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Jacqueline Woodson's Shares Essential Book for Discussing Racism With Kids

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Jacqueline Woodson's Shares Essential Book for Discussing Racism With Kids

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These Children’s Books About Race Can Help Start Essential Conversations With Your Kids

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These reads selected by author Jacqueline Woodson will help us “decide whose narrative we will not only choose to see, but choose to believe.”

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Bettina Love vividly explains the difference between allies and co-conspirators in the fight for justice.

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Bettina Love vividly explains the difference between allies and co-conspirators in the fight for justice.

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Bettina Love vividly explains the difference between allies and co-conspirators in the fight for justice.

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McKenzie Adams and Maddie Whitsett should still be here with us today. But after being tormented at their respective schools last year, the two girls, both 9 years old, died by suicide. According to the girls' families, McKenzie was the victim of racist bullying, and Maddie was taunted because she had ADHD.

These two children represent the human faces behind a disturbing study published in JAMA Pediatrics in 2018: Although the overall suicide rate for Black youth is about 42 percent lower than for white youth, that number represents all young people under 17. While Black teens between the ages of 13 and 17 are 50 percent less likely to die by suicide than white teens, the suicide rate for Black children between the ages of 5 and 12 is about twice as high as that of their white peers.

The study, which analyzed data from 2001 through 2015, does not describe reasons for the disparity, but it points to the need for culturally informed interventions. In a 2015 study published in JAMA Pediatrics, which analyzed data from 1993 through 2012, researchers came to a troubling conclusion: Because there was no significant change in the overall suicide rate among youth, the fact that the suicide rate had decreased among white children but increased among Black children had been obscured.

While youth advocates note that these statistics are disturbing, they welcome the much-needed and long-overdue conversation about the well-being of Black children. This awareness of suicidality among Black youth is why the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) established an emergency Taskforce on Black Youth Suicide and Mental Health in April 2019. It aims to determine the reasons for the significant increase in suicide, recommend ways to improve Black children's access to mental health care and create solutions to better protect and support them.

Black people, including youth, are less likely to receive adequate care for mental health issues for a number of reasons: disparities in access to care, stigma about mental illness and lack of culturally competent mental health practitioners. According to a study published in the International Journal of Health Services, Black children are about half as likely as white children to get mental health treatment. As the CBC task force, mental health experts and policy makers mull over ideas to address this gap, it's also crucial that schools devote significant attention and space to mental health literacy and provide mental health services in the form of counselors and psychologists.

Schools Must Fill the Gap

Because the racial disparities in mental health access and treatment affect children, schools necessarily play a major role in helping to mitigate those disparities. This inequity "perfectly underscores schools as the de facto providers of mental health services to students," says Charles Barrett, a school psychologist and multicultural committee chair for the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP). "Because systemic issues related to race and poverty disproportionately affect Black children and families, schools, due to having access to large numbers of children, are a practical way to meet a significant need."

Advocates agree that school administrators and educators must be part of this work. School faculty and staff are likely to notice signs and symptoms that something is amiss and refer students to the help they need. But schools often fail in this effort when it comes to Black students-and sometimes cause even more harm.

When Black students exhibit negative behaviors or become withdrawn, educators often label them as problems and subject them to reactionary, zero-tolerance policies and other practices that disproportionately affect Black students but don't address the root causes of such behavior.

This harm manifests in a number of ways: adopting curriculum that isn't culturally responsive, lowering academic expectations, tracking Black students into remedial or special education classes and seeing Black youth as older and less innocent than their white peers-a bias known as adultification.

"Kids who don't feel safe, engaged or supported cannot show up in schools and demonstrate what they know and have learned," says David Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition, a civil rights organization dedicated to empowering Black LGBTQ and same-gender-loving communities. "In particular, those who have been terrorized by [educators'] indifference and our ignorance-and the hate that is often birthed from that-suffer and are suffocated."

We see this suffering play out regularly in news reports of egregious assaults on Black children's dignity at school: A Black student is humiliated when made to clean feces off a bathroom wall; a teacher rips the braids from a Black girl's head; groups of Black kids are forced to act as enslaved people while their white classmates pretend to trade them as property; Black students are turned away from school because they have dreadlocks or some other "unacceptable" hairstyle.

These stressors are serious. And sometimes they rob children of their lives, especially if they're compounded by underlying mental health issues.

"I'm acknowledging that the world often doesn't allow Black people to simply be," Johns says. "But it's incredibly important for parents, family members and educators to protect the ability for our babies just to be babies-to laugh, to make mistakes, to color outside of the lines, to create things with blocks that don't make sense to those of us who have forgotten how to dream. Too often we snatch them from Black kids in ways that are unfair and undeserved."

Johns leads a policy committee for a working group commissioned by the CBC's task force. He leverages his experience as a former kindergarten and third-grade teacher into policy work and activism. He spent a decade crafting federal policy, from serving as a congressional fellow to directing the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans under President Barack Obama. His work has focused on education and health care issues as they relate to children and families.

In his postgraduate work at Teachers College, Columbia University, Johns describes how schools themselves are sources of trauma for kids who are not white, cisgender or heterosexual.

Too often, he says, academic researchers and policymakers approach conversations about issues Black youth face with a deficit mindset-treating Black students, their families and communities as perpetually problem-ridden despite the fact that these conditions were forced on them. "We need to invert that. Black feminists a long time ago talked about the reality that there are signs, symbols and systems that work to make white privilege real and work to preserve it and often make it invisible," Johns emphasizes.

Johns notes that there is urgency in the establishment of the CBC task force, which is expected to produce a report with recommendations by the end of the year.

"The emergency in this context also signals that it's not designed to be permanent," he explains. "This isn't going to be a standing caucus. We are working through the first quarter of next year to accomplish as much as we can and to plant seeds that will continue to bloom."

"We're Still Healing"

Gabriel Bryant, coordinator for Engaging Males of Color, a Philadelphia youth initiative, sees firsthand how under- or undiagnosed mental health issues can add to the challenges Black students might have at school.

"Oftentimes, there are added stressors for young people when they don't feel that they have an outlet with which to cope, with which to manage the grief, the loss, the anger, the sadness," Bryant says. "And what happens is that it's compounded when that young person recognizes that they also have just a whole host of social determinants to navigate. That can be overwhelming."

He argues that these added stressors-the causes of that grief, loss, anger and sadness-must be addressed before there can be real change. Such stressors include the effects of poverty, environmental issues, living in a food desert and having disabilities.

The growing awareness of mental health concerns for Black children doesn't mean something new is happening. Educators and mental health advocates note that perhaps the increase in Black youth suicidality may be coming to light now because previously there wasn't a collection of such data specific to Black children.

"And in particular," David Johns points out, "we have a lot of work to do to overcome the stigma that's still associated with mental health, which is still seen in too many communities as a 'white people thing.'"

Charles Barrett encourages school psychologists and school counselors to help Black families understand how depression and anxiety look in children, which may be different from adults.

"Relatedly, school-based mental health professionals need to assist Black families with accessing culturally responsive community-based resources-for example, counseling and therapy," Barrett says. "And although it's improving, school-based mental health professionals can also work with Black families to reduce the stigma that is associated with mental health in the Black community."

Trust has to be built, though.

"Whenever possible-and it's not always feasible-I think identifying other Black providers for families could be very helpful," Barrett says. "I think sometimes I've shared the same message that they've heard from others, and it's received better from someone who looks like you."

Another aspect of that lack of trust has to do with Black communities' historical and ongoing struggles for equal rights. On top of that, some communities must also tackle issues that are exacerbated by these inequities, such as violence, poverty and substance abuse. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, an associate professor of English education with Teachers College, Columbia University, says Black people are often left out of critical conversations about these problems that plague families of any race.

"As Black people, we're still healing," she says. "We've been ignored for so long. The issues that have been in other communities-let's say issues of abuse or incest or whatever-always seems to get public media attention when it happens to white families. Some of these same ills have always been happening in our community and probably more so because of the vestiges of enslavement and captivity in this country."

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McKenzie Adams and Maddie Whitsett should still be here with us today. But after being tormented at their respective schools last year, the two girls, both 9 years old, died by suicide. According to the girls' families, McKenzie was the victim of racist bullying, and Maddie was taunted because she had ADHD.

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An Essential Reading Guide For Fighting Racism

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An Essential Reading Guide For Fighting Racism

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

If you want to dive deeper with Kendi, there's his National Book Award-winning Stamped From the Beginning, which scrutinizes the history of anti-black racist thought in America from its very beginning to now. By showing how deeply entrenched racist ideas have been - and still are - in America, and thus exposing clearly and discrediting these ideas, Kendi has created not only a great work of scholarship but a much-needed tool.

For younger readers, check out Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You - Kendi's adaptation of both Stamped and How to Be an Antiracist, co-written with Jason Reynolds.

In the aftermath of the Ferguson riots, Anderson wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post arguing the nation's attention should be on the rage that had sparked them - but, she wrote, it wasn't black rage. In her 2016 book, Anderson continues her piercing analysis of white rage, and the ways in which it has fueled, and continues to fuel, political decisions which push back against the advancement of black Americans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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An Essential Reading Guide For Fighting Racism

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From Audre Lorde's groundbreaking essays to Ibram X. Kendi's guide to being antiracist, these books are a great resource for understanding why people are protesting right now.

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These recent poetry collections offer poignant narratives and snapshots of racial injustice in America, from lasting testaments of systemic violence to a public appeal for the vital work that remains to be done as the country confront its legacy of racism and exploitation.

White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia by Kiki Petrosino (Sarabande)
"In this deeply felt fourth collection, Petrosino investigates her family tree-especially its roots in Virginia-and reports back on this exploration and its gaps.... This is an important and remarkable exploration of heritage."

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These recent poetry collections offer poignant narratives and snapshots of racial injustice in America, from lasting testaments of systemic violence to a public appeal for the vital work that remains to be done as the country confront its legacy of racism and exploitation.

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#SAYHERNAME--Justice for Breonna Taylor 

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#SAYHERNAME--Justice for Breonna Taylor 

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"There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives." -Audre Lorde

At 1am on March 13, 2020 Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, were asleep in their apartment when three plainclothes officers with the Louisville Metro Police Department arrived to execute a "no-knock" search warrant in a drug case. The police broke down the door and Walker, believing they were being robbed, called 911, grabbed a gun and fired once, shooting an officer in the leg. He had a license to carry. Taylor was unarmed. The police fired more than 20 shots into the apartment and Breonna Taylor was shot eight times and killed. Kenneth Walker was arrested and charged with assault and attempted murder on a police officer. Since the raid and the wrongful death of Breonna Taylor, more information has come out about the incompetence of the police in this case, and the misconduct of one officer in particular, Brett Hankison, who has been accused in an ongoing Federal lawsuit of harassing suspects with unnecessary arrests and planting drugs on them. All three police officers are currently on leave and this week, Louisville's mayor and police chief asked the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI to review the police department's internal investigation into the shooting. We join the call for the three officers, John Mattingly, Brett Hankison, Myles Cosgrove, to be charged immediately in the wrongful death of Breonna Taylor.

As the movement for Black lives has brought increased attention to the murders of Black men by police and white vigilantes--most recently the murder of Ahmaud Arbery right here in Georgia--we cannot allow the deaths of Black women like Breonna Taylor to go under-remarked and under-mourned.

#SayHerName is a response to the Black Lives Matter movement and the mainstream media's tendency to sideline the experiences of black women in the context of police brutality and anti-Black violence. Black women and girls have always been targets of structural and interpersonal white violence at rates similar to Black men, but because of structural sexism, their numbers and names are often not remembered or recorded in the same way. As feminists, we are always fighting multi-dimensional battles, knowing, as Audre said, we do not live single issue lives. To see men's lives and deaths more honored and more centered than the lives and deaths of women, even within movement spaces, is painful.

As always, we believe that books build bridges and change lives even in times of great sadness, anger, and exhaustion. This booklist, inspired by the #SayHerName movement, features books on police brutality against Black women, the school to prison-pipeline and Black girls, the role of women and non-binary folks in the Black Lives Matter movement, and the historical underpinnings of our current moment. Whether you are a Black woman sitting with pain or terror or numbness at yet another murder, a Black man wanting to learn more about how to support the specific calls to action from Black feminists or a white or non-Black person of color trying to be an accomplice in the fight against police brutality and structural racism and sexism, this list offers many places of entry for recognition, for healing, for action. Together we can begin to envision and build a world that celebrates and fights for the dignity and freedom of Black women-mind, body and soul.

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"There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives." -Audre Lorde At 1am on March 13, 2020 Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, were asleep in their apartment when three plainclothes officers with the Louisville Metro Police Department arrived to execute a "no-knock" search warrant in a drug case.

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

Educate yourself!

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

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

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

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

Get involved locally.

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

Uplift and center the voices of the most marginalized people.

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

Take action in your own life.

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

Why does it matter?

