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How does systemic racism impact the social, economic, and political sphere of people of color?
Systematic racism not only impacts people's mental health, but also impacts the social, economic, and political sphere of people of color. Socially, systematic racism can create stereotypes that obviously are not true, everybody is entitled to their own personality and likes and dislikes. Economically, we see that racism can sometimes effect many individuals and their career. Sometimes hiring managers or coworkers make it harder to work peacefully if they consider race a factor in the integrity of a certain POC's work. We also see racism in politics such as the topic of interracial marriage laws in the "Loving Vs Virginia" in 1967.

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This website is an organization that exists to help fight racism in rural America. This is one of the few organizations that America has to fight racism. This one covers "The Challenge:" "Gun Violence" "Race and Justice Policies" "Criminal Justice" and more topics.

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Structural discrimination and unjust policing, prosecution, and incarceration practices unfairly impact Black communities. Building a just system urgently demands reform.

The challenge

When we talk about race and justice, we're talking about the ways that discrimination, policing, prosecutions, and incarceration practices impact Black communities.

Our criminal justice system is shaped by biased policing and unfair judicial precedents, rooted in anti-Blackness and racial disparity. The emotional, mental, physical, and financial impact on our communities is a tangible experience for millions of Black people in the U.S. The cost of an unjust justice system is high.

Black people are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites.

65 percent of Black adults have felt targeted because of their race. Similarly, approximately 35 percent of Latino and Asian adults have felt targeted because of race.

Black men are five times more likely to be stopped without just cause than a white person.

Our Work Against Gun Violence

Meet Keisha Deonarine

Keisha Deonarine serves as Director of Opportunity, Race, and Justice, guiding the strategy that drives the NAACP's work inclusive economy, race, and justice work. Keisha is a consultant specializing in anti-racism and anti-white supremacy strategic planning. She commits to educating businesses, organizations, and individuals contextualizing and resolving inequitable outcomes that are rooted in our shared Black history and race.

Race & Justice Policies

When we see policies that unfairly target or penalize Black people in the criminal justice system, we must address these issues where they are - with laws and legislation, and with elected and appointed leaders. We provided policy recommendations to the Biden Administration to eliminate race-based discrimination in policing, courts, and incarceration.

Accelerate compassionate release in federal prisons

President Biden should accelerate compassionate release consideration of all federal prisoners over the age of 60 and order the immediate release of as many people as possible.

Address racial violence by police and impose national accountability standards

Police agencies without the policies, training, and databases in place should not be able to receive grants and other funding. Other practices to increase police accountability include an end to qualified immunity and a national database to document violent and fatal encounters with police.

Boldly and urgently transform the federal judiciary

A vision and strategy for securing strong, diverse representation on the courts for decades to come that includes civil rights lawyers is long overdue.

Fully resource community mental health and substance abuse programs

Congress must fund local communities to respond to resident's mental health and substance abuse needs.

Reform federal prosecutorial standards to eliminate racial disparities

President Biden must direct the Attorney General to instruct federal prosecutors to refrain from engaging in practices that lead to higher sentences, such as seeking sentencing enhancements or life without the possibility of parole for young people.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE FACT SHEET

The criminal justice system is heavily impacted by the bias of police mentality, as well as outdated judicial precedents. View this toolkit of facts and figures surrounding policing, the criminal justice system, incarceration, and more.

What We're Fighting For

Form a diverse and fair federal judiciary

We need a fair and balanced judiciary that reflects all aspects of the legal profession, especially those who've promoted equality in the civil and criminal justice systems. The number of former prosecutors and corporate attorneys who sit on the bench outnumber former civil rights lawyers and public defenders, creating a system that's skewed against individuals. This imbalance will last for decades without intervention.

Eliminate racial and economic bias

To reform our justice system, we must address the structural inequities that allow people with lower incomes to be penalized in ways that wealthy people aren't. This systematically affects Black communities who continue to be over-policed, surveilled, harshly sentenced, and sent to prison in lieu of access to quality healthcare.

End mass incarceration

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world - 1 in 100 citizens is behind bars. When incarceration is used as the primary response to social problems, individuals, families and communities suffer. We need to shift resources from prisons to education and community development, eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent offenses, establish treatment for health issues, and end the death penalty.

Black men are five times more likely to be stopped without just cause than a white person.

Our Work Against Gun Violence

Keisha Deonarine serves as Director of Opportunity, Race, and Justice, guiding the strategy that drives the NAACP's work inclusive economy, race, and justice work. Keisha is a consultant specializing in anti-racism and anti-white supremacy strategic planning. She commits to educating businesses, organizations, and individuals contextualizing and resolving inequitable outcomes that are rooted in our shared Black history and race.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE FACT SHEET

The criminal justice system is heavily impacted by the bias of police mentality, as well as outdated judicial precedents. View this toolkit of facts and figures surrounding policing, the criminal justice system, incarceration, and more.

What We're Fighting For

Form a diverse and fair federal judiciary

We need a fair and balanced judiciary that reflects all aspects of the legal profession, especially those who've promoted equality in the civil and criminal justice systems. The number of former prosecutors and corporate attorneys who sit on the bench outnumber former civil rights lawyers and public defenders, creating a system that's skewed against individuals. This imbalance will last for decades without intervention.

Eliminate racial and economic bias

To reform our justice system, we must address the structural inequities that allow people with lower incomes to be penalized in ways that wealthy people aren't. This systematically affects Black communities who continue to be over-policed, surveilled, harshly sentenced, and sent to prison in lieu of access to quality healthcare.

End mass incarceration

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world - 1 in 100 citizens is behind bars. When incarceration is used as the primary response to social problems, individuals, families and communities suffer. We need to shift resources from prisons to education and community development, eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent offenses, establish treatment for health issues, and end the death penalty.

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Structural discrimination and unjust policing, prosecution, and incarceration practices unfairly impact Black communities. Building a just system urgently demands reform. The challenge When we talk about race and justice, we're talking about the ways that discrimination, policing, prosecutions, and incarceration practices impact Black communities.

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The Psychological Impacts Of Systematic Racism
Some of the impacts of systematic racism can consist of feeling left out or not good enough. It can cause people to be quieter and have to manually try and break or stray away from stereotypes.

