, feeling uncertain on their own, were moving up the cliff together.

For Johnson, this came as a small revelation, and it helped her find her confidence in her work again. She'd been trying every teaching technique she knew, but it turned out that one of the best tools available was just what made the freshman class the freshman class: the mixture of students and the bonds that developed among them. Pedagogy is full of big ideas, but its unofficial golden rule is that, whenever something really works, you keep doing it. Even as Johnson changed her seating chart around, she tried to keep the boys together, silently cheering them on.

If one model of expanding access is to let more people through the door, another relies on curricular design: what happens once students show up inside the building. "We don't know what these kids are carrying-they need support," Nicole Henares, a freshman-English teacher, told me in the courtyard one afternoon. "The curriculum has to be culturally responsive." In her freshman classes, students study, alongside "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Angie Thomas's "The Hate U Give" and works by the Bay Area poet Asha Sudra. Henares's assignments encourage students to develop their own voices. (One prompt invites them to "assume the identity of the character that most stands out to you and write a monologue.")

There is, however, a third model, which is that education is essentially relational. Access isn't determined only by which students get past the gate, or by where they come from, but by how they make their way in relation to their teachers and their peers. That kind of access is hard to track; the reason Brandon started doing his homework can't be captured in numbers. Yet, the more I talked with students, the more I found that relational access was the kind that mattered most to them, and the kind they found most unreliable at Lowell.

"In our slavery unit, the teacher let us know that images are going to be disturbing-and she just looked at me and told me, in front of the whole class, if I would like to step out I can, because this will affect 'your kind of people,' " a junior named Aliyah Hunter, the events coördinator of the Black Student Union, said. Her schoolmates in the B.S.U. told me that teachers unsure how to treat period passages containing offensive racial terms would sometimes ask Black students to read them aloud. Other Lowell students described feeling trapped by stereotypes at play among their peers. Jacqueline Juarez, a junior who identifies as Latinx, told me about struggling with math in her freshman year, and getting the cold shoulder when she sought help from classmates. When she asked the teacher, she was told that she should be learning from her peers. Desperate, Jacqueline called her sister, in college, who offered to tutor her.

"Suddenly, I knew more than the other students, and they would approach me for help. I'm, like, No." She'd realized she'd been left off the group chats that students used for studying, an exclusion that she believed rose from stereotypes about Latinx people and math. This past fall, she began tutoring a freshman who was experiencing the same cold-shouldering, and was thinking of leaving Lowell. Jacqueline sat him down and told him how things were. "I was able to convince him to stay," she said. "For now."

The relational vision of education means that performance should be thought of less as a measure of fixed aptitude and more as a quantum path: one outcome among many possible ones. It means that a school like Lowell isn't in the excellence-sorting game but in the path-making game. And it means that, in shaping equal access, you can't think only of one individual or group; you have to study how they interact.

Imagine you're the kind of student often called underprivileged. Your parents struggle with bills, unemployment, prejudice, addiction, mental illness, or all of the above. Through effort and luck, you perform well in school, advance to a good college, and get a first-rate job. You earn, let's say, a six-figure salary. At thirty or so, you realize that you've made it to what's often called the middle class. Sure, you might run into difficulty from here, but you're resourceful, informed, and, as a result of your path, well connected. When people speak of educational access for the underprivileged, this is the outcome they hope for.

Perhaps you land in a prospering city, such as San Francisco or New York. You have kids. Now you notice that, somewhere along the way, the economies of things changed. The costs you confront-a home, child care, education-make your head hurt. Somehow, you are still living on the edge.

Much has been made of working-class Americans who feel cast out of the garden. We hear less about another group with similar anxieties. Call them the pinched middle: supposedly accomplished professionals who now feel that they're barely holding on. By scrambling onto the middle-class raft, you thought you had reserved a place there for your kids as well. But you've done the math, and, though you might have been able to afford private school twenty years ago, when tuition could be below twenty thousand dollars, now tuition is more than fifty thousand (per year! per child!), and the good schools offer slim odds of entry.

For most people, that leaves the public system. Looking at schools in your city, you have visions of being thrown back toward the upbringing you thought you had escaped. And no one is interested in giving you a leg up now: you are the middle class.

Those who speak about Lowell often frame their concerns in terms of access for underprivileged kids, and with good reason. What becomes clear, though, is that, in order to secure that access, access must also be insured for the pinched middle class. If no middle-class stability waits at the top of the ladder, then your climb has been for naught (and heaven forbid you pick up school debt on the way). The access has become a trap.

Middle-class parents told me how stuck they felt. "Private school was never an option for us," an Oxbridge graduate who runs an events business said. His daughter had been a middle-school valedictorian and aspired to go to Lowell, but didn't make it past the lottery. He and his wife, both of whom worked full time, couldn't afford private school: applying cost a hundred dollars per application, and that was just the start. "It's basically a rich person's game," he said.