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

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

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10 Books to Better Understand the History of Racism in America

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10 Books to Better Understand the History of Racism in America

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An  Anti-Racist Graphic Novel Reading List

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An  Anti-Racist Graphic Novel Reading List

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In tribute to the memory of George Floyd, who died at the hands of the Minneapolis police, and in support of the worldwide outcry over his death, PW 's comics editors have compiled a list of graphic titles about African American life and history. The titles listed here are primarily nonfiction graphic works that address topics including the Civil Rights Movement, hip-hop, gentrification, white supremacy, the criminal justice system, police brutality, and the lives of black women. In addition the list also offers several works of fiction that offer insights into similar topics via their settings and skillful characterizations. We welcome suggestions for other titles to add to our list.

A Black Woman Did That by Malaika Adero and Chanté Timothy (Downtown Bookworks)
A lively compilation of illustrated biographical profiles of 42 dynamic black women whose accomplishments have transformed the world, including such figures as Michelle Obama, Ida B. Wells, Serena Williams, Ava DuVernay, and Stacey Adams. For young readers.

Bingo Love by Tee Franklin and Jenn St-Onge (Image).
Hazel and Mari, two black teen girls, meet at a bingo hall in 1963 and fall in love but must hide their feelings and go separate ways, only to accidentally reunite decades later-after marriage and raising children-in a lovingly rendered fictional tale about second chance queer love.

Black History in Its Own Words by Ronald Wimberly (Image)

A collection of inspirational quotations from black leaders and artists throughout American history accompanied by Wimberly's evocative drawings.

Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence byGeoffrey Canada with art by Jamar Nicholas (Beacon)

This vivid graphic adaptation of Canada's acclaimed memoir marks his emotional evolution as he moves through escalating levels of neighborhood violence while growing up poor in the Bronx.

Ghetto Brother: Warrior to Peacemaker by Julian Voloj with art by Claudia Ahlering (NBM)

The true story of Bronx legend Benjy Melendez, son of Puerto-Rican immigrants, who founded the notorious Ghetto Brothers gang in the 1960s before establishing peace between the warring gangs in the 1970s in what was a prelude to the Hip-hop era.

Hip Hop Family Tree by Ed Piskor (Fantagraphics)

This massive 4-volume graphic history of Hip-hop beginning in the 1970s in the Bronx covers four decades of musical, visual, and literary innovation that has transformed music and youth culture around the world.

Hot Comb by Ebony Flowers (Drawn & Quarterly)

Flowers offers a series of poignant and insightful graphic stories that explore the lives of black women, the cultural complexities around their hair, and issues of race and class in the U.S. and in Africa.

Kindred byOctavia Butler, adapted by Damian Duffy and John Jennings (Abrams ComicArts)

Recreated graphically, Butler's acclaimed 1979 novel tells the story of an -African American woman from the 1970s who travels back in time to slavery and meets an unlikely ancestor.

Nat Turner by Kyle Baker (Abrams)

Baker's powerful graphic work depicts the life and times of the self-educated African American preacher who led a slave revolt in Southampton County, Va., in 1831, believing that God wanted him to free the slaves.

Sentences: The Life of MF Grimm by Percy Carey and art by Ron Wimberly (Vertigo)

The true story of the life of legendary Hip Hop MC Percy "MF Grimm" from his time as child actor on Sesame Street, then as a drug dealer who uses a wheelchair after a murder attempt, and his eventual rise to become an underground rap star.

Showtime at the Apollo: The Epic Tale of Harlem's Legendary Theater by Ted Fox and James Otis Smith (Abrams ComicArts)

Fox's history of the famous venue surveys the personalities and social issues that have impacted the theater and the Harlem neighborhood that surrounds it, over the course of 85 years.

Six Days in Cincinnati: A Graphic Account of the Riots That Shook the Nation a Decade Before Black Lives Matter by Dan Mendez Moore (Microcosm)

An account of an uprising that engulfed Cincinnati in 2001 after 19-year-old Timothy Thomas was killed by the police, as told from the viewpoint of a participant in the civil disobedience.

Strange Fruit: Uncelebrated Narratives from Black History by Joel Christian Gill (Fulcrum). The lives of little known figures in black American history such as Box Brown and Bass Reeves are featured in biographical stories that bring them back to life.

Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse (First Second).
A pioneering queer/civil rights graphic novel based in-part on Cruse's life, it is the story of a young gay white man growing up in the Jim Crow south and his complex relationships with queer and straight members of the African American community in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement.

Yummy: the last days of a Southside Shorty by G. Neri and Randy Duburke (Lee and Low)
A YA graphic novel based on the life and death of Robert "Yummy" Sandifer, an 11-year-old gang member from Chicago's Southside who was killed by members of his own gang.

March Trilogy by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell (TopShelf)

The three volumes covering the life of Rep. John Lewis offer a gripping and panoramic narrative of the Civil Rights Movement across the arc of Lewis' heroic social activism and public service.

King: A Comics Biography by Ho Che Anderson (Fantagraphics)

The final deluxe hardcover compilation edition of a pioneering and critically acclaimed graphic biography of Martin Luther King Jr. has been praised for its expansive and creative depiction of King's life.

Martin Luther King and The Montgomery Story by Fellowship of Reconciliation, Alfred Hassler, Benton Resnick (Fellowship of Reconciliation)

The landmark 16-page 1957 comic book account of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott led by Rosa Parks details the tenets of the philosophy of nonviolence as well as the tactics used to battle Jim Crow segregation on city buses.

Big Black: Stand at Attica by Frank "Big Black" Smith and Jared Reinmuth, art by Améziane. (Archaia)

A graphic memoir by the late Frank "Big Black" Smith, a former Attica prison inmate later turned prisoner-rights advocate, who was an inmate leader during the four-day 1971 Attica prison uprising, a landmark event in the history of mass incarceration.

Race to Incarcerate by Marc Mauer with art by Sabrina Jones (New Press)

Maurer and Jones adapt Maurer's landmark examination of four decades of the explosive and socially corrosive expansion of the American prison population into a graphic work.

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix edited by Lois Ahrens (PM Press)

This anthology of comics looks at the economics, racial disparity, and racist social impact around financing and building prisons.

Race and Social Justice

Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet by Ta-Nehesi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze (Marvel)

The classic Marvel black superhero, the Black Panther T'Challa, King of the Afrofuturist African domain of Wakanda, has been reimagined for a new generation by National Book Award -winner Coates.

BTTM FDRS byEzra Claytan Daniels and Ben Passmore (Fantagraphics)

An irresistible combination of satire and horror in a quirky graphic exploration of urban gentrification, racial tropes, and class among the young and insufferably hip in a former working class Chicago neighborhood.

I Am Alfonso Jones by Tony Media with art by Stacey Robinson and John Jennings (Lee and Low)

This complex and inspirational graphic novel is aimed at young adults and memorializes a number of victims of police violence (among them Eleanor Bumpurs, Amadou Diallo, and writer Henry Dumas), while also probing the issues surrounding police brutality and Black Lives Matter.

Your Black Friend and Other Strangers by Ben Passmore (Silver Sprocket).

These thoughtful and dazzlingly illustrated short stories and graphic essays focus on contemporary responses to race, prisons, police brutality, gentrification, radical politics, and more.

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An Anti-Racist Graphic Novel Reading List

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In tribute to the memory of George Floyd, who died at the hands of the Minneapolis police, and in support of the worldwide outcry over his death, the 'PW' comics editors have compiled a list of graphic titles about African American life and history.

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Schomburg Center Black Liberation Reading List

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Schomburg Center Black Liberation Reading List

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So You Want to Talk About Race Readers Guide

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So You Want to Talk About Race Readers Guide

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A Conversation on Race and Privilege with Angela Davis and Jane Elliott

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A Conversation on Race and Privilege with Angela Davis and Jane Elliott

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A Conversation on Race and Privilege with Angela Davis and Jane Elliott

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Systemic Racism: Is That Really a Thing?

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Systemic Racism: Is That Really a Thing?

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How to raise kids to be anti-racist and talk to them about racism

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How to raise kids to be anti-racist and talk to them about racism

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How to raise kids to be anti-racist and talk to them about racism

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Black Parents Explain How to Deal with Police

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Black Parents Explain How to Deal with Police

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Black Parents Explain How to Deal with the Police | Cut

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[Image description: Illustration from All Are Welcome by Alexandra Penfold & Suzanne Kaufman. Children of various races and faiths pointing to locations on a world map.] If you're nervous about talking about race with your kids, these books about racial diversity will give you an easy place to start destigmatizing difference & celebrating racial diversity. Bold and *marked books are written or illustrated by #OwnVoices makers of color. Raising Luminaries is free and accessible for readers who can't afford a paywall. Donate or shop using an affiliate link via| Paypal | Venmo | Ko-fi | Buy a t-shirt | Buy a book Anti-Racism For Beginners: Part 1 Acknowledging & Celebrating Racial Diversity Posts may contain affiliate links, which allow me to earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Check out the full affiliate disclosure along with my statement of accountability. If you're into supporting libraries (please do!) more than consumerism, you can also support my work directly:

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" How do I teach my kids to be anti-racist when I'm still learning myself?"
- Anonymous, Books For Littles Facebook Group (archived)

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It's normal to get flustered when when our children talk about race. But if we let nervousness keep us silent and still, our fear becomes a weapon.

Growing up, I was told that discrimination would magically disappear if we stop acknowledging racial difference. All people are the same. Skin color doesn't matter. Only bad people are racist. If we are all nice and well-behaved, racism will go away.

This is the fallacy of colorblind ideology. It's a tool to keep us complicit in white supremacy. Don't be a tool.

We must talk about race with young kids. Racism thrives in silence.

When we refuse to talk about race at an early age, children absorb our silence as shame. We're taught that if we have nothing nice to say - say nothing at all. Well - white folks are aggressively silent when it comes to race! Does that mean that being Brown or Black is something to be ashamed of?

Kids pick up when we refuse to acknowledge racial difference - and how we treat people of color. Why are we surprised then, to see nice, well-behaved children reflect unconscious bias against people of color, then grow into adults who blame people of color for violence and harm against them?
(It's your job to be that adult.)
Your child needs at least one adult to speak truth to BS about racial assumptions.

My White mother who openly talked about race from birth - and how society would perceive and treat me because of my multiracial heritage. She raised me to understand that discrimination against me was not my fault. Violence would happen to me because of my race, my gender, my class but it wasn't caused by me - it was caused by white supremacy.

The Mominator refused to let me internalize the idea that I deserved racism. To do that, she first needed to acknowledge my race and the fact that I would have obstacles in life that white kids didn't.

We can help our children understand racism - and empower them to work toward racial equality.

Raise kids of color to feel proud of their culture and their right to self-advocate.

Raise white kids to recognize their duty to stand up against injustice.

But first, you've gotta acknowledge that racial differences - even though they are an imaginary, human-imagined construct, exist as a real thing in our society, with real-life impact on real-life people.

Start by telling our kids that yes - we do see skin color and racial identities.

For folks who were never given space to talk about racism and discrimination as kids (or even racial diversity), it's scary to start. We don't want to say the wrong thing and mess it up.

No worries, we are going to start very gently with non-controversial, easygoing books that just show kids that racial diversity exists. In future collections, we'll get into more emotionally loaded topics - like racial discrimination, racial privilege, colorism, and the subtle tools that uphold white supremacy, such as white fragility and respectability politics.

And this diversity is glorious.

Acknowledge & Celebrating Racial Diversity

From two anonymous BFL members:

"My daughter came home saying she didn't like her brown skin and wanted white skin and 'bright' hair instead. I'm looking for books that reinforce pride in who she is."

"My white daughter said to me the other day, 'I don't like dark skin. ' I ran to the internet to research books like these."

Yikes.

Use these comments as learning opportunities. Read these books to discuss biases they've absorbed during a quiet time home together (story time!) Encourage kids to speak bias aloud so they can hear how ridiculous it sounds, think about where it comes from, and realize how it develops.

When children point out that they like particular skin tones, body shapes, or hair textures more than others - don't shout at them or insist they are wrong. Kids this age can't untangle feelings from fact. Shaming them for a gut reaction is just going to get them to clam up.

Instead, help them untangle bias from fact on their own. Ask why they feel this way. Use in an open, non-judgemental tone. Keep asking questions to unpack these assumptions. We're not here to tell them what to think, we're here to model critical thinking about racial bias moving forward.

Discuss how all bodies are good bodies - how we differ, and what we have in common.

All Are Welcome, *Lovely, We're Different, We're The Same

Acknowledge & Celebrate Cultural Diversity

When we over-simplify racism, we tell kids that racism is simply bias against people based on skin color - it's not.
How do we counter the entrenched dominant narrative's focus on whiteness?
(That's colorism, another problem we can tackle later.)