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This article is all about a bunch of stories that encounter racism. The first story was about a kid who was walking to the comic store in a “white working-class neighborhood” and a man got out of his car and yelled at the kid to get out of his neighborhood, and then when the kid talked back the guy had gotten some kind of bat and chased the kid down the street until the kid was able to find safety.  In the second article a man was driving minding his own business following the law, and cops were following him, when he pulled into the gas station the cops followed him and got out of their car and pulled a gun on him for no reason. The following article covers the 5th questions on the research questions. "Research the statistics around racism, specifically around black men (the “reaped” men in Ward’s memoir). What do you notice?" Our group said that Black men face more racism and are also usually the ones getting chased down streets, getting guns drawn on them, getting beat up, and yelling multiple racial slurs by white men, and we can see that a lot in this article.

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After posting his " Letter to My Son," Ta-Nehisi Coates asked his readers to share their experiences with racial prejudice. Below is the first batch of many.

Scores of emails have arrived from readers responding to Ta-Nehisi's request for "your stories, your experiences with racism and its physical consequences." Here's one from an African American reader in Atlanta:

In 1982, when I was 13 years old, I wanted to go to a comic book store in a section of Brooklyn called Canarsie. At the time Canarsie was ethnic white working class. I got off at the bus stop and started walking to the comic book store. A car stopped and a man got out and yelled at me to get out of his neighborhood. I distinctly remember him telling me, "If I came to your neighborhood I would be jumped."

As I walked away I turned back to look at him going into his car to get a stick or some kind of blunt instrument. I realized then that he wanted to make sure I never came back to his neighborhood again. He chased me down the street. While running I saw an elderly white woman and her black caretaker sitting outside. I ran towards them and the man turned around and walked away.

A far more recent story from a reader in central Florida:

Crazy. Today is Sunday, July 5th. About two hours ago, I saw a tweet from Bomani Jones about Ta-Nehisi's piece " Letter to My Son " and read it of course. It was a break from some work I was completing. I saw the request for personal stories about "The Talk." (One of the commandments my mother gave me: When I get pulled over, pull over in a populated area so there will be witnesses.) I thought I would email a story later this week. I resumed my work but realized I needed a book I had left at the office. It's about 20 minutes from my house, so I hopped in the car.

The ride there was smooth, as I listened to the new Jazzy Jeff/Mick Boogie mixtape "Summertime Vol 6." On the way back, I turned onto an arterial road with a speed limit of 45 MPH. Then I saw a police car trying to ride in what would normally be my blind spot. I figured he was trying to check me for speeding, which I was not. He stayed there for a while, then he got behind me, but kept a good distance. I figured he was running my tags and would find nothing. I stopped at the next light. When the light turned green, his lights went on, joined by another police vehicle that had gotten behind him.

I cross the intersection, still not thinking they will pull me over. At the intersection there's a gas station. I pull into it and adjacent to the car wash. Both vehicles follow me in. I am 35 and have been pulled over plenty of times. Too many times. I am a vet, so I roll my window down, put the car in park and turn off the engine. One of the officers is yelling commands, so I look in my side view and see that he has his gun drawn.

He yells "Put your right hand out of the window." I already have both hands out of the window. "Open the door with your right hand." I go to use my left hand, which would be easier given that he wants me to open my door from the outside. He yells it again. I do it his way. Then he tells me to get out of the car.

I get out, face the officers and ask them "What's the problem? What's going on? Why is your gun drawn?" Not given any answers, I'm told to turn around, keep my hands up, use my right hand to lift the collar of my t-shirt to show that I do not have a gun tucked in my waistband. Even though I have been pulled over plenty of times, all of these instructions are starting to sound like a bad Twister game.

Then I'm told to walk backwards. The gun is still pointed at me. Then the pat-down ensues. I ask my same questions. I'm finally told that someone, driving a car like mine, pulled a gun on someone in the neighborhood. The other officer walks to my vehicle. He asks for my ID. My wallet is on my front passenger seat, a fact that the other officer concurs from walking around my car.

We walk up to my car so I can get my ID. I am fuming. I get my wallet and slam my door. "Calm down, I could be worse," says the other officer. I say, "I'm stopped here. Gun drawn on me. You're right. I could be shot." He responds, "You don't understand." I bite my tongue before I go off. I don't understand? It's a Sunday afternoon and here I am standing in a gas station parking lot, with my hands on my head, after having a gun pulled on me and patted down by an officer, all while another officer circled my vehicle with his hand on his weapon. He had a point; I guess the threat of being shot is better than being shot.

The officer says to me, "Do you live around here?" I reply "No." He's holding my ID, which has my address printed on it. "Do you have friends and family around here?" "Yes." "Don't you want us checking out reports of guns being pulled on people?" I don't answer. Why respond to stupid stuff like that? He hands me back my ID. I get into my vehicle, turn on my car, A/C, Summertime Vol. 6, check my mirrors and drive out of the gas station.

The path I drive to exit takes me past the two officers and their vehicles. They haven't left yet. The second officer is leaning into the passenger window of the first officer and they are talking. I guess going to find the "real criminal" driving around in a car like mine isn't that important.

From a white reader with a black girlfriend:

She and I were on a date in downtown Syracuse about a month ago. We were going to listen to some amateur musicians at the Funk 'n Waffles. It was a really fun time, and we decided afterwards to take a walk through downtown. After a brief stop at Starbucks, we kept walking around downtown. It was a Sunday. The streets were fairly deserted. We were holding hands, enjoying ourselves.

At some point, three black boys (probably high-schoolers) were walking behind us. We didn't pay them any mind until we distinctly heard someone say, "Yo, she darker than he is." My girlfriend and I kind of looked at each other, trying to affirm nonverbally that we'd heard exactly what we thought we'd heard. We kept walking.

Then one of them said, "What color your baby gonna come out?"

We didn't respond, didn't even look back; we just kept walking.

"Hey! I said, what color your baby gonna come out?!"

By then, it was perfectly clear they were no longer talking about us but AT us. Now, we're not strangers to racial harassment. It's usually some white guy walking down the street in the opposite direction making a quick remark and then vanishing before we can respond. Or it's some stationary drunk guy with a beer in his hand, leaning against a structure of some sort. Often, we'd just respond with a middle finger and that was that.