It is telling that students have begun to feel the middle-class pinch, too. "I used to ask, 'How many of you want to get a 4.0 because you want to buy your parents a home?,' and everybody would raise their hands," Nicole Henares, the English teacher, told me. "Now they don't, because they know they're not going to be able to." Lowell shows that underprivileged access and middle-class access are increasingly twinned. Fulfilling any promises that public education makes depends on genuinely opening the doors to underprivileged students while carrying the striving middle class through, too. This year, for all its trials, Lowell seemed the rare school on its way to getting there.

Winter break drew near. Johnson played "Last Christmas" and "Ocho Kandelikas" as her students worked together in groups. Wenning had holiday lights strung above his whiteboards. In A.P. Economics, a senior with a calculator wondered whether to drop one of his low scores, as Johnson allowed. "Currently, 17.6 per cent of my grade is the final, but if I drop a quiz it becomes 18.4 per cent," he told a classmate. He decided to hedge.

Yet things were looking up. Several of Wenning's struggling freshmen were doing better. In World History, Johnson was leading her students toward the big picture. What were the two I-words? she asked. "Industrialism" and "imperialism." Hadn't we seen how they were linked-how industrial activity accelerated imperial activity? Could we compare the populations living under industrialism with those living under imperial rule? Yes: both made important migrations starting in the nineteenth century, but they were coming from different places, and with different prospects. Maybe that would end up being important later on.

Outside the classroom, Arin and Brandon were having trouble finding time for each other. As basketball ramped up, Arin started spending lunch in the library, desperate not to fall behind. Brandon, when he sat down to work, found himself getting distracted by his phone. Both boys seemed less propulsive, as if bouncing on a seesaw alone.

Johnson spent her break reflecting on her classroom strategies. When she returned, in January, she divided the class into new work groups and spent time with the students who had been struggling the most. Then she reshuffled the groups again and had the students present to their teammates what they'd learned. Some of those who had been falling behind were now teaching their peers.

"The trick is that the kid has to recognize that they've made a step and that it's solid footing for them, so then, when they step back, they know that it's not their ability limiting them," she said. For Brandon, the gains carried. Johnson wouldn't tell me about specific students' performances, but she said that kids who had started the semester doing F work, or none at all, were now turning in writing assignments in the B range. One of the most foot-dragging freshmen had shyly asked whether she thought he should enroll in an A.P. history class next year. Yes, she told him, working to hide her excitement.

"In the past, we would ask, you know, Are these kids 'Lowell'?" She paused in what looked to me like awe. "They are Lowell. These are Lowell students. And, to me, that says that anybody can be a Lowell student." It just required good support and attentive work from clever teachers. And time.

On January 26th, Johnson and her colleagues attended a meeting with the heads of their union, the United Educators of San Francisco, which was under new leadership. They had recently heard details about a contract extension that was being submitted to the school district, and there was good news: a bunch of money held in escrow for teachers was finally being disbursed, helping to fund two two-thousand-dollar bonuses. But there was also ominous news: the contract would forfeit the extra A.P. funding, the six hundred dollars per test, to help with a budget crisis. Lowell teachers remember this being framed in terms of equity, since low-performing schools had fewer A.P. tests. (A union representative disputed this characterization.) The A.P. cuts were set to expire in a year, but Cassondra Curiel, the head of the union, acknowledges that the district will probably want to extend them. "It is reasonable to prepare for the fact that the district will bring the cuts forward," she told me. The money would then have to be brought back, if at all, by way of the negotiating table.

Johnson's stomach dropped when she learned about the cuts. She shakily made some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and, when the question-and-answer period opened, was one of the first to speak. Had the union heads realized what the A.P. money funded? she asked. Lowell got more than two million dollars a year from the funding and used most of it for salaries. With the money forfeited, it would lose-she checked her calculations-about twenty-five full-time teachers.

There was a long silence. At Lowell, the spillover from A.P. funding supports programs such as arts and robotics, as well as those, such as Peer Resources and AVID, that help underrepresented students find their way: the very offerings that made Lowell both appealing to middle-class families and viable for students arriving from all backgrounds. Johnson saw a school district at risk of collapsing on itself: the best schools stripped of their competitive extras; the middle class slowly pulling away; enrollment, and thus funding, continuing to fall; underprivileged kids being chased up an achievement path to nowhere-all while the prosperous further enriched and sealed off their caste through private access.

Union voting on the contract ended on February 7th. It was ratified, fifty-seven to forty-three. Soon after President Biden finished his State of the Union address last Tuesday, the school board prepared to vote on acceptance. Joanna Lam, via Zoom, pressed the district's representatives for details of the contract's effects: "Will there be a loss of either A.P. or elective courses as a result of this tentative agreement passing?"

"At this time, we do not anticipate there will be a reduction in courses," the assistant superintendent of high schools answered.

When I spoke with Dominguez, he was raking over the budgets, figuring out what could be rescued. Between system-wide cuts and the forfeited A.P. funds, he told me, Lowell would lose $3.6 million, dropping its per-pupil funding to the bottom of the district. It would lose between twenty-one and twenty-eight educators, about twenty per cent of its faculty; between one and three teachers would likely be pink-slipped, and the district would scatter the rest to other institutions. Dominguez thought he'd eked out a way to hold on to AVID -for one more year, at least-but he hadn't figured out how to keep Peer Resources as it currently existed, or Lowell's arts and languages programs: with so much money gone, it was impossible to fund what once made Lowell unique.