Racism expands beyond skin color - it's assumptions and discrimination against individuals and groups of people, based on racial identity. This includes not just skin color, but also cultural norms and behavior, language, and other markers of racial and ethnic identity.
*On The Day You Begin, *Where Are You From?, *Alma And How She Got Her Name
White supremacy is assuming that racism would be over if people of color just assimilated and acted more like white people, that assimilation is even a goal for people of color, and that non-white culture is deviant or inferior to whiteness.

Read stories that show how people of color are not monolithic - we're complex individuals who can't be reduced to the caricatures of mainstream media. Our ethnic heritage is something valuable worth exploring, and our ancestors traditions, achievements, and challenges have an impact on who we are today.

But our race and ethnicity is not the only thing that defines us. Show kids how we all have a right to pride in our heritage - just not at the expense of punching down another culture.

Not pictured: *Islandborn is another lovely book, which I recommend with reservations. In 2018, several survivors came forth about Junot Díaz's problematic behavior toward women. One of these reports has been shown to have been overblown - but I'm not comfortable with the way we're dismissing all survivors of his actions because of this. The book itself is great - so I'll let you decide how to move forward with all that on your own.

Explain How Diversity Makes Us Stronger

Having a broad range of experiences to draw from, mindsets to brainstorm, and abilities to solve the problems facing humanity is a very good thing. Human diversity is good for all of humanity and evolution and stuff. I am pretty sure this is SCIENCE.

The idea that winnowing humanity into one make-believe-super-race, or segregating us all into silos based on our racial identity sounds ABSURD. Right? RIGHT?!

Obviously some families are not absorbing the fact that genetic diversity is good for society and the fate of humanity, so we have to make this clear. That whole 'melting pot' assimilation thing our teachers celebrated 20 years ago turned out to be a bad idea.

What we need is more of a chunky stew, with folks proudly retaining and celebrating our individual racial and cultural identities while cognizant of the challenges and discrimination many groups face. These books help kids see how diversity makes us stronger.

Stay Curious, Stand Brave & Talk About Race

Don't stop here. Now that your kids understand that human skin, hair, and all of that stuff comes in a broad change of colors, shapes, and textures - help them see how all people deserve basic human rights, respect, and kindness.

Click here for part 2 of raising Anti-Racist Kids - Children's Books That Teach Kids About Social Power & Paternalism

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Anti-Racism For Kids 101: Starting To Talk About Race - Books For Littles by Raising Luminaries

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Books to help kids to unpack racial bias so they can hear how ridiculous it sounds, think about where it comes from, and realize how it develops.

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Based on "Ten Quick Ways to Analyze Children's Books for Racism and Sexism." Updated in 2013.*
Children's books continue to be an invaluable source of information and values. They reflect the attitudes in our society about diversity, power relationships among different groups of people, and various social identities (e.g., racial, ethnic, gender, economic class, sexual orientation, and disability). The visual and verbal messages young children absorb from books (and other media) heavily influence their ideas about themselves and others. Depending on the quality of the book, they can reinforce (or undermine) children's affirmative self-concept, teach accurate (or misleading) information about people of various identities, and foster positive (or negative) attitudes about diversity. Children's books teach children about who is important, who matters, who is even visible. Consequently, carefully choosing quality children's books is an indispensable educational and child-rearing task.

It is important to offer young children a range of books about people like them and their family-as well as about people who are different from them and their family. All of the books should be accurate and appealing to young children. Fortunately, there are some good anti-bias children's books, which are available as a result of the ongoing activism of many individuals and groups over many years. However, while choices have improved over past decades, the lack of quality multicultural kid's books currently being published has frustrated many communities. The number of children of color in the United States continues to rise, but the number of books published by or about people of color stays the same or even decreases.

Check the Illustrations

Look for Stereotypes: A stereotype is an oversimplified generalization about a particular identity group (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, ability/disability), which usually carries derogatory, inaccurate messages and applies them to ALL people in the group. Stereotypes dehumanize people. So, too, does misinformation. ( See Box 1 below for a list of common, harmful stereotypes).

Unfortunately, all of us absorb socially prevailing stereotypes about a range of people, even if we do not consciously subscribe to them. To alert you to stereotypes in children's books, as well as other media, it is useful to list all the stereotypes you know about various groups of people as precondition for critically reviewing children's books. The books you choose should depict people compassionately and as real human beings. Also consider if images depict all people as genuine individuals with distinctive (rather than stereotypical) features. Books containing stereotypes require you to engage children in critical thinking, but should probably be eliminated from your collection.

BOX 1: Common Harmful/Undermining Stereotypes

Strong, independent girls and women are "manlike"

Book-loving or nonathletic boys and men are "effeminate"

Latino men talk funny, are lazy, gang members, or wear oversize sombreros,

Latina women are earth mothers or subservient

African American men are gang members, oversexed, or underemployed

African American women are too independent, oversexed, or "welfare moms"

Arab and/or Muslim men are terrorists

Arab and/or Muslim women are voiceless and passive

All Muslims are Arab / All Arabs are Muslim

American Indians live in teepees, carry bows and arrows, or are half-naked in winter

Disabled people are not independent or are to be pitied

Disabled people must "overcome" their disabilities rather than just live with their disabilities

LGBTQ+ people are invisible

Poor people are invisible

Poor people are depicted as passively needing help from others

AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islanders) are depicted as the "model minority"

AAPI are exotic or their food is exotic/abnormal

All AAPI know martial arts or are meek and compliant

AAPI are portrayed with slanted eyes or just lines to represent eyes

Look for Tokenism: This is the "one only" message. Regularly seeing only "one" person of any group in a book teaches young children about who is more or less important. Examples of tokenism include books with only one African American child among many white children or having only one book about children with disabilities among many other books. Tokenism also becomes stereotypical. It only allows children to see one view of a group of people, rather than the diversity that exists among all groups.

Look for Invisibility: What children do not see in their books also teaches them about who matters and who doesn't in our society. Invisibility in their storybooks-as well as in textbooks as they get older-undermines children's affirmative sense of themselves and reinforces prejudiced ideas about people who are not seen (See Box 2 for examples of groups who tend to be invisible). The booklists on this website include a great variety of books with groups who are often excluded. (The titles are vetted by Teaching for Change.)

BOX 2: Examples of Groups of People Who Are Often Invisible in Children's Books or Mainstream Media

Families who live in rural areas

Blue-collar workers

Musicians, artists, and writers

Families with two dads or two moms

Single mothers or fathers

Homeless families

Families with an incarcerated parent

People of Middle Eastern descent

Families who practice Islam

Transgender adults and children

Check the Story Line and the Relationships Between People

Even if a book shows visual diversity, the story line may carry biases related to how it handles power relationships among people of various identities. Are whites or male characters the central figures with people of color or female characters in essentially supporting roles? To gain acceptance and/or approval does a child of color, a girl, or child with a disability have to exhibit extraordinary qualities or be the one to understand, forgive, or change? Are the achievements of girls and women based on their own initiative and intelligence, or are they due to their looks or relationship with boys/men?

Are people of color, women, low-income families, or people with disabilities depicted as needing help or in passive roles, while whites, men, and "able-bodied" people are in leadership and action roles? How are problems presented, conceived, and resolved? Who typically causes a problem and who resolves it? Your book collection needs a balance of different people in "doer" roles.

Look at Messages About Different Lifestyles

Do the lives of people of color or people living in poverty in the story contrast unfavorably with the norm of white, middle-class suburban life? Are negative value judgments implied about ways of life that differ from the dominant culture or economic class (e.g., people are to be pitied, or the story is about one person who "gets out" of the less desirable way of life)? Do images and information go beyond oversimplification and offer genuine insights into the lifestyle of the characters in the story? Does the setting reflect current life-or past assumptions about life? Does your book collection depict diversity among people within a specific racial/ethnic group, such as a range of family structures, living environments, socioeconomic conditions and types of work, and male/female roles within the family? (Remember that every racial/ethnic group has diversity, including people who self-identify as white).

Consider the Effects on Children's Self and Social Identities

In addition to specific books, also examine your book collection. Do your books reinforce or counteract messages that teach children to feel inferior or superior because of their skin color, gender, family income, able-bodiedness, or type of family structure? At school, will all of the children you serve see themselves and their family's way of life reflected in your book collection? Will all children of color, including those with mixed heritage, girls, and children from the many types of family structures, children living in poverty, and children with disabilities see one or more characters with whom they can readily and positively identify? If they are visible in your book collection, are the illustrations and information accurate and respectful? Does your overall collection balance the backgrounds of all the children in your program? Does it also show diversity within the social indentity groups to which the children belong (e.g., a range of ways to be female and male, families reflecting different kinds of jobs within a racial/ethnic group). Does your book collection also include a balance between diversity within your classroom and beyond your classroom?

At home, does your book collection reflect diversity among the groups to which your family belongs? Does it have stories about people like you who have contributed to creating a more just world? Does it also include a range of books showing diversity beyond your family and neighborhood?

Look for Books About Children and Adults Engaging in Actions for Change

To fully develop a strong sense of self and a disposition toward cooperation and fairness, children need to know how to stand up for themselves and others when faced with unfairness. They also need to know about people from all social identity groups who have-and are currently-working for justice for all. In addition to previous criteria, here are more items to consider: The story line should be about children and adults working together, rather than perpetrating the myth that change happens because of special, individual people who do it by themselves. Does your book collection include a balance of people who have made important and honored contributions to American life as well as the world community-and not just the traditional white, male "heroes?" Do some of your books about important people include struggles for justice? Do they show people who were/are poor or from racial/ethnic groups of color? Are people with disabilities engaged in these struggles for justice?

Consider the Author's or Illustrator's Background and Perspective

All authors write from a cultural as well as from a personal context. In the past, most children's books were by authors and illustrators who were white and members of the middle class. As a result, a single cultural and class perspective dominated children's literature. There are now excellent books by people of color from a range of backgrounds-although not nearly enough. Consider the biographical material on the jacket flap or back of the book. What qualifies the author or illustrator to deal with the subject? If the book is not about people or events similar to the author or illustrator's background, what specifically recommends them as creators of the book? What is the author's attitude toward her/his story characters? Are the images accurate and do the illustrators respectfully render the people in the story? Do you have books reflecting a balanced range of author and illustrator identities and experiences?

Watch for Loaded Words

A word is loaded when it in any way demeans or makes people invisible because of any of their identities. One example is the generic use of the word "man" to stand for women as well as men (although the opposite never occurs). This traditional terminology is now questioned by many because of its sexist implications. Here are some examples of ways to avoid sexist language: community instead of brotherhood; firefighters inserted of firemen; human family instead of family of man; ancestors instead of forefathers; chairperson instead of chairman. Examples of adjectives applied to people of color that carry racist messages include: "savage," "primitive," "superstitious," "backward," "inscrutable" and "treacherous." Always consider the context in which a word is used and to whom it applies.

Look at the Copyright Date

Copyright dates indicate the publication year, not the time of its writing, which might be two to three years before the copyright date. Although a recent copyright date is no guarantee of a book's relevance or sensitivity, copyright dates are useful information. More children's books began to reflect the reality of a pluralistic society and nonsexist and non-ableist perspectives in the 1970s. Since then, the range of accurate, respectful, and caring books reflecting diversity has increased significantly (unfortunately the diversity of books published in the United States still does not accurately reflect the actual diversity of the people living here). When considering new books for your collection, begin with most recently published ones and then continue with descending copyright dates.

Assess the Appeal of the Story and Illustrations to Young Children

Although these guidelines focus on the messages about diversity and equality reflected in children's books, it is also important to take quality into account. Be sure the book is a "good read." If children find the story or illustrations boring, a book will not hold their attention, even if the book adds a specific kind of diversity you need. Check for active, interesting story lines where different kinds of people are integral to the people in the story, not the main topic. For example, in A Chair for My Mother, a young child tries to save money to get a comfortable chair for her waitress mother. Although the book shows a single parent, working-class family, and a resourceful girl, it is not didactic. Also look for illustrations that are colorful and recognizable to young children. Although they enjoy a range of styles, illustrations that are too subdued or abstract may not hold their attention.

Check for age appropriateness. Most booksellers list any picture book as appropriate for early childhood even if the story line is really for primary grade children. Sometimes a book for older children will work if you simplify the story or "tell" the story rather than read it. In some cases, this is the only way to get books that present specific groups of children (e.g., stories with Cambodian children or children with learning disabilities). Some additional issues to consider:

Many children's books use animal characters instead of people and there are some excellent books that explore diversity with animal characters (e.g., And Tango Makes Three or A Coyote Solstice Tale). Children enjoy these. However, such books are not a substitute for exploring issues of diversity and anti-bias fairness with people as the main characters.

Some early childhood teachers wonder if it is necessary for every book in their collection to show diversity. Every book needs to be accurate, caring, and respectful. However, you will want individual books about specific kinds of people (e.g., a biracial family or a family with adopted children). Diversity becomes essential in the balance of your book collection, where you want to avoid invisibility or tokenism of any group.