This incident, however, was our first experience where our harassers were actually following us.

We whispered to each other about what to do. Keep walking? Turn around and confront them? What if that lead to a fight? What if one of them was carrying a weapon of some kind? We're not very confrontational people and we hadn't prepared for this. We both sort of committed to stepping up our pace a little bit but pretend we couldn't hear them.

The same sentence "What color your baby gonna come out?!" was shouted again and again while these boys followed behind us about thirty feet away for three blocks. At one point, I heard the phrase "black bitch" directed at my girlfriend, to which I definitely felt her tense up on my arm. She clearly wanted to turn around and punch them. Once again, we didn't know what to do: keep walking or confront them?

When we came to an intersection, we saw a group of people gathered around a building entrance down the street on the right, so we turned and walked in their direction. The trio of youths apparently decided not to keep following us now that there was more than just the two of us, and they kept walking off to another street.

My girlfriend was shaking-from fear, from anger, from anger at herself for not confronting them, even anger at me for not standing up for her. I was also shaking. We had a long conversation about it, and I was angry at myself for not saying something to those boys, particularly when they called her a "black bitch."

That struck me as so odd. The boys never said anything about me, really. I can count on one hand the number of times in my life I've ever been called a "cracker," which I honestly cannot find offensive. It sounds so silly, like I'm being compared to a dried baked good made by Ritz or Saltine. Most other anti-white "slurs" never offended me either. Honky? Sounds like the noise a car horn makes. Peckerwood? I think it goes without saying why I find that hilarious rather than offensive.

Now, I'm not exactly naive to issues of institutional racism. Recklessness by police in Syracuse has resulted in the deaths of people like Chuniece Patterson and Raul Pinet, Jr., as well as the maiming of an African immigrant named Maparo Ramadhan. About two years ago I witnessed a black student get arrested and thrown to the ground at the downtown bus hub, just for refusing to get off the bus because he was trying to get home on the last day of school and his pass (which worked that morning) was not working that afternoon, for some reason. A black woman even offered two dollars from her own pocket to pay the boy's fare, to which the officer yelled at her, "Shut the fuck up! Sit down!" Had I a camera at the time, I would've recorded the incident.

I suppose the final thing that worried my girlfriend and me most was the implications of those three youths, regarding our having children. If we did have children, how would they be treated by other black folks? How would they be treated by police? How would they be treated by white folks? That's what has me scared the most. As a white person raised in a 99 percent white environment, I never had to deal with issues of race for at least the first 20 years of my life.

I've never had this "Talk" my black acquaintances refer to, so the thought of us having a child together and my restricted ability to help that child scares the crap out of me. It also concerns my girlfriend that, despite her being a black woman, she might not know how to contend with raising a biracial child in this society.

We've discussed how to deal with another potential "following harassment" incident. We've discussed all the pros and cons of simply walking on or confronting any future harassers. Still, the fear that we're not prepared is there.

From a young African American woman in Wichita:

My mother has four children-one white and three brown. To my white grandmother, we were niggers. I, in particular, was a chubby nigger-an offense, I learned, which greatly aggravated my already punishable-by-shunning crime of being born black. It was, after all, one thing to allow a little nigger girl into your home to sit in silence as you went about the business of teaching your real granddaughter how to be a woman. It was another thing entirely to watch as that little nigger girl ate you out of house and home and then had the gall to cry to her mother about "special treatment" and "injustice" without even bothering to wipe the crumbs-your crumbs-from her greedy black mouth. Indeed, gluttony and blackness, for my grandmother, became an inseparable (and unforgivable) pair.

My grandfather, on the other hand, was incredibly tolerant and countered my experience with my grandmother as much as he could. But when they both eventually passed and my mother inherited their Kansas house-the house whose many white rooms and fixtures had been off-limits during my childhood-it was with pride rather than shame that my father, siblings, and I sank our black feet into the plush white carpets beyond the front room and reclined on the once-banned white sofa to watch Roots together for the first time.

From another black reader, in northern California:

I'm a member of the Horde and used to comment as Baiskeli. I came to the U.S. as an African immigrant when I was 18. I was familiar with racism, coming from a former British colony where structures laid in place during colonialism still propagate themselves. But I never felt racism as viscerally as I did when a cop pointed a gun at me three months after arriving in the U.S.

I had the misfortune of jogging early in the morning through my almost all-white neighborhood in small city near Boston. There was no crime in progress; a cop just thought I looked suspicious, pointed a gun at me and forced me to the ground while peppering his orders with lots of curse words. He demanded ID and grilled me about "what I was doing in the neighborhood." Then he left me with a sarcastic "have a nice day."

Since then I've had a few more incidents-"random" driving stops, job and rental discrimination, etc-but none as visceral as that incident. The really scary incidents have been interactions with police. In 2004, my white wife (fiancee at the time) and I were walking where she lived in Brookline and a cop driving the other way did a quick U-turn and drove up almost on the curb. He asked my wife "Are you OK?" and she replied "umm, yes." He asked her again and then gave her a look of disgust and me a glare that could kill, and then roared off.

What does it mean when people whom we entrust with the ultimate power-the power to take life-view certain people like us not worthy of basic rights, as automatically suspect? (Though quite a few times the treatment improved as soon as people realize I'm a first generation African immigrant vs African-American, which shows the depth of hate/distrust reserved for African Americans.) One of the ways I've dealt with it has been reading a lot of American history-especially centered around the Civil War and Reconstruction-and Ta-Nehisi's blog was an invaluable resource.

One more reader for now:

I'm Mexican but was adopted by an all-white family in a white community. I don't speak any Spanish and nobody would know I was Mexican unless they looked carefully. When I married I never talked about my heritage with my in-laws, so they may have assumed I was just a very tan white person.

One day driving home with my sister-in-laws, we saw a black woman being pulled over. Immediately the race jokes began. My husband looked his sister in the eye and asked, "Are you a racist? Why would you say that?" She responded that she was and hated all people of color. It was her right to be racist.