During a call-in period at the board meeting, Aliyah Hunter joined other B.S.U. members in pleading against the contract. "Please listen to students," she said. A junior named Cal Kinoshita, who is one of the leaders of Lowell's parliamentary debate team, followed. "You hear all these students get on here, some of them borderline crying, Black and brown students," he said, accusing the board of "stripping the comfort away from marginalized students-it's not humane."

The grownups on the school board considered the matter. "I think it's been well known for a long, long time that this extra prep period for A.P. has been an inequitable practice," Matt Alexander, a non-recalled board member, said.

"This funding model basically means that schools that have students that are more likely to take tests get more money," Collins, voting while waiting out her replacement, said.

"Again, we are met with the opportunity to correct a decades-long issue around this funding inequity," López, also waiting out her recall replacement, said. In the end, only Lam, the student, voted against the contract.

I visited Johnson at school not long before the final meeting. She hadn't cooked or exercised in days. "I walked into my office after the union vote," she said, "and I worried, You're not going to be here next year, you're not going to be here next year, and you're not going to be here next year. Then I went to my class and tried to teach without crying."

She had organized a working group and helped assemble a picket. Here, she thought, was a cause worth fighting for. Johnson and her colleagues had spent months in the trenches of the equity project, trying to transform Lowell into a stellar urban school that anyone in town could gain access to. And they had started to succeed. Now, instead of sharing the good, there had been a cursory equalizing of numbers, a dismantling of structures that had brought about real equity. "If you don't have leaders willing to look beyond the gray area, beyond the outward number of 'fair,' " she told me, glancing at the classroom around her, "you're going to end up hurting the people that you're trying to help." ♦

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What Happens When an Élite Public School Becomes Open to All?

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Nathan Heller writes about the legendarily competitive Lowell High School, and about the new challenges-and new opportunities-that arose when it dropped selective admissions.

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Me and White Supremacy: A Guided Journal by Layla F. Saad

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Me and White Supremacy: A Guided Journal by Layla F. Saad

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Radical Healing Handbook by Anneliese A. Singh

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Radical Healing Handbook by Anneliese A. Singh

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June 3, 2020

Therapist and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem is working with old wisdom and very new science about our bodies and nervous systems, and all we condense into the word "race." "Your body - all of our bodies - are where changing the status quo must begin." Find a quiet place and...

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Body, Healing & Trauma | The On Being Project

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Pursuing deep thinking and moral imagination, social courage and joy, to renew inner life, outer life, and life together. A nonprofit media and public life initiative.

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Untigering - Adventures of a Deconstructing Tiger Mother (blog, web resource)

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Untigering - Adventures of a Deconstructing Tiger Mother (blog, web resource)

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Untigering | Adventures of a Deconstructing Tiger Mother

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who we are UNTIGERING is a global movement of cycle breakers who are committed to the practice of peaceful parenting and self-directed education -- honoring, respecting, and trusting in the inherent dignity and rights of children as human beings.Together, we are unlearning and dismantling the ways of tiger parenting (with its roots in authoritarianism, domination,

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Anti-Racism Daily  (daily updates, newsletter, podcast)

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Anti-Racism Daily  (daily updates, newsletter, podcast)

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Anti-Racism Daily: The #1 Educational Newsletter to Unlearn Racism and Oppression

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The #1 newsletter to learn about racism, oppression and how to take action. Subscribe to join 300,000 subscribers and take action each morning.

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Henry Street Settlement Living Wage Increase Announcement

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Henry Street Settlement Living Wage Increase Announcement

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A Statement from Henry Street Settlement

By Henry Street Settlement

On March 22, 2022, Henry Street Settlement announced that, as of July 1, it would raise its wage floor to $22 per hour, or 50 percent above the New York minimum wage. Following is the memo sent by CEO David Garza to all team members, announcing this historic increase:

A Step Toward Equity for Henry Street

Historically, many of our hardworking, dedicated team members have earned a wage that is set by government contracts or informed by state and local minimum-wage requirements. To our longstanding frustration, this wage has not kept pace with inflation, and it falls short of putting our valued employees in a position to afford their basic needs.

A significant percentage of Henry Streeters fall into this category, and we cannot continue to live with this reality any longer. Therefore, starting July 1, 2022, the minimum hourly rate at Henry Street Settlement will be raised to $22.00/hour-an action taken after thoughtful reflection on our values and mission.

Henry Street Settlement is, at its core, a poverty-fighting organization. Our mission is to help people reach their full potential, whatever that takes, and it is no secret that having enough money is the first prerequisite to food, housing, health care, transportation, stability, and to expressing one's full humanity.

One of the most important ways we can reflect this value is to pay a fair and livable wage to our own team. By committing to paying higher wages to our lowest paid employees, Henry Street is addressing pay disparities and helping everyone on our team meet their basic needs. Our belief is that no one should unnecessarily struggle to make ends meet.