Folk and fairy tales have long been a mainstay of children's literature. In the cultures from which they come, folk and fairy tales were used to teach important lessons and values related to their culture of origin. Children love them in their original versions-not their commercially sanitized adaptations. However, folk and fairy tales also carry messages that convey sexism, classism, and racism and must be used thoughtfully as part of introducing young children to diversity and anti-bias values of quality and fairness.

Overuse of folk tales to "teach" about a specific ethnic/cultural group leads to misinformation and confusion. They are about animals and occasionally people from a mythical past and are designed to teach core values and beliefs in their culture of origin. They are not about how people actually live in contemporary society-and that is what young children need to understand. Information and images about how people really live now is what enables young children to build connections to people who are from different cultures while countering stereotypes that children have already absorbed (e.g., how American Indians really live).

Finally there is the somewhat sensitive issue of what to do about "classic" or "well-beloved" children's books. Many of these are wonderful as children's literature, but unfortunately they often convey values of sexism, racism, ableism, or even colonialism. People who love the books that pose this dilemma argue that it is OK to use them because they "reflect their times," which they imply somehow excuses their biased messages. For example, I adored the Babar series of books as a young child and was unpleasantly shocked to realize as an adult how much the images and story lines reflected messages of European colonialism in Africa. I chose not to use them with my own children, wanting them to learn accurate information about how people in Africa really live. Not sharing childhood favorites may sadden some, but it is far better than the harm caused by reinforcing messages of racism and colonialism.
In a nutshell-as you choose books or critically examine your current book selection, always keep in mind the power of books-their words and their images-to nurture or, conversely, to undermine a child's sense of self, positive attitude toward others, and motivation to act for fairness.
Additional Resources

Louise Derman-Sparks is an internationally respected anti-bias educator and author (along with Julie Olsen Edwards) of Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves. She has co-authored several additional books with Dr. Carol Brunson Day (Teaching/Learning Anti-Racism), the ABC Task Force ( Anti-Bias Curriculum: Tools for Empowering Young Children), Dr. Patricia Ramsey (What If All the Kids Are White?), and Dr. John Nimmo and Debbie Leekeenan ( Leading Anti-Bias Early Childhood Programs: A Guide for Change). She speaks throughout the United States and abroad, and served on the NAEYC Governing Board from 1998 to 2001. Louise has a lifelong commitment to building a more just society for all people. Her children Douglass and Holly, now grown, were her inspiration. A Pacific Oaks College faculty member for 33 years-when its mission and pedagogy reflected anti-bias education principles-Louise is now retired.
*In 1980, the Council on Interracial Books for Children published the book Guidelines for Selecting Bias-Free Textbooks and Storybooks. A shorter version of the book in pamphlet form, "Ten Quick Ways to Analyze Children's Books for Racism and Sexism," followed. One of the first guides written for teachers and families, it became an invaluable tool for hundreds of thousands of people. Both the book and pamphlet have been out of print for several years. Rethinking Schools published their adaptation of the original Guidelines in 1994.

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Guide for Selecting Anti-Bias Children's Books - Social Justice Books

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By Louise Derman-Sparks Based on "Ten Quick Ways to Analyze Children's Books for Racism and Sexism." Updated in 2013.* Children's books continue to be an invaluable source of information and values. They reflect the attitudes in our society about diversity, power relationships among different groups of people, and various social identities (e.g., racial, ethnic, gender, [...]

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Anti-Racist Educator Questionnaire and Rubric

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

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

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

- John Locke, "Second Treatise"

- Anonymous, 1861

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contract sellers became rich. North Lawndale became a ghetto.

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

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

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

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

Video: The Contract Buyers League

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

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

II. "A Difference of Kind, Not Degree"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. "We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV. "The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V. The Quiet Plunder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI. Making The Second Ghetto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIII. "Negro Poverty is not White Poverty"

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

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

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

Video: The Guardian of North Lawndale

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

"That's their corner," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX. Toward A New Country

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

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

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

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

And this was just one of their losses.

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

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

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

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

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

On some level, we have always grasped this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Assessing the reparations agreement, David Ben-Gurion said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 2011, Bank of America agreed to pay $355 million to settle charges of discrimination against its Countrywide unit. The following year, Wells Fargo settled its discrimination suit for more than $175 million. But the damage had been done. In 2009, half the properties in Baltimore whose owners had been granted loans by Wells Fargo between 2005 and 2008 were vacant; 71 percent of these properties were in predominantly black neighborhoods.
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products of many generations of privilege

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

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*Contains explicit language*

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https://bookshop.org/books/the-fire-this-time-a-new-generation-speaks-about-race/9781501126352

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Let’s get to the root of racial injustice

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Let’s get to the root of racial injustice

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Let's get to the root of racial injustice | Megan Ming Francis | TEDxRainier

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Jason Reynolds and Ibram Kendi Keynote Conversation | SLJ Day of Dialog 2020

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Jason Reynolds and Ibram Kendi Keynote Conversation | SLJ Day of Dialog 2020

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Jason Reynolds and Ibram Kendi Keynote Conversation | SLJ Day of Dialog 2020

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How to speak to kids about race relations in America

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How to speak to kids about race relations in America

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How to speak to kids about race relations in America

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Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely, co-authors of "All American Boys," join Hoda and Jenna to talk about how parents can talk to their kids about race relations in America and why it's important to continue these conversations.

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This article was updated on June 2, 2020.

But tensions between the police and black communities are nothing new.

There are many precedents to the Ferguson, Missouri protests that ushered in the Black Lives Matter movement. Those protests erupted in 2014 after a police officer shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown; the officer was subsequently not indicted.

The precedents include the Los Angeles riots that broke out after the 1992 acquittal of police officers for beating Rodney King. Those riots happened nearly three decades after the 1965 Watts riots, which began with Marquette Frye, an African American, being pulled over for suspected drunk driving and roughed up by the police for resisting arrest.

I'm a criminal justice researcher who often focuses on issues of race, class and crime. Through my research and from teaching a course on diversity in criminal justice, I have come to see how the roots of racism in American policing - first planted centuries ago - have not yet been fully purged.

Slave patrols

There are two historical narratives about the origins of American law enforcement.

The first slave patrols arose in South Carolina in the early 1700s. As University of Georgia social work professor Michael A. Robinson has written, by the time John Adams became the second U.S. president, every state that had not yet abolished slavery had them.

Members of slave patrols could forcefully enter anyone's home, regardless of their race or ethnicity, based on suspicions that they were sheltering people who had escaped bondage.

The more commonly known precursors to modern law enforcement were centralized municipal police departments that began to form in the early 19th century, beginning in Boston and soon cropping up in New York City, Albany, Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere.

Police corruption and violence - particularly against vulnerable people - were commonplace during the early 1900s. Additionally, the few African Americans who joined police forces were often assigned to black neighborhoods and faced discrimination on the job. In my opinion, these factors - controlling disorder, lack of adequate police training, lack of nonwhite officers and slave patrol origins - are among the forerunners of modern-day police brutality against African Americans.

Jim Crow laws

Slave patrols formally dissolved after the Civil War ended. But formerly enslaved people saw little relief from racist government policies as they promptly became subject to Black Codes.

For the next three years, these new laws specified how, when and where African Americans could work and how much they would be paid. They also restricted black voting rights, dictated how and where African Americans could travel and limited where they could live.

Reverberating today

For the past five decades, the federal government has forbidden the use of racist regulations at the state and local level. Yet people of color are still more likely to be killed by the police than whites.

The Washington Post tracks the number of Americans killed by the police by race, gender and other characteristics. The newspaper's database indicates that 229 out of 992 of those who died that way in 2018, 23% of the total, were black, even though only about 12% of the country is African American.

Policing's institutional racism of decades and centuries ago still matters because policing culture has not changed as much as it could. For many African Americans, law enforcement represents a legacy of reinforced inequality in the justice system and resistance to advancement - even under pressure from the civil rights movement and its legacy.

In addition, the police disproportionately target black drivers.

When a Stanford University research team analyzed data collected between 2011 and 2017 from nearly 100 million traffic stops to look for evidence of systemic racial profiling, they found that black drivers were more likely to be pulled over and to have their cars searched than white drivers. They also found that the percentage of black drivers being stopped by police dropped after dark when a driver's complexion is harder to see from outside the vehicle.

This persistent disparity in policing is disappointing because of progress in other regards.

There is greater understanding within the police that brutality, particularly lethal force, leads to public mistrust, and police forces are becoming more diverse.

What's more, college students majoring in criminal justice who plan to become future law enforcement officers now frequently take "diversity in criminal justice" courses. This relatively new curriculum is designed to, among other things, make future police professionals more aware of their own biases and those of others. In my view, what these students learn in these classes will make them more attuned to the communities they serve once they enter the workforce.

In addition, law enforcement officers and leaders are being trained to recognize and minimize their own biases in New York City and other places where people of color are disproportionately stopped by the authorities and arrested.

But the persistence of racially biased policing means that unless American policing reckons with its racist roots, it is likely to keep repeating mistakes of the past. This will hinder police from fully protecting and serving the entire public.

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The racist roots of American policing: From slave patrols to traffic stops

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Half a century after the federal government voided Jim Crow laws, the criminal justice system still discriminates against African Americans.

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Tamika Mallory and Stephen Jackson speak at rally for George Floyd

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Tamika Mallory and Stephen Jackson speak at rally for George Floyd

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Tamika Mallory and Stephen Jackson speak passionately at rally for George Floyd who was murdered

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*Contains explicit language*

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Cultivate positive identity formation, encourage students to confront racial and ethnic injustice, and prepare them to live and work together in a diverse world. Our resources can help you facilitate discussions about race and guide students through lessons on white privilege, economic inequality, mass incarceration, the complexities of identity and more.

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

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Cultivate positive identity formation, encourage students to confront racial and ethnic injustice, and prepare them to live and work together in a diverse world. Our resources can help you facilitate discussions about race and guide students through lessons on white privilege, economic inequality, mass incarceration, the complexities of identity and more.

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Vocabulary

activism [ AK tuh viz uhm] ( noun) the taking of action to achieve social change

civic action [ SIH vik AK shuhn] ( noun) working actively, usually in a collaborative group, to empower citizens

petition [puh TIH shuhn] ( noun) a written document signed by people to demand a kind of change

hashtag [ HASH tag] ( noun) on social media sites, a word or phrase that starts with the sign # and is used to identify messages about a particular theme or topic

Series Overview

As technology advances and the social landscape shifts, it is crucial for students to become digitally literate citizens. In this series, elementary students will learn the ins and outs of media literacy, from choosing reliable sources and understanding online searches to navigating online security and participating in digital communities.

Lesson Overview

The internet can be a powerful tool for social justice and civic action, and kids are often excited to learn about how they can use digital technologies to work for change they believe in. The beginning of this lesson introduces children to different ways young people have used the internet to work toward positive social change.

Kids will also have a chance to think about some of the strengths and weaknesses of the internet as a tool for activism, especially among people their age. This will give them the opportunity to consider how other channels compare and contrast to digital ones.

Finally, students will think about a local issue they care about and generate an action plan that involves using digital technology to educate others or impel activism in their school or community.

Procedure

Internet Activism

1. Ask students if they have ever heard of the idea of using the internet for social action, or in simpler terms, using the internet to help people or to do something good. As a group, discuss what activism is and what it might mean to work on activism using digital media.

2. Pass out the "Taking Action Online" handout. Give students time to read the handout independently. Alternatively, you can read the handout to students or pair them up with partners to read. Ask students to underline any unfamiliar words and highlight key ideas. Then, bring students back together and discuss the following questions.

What are some of the ways young people used the internet for activism?

How does the internet help students with their activism?

How did the stories in this handout make you think and feel?

Strengths and Weaknesses

1. Explain to your students that, as with any tool, the internet has pros and cons. Some people see mainly strengths in the internet as a tool for social organizing, while others see more disadvantages. Give students the "Strengths and Weaknesses" handout. Ask them to work with partners to complete the handout, listing at least three strengths and three weaknesses of the internet as a tool for action.

Some possible strengths include being able to reach more people, being able to work quickly, getting a lot of broad attention, working from grassroots, putting control in the hands of a younger generation and incorporating videos and images along with text.

Some possible weaknesses include the need for people to be able to access the internet in order to be involved, the fact that many kids do not have access to social media, the concept of slacktivism (using the internet for social activism can make you feel like you are doing more than you actually are), and the possibility of echo chambers (activists talk to each other but it is not always clear whether anyone is listening).

Your students may also come up with strengths and weaknesses of their own, which is fine. You can use your instincts about whether or not it makes sense to offer ideas as they work. If students need more support in coming up with ideas, encourage them to return to the "Taking Action Online" handout you began with for stories. They can focus on one of the examples in the handout and analyze what they believe did and did not work well within the example.

2. Bring students back together to share some of the ideas and questions that came up as they worked on the "Strengths and Weaknesses" handout.

Change in Your Community

1. Ask students to think about a school or community issue they have been working on or would like to see addressed. Facilitate a short discussion about how the internet might help people work on this problem.