I remember my husband yelling at her. I remember feeling my body shake as I realized the family I married into hated me. I remember saying that if she ever spoke like that in the future I wouldn't give her the opportunity again. But most of all I remember feeling sick. My whole life people assumed I was white but I wasn't. I'd been living a lie. And now my in-laws knew I wasn't white. I knew they wouldn't like me now. It's troubling, to say the least. Now at family gatherings I can't help but feel insecure. I know nobody will forget that day in the car-the day they realized I wasn't one of them.

But today ... I'm proud. I'm proud to be Mexican. Sometimes I'm thankful for that night. I'm thankful because it allowed me to come out and be proud of who I am regardless of what some might think.

I'm excited to see how your series evolves about your readers' experiences with racism. Sadly it's so common but few people talk about their personal experiences. Often it's because they're embarrassed.

Have your own experience to share? Email us at hello@theatlantic.com (and please try to be concise so we can publish more of them). A variety of stories are forthcoming and you can keep track of them all here.

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After posting his " Letter to My Son ,” Ta-Nehisi Coates asked his readers to share their experiences with racial prejudice. Below is the first batch of many.

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This article by the New York Times was about many citizens first encounters with racism, we see a common issue with racism, but nobody really takes the time to explore the topic. Most of the people we see talking about their first encounters with racism were kids/young adults. This source provided the story of four young adults and their first encounter with racism, some were as young as kindergarten. This article covers the psychological effects of systemic racism.

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First Encounters With Racism (Published 2017)

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Race/Related and Youth Radio partnered to ask teenagers to share stories of their earliest experiences dealing with race.

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Being a black man living in the deep south.

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Being a black man living in the deep south.

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In this article it talks about a black male moving to the deep south and dealing with all the racism surrounding him. He moved to a small town in Mississippi where the people bring up pictures of slavery, lynching, and poverty. The confederate flag is often represented by the people, and the cemeteries are even segregated.

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This story is part of a group of stories called

First-person essays and interviews with unique perspectives on complicated issues.

I almost swerved off the road the first time I saw cotton in full bloom.

I had seen the dull green cotton plants crawling toward the sky through the summer months. Then, practically overnight, the cotton bolls exploded to reveal their fluffy prize. Nothing moves fast in the South - except when it does.

My wife's grandmother spent some of her childhood days picking cotton. She described to me how the plant grudgingly yielded its prize, how the spiny shell would scrape open her fingers.

Cotton farming is all automated now. Huge machines comb the plants for their fibrous cotton centers. The cotton gets smashed into huge rectangular bales that are loaded onto flatbed trucks and shipped off for processing. But when those fields are blooming, you can't help but picture slaves dressed in rags, hunched over in the oppressive heat, their hands scarred from years of labor.

The first question I get when I tell people I live in the Mississippi Delta is, "Why?"

This is what strikes me most about the Deep South - the immediacy of the past. Nothing stands between you and the stories you hear about slavery, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement. This history is in the ground you walk on and the people you live among.

"It's real down here"

The delta is a place historian James C. Cobb called "the most Southern place on earth." For most people it's a region that brings up pictures of slavery, lynching, and poverty. So why would I, a black man from the Midwest, volunteer to move to the cradle of American racism?

My journey in the South started as a middle school teacher. I joined the Teach for America program and signed up for a two-year stint in a new public charter school on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River.

At first, I hated it. This tiny rural town felt like an island. Even more remote than an island, it seemed detached from both space and time. I couldn't even describe to friends and family back home - "It's real down here" is the best I could come up with.

Some of the differences from places I'd lived before were trivial. Store hours were rarely followed. You still can't buy alcohol on Sundays. Camouflage is always appropriate attire, whether you're going to the dentist or even church. And be careful driving at night - you don't want to be stranded on a country road in the delta with no towns or streetlights for miles.

But there was the darker stuff. On my daily commute, I would pass a truck weigh station that flew the state flag. Mississippi is the last state in the country to retain the "Southern cross" on its flag; it defiantly sits in the upper left corner of the banner. At this truck station, the flag hangs just below the American flag, the two symbols inseparable from each other.

Even the cemeteries are segregated. In our town, the Confederate cemetery, which now sits in the corner of a larger cemetery, was meant only for white people. A completely separate plot of land in another part of town, unkempt and underfunded by comparison, was reserved for deceased black people. The cemeteries still operate, and although segregation is no longer enforced, the racist history is literally etched in stone.

Most of the black folks I talk to outside of this region can't fathom ever living here. I try to tell them that they can't truly understand the nation or themselves unless they at least make a pilgrimage to the Deep South.

For black people, the South is our homeland away from home. We were divorced from our native soil on the African continent and shipped to agricultural regions of North America; the Deep South is as close as many African Americans will get to their past.

I could have easily left after my two-year commitment - but I didn't. The people I surrounded myself with and the impact I was making on my students in this small Southern town kept me rooted in place. But it was more than that. In some sense, I chose to live in the Deep South not in spite of its racial past but because of it. The racial wounds are apparent here, and they help me see this nation for what it truly is.

The Deep South is a mix of Confederate messaging and civil rights heroes

Although the trend is changing, black people have been stealing away from the South for decades. It's a place that represents bondage, lynching, and the humiliation of second-class citizenship. Down here, you're constantly faced with physical reminders - the flag, Confederate statues - of our nation's bigotry. Even today, the stigma of entrenched racism remains.

When I was a teacher, my roommates and I, all black, went looking for houses to rent. The real estate company showed us certain properties, while our white co-teachers had access to more and better options in the wealthier parts of town. My friends and I didn't get the best treatment, but we didn't get the worst either. The brokers knew we were teachers and from out of town. We also had steady paychecks. So in their minds, we weren't as big a risk as the locals who probably saw even fewer sites than we did.

Such blatant discrimination confused and then angered me. I wanted to boycott the company, but there were only a couple of real estate brokers in town and this one had the most properties by far. While we did have other options, they weren't very good ones. We ended up renting from them. A sense of powerlessness simmered into frustration - the bitter realization that principles and pragmatism don't often dwell in harmony when it comes to race in America.

But as long as there has been oppression, people have resisted it. Living in the South has turned my attention to the countless women and men whose acts of defiance, both everyday and exceptional, broke down barriers and built new bridges.