Why $22.00? A number of economists and policy institutes maintain living-wage calculators, which use research and social data to estimate the wage rate needed to meet minimum living standards in a given region or community (e.g., the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Living Wage Calculator, Economic Policy Institute Family Budget Calculator, University of Washington Self-Sufficiency Standard). Based on these tools, conversations with experts, and Henry Street's compensation and benefits coverage, we have determined that $22.00 per hour is an estimated minimum hourly wage a single working adult needs to afford food, medical expenses, housing, transportation, taxes, and other basic living expenses in New York City. These are basic costs of living for every resident of NYC, regardless of their type of job, position, seniority, or skill set. This will set Henry Street's minimum wage at 1.5 times greater than the current NYC minimum wage.

Dignity, Equity, and Appreciation We are aware that many of our own team members feel the effects of longstanding income and asset gaps driven by racism and social inequality. Henry Street has long played a leading role in advocacy efforts, such as #JustPay and Fight for $15, to increase the wages granted through city contracts. However, we feel that we can't wait any longer for the city to take action. It is both within our ability and our moral imperative to take a step to address this disparity. Paying everyone on our team a "living wage" reinforces and reflects our commitment to equity.

Increasing our minimum hourly rate will benefit everyone at the Settlement. Organizations that pay a living wage have increased employee retention, engagement, and morale. Our community benefits from having a healthy, thriving workforce. Paying everyone on our team a living wage will enable Henry Street to serve our community more effectively.

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A Statement from Henry Street Settlement - Henry Street Settlement

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On March 22, 2022, Henry Street Settlement announced that, as of July 1, it would raise its wage floor to $22 per hour, or 50 percent above the New York minimum wage. Following is the memo sent by CEO David Garza to all team members, announcing this historic increase: A Step Toward Equity for Henry...

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What It Means to Be an Antiracist Company

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What It Means to Be an Antiracist Company

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Fractured Atlas Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression Statement

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Fractured Atlas Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression Statement

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We help individual artists and arts organizations at every level of the cultural ecosystem, in every creative medium by providing fundraising tools, educational resources, and personalized support.

That means artists can devote their effort to doing what they do best - making art that matters to them and the world.

We are based in New York but our influence is national - even global, with international members.

Our vision is to create a world where all artists have the tools they need to make their creative dreams a reality.

Fractured Atlas's mission is to make the journey from inspiration to living practice more accessible and equitable for artists and creatives.

900k

Artists & Organizations Served

$25M

$175M

Fractured Atlas History

Fractured Atlas was founded as a performing arts producer in downtown New York City in 1998 by former CEO Adam Huttler.

Fractured Atlas evolved into an arts service organization in 2002, with a new goal of empowering a wider segment of the arts community in a manner that was both scalable and sustainable. We want to ignite the art of progress by providing educational resources and technological tools to help you make art that matters in the world.

View our current 990 (PDF).

View our current audit (PDF).

Anti-racism and Anti-Oppression
Community Guidelines

Fractured Atlas's membership includes individual artists - performing, visual, literary, design, media, and everything in between - and arts organizations - from one-person outfits to the biggest of the big. Many individuals, including Fractured Atlas members, face practical barriers and oppressive experiences because of individual and systemic unequal power related to race, ability, age, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, and immigration status. Since Fractured Atlas is a reflection of the society in which we live, these uses of power will inevitably exist within Fractured Atlas as well.

Discrimination and oppression can prevent people from engaging with Fractured Atlas in a way that fully reflects their ability, experience and contributions. We recognize that understanding, acknowledging and working to eliminate oppression is a learning process for us all. Different people can be at different stages in the learning process, and we all need to create opportunities for learning and assist each other in the learning process. The complete set of guidelines are available here.

Fractured Atlas recognizes that those who experience discrimination can make choices that will dismantle systems of oppression for themselves and others.

Our Commitment

We are committed to anti-oppression principles in all areas of our work. We believe change is possible, and that our organization and the artistic community will grow stronger as oppression is eliminated.

Fractured Atlas will ensure that its work accurately reflects the variety of knowledge of all peoples. We recognize the leadership of disenfranchised and oppressed individuals and groups to bring about anti-oppressive change. We acknowledge discrimination and challenge oppression.

Fractured Atlas will work to ensure that:

The membership of Fractured Atlas accurately reflects the vibrancy of the arts community and our society as a whole;

Our products are developed in an accessible way so that our members can utilized them in a manner free from obstacles, barriers and oppression;

Fractured Atlas's networking, information sharing, and strategy consultations are informed by the goal of identifying and countering the impact of the various and combined forms of oppression affecting our membership;

Fractured Atlas's advocacy work with government, and communications with the media and the public address the diverse and combined forms of oppression facing our diverse membership, and offer practical solutions to eliminate this oppression.

Our capacity and the capacity of our membership is strengthened to challenge unequal power and biases that lead to oppression;

We strengthen our capacity and the capacity of our membership to develop individual leadership and advocacy potential;

Fractured Atlas has an effective process for resolving concerns and complaints that may arise from members' experience of unfair, inequitable or oppressive treatment within Fractured Atlas;

A process is put into place to develop policies and practices that promote anti-oppression, and to implement, periodically review and improve such policies and practices where necessary.