2. Break students into small groups, and ask each group to come up with a hypothetical plan of three different ways they might use digital media to work on the problem they identified. Each group should create an illustrated outline or plan for how they would use the internet to work on the cause they care about. Leave students time to share their action plans with each other and relate them back to the strengths and weaknesses you discussed, and if time permits discuss examples as a class.

Do Something

Creating a hypothetical plan might not be enough for all of your students! If you have time and family support, see if you can help students carry their plans out. Make sure to keep security and privacy in mind as you support your students in what is likely to be their first real effort at digital social action. Leave plenty of time to reflect on the experience and consider the strengths and weaknesses of taking this approach to achieve social change.
Alignment to Common Core State Standards CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.4.4
Determine the meaning of general academic and domain-specific words or phrases in a text relevant to a grade 4 topic or subject area.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.4.5
Describe the overall structure (e.g., chronology, comparison, cause/effect, problem/solution) of events, ideas, concepts, or information in a text or part of a text.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.4.7
Interpret information presented visually, orally, or quantitatively (e.g., in charts, graphs, diagrams, time lines, animations, or interactive elements on Web pages) and explain how the information contributes to an understanding of the text in which it appears.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.4.1.a
Come to discussions prepared, having read or studied required material; explicitly draw on that preparation and other information known about the topic to explore ideas under discussion.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.4.1.b
Follow agreed-upon rules for discussions and carry out assigned roles.

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

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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Talking about race, although hard, is necessary. We are here to provide tools and guidance to empower your journey and inspire conversation.

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Shelly Tochluk and Christine Saxman have been investigating White supremacist organizations and their tactics for recruiting White youth. Join us for a discussion about the importance of having explicit conversations about race and what teachers and parents can do to support White students.

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Shelly Tochluk and Christine Saxman have been investigating White supremacist organizations and their tactics for recruiting White youth. Join us for a discussion about the importance of having explicit conversations about race and what teachers and parents can do to support White students.

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Intersectionality Matters! is a podcast hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory.

Intersectionality Matters! is a podcast hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory.

If I could only reply to others reviews

At _2020Unties_if that's even right but I always check out reviews to get a pulse on what a podcast is so I can listen an make my own decisions...but I haven't even heard this one yet an was blown away by the complaint that this podcast only talks on black people and black and white issues and how it's disappointing that it doesn't represent the country....welp did you see the title an the description of this podcast before you listened or made that wild statement???
Reading is fundamental...

Always informative.

I always learn a lot.

Powerfully informative

This podcast is compelling and very important. Every single episode presents a lesson on how we mitigate the disease of racism and achieve true liberation. Exceptional!

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‎Intersectionality Matters! on Apple Podcasts

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Intersectionality Matters! is a podcast hosted by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory.

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Black Feminism & the Movement for Black Lives

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Black Feminism & the Movement for Black Lives

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Black Feminism & the Movement for Black Lives: Barbara Smith, Reina Gossett, Charlene Carruthers

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The 1619 Project Curriculum in Lesson Plan Grouping - The 1619 Project, inaugurated with a special issue of The New York Times Magazine, challenges us to reframe U.S. history by marking the year when the first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil as our nation’s foundational date. Here you wil…

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Curriculum Subjects: Social Studies: African American Heritage, Social Studies: America, Social Studies: History

Age Range: 12 & up

Grade Range: 7-17

F&P: Level Z+
Download Educator Guide A timely, crucial, and empowering exploration of racism-and antiracism-in America
This is NOT a history book.
This is a book about the here and now.
A book to help us better understand why we are where we are.
A book about race.

The construct of race has always been used to gain and keep power, to create dynamics that separate and silence. This remarkable reimagining of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning reveals the history of racist ideas in America, and inspires hope for an antiracist future. It takes you on a race journey from then to now, shows you why we feel how we feel, and why the poison of racism lingers. It also proves that while racist ideas have always been easy to fabricate and distribute, they can also be discredited.

Through a gripping, fast-paced, and energizing narrative written by beloved award-winner Jason Reynolds, this book shines a light on the many insidious forms of racist ideas-and on ways readers can identify and stamp out racist thoughts in their daily lives.

PRAISE

"An amazingly timely and stunningly accessible manifesto for young people....At times funny, at times somber but always packed with relevant information that is at once thoughtful and spot-on, - Stamped is the book I wish I had as a young person and am so grateful my own children have now." Jacqueline Woodson, bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of Brown Girl Dreaming

"Teens are often searching for their place in the world, in Stamped, Reynolds gives context to where we are, how we got here, and reminds young people-and all of us-that we have a choice to make about who we want to be. This unapologetic telling of the history of racism in our nation is refreshingly simple and deeply profound. This is the history book I needed as a teen."

"Jason Reynolds has the amazing ability to make words jump off the page. Told with passion, precision, and even humor, - Stamped is a true story-a living story-that everyone needs to know." Steve Sheinkin, New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Bomb and Born to Fly

"The R-word: Racism. Some tuck tail and run from it. Others say it's no longer a thing. But Dr. Kendi breaks it down, and Jason Reynolds makes it easy to understand. Mark my words: This book will change everything."

"Reading this compelling not-a-history book is like finding a field guide to American racism, allowing you to quickly identify racist ideas when you encounter them in the wild." -Dashka Slater, author of The 57 Bus

* "Readers who want to truly understand how deeply embedded racism is in the very fabric of the U.S., its history, and its systems will come away educated and enlightened. Worthy of inclusion in every home and in curricula and libraries everywhere. Impressive and much needed." -Kirkus Reviews, starred review

* "An epic feat... More than merely a young reader's adaptation of Kendi's landmark work, Stamped does a remarkable job of tying together disparate threads while briskly moving through its historical narrative." -Bookpage, starred review

* "Reynolds ( Look Both Ways) lends his signature flair to remixing Kendi's award-winning Stamped from the Beginning...Told impressively economically, loaded with historical details that connect clearly to current experiences, and bolstered with suggested reading and listening selected specifically for young readers, Kendi and Reynolds's volume is essential, meaningfully accessible reading." -Publishers Weekly, starred review

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Curriculum Subjects: Social Studies: African American Heritage, Social Studies: America, Social Studies: History Age Range: 12 & up Grade Range: 7-17 F&P: Level Z+ Download Educator Guide A timely, crucial, and empowering exploration of racism-and antiracism-in America This is NOT a history book. This is a book about the here and now.

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Watch The Film | Slavery by Another Name | PBS

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watch slavery by another name / slavery by another name online

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Watch The Film | Slavery by Another Name | PBS

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Watch the 90-minute film about slavery after the Civil War. SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME is based on the book by Douglas Blackmon.

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The Subtle Linguistics of Polite White Supremacy

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The Subtle Linguistics of Polite White Supremacy

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Polite White Supremacy is the notion that whites should remain the ruling class while denying that they are the ruling class, politely. Affectionately, it's called #PWS for short. It has been referred to as the Casual American Caste System, Delicate Apartheid, Gentle Oppression, or what I like to call it after a few drinks: Chad Crow, the super chill grandson of Jim Crow.

No but seriously, Polite White Supremacy is very real. So why is it that we must specifically say 'Polite White Supremacy' rather than Racism? We must say Polite White Supremacy for three reasons. First, saying #PWS puts the responsibility solely on the creators of a systemic problem. Second, this phrase addresses the subtlety and casualness with which oppression is administered. Thirdly, it eradicates the all-too-common confusion between racism and prejudice. It's important to eradicate this confusion so it can be clear that racism is tied to a power structure and access to resources.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
RACISM AND PREJUDICE

Racism and prejudice are NOT interchangeable. Racism is the systemic oppression of one group of people who can be categorized within certain phenotypical traits over multiple generations that has been, at one point, sanctioned by a country, the majority and/or ruling class. Racism is committed only by the ruling class and agents of the ruling class because they have the power that comes with racism. Racism, in America, is absolutely the attack dog of the white ruling class. However, sometimes it's also a slow poison in that it causes its victims to die of exhaustion or grief. Again, racism is a kind of prejudice that comes with power. Racism is the systematic and intentional oppression of group of people from the ruling class and its agents. In America, the ruling class is white people...of all classes.

America has been playing a centuries-long game of 'stop hitting yourself' while holding the arms of Black America.

Prejudice, though harmful, is not necessarily systemic and can be committed by anyone. It simply requires one to pre-judge. It does not require its user to have any access to the ruling class or status of whiteness. However, you have to be part of or support the ruling class to wield the power of racism. Those who are not part of the white ruling class, yet support white supremacy of any form, are called agents of white supremacy. They are not white, but benefit in some direct way from empowering and enforcing white supremacy often times on their own people. Historically black overseers and house slaves were bestowed more rights, and ultimately more power during slavery. These were employed agents of white supremacy who oppressed their fellow blacks. This employment was a status. It was a form of racist power that white slave owners gave to black overseers as a way to also instill mistrust within the black community. Prejudice alone, has no real power without the system of control and power to support it.

OVERT RACISM TO COVERT RACISM:
THE EARLY STAGES OF POLITE WHITE SUPREMACY

Today's covert version of white supremacy is a lot more subtle than having black overseers beat their fellow slaves. Nor is this power the same as buying or selling your slaves children for a good price, using black children as alligator bait, cutting open pregnant black women, castrating black men, generational rape and molestation of black women and men, and lynchings of those who were accused of making whites nervous. This is something more subtle than that. The ruling class has begun to employ a particularly clever passive tactic to remain in power while denying this power. They pretended this was the natural way for society to function and influenced perception by using double standards in language as a starting point.

The passive methods of #PWS have been ingrained in almost every facet of American society to such a point that speaking about it's existence seems mythical. It's not a unicorn though. In fact, bringing it up causes people of all colors to feel discomfort because Black Americans have become accustomed to appeasing the comfort levels of white fragility. As a result, certain black folks think about white reactions first before doing any action. This subservience illustrates the passive 'slow poison' effect of polite white supremacy that still effects many Black Americans until this day.

THE 3 KEY INGREDIENTS OF
POLITE WHITE SUPREMACY

In detail, Polite White Supremacy relies on three key components to ensure its success: comfort, control, and confidentiality.

Whites who participate in #PWS desire to be comfortable in all settings while maintaining some influential level of control over all situations without acknowledging this power. Omitting acknowledgment of white privilege gives off the psychological effect that whites have somehow worked harder than non-whites and blacks must be lazy since statistically blacks are suffering a great deal in America. They pretended this was all natural.

These three components manifests themselves in various scenarios. They are not restricted to obvious positions like law enforcement or government. Often times, it was not the wealthy or elite that carried out the bulk of these practices. Their employees did. One such group of employees were home loan officers. White home loan officers carried out and maintained Polite White Supremacy by using the subtle tactic of redlining.

Redlining ensured whites would control of their neighborhoods comfort by confidentially employing this tactic. Later, discriminatory hiring practices reinforced an intrinsic authoritative status for whites.

INGREDIENT 1 - COMFORT

The comfort level of whites relied on redlining to keep blacks out of white neighborhoods. To maintain comfort, home loan officers covertly switched from overt segregation to the more subtle practice of redlining, one early example of Polite White Supremacy.

This practice prevented black people people from getting home loans, bank accounts, insurance and other services necessary for financial growth. Often times, poor whites would get the aforementioned services while middle and upper-class blacks faced rejection. This ensured that Black Americans would have a much more difficult time in establishing a multi-generational legacy. Eventually, redlining helped to create present-day black inner-cities across America along with dependence on white oppressors for employment and certain resources. Meanwhile, this white participation privilege lead to multi-generational wealth and self-sufficiency in white communities.

As mentioned before, all classes of whites can and did participate in Polite White Supremacy. Moreover, Polite White Supremacist practices such as redlining reinforced stereotypes and portrayals of blacks as underachievers because it helped create the ghetto. Because of practices such as redlining and employment discrimination, blacks are still inaccurately perceived as dependent underachievers.

AHOLC 1936 security map of Philadelphia showing redlining of lower income
neighborhoods.[1]Households and businesses in the red zones could
not get mortgages or business loans.
Source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

Omitting the acknowledgment of white privilege from practices such as redlining gives off the psychological effect that whites have somehow worked harder than non-whites and blacks must be lazy since statistically blacks are suffering a great deal in America.

Redlining is a direct ancestor of gentrification.

The subtle power of controlling neighborhoods, resources and wealth is present today in social and professional settings. Redlining disregarded the qualifications of people of color who already proved their competence, bravery, and skills. Remember, redlining is only one example of polite white supremacy. There are many others that ensured the comfort of white nerves.

INGREDIENT 2 - CONTROL

Control the terminology and you can control the perception. Eventually this perception helps onlookers judge whether an area is good or bad. Polite White Supremacy adapted many forms of control to maintain its subtlety. #PWS controls the narrative and perception by controlling language itself. The subtle linguistics of Polite White Supremacy influence perception through usage of disingenuous and misleading terminology with subtle double standards. These double standards continue to permeate stereotypes within news, film, education and music.