When I was teaching a Sunday school class at my church in Jackson, Mississippi, I noticed an older man with a rim of gray hair around his balding head sitting quietly. When I later asked who he was, I found out he was James Meredith - a man who, in 1962, became the first African-American student at the University of Mississippi. The night before he started classes, white segregationists started a riot on campus. By the end, thousands of federal troops had been dispatched to quell the chaos and two people were dead.

This kind of thing - a personal encounter with a living legend of the civil rights movement - has a way of reminding you that the worst days of segregation and racism are not that far away.

There's a new kind of racism

I think many people were appalled at what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, because they thought America had moved past such performative displays of white supremacy. But I wasn't surprised at all. Living in the Deep South has taught me that racism never really goes away. It just changes forms.

I recently visited the Jefferson Davis Presidential Library and Museum, dedicated to the president of the failed Confederacy during the Civil War. The library, located in Biloxi, a six-hour drive from my house to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, is dedicated to preserving and celebrating his memory. Like many rich Southern men, Davis owned people. Few placards mentioned slavery at all; several of them simply praised Davis's beneficent care of his human property and their unfailing loyalty to him. Most of the exhibits ignored the war's root causes in slavery.

In his illuminating look into the Southern mind,Baptized in Blood, historian Charles Reagan Wilson describes the South's Lost Cause narrative as "a mythic construct that helped white Southerners define a cultural identity in the aftermath of Confederate defeat." The civil religion of the Lost Cause is on full display at a place like the Jefferson Davis Museum, recasting Confederate history as heroic and virtuous.

And the Lost Cause isn't just a Southern myth; it's a national one. This is why you see Confederate flags in Maine. It's why the current president can say "they are trying to take away our history and our heritage" at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona, and still get wild applause. It's why the domestic terrorist who rammed his car into counterprotesters in Charlottesville was born and raised far away from the South, in Ohio. It's why cities from Birmingham to Brooklyn are grappling with what to do about their Confederate monuments.

Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, put it well: "The North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war."

The South is special - and progress will keep happening here

The promise of the Deep South, though, is that if racial progress can happen here, then it can happen anywhere.

Moving to the delta put me in touch with the legacy of liberation that my ancestors left me.I live here because it is where they learned resistance and resilience in the face of injustice. The South produced Medgar Evers, Coretta Scott King, Ruby Bridges, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Clyde Kennard. Even though the North boasted its own civil rights movements, the Deep South nurtured initiatives like the Delta Ministry, which provided relief services to poor, rural black people, the Freedom Rides to integrate public transportation and facilities, and kneel-ins to challenge segregation in churches.

I'm living where so many marched, bled, and died to secure my basic freedoms. It's emboldened me in a way I don't think I would have experienced in the Midwest.

I'm not sure how long I'll live in the Deep South. But after more than a decade down here, this place has given me an unshakable respect for who I am and where I come from.

I still count down the time to see when the cotton will bloom. It's a one-of-a-kind sight. Acres of white puffs blanketing the landscape like powder, the memory of brown-skinned men, women, and children bent over in the suffocating humidity.

My son was born and is being raised in the South, a region that has not been kind to black men. He is also being raised in a country that has denigrated the dignity of people like him. My hope for my child's future is that his skin color won't be a source of shame to him or derision from others.

Above all, I want my child, and myself, to be black and free. Free to live in the South as black human beings - no explanations, no apologies, no fear. Simply the freedom to be.

Jemar Tisby is a PhD student in h istory and a former school teacher and principal. He writes about race, religion, and culture as President of The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, and he is the co-host of the Pass the Mic podcast. F ind him on Twitter @JemarTisby.

First Person is Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

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"I'm a black man who moved to the Deep South. Here's what it's teaching me about race."

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First-person essays and interviews with unique perspectives on complicated issues. I almost swerved off the road the first time I saw cotton in full bloom. I had seen the dull green cotton plants crawling toward the sky through the summer months. Then, practically overnight, the cotton bolls exploded to reveal their fluffy prize.

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In this source, it's a Q&A with historians Jane Dailey, James Horton, John David Smith, and Stephen Whitfield talking about Sex and Race in 1955 Mississippi. This question helps answer the first question, "Research the history of rural Mississippi when it comes to racism and discrimination."
We learn that racial and social mores of slavery remained very much alive in Mississippi in 1955. Even though white people knew that black people were free of slavery, they did not accept equality. Blacks were not expected to have serious opinions of their own, to exercise independence of judgment, to have the capacity to educate themselves in any advanced, formal manner, or to be qualified to vote or to serve on juries.

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The Murder of Emmett Till | Article

Sex and Race in 1955 Mississippi

Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, charged with murdering Emmett Till, sitting in a courtroom with an attorney, September 19, 1955. Library of Congress

Q&A with historians Jane Dailey, James Horton, John David Smith, and Stephen Whitfield
Q. How did whites like Milam and Bryant see themselves in relation to blacks?
John David Smith:
It's not too much to say that the racial and social mores of slavery remained very much alive in Mississippi in 1955. While whites begrudgingly recognized that blacks were free, they were unwilling to accept them as social and racial equals. White sexuality, before and after slavery, always provided a means of white control over blacks. Till crossed the line of white propriety; he committed what whites considered a betrayal of racial lines. Till insulted Bryant's wife and insulted the very bases of white racial control and hegemony.

Stephen Whitfield:
The deference expected of blacks varied in intensity, depending on the region, and also depending on whether the setting was urban or rural, upper South or Deep South. In the Mississippi Delta in 1955, deference was about as thorough as could be imagined. Blacks were not expected to have serious opinions of their own, to exercise independence of judgment, to have the capacity to educate themselves in any advanced, formal manner, to be qualified to vote or to serve on juries (or of course to hold public office). In that part of the Deep South, whites arrogated to themselves the right to control whatever they wished of black life, and exercised the power to do so. As the forces of modernization gathered momentum, whites in the Deep South became especially keen to detect any challenges to that deference.