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Providing artists and creatives with resources to successfully execute their projects and endeavors.

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Neurodiversity is a term originally coined by Australian sociologist, Judy Singer, in the late-1990s.

Judy has built on her original idea - which can be found here. Some of this material is reproduced below.

"Neurodiversity is:
- a state of nature to be respected
- an analytical tool for examining social issues
- an argument for the conservation and facilitation of human diversity"

- Judy Singer 2020

"Neurodiversity is a term that refers to an obvious and indisputable feature of Earth's biosphere."

"Neurodiversity refers to the virtually infinite neuro-cognitive variability within Earth's human population. It points to the fact that every human has a unique nervous system with a unique combination of abilities and needs."

"Neurodiversity is a subset of Biodiversity, a term mostly used for the purpose of advocating for the conservation of species."

"The NeuroDiversity Movement

Despite there being no official definition or spokesperson for the movement, its consensual aims can be discerned. They are to:

shift mainstream perceptions of marginalized NeuroMinorities

replace negative, deficit-based stereotypes of NeuroMinorities with a more balanced valuation of their gifts and needs

find valued roles for neurologically marginalized people

show that all society benefits from the incorporation of NeuroMinorities."

In the workplace it is the idea of inclusivity that extends to neurological differences, including hiring and retaining talent with neuro-variations such as autism, ADHD and dyslexia.

PREVALENCE OF Autism in the population

In a study in the US in 2016, amongst children aged 8, prevalence of autism was estimated at 1 in 54. The prevalence was 1 in 34 for boys and 1 in 145 for girls - so boys were 4.3 times more likely than girls to be diagnosed as autistic.

Studies in Asia, Europe, and North America have identified average prevalence of between 1% and 2%.

There are 205,200 autistic Australians - with males 3.5 times more likely to be autistic than females and prevalence rates of 1.3% and 0.4% respectively

Of the 106,600 autistic young Australians (aged 5 to 20 years) who were attending school or another educational institution, 78% reported experiencing difficulty at their place of learning. Of those experiencing difficulties, the main problems encountered were fitting in socially (60%), learning difficulties (55%) and communication difficulties (51%).

In 2018, Autism Spectrum Australia estimated that about 1 in 70 people in Australia were autistic - or about 353,880 people - but only 40% were employed

As at March 2018, 29% of active participants in the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) were autistic

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html, Australia Bureau of Statistics (2018), Autism Spectrum Australia: https://www.autismspectrum.org.au/news/autism-prevalence-rate-up-by-an-estimated-40-to-1-in-70-people-11-07-2018, NDIS "Outcomes for participants with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)" (June 2018).

Alexander's film gives an uplifting introduction to autism for young non-autistic audiences, aiming to raise awareness, understanding and tolerance in future generations.

LIVED EXPERIENCE

Beth Radulski, La Trobe University PhD Candidate & Project Officer: Neurodiversity, speaks about her lived experiences as an autistic learner and offers ideas on what society can do you be more inclusive for all neuro-types. (Note: The YouTube videos may not play in Safari.)

What are the neurodiverse variations?

"These differences can include those labelled with Dyspraxia, Dyslexia, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Dyscalculia, Autistic Spectrum, Tourette Syndrome and others."

- SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY, NATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON NEURODIVERSITY 2011

Neurodiversity is a combination of traits that are seen as both strengths and challenges. Depending on the neurodiverse variation and its intensity, individuals can display strengths in different areas, including:

AUTISM

average to very high intelligence

good verbal skills, rich vocabulary

ability to think in visual images and identify patterns

propensity to think outside the box and generate novel solutions to problems

ability to absorb and retain large amounts of information, especially about topics of special interest

detail oriented

ability to focus for long periods on areas of interest

ability to perform repetitive tasks where accuracy, rules and routine are important

reliability and punctuality

honest, loyal, fair and just

non-judgemental listening

DYSLEXIA

improved visual processing and pattern recognition

good spacial knowledge

seeing the bigger picture, often seeing things more holistically

mechanical aptitude

picture thinkers

sharper peripheral vision

highly creative

creativity and entrepreneurial proclivities

50% of NASA employees are dyslexic

ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder)

hyper-focused

higher levels of creativity and curiosity,

innovation and inventiveness

leadership abilities

high energy, spontaneity and productivity

DYSPRAXIA

creativity and original thinking

good strategic thinking and problem-solving

determination and hard-working

highly motivated

able to develop their own strategies to overcome difficulties

DYSCALCULIA

DYSGRAPHIA

Autistic teams undertaking software-testing roles in an Australian Federal Government Department demonstrated 30% higher productivity over Neurodiversity-typical teams.

A team in another Government Department were provided with a significant backlog of firewall security event logs. The backlog was assessed as likely to take 18 months to clear. However, the new team were able to clear it in 4 months and redesigned the process at the same time.

Cyber security analysts start at a level one and normally progress to level two after five years. In some cases, in a new autistic team in an Australian bank, some trainee analysts were writing level two reports after only five months.