Polite White Supremacy attempts to control the language, the narrative, and the perception. Moreover, the heavy white-washing of history to eradicate black contributions to the global human story has negatively impacted black self-worth and self-confidence. Consequently, psychological effect of believing these stereotypes is that, simply put, blacks deserve to suffer.

CONTROL THE LANGUAGE

Polite White Supremacy relies on subtlety such as using the passive voice to describe events involving a white aggressor and a non-white victim. For example, when a police officer shoots someone, the report uses the passive voice instead of the active voice when describing the shooting. Saying things such as "There was an officer-involved shooting" or "Force was used" sidesteps any notion of personal responsibility and makes it automatically appear as though the officer acted defensively. Often times the officer does everything to escalate the situation regardless of what version of the truth he or she writes in their report. There is a difference between saying 'There was a person who got into a fight' and 'he punched someone because they hurt his ego and they punched him back'.

Law enforcement 's reliance on the term 'resisting arrest' incarcerates many blacks who have claimed to do no such thing. As a matter of fact, it's a simple fact that the human body bends in certain ways at certain joints. So, when an arm is twisted by surprise at specific angles by a burly officer (or several), any person's involuntary muscular reaction is to correct the pain they're feeling. This is called 'resisting'. What regular person can lie perfectly still as their arm is being broken? Who can pretend to not be in pain?

CONTROL THE NARRATIVE

Terms such as 'black on black' crime place a spotlight on black crimes while omitting that 'white on white' crime is nearly identical statistically. Major news outlets rarely pay attention to black conferences for peace or organizations that uplift our youth such as Black Girls Rock as blacks try to 'do for self'. As a result, the narrative continues that blacks don't care about crimes or the well-being of black neighborhoods. Nothing could be further from the truth.

When white crimes are actually acknowledged there are double-standards in the terminology. The same action committed by whites versus those committed by blacks are somehow perceived as less threatening if there is a white aggressor. According to Polite White Supremacy, screwdrivers become 'burglary tools' depending on the color of the person holding them. A group of black people gathering is thus deemed a 'gang' and a group of whites gathering is...a group of whites gathering. Words such as 'Lawlessness', 'looting', 'criminal' and 'thug' often accompany the most peaceful protests by Black Americans long before agent provocateurs can influence a crowd towards violence.

What do media outlets call white rioters who torch property after their team wins or loses? 'Revelers'. Basically, 'revelers' means they're white and just having some wild fun. The perception is that revelers are white and aren't scary like those black 'rioters' who did just as much property damage, though for different reasons.

There's also the less of physical control and less lethal assaults placed upon the bodies of unarmed white aggressors. In a nutshell, it's important to look at what's not being done when whites pose a threat.

What did the police not do to the white bikers who got into a brawl that killed nine people? What did the police not do to Dylan Roof or TJ Lane when they were arrested? Polite White Supremacy makes it seem safer to be a white serial killer rather than a black man or woman speaking their American rights to an officer of the law.

White aggressors who do the same actions (or far worse) as black aggressors don't face the consequences blacks often face because white lives are actually valued more by law enforcement.

CONTROL THE PERCEPTION

The value of white lives influences the perception of good neighborhoods vs bad neighborhoods. The oversimplified assumption is that good neighborhoods have very little crime, while bad neighborhoods have high crime. This seems like common sense. Unfortunately, it's slightly inaccurate. The perception of neighborhoods as good or bad comes highly influenced from whether or not it is being over-policed. Good neighborhoods don't have a large police presence so naturally one must conclude that bad neighborhoods have a high police presence. The problem with this comes from the documented fact that police departments across America are around disproportionately white males.

Frankly put, these white males are not going to over-police their own communities. They're not going to snitch on each other and reveal who amongst them are of the ' Ghost Skin variety. When they do police and potentially arrest their own people, their lives are actually considered. White lives actually matter to the police. To them, ' white on white crime' seems ludicrous. Meanwhile, blacks seem like an easy target to fill a quota.

INGREDIENT 3 - CONFIDENTIALITY

Confidentiality is silent complicity while pretending that black suffering happens because blacks somehow deserve it. Polite White Supremacy uses confidentiality to pretend this is all normal for it's own existence to remain in power covertly.

The silence of confidentiality is the glue holding this whole charade in place because #PWS can't exist out in the open as overt white supremacy, not because it's wrong, but because it's unfashionable to be an open white supremacist in today's society.

Instead of openly celebrating a lynching, pretend you actually believe it was a suicide. Pretend you actually believe that whites work harder when blacks worked for free and literally built this country. These are the same people who don't hire equally qualified Black Americans for positions then complain that Blacks are lazy and unemployed. Pretend that over-policing doesn't target the poor and perpetuate the stereotype of bad neighborhoods. Pretend you didn't just see a man choked to death and his heart attack happened randomly at the same moment he was being choked because 'he was fat'. Pretend that unionization had nothing to do with whites fearing competition from the useful, tangible skills of blacks. Pretend like redlining didn't exist and that whites just worked harder so they lived in 'better' areas.

Pretend that giving a bullet proof vest and Burger King to a person that just walked into a church and massacred nine Black Americans after he has been is not at act of terrorism. Pretend it was a coincidence we had to watch black officers to re-raise the Confederate Flag after a Black American woman bravely, but illegally removed it. Later, white officers took it down and treated it like it was some heavenly artifact during a religious ceremony. Let's just pretend that didn't happen.

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The Subtle Linguistics of Polite White Supremacy

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Polite White Supremacy is the notion that whites should remain the ruling class while denying that they are the ruling class, politely. Affectionately, it's called #PWS for short. It has been referred to as the Casual American Caste System, Delicate Apartheid, Gentle Oppression, or what I like to call it after a few drinks: Chad Crow, the super chill grandson of Jim Crow.

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White People, It’s Time To Prioritize Justice Over Civility

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White People, It’s Time To Prioritize Justice Over Civility

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Pixabay

In striving to be 'civil,' white moderates provide cover for deadly white supremacy.

The Boston Globe recently ran - and subsequently deleted - a tweet that, with a straight face, asked: "Can white power groups get past old differences and build lasting relationships?"

Welcome to our current reality, in which white supremacists are treated like B-grade celebs on a reality TV show.

The tweet should hardly come as a surprise. White supremacists are, after all, routinely landing profiles in leading media sites - because it's apparently surprising Nazis can brush their hair and tuck in their shirt - and often getting invited onto popular shows, as if their ideas deserve more attention and platforms.

In fact, in today's media and political environment, white supremacists have some of the most powerful platforms in the world, as well as the power to act on their toxic resentment. These are people who, in one breath, can claim to be oppressed, and in the next boast about retaining most of the world's wealth and power and even the executive and legislative spheres of American government. And on the latter point, they're not wrong.

Still, I'm not primarily concerned with the almost cartoonishly - but for the fact that they hurt people of color every day - evil Trump Administration, or the Neo-Nazis around the world who love said administration. Instead, I'm mostly concerned about those who look on and treat racism as fairly normal, as everyday, as a mere quality of a "passionate" group.

I'm concerned about those white people who think profiling Nazis amounts to "hearing both sides," as if racist ideas are taking place in some kind of , instead of a battlefield where we must regularly dodge hatred.

It's the epitome of white privilege to be able to encounter racism and consider calmly listening to what this nicely dressed man thinks about segregation and integration, "black on black crime," and so forth.

Worse still is that this kind of engagement means not giving time to people of color: whether as a media platform or your individual attention. When you invite a Nazi into your house, you probably won't find us wanting a seat at your table. When you make efforts to hear a racist, it means you've ignored efforts to hear a person of color. Whenever you profile a Nazi, you've made it clear to us precisely whose views you would rather use your finite resources and platform on.

This isn't an issue of balance: You can't counter this by claiming to also want our opinion. The planet's entire history is one of hearing, witnessing, and struggling against white people's ideas of race. We're not on equal platforms; we're still fighting an uphill battle against the mountain of white supremacy, in the shadow of colonial history. South Africa, my country, only experienced universal, non-racist adult suffrage in 1994. There's no level playing field here.

And yet, white moderates would rather fall on their swords to hear what racists think in the name of "free speech" than take the time to understand people of color's perspectives. They insist on saying people are "too harsh" in punching Nazis ( I have my own views), in shouting down Nazis, and in calling Nazis, well, Nazis. The opposition to Nazis lecturing at universities gets shoved into a nonsense debate about "free speech," instead of getting discussed as an issue of survival for people of color.
Why Punching Nazis Is Not Only Ethical, But Imperative
By adding a dash of synonyms ("alt right"), a sprinkle of personal hygiene ("well-groomed"), and a tone of smirking civility, white moderates welcome white supremacists to share their platforms, as if they're not spouting views that echo apartheid or Nazi history. When white supremacists get called "clowns" or "crusaders" or trolls of the "alt-right," we ignore that these people are actually proponents of racist ideology who would love to see people of color die or no longer exist.

When framed in this way, any opposition from people of color is also viewed not as opposing racists, but as opposing a passionate or playfully villainous group just trying to express its free speech.

The issue with all this isn't that suddenly Not Racist white people will start finding comfort with the Klan. It's that these white people tolerate and entertain views from those who would see us dead.

In his " Letter from a Birmingham Jail," Dr. King made a claim that you won't find most white people sharing on social media on MLK Day:

"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice."

For people of color, many governments' idea of maintaining "law and order" is not maintaining (actual) justice, but continuing oppression. In South Africa, the apartheid regime was entirely legal, maintained by laws set down by elected lawmakers, often given further veracity by courts. Maintaining "law and order" meant maintaining segregation (literally "apartheid"), limiting how far and when and how often people could go: in life and in daily movement.

Our first black President in South Africa was officially listed as a terrorist and prisoner by the same country that, a few years later, he led.

As Dr. King later points out in the same letter: "I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when [law and order] fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress."

This is why the status quo deserves to be upset: because the way things are doesn't equate to how things should be. It's only through confronting various personal and political systems, and upsetting them, that progress happens. Remember: Opposing apartheid was literally illegal. If people of color are disruptive, it's because things need to be changed.

White supremacy is being treated like a normal way of thinking by those who do not bear any fallout of such views taking root. It's not white people who make up most of America's prison system, and it's not people from white countries who were being denied entry into America's airports. White moderates must understand that flirting and ogling well-groomed Nazis isn't an academic exercise for us. Yes, you might be able to do so and face no repercussions, but who benefits? Certainly not people of color. Certainly not people who claim to support us. All that happens is white supremacists obtain an air of legitimacy.

And the opposition to such legitimacy - whether on shows or campuses - is construed as people of color being hypersensitive, disruptive. "How dare they shake things up!" Instead of seeing that the status quo is fucked and toxic - since we've not shaken off the effects of white supremacy - white moderates opt for "civility" when what's required is justice. They would rather spend time finger-wagging at Black Lives Matter or other activists for being too loud, than call out Nazi-loved lawmakers making statutes that kill people.

And so white supremacy gets another cover - the white moderates' displeasure at people of color, and their opinion about how we should fight against racism. "Don't lump all white people together!" "It's not a race issue, it's a class/economics issue!" "If you don't do anything wrong, the government won't discriminate!" Not understanding that even following the rules doesn't lead to positive outcomes for people of color, white moderates engage in a form of racism that bolsters more overt white supremacy.

In turn, more cover means white supremacist views can gain footholds and start influencing beyond the dark corners of the internet. The Trump Administration is no accident. The growing international support of such populist, racist movements is not by chance. We saw this coming because white people don't listen and don't want to listen. Think about the fact that non-racist, diverse modern societies are new. Our entire history has been one of inequality. These ideas aren't emerging from nowhere: Indeed, we're fighting against humanity's collective history. But that's all the more reason we need more white people speaking out against it, interrogating their own privilege and seeking out people of color's perspectives.

There can be no peace without justice. And it's time white moderates prioritized justice above civility, and put the well-being and safety of people of color above their curiosity over that funny little man who makes feminists angry. It's time for white folk to stop expressing personal displeasure when, say, some young activist calls them "oppressor," instead of wondering what would lead someone to say that in the first place. White moderates have little to lose by maintaining the status quo, but much to gain by fighting against it.

Privilege is a blindspot that requires constant interrogation, and we can only hope that white people listen to us when they blunder, instead of flirting with the sympathetic eye of the Nazi.

But who said being a better person would be easy? Racism is primarily white people's problem, even though people of color must face it every day. White people can help us by putting aside their white fragility - and, importantly, not making it our problem to manage - and start fighting white supremacy alongside us: Start by listening to our opinions on race, instead of your gut reaction and feelings of being attacked.

That is what we need, that is how we progress, that is how we obtain justice.

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White People, It's Time To Prioritize Justice Over Civility

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The Boston Globe recently ran - and subsequently deleted - a tweet that, with a straight face, asked: "Can white power groups get past old differences and build lasting relationships?" Welcome to our current reality, in which white supremacists are treated like B-grade celebs on a reality TV show. The tweet should hardly come as a surprise.