Poor whites like Bryant and Milam prided themselves on easy-going, informally "good" relations with blacks. So long as the etiquette of Jim Crow was understood by both sides, so long as no disruptive signals were emitted, blacks and whites seemingly got along without any overt signs of intimidation, though the threat of violence was always there, whether or not a Mississippi black was "uppity" or not. J. W. Milam made a living by renting Negro-driven mechanical cotton pickers for plantations in the Delta. He prided himself on knowing how to get along with blacks, on knowing how to "handle" them.

James Horton:
Few white residents of Tallahatchie County would have been prepared to deal with a black boy like Bobo. Bryant and Milam claimed that they had never intended to kill Till but simply wanted to beat him and frighten him by threatening him with death. But Bobo would not react as expected. He was defiant, refusing to beg for mercy or to be remorseful. Even in the face of beatings, he continued to defy Southern racial/sexual taboos, bragging to his attackers about his intimacy with white girls, and showing them the picture from his wallet to support his case. These were not the actions of black people with whom Bryant and Milam were familiar.
Q. Why was what Till did so wrong in the eyes of Milam and Bryant? Why did a whistle result in a lynching?
James Horton
Save for its horrible conclusion, Till's experience was not unique. His was the first generation in which substantial numbers of America's blacks were born and reared outside of the South. This was a generation of children who returned to their parents' birthplace to visit relatives in an environment different from that in which they were socialized. Their unfamiliarity with Southern racial etiquette often confused white Southerners and put Northern black visitors and their Southern relatives at risk and sometimes in danger... Bobo's fatal mistake was in crossing the racial/sexual line in his encounter with Carolyn Bryant.

Jane Dailey:
Most historians today see the Till lynching as linked to the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. A large and vocal segment of white southerners interpreted the Brown decision in explicitly sexual terms. For example, Walter C. Givhan, an Alabama state senator, asked about the decision, "What is the real purpose of this? To open the bedroom doors of our white women to Negro men." Beginning in 1954, white southerners used a variety of tactics to prevent this outcome. Southern congressmen declared their unwillingness to abide by the law; their action encouraged mobs to prevent the integration of schools and universities across the region. White Citizens' Councils -- known across the South as the "uptown Klan" -- put a respectable face on social and economic intimidation of Civil Rights supports, and inundated southern mailboxes with alarmist fliers promising white parents black grandchildren should they not stand together now against school integration. In this climate of cultivated white hysteria about black sexuality, eight-year old African American boys could be made wards of the state for playing a "kissing game" with little white girls (as happened in North Carolina) and the flirtatious crack of a 14-year-old boy could become a death sentence, as it did for Emmett Till in 1955.

If the whole system of segregation had not seemed besieged (as it did to white Mississippians in 1955), then Milam and Bryant probably would not have responded so violently to Till. But in this context of white fear and anxiety about African American sexuality, and about black sexual access to white women and girls, Till's actions assumed a new, more powerful, meaning.

John David Smith:
It was more than a whistle. Till allegedly touched Carolyn Bryant, propositioned her, and thus crossed over into the white man's sexual world. Till's behavior became "uncivilized" and, to the likes of extreme white supremacists, justified the actions of Bryant and Milam. People in control have historically employed extralegal or vigilante justice to enforce social customs. In this case they used racial violence to enforce community/racial standards, codes of behavior, in a ritual of racial fear and hate.

Stephen Whitfield:
Till not only engaged in a wolf-whistle, but was accused of squeezing the arm of Mrs. Carolyn Bryant and asking her for "a date." To him it was a joke, done to impress local young blacks. To her husband and his brother-in-law, it was a crude and crass violation of the etiquette of Jim Crow, an insult that required punishment, lest other blacks try to cross the color line in such a fashion. The whistle itself did not "result in a lynching." But if Bryan and Milam can be believed, in testimony they presented to a journalist, William Bradford Huie, after they had been acquitted (and could no longer be tried for the same offense), it was Till's impudence, his apparent defiance and perhaps lack of fear, that pushed the two abductors into killers.

Whether it was a lynching or not depends on the definition. If lynching means a public ritual meant to assert an ethos by killing those who overstep boundaries, a communal act of murder (often accompanied by torture), then Till's death was not a lynching. The two men (and possibly others) acted in secret. They did not intend to get caught or be prosecuted. This racially-motivated killing lacked the unashamed, public features of lynchings earlier in the 20th century.
Q. Mamie Till Mobley describes looking at her son's body and feeling relief that the killers hadn't mutilated his genitals. Why was she afraid they might?
Jane Dailey:
Mamie Mobley was afraid that her son's killers had mutilated his genitals because it was very common for lynchers to do exactly that. At the height of the Southern lynching craze (which peaked in 1892), naked black men were castrated by white men in full view of white women and children. In Atlanta in April 1899, for instance, Sam Hose was burned before a crowd of thousands for killing his employer and allegedly raping the white man's wife. Before setting him alight, his executioners cut off his fingers, ears, and genitals, and skinned his face.

John David Smith:
In their racist rage white mobs often mutilated the bodies of their male victims. This kind of gross ritualization of hate and control falls again into the realm of dehumanizing one's victims and thereby gaining a sense of moral vindication. In other words, those who enforce community standards believe that they are "civilized," while those beyond community standards (those who we interpret as "victims") could be brutalized because they were not "civilized." The fixation of white mobs on the sexual organs of black alleged rapists no doubt signified to some degree their own sexual fantasies and resulted in part from their ritualized need to project sexual control on the victims of their racist rage.

Q. Some Southerners felt lynchings protected the virtue of white women. Why was that important to them?

Jane Dailey:
It has often been important to various groups of men to protect what they call the virtue of the women they consider theirs. In "protecting" a woman's sexual purity, a husband (or father or brother) protects his monopoly on her sexual favors. Protecting the virtue of southern white women meant more than that for white southern men, though. White women personified the South itself -- its mind, its essence, its timeless continuity. White supremacists equated any attack on white womanhood with an attack on the South, and vice versa. As the Pulitzer-prize winning southern author W. J. Cash put it in 1941, any assault on the segregated South would be felt as an assault on white women, and "the South would inevitably translate its whole battle into terms of her defense." In punishing Emmett Till, Bryant and Milam thought they were protecting the white southern way of life. "Protecting" white womanhood was the lynchpin of an ideology, and not just a rhetorical stance.