In early 2018, a major Australian bank commenced their Autism@Work Program. Their initial cohort of nine trainees were proficient four months earlier than expected, returning 12 months' value in five months and delivered an over 50% increase in productivity. In April 2019, the bank took on its second cohort of trainees. Within four months, this team had created detection rules in the security/intelligence tools used and moved from a process that was mainly manual to the automation of more than 78% of the process - resulting in an ongoing saving of hundreds of hours per month.

A team at an Australian Bank - dealing with access requests - were 26% more productive that neurotypical team within 2 months of commencement

A program implemented by JPMorganChase in the US demonstrated 48% higher productivity from a neurodiverse team when compared to a "neurotypical" team. After three to six months working in one area of the bank, autistic workers were doing the work of people who took three years to ramp-up - and were even more than 50% more productive.

A study by Curtin University in 2016 found that employing autistic adults benefited employees, employers and their organisations without incurring additional costs.

A survey of co-workers of those in Autism At Work programs in Australia (as part of a larger longitudinal study by Olga Tennison Autism Research Centre) indicated strong conviction about the importance and value of such programs:

"They've actually helped sharpen up some of the thought processes amongst the teams. They'll ask questions where others fear to tread..."

- FROM SURVEY OF CO-WORKERS - BY DARREN HEDLEY, OTARC, LATROBE UNIVERSITY

In March 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that 85% of autistic people in the US are unemployed or underemployed and 60% of them have cognitive abilities at or above those of neurotypical people. A 2016 study by the National Autistic Society in the UK arrived at a similar conclusion. A United Nations proclamation on World Autism Day 2016 estimated that more than 80% of autistic adults around the world are unemployed.

In Australia,

the unemployment rate for autistic people is 31.6 per cent. This is three times the rate of people with disability, and almost six times the rate of people without disability.

whilst more than half of autistic Australians would like a paid job, only one in three were currently in a paid role

more than half of unemployed autistic Australians (53.9 per cent) had never held a paid job, despite often possessing the skills, qualifications and a strong desire to join the workforce

(source: Amaze - study by the Centre for Health and Social Research and Australian Catholic University - 28 March 2019)

Autistic Australians wereless likely to have an educational qualification beyond school. Neuro-typicals were 4.4 times more likely to have a tertiary qualification whist people with disabilities were 2.3 times more likely to have one.

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What is Neurodiversity — Neurodiversity Hub

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Neurodiversity is a combination of traits that are seen as both strengths and challenges. Depending on the neurodiverse condition and its severity, individuals can display strengths in different areas.

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Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger by  Lama Rod Owens

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Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger by  Lama Rod Owens

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Love and Rage by Lama Rod Owens: 9781623174095 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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A LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER In the face of systemic racism and state-sanctioned violence, how can we metabolize our anger into a force for liberation? White supremacy in the United States has…

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The Person You Mean to Be by Dolly Chung

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The Person You Mean to Be by Dolly Chung

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About the Book

An inspiring guide from Dolly Chugh, an award-winning social psychologist at the New York University Stern School of Business, on how to confront difficult issues including sexism, racism, inequality, and injustice so that you can make the world (and yourself) better.

Foreword by Laszlo Bock, the bestselling author of Work Rules! and former Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google

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Book: The Person You Mean To Be - Dolly Chugh

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The Person You Mean to Be is an inspiring guide from Dolly Chugh, an award-winning social psychologist at the NYU Stern School of Business, on how to confront difficult issues including sexism, racism, inequality, and injustice so that you can make the world (and yourself) better.

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Leadership And Self Deception: Getting Out of the Box - The Arbinger Institute

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Leadership And Self Deception: Getting Out of the Box - The Arbinger Institute

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Visit the Arbinger Store for bestselling books and resources on leadership development, outward mindset theory, conflict resolution and more.

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All We Can Save:  Truth, Courage and Solutions for the Climate Crisis by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson

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All We Can Save:  Truth, Courage and Solutions for the Climate Crisis by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson

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About the book

There is a renaissance blooming in the climate movement: leadership that is more characteristically feminine and more faithfully feminist, rooted in compassion, connection, creativity, and collaboration. While it's clear that women and girls are vital voices and agents of change for this planet, they are too often missing from the proverbial "table." More than a problem of bias, it's a dynamic that sets us up for failure. To change everything, we need everyone.

Intermixing essays with poetry and art, this book is both a balm and a guide for knowing and holding what has been done to the world, while bolstering our resolve never to give up on each other or our collective future. We must summon truth, courage, and solutions, to turn away from the brink and toward life-giving possibility. Curated by two climate leaders, this book is a collection and celebration of visionaries who are leading us on a path toward all we can save.

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All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis | A national bestseller - The All We Can Save Project

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About the book There is a renaissance blooming in the climate movement: leadership that is more characteristically feminine and more faithfully feminist, rooted in compassion, connection, creativity, and collaboration. While it's clear that women and girls are vital voices and agents of change for this planet, they are too often missing from the proverbial "table."

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Insight Timer - #1 Free Meditation App for Sleep, Relax & More

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The best meditation app with the world’s largest FREE library of more than 190k guided meditations, 17k teachers & the world’s most loved meditation Timer.