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The Work Is Not The Workshop: Talking and Doing, Visibility and Accountability in the White Anti-Racist Community

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The Work Is Not The Workshop: Talking and Doing, Visibility and Accountability in the White Anti-Racist Community

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Ok, white folks. I think it's time for us to focus. We know a whole lot, y'all, but I don't see us putting our knowledge to real use out there. I mean there's a whole big movement going on in this world!! Where are all the white folks? Where are we?

This is what I mean. Here's what happened in my community last week. When I say "my community" I'm not talking about the city I live in but the people I know.

1) Two hundred Palestinian-American residents of New Orleans found out that the lands their families have owned and farmed for generations, the lands many of their family members still live on, are about to be destroyed by the Apartheid Wall that Israel is building to imprison the Palestinian people.

2) My friend teaches at an all-African-American high school that lost a soccer game two nights ago to an all-white school. The (white) referee falsely called fouls on the all-black team and never made any calls against the white team. After the game, some of the players on the white school's team, together with their friends and parents (!), taunted the African-American players with racist slurs. Some of the African-American students fought back and are now facing lawsuits, expulsion from school, and criminal charges. The white students are not being punished at all.

3) My friend's boyfriend got out of jail after having spent a year imprisoned under false charges of killing a cop. The only reason he got out of jail at all was because folks in the activist community were able to raise thousands of dollars so he could get a decent lawyer. Hundreds of thousands of low-income African Americans just like my friend are in jails across the country, imprisoned on outrageous or false charges, without basic rights to privacy, healthcare, or good counsel.

Last week, y'all! To folks I know! We gotta get our shit together!

I think it might be time for the white anti-racist community to take a critical look at ourselves. I think of myself as a part of this community and I'm saying what I'm saying out of a need I feel to hold myself accountable for the actions (and inaction) of my community. Everything I've written I've taken from my experience and direct observation of white anti-racist culture. I take responsibility for any incorrect representation of my community. I'm also writing out of love for the countless fierce and dedicated white anti-racists I know, and because I've been feeling this sense of urgency more and more lately. Maybe it's 'cause I moved back to the South, where the brutality of racism doesn't only stare you in the face every day; it picks you up while you're walking on the sidewalk, smashes your head against the concrete, and tosses you into oncoming traffic. Things are bad here. Maybe, though, it's also 'cause I know that we, white folks, have not only the obligation but the potential-we really do-to make a real-live, genuine, accountable contribution to the struggle for racial justice that is happening in our world, right now. But I don't see us out there. I want us to get started. White folks really are out there, fighting for justice. But sometimes I think that those of us who are fighting are not nearly as effective as we can be.

I'm beginning to think a large explanation for this situation lies in some fundamental aspects of white anti-racist culture. The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond says that any time white folks get together, we re-create the structures of racism whether we're conscious about it or not. Looking at white anti-racist culture, I believe it more and more. Even if we're getting together to strategize about fighting racism, I'm not sure that we're as aware as we need to be about how even our anti-racism can uphold the system of white supremacy. I'm speaking of three specific aspects of white anti-racist culture: our preoccupation with perfection, specifically as it relates to behavior; our focus on thinking about and analyzing, rather than actually doing, the work; and our skewed system of honor and recognition.

Before I used the term "white anti-racist activist" to describe myself, I spent a lot of time doing racial justice work without thinking about larger issues like imperialism, global economic injustice or even institutionalized racism. I knew racism was a bad thing, I did what I could to fight against it, and that was that. Once I began moving in more established (and, interestingly, more white) activist circles, I began drawing connections between, say, a seemingly isolated incident of racist violence and the global structures of oppression that allow such acts of violence to happen regularly in our society. And, because it was San Francisco and they were available, I went to a ton of workshops. I am boundlessly grateful for all I was able to gain from participating in so many anti-racist trainings. Interestingly, though, even though I had a more sophisticated analysis of racism and my role in the white supremacist system that we all live in, my work wasn't initially that much more effective because of all this knowledge I'd acquired. Ironically, because I was spending so much time first participating in and then giving workshops about racism, I had a lot less time to fight it.

Tema Okun says that perfectionism is one of the hallmarks of white supremacy culture. I think one of the unfortunate ways in which white anti-racist culture mimics white supremacy culture is our tireless dedication to "figuring out" how to be the perfect anti-racist. While we are congratulating ourselves 'cause we're getting closer to understanding what accountability really means; while we debate whether it's more effective to say X or Y thing at the people-of-color-led meeting, the world is broiling outside! People are dying out there, y'all! I guess if I have one overarching thing to say to white anti-racist activists it's this: Think less. Do more. How we do stuff is important. It really is. But it's not so important that we need to figure out all the intricacies of how to do the work before we dig in and start rolling up our sleeves.

And why is it, anyway, that we spend so much time talking about things like What To Say At The Meeting, or When To Go To The Meeting, or Taking Up Too Much Space? I do think it's useful and important for white anti-racists to be conscious of our behavior in multiracial settings so that people of color don't have to deal with our shit. But at the point when discussing behavior in an anti-racist setting stops being about useful political strategy and begins to be about how not to get embarrassed 'cause you said the wrong thing at the meeting, we got issues.

Like I said, I really do think it's supremely important to have consciousness about what we do as activists and organizers, especially when it comes to standing in solidarity with people of color. I just think it's more ok for us to make mistakes than we may have trained ourselves into thinking. And while I think that certain aspects of anti-racist etiquette are integral to establishing good relationships (e.g., Don't Talk Too Much At The Meeting), I think that if we spend too much time focusing on these things it can end up guiding the white anti-racist movement into the direction it's in danger of heading right now: equating anti-racism with interpersonal behavior instead of with true radical change, which takes on the entire system of white supremacy. And white supremacy will only go away if we organize, not 'cause some white guy finally held his tongue at a meeting.

But the organizing part- hopefully the real reason white folks are taking the time to learn so much about anti-racism in the first place-can often be a point of paralysis in white anti-racist culture. Because we spend so much time discussing why, for example, it's not always appropriate to go to meetings or join groups that are primarily for people of color (and this is true and important), it can often be hard for a white person to figure out exactly, then, where it is ok to go. Sometimes I think white folks can get really hung up on the What Is My Role question. This is a big question, and it's worth figuring out. But I wonder sometimes if our workshop-heavy culture has obscured it more than necessary. Look around, is what I finally realized. There are as many, if not more, ways for white anti-racists to plug into the struggle for racial justice as there are white anti-racists.

After I started going to lots of anti-racist workshops, I spent a lot of time pondering where exactly it was that I fit into the whole anti-racist picture. At the same time a whole bunch of low-income women of color weren't even able to get to their meeting a few blocks away 'cause no one was around to watch their kids. A few friends and I decided to start a group that provides childcare for meetings and events held by people-of-color-led organizations in our city. We showed up consistently and we took considerable direction from the moms around the tone, goals and rules of the childcare. At the same time, we also spent a lot of time as a group developing our own principles- around childcare, our group structure, strategies for leadership development, and standards around which groups we would support and why. I learned a lot from that experience about taking leadership from people of color, and developing my own anti-racist principles and sticking to them, and about the variety of ways in which white folks can be in legitimate solidarity with people of color who are fighting for liberation.

Interestingly, when I was working with the childcare collective, one of the biggest challenges we faced as an organization was around getting a group of high profile mostly male white anti-racists to take childcare seriously. Even though in larger anti-racist circles childcare had come to be recognized as legitimate political work, we ran into consistent issues with people who had committed to do childcare regularly but who were "too busy" when we actually called them. One person even told me he thought he had moved "beyond" doing childcare; that childcare was a good introductory activity for people getting to know more about anti-racism, but that he had surpassed that level. This opened up a whole lot of questions to me about where the priorities lie in the white anti-racist community.

Lots of white anti-racists talk about how doing anti-racist work means often taking on the tasks that are "not sexy." Yet our same community, which advises doing the unsexy work, continues to reward the work that is more high-profile and glamorous. We probably know at least a little bit about the work of folks who put on workshops and travel around the country speaking about racism. This is important work. But what do we hear about the tons of people who even now are driving the family members of a prisoner to visit their incarcerated relative, or making phone calls to housing project residents to let them know when the next community meeting is, or providing translation at an organizing meeting so that recent immigrants can participate in a cross-race struggle for workers' rights?

That white anti-racist culture places such strong rewards on high-visibility work, like conducting workshops or speaking and writing about racism, while it ignores other aspects of anti-racist work, is dangerous for a variety of reasons. Most obviously, this dynamic contributes to an overall sentiment that if we talk about or think about being anti-racist we are in fact being anti-racist. This idea, in turn, can help to create an anti-racist culture that puts more importance on talking and learning about the work than on actually doing it. An overwhelming critique from organizers of color who work alongside white folks in struggle is that white folks talk too much and do too little.

If we are to be truly accountable to revolutionaries of color we need to create a culture that prizes the doing, as much as we prize our abilities to educate each other. Both are crucial if we want to build an effective movement.

Even more disturbing to me, though, is that our workshop culture may have gotten to the point where it is more committed to supporting workshops than supporting the actual work. I can't count the number of times I've talked to anti-racist white folks with incredible energy and commitment who take an anti-racist workshop and then think the only way for them to do real-live anti-racist work is to become an anti-racist trainer. This is not to say that being an anti-racist trainer isn't an important way to do anti-racist work, but it is by no means the only one. It is, however, the most visible, and this is the part that's problematic. The What Is My Role question, already a source of at least temporary paralysis for a good number of emerging white anti-racists, becomes even more obscured if newer anti-racist white folks don't have any role models to look toward except the people putting on the workshops. The problem, of course, is not that these other role models don't exist but that we, as an anti-racist community, don't celebrate them as much as they deserve.

Finally, if the white anti-racist community is saying that white folks should do the less sexy, less visible work while at the same time we devote our energy to raising up the very work in our own community that is the most sexy, most visible work, we are sending mixed messages to everyone our community affects.

Perhaps most importantly, we're sending the message to organizers of color that white folks don't practice what we preach. Again, if our movement is to be truly accountable to communities of color and to our goals of racial justice, we need to actually act on our principles.

In addition, this dual message can have a confusing effect on other white folks. In essence the white anti-racist movement is saying "it's not ok for white folks in general to do this, but it is ok for this white person to do this." This dynamic can create distinctions among white folks that will not help our movement. If I've learned anything from my experiences doing anti-racist work in the Bay Area and now, struggling to be effective here in the South, it's that the white supremacist strategy of divide-and-conquer doesn't only succeed famously in keeping oppressed folks apart, it also works like a charm by creating these false distinctions in the white anti-racist movement.

If we're serious about creating an anti-racist praxis that legitimately challenges the visibility white folks have enjoyed at the expense of legacies of hard, uncelebrated work of people of color, we need to be able to look critically at where the visibility lies in our own community. What does it mean, in a movement whose very mantra is Don't Talk Too Much, that our own celebrities are folks who do a lot of talking? Does it mean that these folks are so special that they don't need to abide by the standards we as a movement have set for ourselves? Does it mean that maybe one day, if I'm special too, I can kinda bend our principles in the name of doing the work? I am not at all saying that anti-racist trainers are bending the principles of anti-racism by doing the incredible and necessary work they do. I am saying that this has the potential to be dangerous territory, and that all of us need to be aware and responsible with the positions we hold.

I should take the time to stress here that I am specifically not aiming my criticism toward white anti-racist trainers themselves. I, like many white anti-racists, owe a huge amount of my political development to incredible anti-racist trainers like Sharon Martinas, Clare Bayard, Chris Crass, and others. Instead, I am offering feedback to the larger white anti-racist community, of which I consider myself a part. More than the acts of any anti-racist trainers, who, again, are doing good work in our community, it's the culture of our community, which prizes things like perfectionism, talking instead of doing, and the creation of Famous Anti Racists, that is actually hindering our progress toward achieving true racial justice.

This being said, however, I would like to point out that white anti-racist trainers, because of the amount of visibility they do have, are in a unique position to guide our movement toward greater accountability and effectiveness. I think one of the useful ways for trainers to begin to do this is to challenge their own visibility by giving props to the many white anti-racists working behind the scenes in communities across the country. Take the time to find out who these folks are. Mention them by name in trainings, essays and speaking engagements. Talk about the work they're doing. Emerging white anti-racists need a variety of role models, and the white anti-racist spending most of her free time Xeroxing, phonebanking, or taking care of a revolutionary mother's kids can probably use the support of her fellow white anti-racists, in addition to the reassurance that her work really is important and necessary.

Additionally, I would like to ask white anti-racist trainers to be respectful and responsible with their position and with the language they use. These two examples may seem picky, but I think resolving them can contribute toward making our movement more accountable to our goals of true racial justice.