John David Smith:
Of course whites always positioned their women on a pedestal as they abused black women sexually and psychologically. There are several levels of possible analysis here. By establishing an unrealistic place for white women, white men provided the necessary psychic distance to exploit all blacks and create the mythology of the purity of "mothers" who gave birth to southern white culture. The "untouchable" white women stood in contrast to those black women who, because of their alleged "uncivilized" place in the hierarchy of peoples, had no control over their bodies and who bore the brunt of white racial and sexual exploitation of people of color in the Old and New Souths.

Stephen Whitfield:
The Southern whites who believed that "lynchings protected the virtue of white women" were making several assumptions. One is that white women needed protection, that left on their own they might be intimate with black men, or would be unable to protect themselves against the advances of black men. Another is that lynchings were the consequence of rape or attempted rape, which constituted only a minority of the accusations for which this horrendous and barbaric punishment was the result. Finally there was the assumption that white women were virtuous (which was untrue in the notorious case, involving two white tramps or prostitutes), and that all black men furtively desired white women and would under the right circumstances assault them. White Southern men tended to believe even at mid-century that the aim of the Civil Rights movement was racial intermarriage, whereas the right to marry the spouse of one's choice irrespective of race was in fact the lowest item on the priorities of those seeking racial equality in the United States.
Q. Did lynching replace slavery as a means for whites to control blacks?
John David Smith:
Lynching existed along the frontier in all societies and whites employed the device to control "outsiders" throughout the course of southern history. After emancipation, however, lynching and other forms of racial violence provided whites the means to control, to regulate, and to keep African Americans in check. With the legal bonds of slavery removed, whites found in racial violence both a practical means to control blacks but also the means of keeping blacks fearful and perpetually marginalized in southern society. The threat of white violence, in addition to economic and social controls, maintained the controls of slavery in the post-emancipation age.
Q. Why was intimate contact between the races so taboo?
Jane Dailey:
Intimate contact between the races was taboo for a variety of reasons. One important reason had to do with the way Jim Crow discrimination worked in the realm of the law. The point of segregation was to keep black southerners in their separate and inferior places. To do that, the state had to be able to tell who was who. In order to do that, like had to marry like. For more than 300 years, state legislatures wrote laws that defined whiteness for the purpose of marriage. Depending on the state and the decade, people who were more than half black, or a fourth black, or an eighth black, or 1/16 black, or even 1/32 black, could not marry anyone defined at law as white. These laws were the lodestar of segregation, because without controls on sex, racial classification became impossibly complicated. Interracial sex -- what white southerners called miscegenation -- undercut all forms of segregation based on genealogy.

John David Smith:
Intimate contact suggested degrees of shared humanity that slavery, then semi-slavery (peonage, convict lease, sharecropping, farm tenantry) sought to suppress. It also suggested the loss of white control over whom, whites or blacks, would control the racial and social control dynamics of a racially-hierarchical society. Whites could have intimate contact with blacks on the whites' terms but not vice versa. Whites feared that once black men were their sexual equals (ie. having white female sexual partners), that the whites' entire social structure would collapse. Some scholars see sexual control at the core of racial control mechanisms throughout southern history.
Q. Some white slaveowners raped their slaves, though. What about that?
John David Smith:
As I've said above, whites defined blacks in such ways that some whites could justify raping black women. Recent scholars point to the domestic slave trade as the best example of the open, blatant, and perpetual sexual exploitation of blacks, especially women but of men as well. While white women allegedly were shocked by the sexual activities of their husbands and sons, miscegenation was so pervasive that I think it was justified and accepted by whites of all classes as part of the whites' "Herrenvolk democracy." Whites viewed blacks as uncivilized people with no rights that whites were bound to respect.
Q. Didn't whites and blacks ever fall in love?
Jane Dailey:
Whites and blacks often fell in love. There are many instances of interracial love affairs and marriages, from the colonial period through emancipation and Jim Crow and on into the present. Perhaps the most famous couple in the modern era are Richard and Mildred Loving, who married in 1958, were arrested for violating Virginia's anti-miscegenation law, and who challenged that law successfully before the Supreme Court. The decision that made restrictions on interracial sex and marriage is thus called, appropriately, Loving v. Virginia!

John David Smith:
Obviously yes. As brutalizing as slavery was, human emotions certainly were involved in interracial sexual partnerships. Too much of the scholarship on this derives from autobiographical and literary accounts. But "love across color lines," as the German scholar Maria Diedrich notes in her recent book, no doubt existed between slaves and masters and complicates a simple narrative of master-slave relationships.
Q. How are things different today?
John David Smith:
As in history, today people of all ethnic backgrounds are attracted to others of different ethnic backgrounds. Today white southerners seem to be more tolerant of interracial partnerships, but I would argue that this is neither universal nor across-the-board. The farther one lives from a metropolitan community the more one observes stares at interracial couples and the more likely interracial couples are to encounter the social opprobrium of their communities. Ideas die hard and many whites still are uncomfortable with the reality of "racially-mixed couples."

Stephen Whitfield:
The Till case looks more ambiguous than it did in 1955, because of the emergence of feminism. In 1955 no decent human being, no citizen endowed with a conscience, could fail to be revolted by the price that Emmett Till paid for his braggadocio. That is still true. But the feminist movement that had begun to emerge a decade later also saw something sinister in what Till in his joking adolescent way did, which was to assume that females could be "taken" by any males bold enough to make advances upon them. A wolf-whistle was no longer a matter of amusement, but came to be seen as an example of an unpleasant aggressiveness that women no longer needed to endure or make light of.

I should add that the trial, even though it resulted in the injustice of an acquittal, brought to light the horrendous excess to which white supremacists would go to perpetuate "the Southern way of life." The shock of the murder and of the subsequent exoneration produced an outrage that would burst into the Civil Rights movement that crested within the decade, and quite a few activists who helped doom Jim Crow have testified to the emotional impact that the Till case exerted upon them.

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Sex and Race in 1955 Mississippi | American Experience | PBS

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The Murder of Emmett Till | Article Q&A with historians Jane Dailey, James Horton, John David Smith, and Stephen Whitfield Q. How did whites like Milam and Bryant see themselves in relation to blacks? John David Smith: It's not too much to say that the racial and social mores of slavery remained very much alive in Mississippi in 1955.