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20 diversity and inclusion tools to power your DEI program

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20 diversity and inclusion tools to power your DEI program

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20 diversity and inclusion tools to power your DEI program | TechTarget

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Learn how diversity and inclusion tools can help support a DEI strategy, including finding gender bias and enabling employee DEI feedback.

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Click here to register for workshops in your area: https://pisab.org/workshops-in-your-area/

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PISAB - The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond

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We stand on the shoulders of generations who served before us as we bring people from all walks of life into a network of anti-racist community organizers. We've been organizing in community to address structural racism and power for over 40 years. Before it was popular. Before it was profitable.

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NYC Racial Equity Training: Foundations
Click here to find workshops

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We work with communities to build the collective power necessary to counter structural racism. Connected and aligned individuals, organizations, and movements standing together to inspire positive change can build a just, multiracial, democratic society.

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Advancing racial justice in our policies, institutions and culture.

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We work with communities to build the collective power necessary to counter structural racism. Connected and aligned individuals, organizations, and movements standing together to inspire positive change can build a just, multiracial, democratic society.

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Anti-Racist Results Based Accountability
Click here for a list of events: https://www.equityandresults.com/events

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WE ARE:we have aligned Antiracist Principles with a Results-Based Framework to transform your organization’s culture and actions to deliver racially equitable results

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12-month group reflection on embodied anti-racist cultural building created by author of my grandmother's hands

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Resmaa Menakem | Embodied Anti-Racist Education

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Somatic Abolitionism is living, embodied anti-racist practice and cultural building -a way of being in the world. It is a return to the age-old wisdom of human bodies respecting, honoring, and resonating with other human bodies. It is not a exclusively a goal, an attitude, a belief, an idea, a strategy, a movement, a plan, a system, a political position, or a step forward.

Somatic Abolitionism is not a human invention. It is the resourcing of energies that are always present in your body, in the collective body, and in the world. Somatic Abolitionism is an emergent process.

Somatic Abolitionism is a emergent form of growing up and growing into a more fuller energetic human experience.

Why We Need Somatic Abolitionism

Nearly all of our bodies-bodies of all culture-are infected by the virus of white-body supremacy.

This virus was created by human beings in a laboratory-the Virginia Assembly, in 1691-then let loose upon our continent. It quickly infected people of all culture and pigmentation, backgrounds, and economic circumstances.

Today, the WBS virus remains with us-in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the foods we eat, the institutions that govern us, and the social contracts under which we live. Most of all, though, it lives in our bodies.

What Somatic Abolitionism Does

Somatic Abolitionism heals our bodies of the WBS virus, and then inoculates our bodies against new WBS infections through cultural container building. It begins in your body, then ripples out to other bodies, and then to our collective body.

Somatic Abolitionism requires action-and repeated individual and communal practice. Through repetition, you collectively build resilience, discernment, and the ability to tolerate discomfort that comes with confronting the brutality of race.
Download the Somatic Abolition One-Sheet

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Somatic Abolitionism | Anti-Racist Practices

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Resmaa Menakem offers educational pieces and resources about continually building up anti-racist practices to embrace Somatic Abolitionism. Learn more today.

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A community focused on embodied anti-racisim, decolonial work and culture building.

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Join us for public conversation, art-making, movin & groovin, and virtual co-dreaming into the cracks of the crumbling ground of modernity. We aim to find strange and new possibilities for a way forward, outside the confines of what has already been tried and found wanting.

We had a sense of ourselves as interconnected to a world alive...
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(What might we pay attention to?)

Journey through an exploration of Rooted's Ethos...
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The soil in which we're planted and grow...

The Borderlands represent that murky, liminal space that opens up in the disruption and disorientation of confronting trauma response patterns and orientations we've embodied in a culture of coloniality/White Body Supremacy.

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It's the mysterious and messy place that makes way for other possibilities of being in the world and in relationship. It challenges us as it uproots us in ways that can generate discomfort. Many of us have internalized narratives of shame and defectiveness, some rooted in personal histories, ancestral memories, and in the legacy and history of racialization.

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We can't be challenged in our capacity to meet the complexities we face without a foundation of personal and communal support and an expanded capacity to be with what comes as we encounter these borderlands; the liminal spaces between the world we've known and the not-yet world to come.

The kind of revolutionary change at the heart of what many of us we personally and communally long for, requires a confrontation with what we think we know; what has become embodied and is created and recreated through our bodies.

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How can we suspend the stories that play out in our minds and hearts and bones - stories that maintain harmful orientations and habituations? How do we create opportunities to disrupt what has become conditioned and habitual?

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We acknowledge our bodies, these bodies, as a crucial site of transformation and reworlding.

We acknowledge that the bodies that we bring to these spaces are shaped by forces seen and unseen, and that it's in the practices we play with and explore that we learn to cultivate the discernment to allow our bodies - personally and communally - to become our compass. We believe there is an innate inner ethic that we orient towards when the conditions are right.

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"Each interaction matters since the possibility for what the world may become calls out in the pause that precedes each breath before the moment comes into being and the world is remade again, because the becoming of the world is a deeply ethical matter."