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In this article, people say that being middle-class, and light-skinned means being better by American standards, Brian shows that it is not better and you can still face the same amount of racism because even though Brian was light skin, he still faced severe racism. This article helps cover the second research question. "How does systemic racism impact the social, economic, and political sphere of people of color?"

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I am a black man who has grown up in the United States. I know what it is like to feel the sting of discrimination. As a middle-class, light-skinned black man I also know that many others suffered (and continue to suffer) a lot worse than me. I grew up around a lot of white people. In elementary school, I remember being told that I was one of the "good ones" - not like the "bad ones" I was meant to understand; I was different.

I remember the way this kind of backhanded compliment stung me, but it took me a long time to understand why it hurt. In truth, though, the comment rings true. I am "good" by America's standards, or at least "better": my skin is light, most of the time I dress like a middle-class professional and my manner of speech betrays a large degree of assimilation in the white American mainstream (for example, I use phrases like "manner of speech").

But as many others have learned, there is no amount of assimilation that can shield you from racism in this country. Throughout my life, something - the kink of my hair or my "attitude" - would mark me as inferior, worthy of ridicule, humiliation or ostracism. In elementary school I got the distinct impression that teachers didn't like me. I got in trouble a lot, and one teacher actually wrote on my report card that I was "amoral". In third grade, I had my first black teacher and the whole dynamic changed. Mrs Brooks decided it was OK if I squirmed in my chair. She taught us about discrimination and injustice and taught us to recite and interpret poetry from the black arts movement. (Thank you, Mrs Brooks!)

As I got older, I observed that my mother saw racism around every corner. She assumed that I would be the object of discrimination in school and maintained an intense, vigilant determination to protect me from it. She monitored everything about my treatment in school, ready to leap at the slightest slight. Sometimes I thought she went too far. I wasn't chosen to give a speech to my middle school's assembly, and so she inquired as to why I wasn't chosen, and she insisted that I be given a shot. So, thanks to my mother raising a fuss I had to give a speech to my entire middle school. (Thank you, mom!)

'Like many young black people, I internalized the idea that I would have be twice as good to get half as much respect.' Photograph: Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images

In high school I started wondering, as teenagers do, how people go about finding romantic partners. From what I could tell in movies and television shows - my principal sources of information - you had to be a rich and white to be worthy of love. I was neither, so I was worried. Like many young black people, I internalized the idea that I would have be twice as good to get half as much respect. Much to my dismay, my blackness seemed to be the salient thing about me. One of my classmates had a gift for inventing creative ways to make fun of my kinky hair, and he got enough people laughing to send me home in tears for a good part of my freshman and sophomore years of high school.

One year, one of the few black students at my high school found a noose hanging in his locker one day. The culprit - a white student - was quickly discovered, and all he had to do to get out of trouble was issue a lame apology. I thought his punishment should have been more severe. I convinced my best friend to wear black armbands in school to protest. This act earned me no greater respect, and actually greater ridicule. Several of our teachers thought it was funny and even prompted our classmates to laugh at our expense: "Look at Jones," one teacher said, "starting a revolution." (Thank you, Mr I forget-your-name!)

I became so well-practiced in the art of not offending racist white people that I ceased to become outraged by them

Looking back, I realize that, apart from my black armband episode, my survival strategy was to make myself as non-threatening as possible. I became so well-practiced in the art of not offending racist white people that I ceased to become outraged by them, at least when they affected me directly. I knew how to enter a store, to make eye contact with someone who worked there, to smile and say hello as if to say: "Don't worry, I'm not trying to steal anything." Somehow - I suppose from being followed in stores frequently - I learned not to carry books into a bookstore, not to walk through a store with bags that were not sealed or zippered shut, and so on.

Now that I'm older, with a graying beard and significantly less hair on my head, I probably don't need to keep up this routine, as I'm probably the cause of less suspicion, but the habit has stayed with me. While shopping, I still assume that I am suspect. I am a middle-aged man, and yet I still habitually enter the grocery store, the book store, the clothing store, etc looking for the first opportunity to reassure the employees that I'm not going to be a problem.

At some point, I figured out (at least, intellectually) that it doesn't matter how "good" I am - my fate is bound up with all of those who are "bad". There was a moment in my adulthood when I decided that the present order is intolerable and a new world is both possible and necessary. In the grand scheme of things, my experiences of everyday racism are not that important. I am neither the most privileged nor most oppressed. I know that there are people of all stripes who are trying to survive on this planet with fewer resources than I have.

I am consistently inspired by the words of the early 20th-century socialist Eugene V Debs (a white guy!) who famously told a judge, after being convicted of sedition: "Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

Malcolm X: 'Human rights! Respect as human beings! That's what American black masses want.' Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis / AP Images

I am also inspired by the words of Malcolm X, who summarized the goals of the black movement as: "Human rights! Respect as human beings! That's what American black masses want. That's the true problem. The black masses want to not be shrunk from as though they are plague-ridden. They want not to be walled up in slums, in the ghettoes, like animals. They want to live in an open, free society where they can walk with their heads up, like men and women!"

Eugene Debs and Malcolm X are very different men from very different social contexts, and yet in my mind they are congruent.

Growing up in this country, my experience with everyday racism, although unique to my class and complexion, has nevertheless given me some access to the "second sight" that is a crucial part of black people's gift to the world. To paraphrase WEB Du Bois, I believe that black history has a message for humanity. That message, to paraphrase activist Alicia Garza, is that the kind of equality black people need to be free is the kind of equality that will make everyone else free.

I write this as a black person who also knows the white American world. There is ignorance and prejudice there, but there is also pain, suffering and struggle. I am grateful to my parents and teachers who helped me to notice and name racism and discrimination. They have helped me to understand my personal experience and, just as importantly, to see beyond it. I have become convinced that black liberation is bound up with true human liberation. Look at me, with any luck, starting a revolution.
Brian Jones is an educator and activist in New York. He is the associate director of education at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

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Growing up black in America: here's my story of everyday racism | Brian Jones

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As a middle-class, light-skinned black man I am 'better' by American standards but there is no amount of assimilation that can shield you from racism in the US