- Karen Barad

What does it mean to explore connection and belonging across the borders of what separates us in new configurations and across lines of division in acts of collaborative survival? - (Anna Tsing)

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The feminist philosopher and scholar Donna Haraway writes that "' making kin' across divides of species, nation, gender and other borders is perhaps the most urgent task today. Through friendship or kinship we undo and renew ourselves in potentially radical and dangerous ways. In this sense, freedom is rooted in friendship" (Joyful Militancy). This is the Commons to Come (Mary Watkins).How might we imagine undoing the firmament on which colonial paradigms stand and healing lines of division through friendship and kin-making practices?

"Staying with the trouble, yearning toward resurgence, requires inheriting hard histories, for everybody, but not equally and not in the same ways."

Dine Weaving: Cosmological Performance, Mathematical Rhythm, Navajo-Churro Sheep, Hózhó

Culture does not exist 'out there'; it is in and through our bodies that it's created and recreated, and often taken-for-granted as simply being the waters we swim in. It's in the murky and mysterious edges of the borderland spaces that we harness our creativity and imagination to re-world together - that is, to create new culture.

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The etymology of the word "culture" is 'growing, cultivation'; meaning it's in the experiences we have personally and communally - that we then repeat - that become the cultivation of future worlds.

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Rooted takes an decolonial approach and seeks to de-center dominant narratives to make space for 'many worlds'. This isn't about recreating a pristine and romanticized past but navigating the terrain of the new in ways that support and sustain us.

We untethered from historical & culturally harmful structures that have shaped experience...
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(How might relationship to ourselves look?)

We could hear the guidance of ancestors and more-than-human kin...
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(How might that change how we relate to others?)

Free Resource Library

Our free learning library of anti-racism resources to explore.

Tending the Roots Podcast

Composting Conversations, an exploratory podcast with our co-dreamers and friends.

Tending the Roots
Online Festival

Our annual festival celebrating liberation! Come see how we roll.

Come join the conversation on IG...

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Join us for public conversation, art-making, movin & groovin, and virtual co-dreaming into the cracks of the crumbling ground of modernity. We aim to find strange and new possibilities for a way forward, outside the confines of what has already been tried and found wanting.

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Family­Care, Community­Care and Self­Care Tool Kit:Healing in the Face of Cultural Trauma - Association of Black Psychologists

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Family­Care, Community­Care and Self­Care Tool Kit:Healing in the Face of Cultural Trauma - Association of Black Psychologists

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Toolkit providing resources to help us take care of ourselves and each other, and strengthen our sense

of community.

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Multiple resources available - courses, community learning, blogs, etc. dedicated to furthering out anti-oppression and liberation journey.

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Louiza Doran (aka Weeze) is a coach, podcast host, advocate, agent of change, strategist and educator. It's her mission to hold the torch and lead folks on their decolonization and anti-racism journey. Being a compassionate provocateur guiding people in uncovering the path of possibility.

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White Anti-Racist Culture Building Toolkit by Alliance of White Anti-Racists

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White Anti-Racist Culture Building Toolkit by Alliance of White Anti-Racists

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The strategies are grounded in philosophical principles and understandings related to theories of social change and anti-racist white identity development. Its racial caucus format brings together white people to support, stretch, and educate one another so that we are better prepared for the solidarity work needed to fight for racial justice.

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There is an urgency felt by increasing numbers of white people across the U.S. to get active, show up, and work toward racial justice. This is evidenced by the rapid expansion of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) chapters over the last several years. What is less well-developed are the corresponding culture building and consciousness-raising dialogues that complement action groups. These are white affinity group dialogues that sustain, maintain, and enhance political action and energy.

Since 2003, AWARE-LA has hosted monthly Saturday Dialogues as part of its base building strategy to educate and mobilize white people through the development of an anti-racist white community. The strategies are grounded in philosophical principles and understandings related to theories of social change and anti-racist white identity development. Its racial caucus format brings together white people to support, stretch, and educate one another so that we are better prepared for the solidarity work needed to fight for racial justice.

For the last decade, AWARE-LA members have supported individuals who wanted to use our resources and approach to develop consciousness-raising dialogue spaces in their own cities. However, this mentorship was largely passive, responding to those who reached out to us. In light of the 2016 presidential election results, we realized that we need to be more active in making our work available to others who might have the interest, but need resources and/or guidance.

As a first effort, this page offers the following resources:
Foundation Documents

1. AWARE-LA's Core Principles

2. AWARE-LA's Toward A Radical White Identity (foundational article)

3. AWARE-LA and Accountability (includes published book chapter)

4. AWARE-LA's History and Lessons Learned

5. AWARE-LA's Theory of Social Change

6. AWARE-LA's Theory of Personal Transformation

7. White Supremacy System Model

Nuts and Bolts/Logistics Documents
We also offer one-to-one and online group mentorship conversations in order to respond to questions, brainstorm, and support white people interested in beginning racially-caucused dialogue groups in their communities. If you want to speak with one of our long-term AWARE-LA members to request mentorship support, please email awarela@gmail.com.

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White Anti-Racist Culture Building Toolkit - AWARE-LA

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White Anti-Racist Culture Building Toolkit