First of all, on more than a few occasions, I have heard white anti-racist trainers refer to the work they do as "organizing." While the work of white anti-racist trainers is valuable, it is not organizing in the historic sense of the word. Equating the two obscures the vibrant legacy of grassroots organizing in communities of color, which allowed oppressed people to come together, gain a sense of their collective power, and build strategies that allowed them to win important victories in struggles for liberation.

Secondly, because a significant amount of anti-racist training is devoted (necessarily) to anti-racist behavior, I would argue that it's crucial for anti-racist trainers to make the distinction between anti-racist work and anti-racist group dynamics. The white guy who's not dominating the meeting is definitely behaving nicely, but simply by holding his tongue he is not doing anti racist work. Thinking about doing the work, and behaving well within the scope of the work, are not the same thing as actually doing the work.

Maybe more than anything else, white anti-racist trainers can make a concerted effort to guide their training participants toward specific, accountable, and necessary anti-racist work in their own communities. San Francisco's challenging white supremacy workshop now requires its participants to spend 6-8 hours a week working with a racial justice organization during the 15 weeks of its training program. While such a requirement may be logistically impossible for many anti-racist training programs, especially those that don't have long-term relationships with their participants, there may be ways for training programs to work with participants on developing tools to identify and plug into specific racial justice struggles in their own communities. It's been my experience that short-term anti-racist workshops for white folks include a lot of material on how to act once you start doing the work, but not a whole lot on how to actually start doing the work. How do anti-racists find out about racial justice struggles occurring in their communities? How do they figure out appropriate roles for white folks once they know what's going on? What are some specific steps that primarily white social justice organizations can take once they decide to take on an anti-racist agenda and build relationships with organizations of color? These questions, and the many hopefully concrete answers that can come from them, may be a good starting place for white anti-racist trainers who want to guide their work toward supporting more pragmatic anti-racist practices.

Finally, I would like to suggest that white anti-racist trainers are not exempt from doing behind-the-scenes practical anti-racist work in their own communities. In fact, because these folks are in many ways the mouthpieces of the white anti-racist movement, I would think that white anti-racist trainers have more of an obligation to be connected and accountable to the struggles that are happening in their local communities. What does it mean if an anti-racist trainer is "too busy" giving trainings to get involved in even a little bit of on-the-ground work in her own community? Again, training white folks around anti-racism is vital to our work. Many white anti-racists speak about their participation in anti-racism workshops as experiences that changed their lives and deepened their commitments to work for racial justice. This is amazing! But I do think that anti-racist training programs, especially now that we live in a time where there are so many of them, have a responsibility to be knowledgeable about and accountable to the liberation struggles happening among people of color in their own communities. This is vital if anti-racist workshops want to achieve their goal of supporting white folks on their way to becoming active fighters for racial justice.

Like I said, there's a whole big movement out there that needs us. And there are also a whole lot of dedicated anti-racist white folks trying to figure out legitimate ways to participate in the struggle. I would like to challenge all of us in the white anti-racist community to spend a bit of time looking outward, instead of inward. To find out about the specific places that really do exist in the struggle where we can put our fierce and beautiful energy to use, even if it means we're a little less sure of ourselves, even if it means we may make more mistakes, even if it means challenging our abilities to be comfortable in this work. To challenge fame and visibility in our community, whether it's our own or that which we help create. And, finally, to raise each other up for the really unsexy, unrewarded work so many among us take on, out of nothing less than their fierce commitment to build a better world.

I'm saying what I'm saying because I believe in us. And because, for me, the white anti-racist community has not only been a source of sharp political analysis, but also a source of strength, courage, and astounding inspiration.

And because I am in awe, not only of the work that we need to do, but of the incredible potential we have to do it. And because at this point I can't think of any greater act of love that I can give to this community, other than to hold us accountable to the principles we have an obligation to live by.

Revolutionary love is not only about standing together and supporting each other through even the darkest parts of our political process. It's also about challenging each other, compassionately, to be the most fierce, committed, kick-ass fighters for justice we can be. Because our movement requires nothing less.
Rants, comments, and boisterous criticism can be addressed to Catherine Jones at cjones14 at tulane.edu

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Ok, white folks. I think it's time for us to focus. We know a whole lot, y'all, but I don't see us putting our knowledge to real use out there. I mean there's a whole big movement going on in this world!! Where are all the white folks? Where are we?

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75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice 

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75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice 

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*regularly updated*

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106 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice

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

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Racial Identity Caucusing: A Strategy for Building Anti-Racist Collectives

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Racial Identity Caucusing: A Strategy for Building Anti-Racist Collectives

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Our Mission

The mission of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research is to convene researchers and practitioners from various disciplines to figure out novel and practical ways to understand, explain, and solve seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice. We foster exhaustive racial research, research-based policy innovation, data-driven educational and advocacy campaigns, and narrative-change initiatives. We are working toward building an antiracist society that ensures equity and justice for all.
Read the Founder's Statement by Ibram X. Kendi
What is antiracist research?

Whereas racist research historically has posed the question, "What is wrong with people?" antiracist research now asks a different question, a better question: "What is wrong with policies?" Our belief is that framing research on race and racism around antiracist questions leads to antiracist narratives, effective policy solutions, and impactful advocacy campaigns that cut to the root of racial inequality: racist policy.
Learn more about our research

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The mission of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research is to convene researchers and practitioners from various disciplines to figure out novel and practical ways to understand, explain, and solve seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice. We foster exhaustive racial research, research-based policy innovation, data-driven educational and advocacy campaigns, and narrative-change initiatives.

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George Floyd, Minneapolis Protests, Ahmaud Arbery & Amy Cooper 

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George Floyd, Minneapolis Protests, Ahmaud Arbery & Amy Cooper 

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George Floyd, Minneapolis Protests, Ahmaud Arbery & Amy Cooper | The Daily Social Distancing Show

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How Studying Privilege Systems Can Strengthen Compassion

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How Studying Privilege Systems Can Strengthen Compassion

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"How Studying Privilege Systems Can Strengthen Compassion": Peggy McIntosh at TEDxTimberlaneSchools

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We know how to be racist. We know how to pretend to be not racist. Now let’s know how to be antiracist.’

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We know how to be racist. We know how to pretend to be not racist. Now let’s know how to be antiracist.’

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A man holds up a antiracism sign during a rally against racism and white nationalism, and in favor of gun laws, Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2019, near the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

"We know how to be racist. We know how to pretend to be not racist. Now let's know how to be antiracist."

That comes from the new book, " How To Be An Antiracist, " by Ibram X. Kendi, an American University professor who takes readers on a surprising exploration of what it means to be racist - and what it means not to be.

The youngest recipient of the National Book Award for nonfiction for his 2016 " Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, " Kendi tells personal stories that show his own evolution about racist ideas - and he makes clear that "racist and antiracist are not fixed identities.

He gets at the heart of his argument with this:

Denial is the heartbeat of racism, beating across ideologies, races and nations. It is beating within us. Many of us who strongly call out [President] Trump's racist ideas will strongly deny our own. How often do we become reflexively defensive when someone calls something we've done or said racist? How many of us would agree with this statement: "'Racist' isn't a descriptive word. It's a pejorative word. It is the equivalent of saying, 'I don't like you.'" Those are actually the words of White supremacist Richard Spencer, who, like Trump, identifies as "not racist." How many of us who despise the Trumps and White supremacists of the world share their self-definition of "not racist"?

What's the problem with being "not racist"? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: "I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism." But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of "racist" isn't "not racist." It is "antiracist." What's the difference? One endorses the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in between space of "not racist." The claim of "not racist" neutrality is a mask for racism.... This may sound harsh, but it's important at the outset that we apply one of the core principals of antiracism, which is to return the word "racist" itself back to its proper usage. "Racist" is not - as Richard Spencer argues - a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it - and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur, is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction.

Kendi is a professor of history and international relations at American University in Washington D.C., where he moved in 2017 to found the Antiracist Research and Policy Center, the first academic center in the country with the word "antiracist" in it.

He writes in his book that on the September night in 2017 that he unveiled the vision for the center before his peers at AU, "an unidentified, middle-aged, hefty white male, dressed in construction gear, posted copies of Confederate flags with cotton balls inside several buildings." They were also put on bulletin boards outside his classroom. "The timing did not seem coincidental," he said.

He ignored his fears, he said, and pressed on with working on the new center. Not long after, at the age of 35, he learned he had Stage 4 colon cancer. Kendi underwent treatment, and now, he says, he is cancer-free. He wrote:

We can survive metastatic racism. Forgive me. I cannot separate the two, and no longer try. . . . What if we treated racism in the way we treat cancer? . . . Saturate the body politic with the chemotherapy or immuno-therapy of antiracist policies that shrink the tumors of racial inequities, that kill undetectable cancer cells. Remove any remaining racist policies, the way surgeons remove the tumors. Ensure there are clear margins, meaning no cancer cells of inquiry left in the body policy, only the health cells of equity."

In the following version of a conversation I had with Kendi, he explains why he thinks it is possible to create an antiracist society.

Q. You talk about antiracism in your last book. Why did you write a book solely about it?

A. My last book specifically makes that the case that the fundamental contrast was not between being "racist" and "not racist." The contrast is racist and antiracist. I began speaking about this around the country and it was new to many people. People were striving to be not racist. We should be striving to be antiracist. People were saying: "Tell me more about that. I really want to understand how to be an antiracist." It continued to be posed to me. I thought I should answer that question in book form.

Q. What's the difference between being "not racist" and "antiracist?"

A. First and foremost, we should recognize that almost every person in history who has been charged with being racist has responded by saying, "I'm not racist." Whether that's eugenicists, pro-segregationists, white supremacists today. . . . So I wanted to figure out what it means to be "not racist." The more that I studied the concept of "not racist" the more I landed on people basically denying they were racist, and the more I realized that the term "not racist" really had no meaning. In contrast, antiracist, like the term racist, has meaning. So antiracists view the racial groups as equal. Racists view certain racial groups as better or worse. A racist supports policies that create racial inequality, and antiracists support policies that create racial equity. Both of these are very deliberate. There is really no in-between "not racist" neutrality.

Q. Is it enough to declare support for antiracist ideas without taking action? What does it actually mean to be antiracist?

A. The way we support antiracist policies or even racist policies is by supporting the politicians who are enacting or defending those policies. It is by financing those policymakers. It is by joining or financing organizations that are pressing for those types of policies. It is in our daily lives, defending or challenging those policies. . . . If someone is defending and supporting financially a policymaker pushing racist policy, that is a racist. If you are supporting or financially supporting a policymaker making antiracist policies, then we are being antiracist.

When we support a powerful person who is expressing racist ideas and supports racist policies, even if you are someone who has a problem with those ideas and those policies, if you are supporting that person and putting that person in power, then you are being racist.

Q. Does that include people who voted for Donald Trump?

A. Yes. . . . But antiracist and racist are not fixed tattoos and identities. They're descriptive terms that we can change - from being a racist to antiracist - by doing and saying things in the moment. We strive to be antiracist no matter what we say in the past.

Q. There are a lot of people who support Trump over his stance on trade and other policies who will be greatly offended that you're calling them racists. What's your response?

A. My response is people are typically offended if you call someone they support anything they believe that person not to be. We need to clearly define racist - someone who is expressing a racist idea or supporting a racist policy with their action or inaction - and then apply the definition to Trump's ideas and policies. Whether on trade or something else, any stance or policy he is taking that is leading to racial inequity is racist. Any stance or policy he is taking that is leading to racial equity is antiracist.

Q. Calling people racist generally shuts down the conversation. How do you get people to be antiracist when the response is to go on the defensive?

A. We must realize why calling someone racist causes the person to shut down the conversation. Because the denial of racism is the heartbeat of racism. To be racist is to deny one is racist. When a racist is called racist, they deny it, they refuse to talk about their own racism, they shut down the conversation, feeling offended as if they were personally attacked - when in fact they were described. When an antiracist is called racist, they assess whether what they said or did or did not do was racist based on clear definitions, and if they did say something was wrong with a racial group, if they did support a policy that was leading to racial inequity, then they admit they were being racist. They are willing to talk about their own racism and open up the conversation, feeling thankful someone pointed out what they were being so they can change. Being a racist is like being an alcoholic - no one can get someone to recognize their own addiction. They must recognize it for themselves.

Q. How have people reacted to these ideas?

A. People hearing that, as well as other aspects of the book, actually call it liberating. It liberates them to recognize their faults . . . to strive to be different and strive to be antiracist. People have been saying that these ideas are extremely clear. Oftentimes, the way we talk about race is very convoluted, but if there is a topic currently on which we have to be clear, it's race, so that everybody can understand it. That is what I strive to do with "How To Be An Antiracist."

Q. Sometimes you hear people say that they are "colorblind." Is anybody really colorblind in this context?

A. No, you can't be colorblind. If we strive to be colorblind, then we are actually going to be passing on racial inequality to the next generation. The reason that would be so is that people who typically say they are colorblind also say they don't see race. And if we can't see racial inequity, we can't see racist policies, how can we eliminate racist policies and eliminate racial inequity? In the book, I identify and categorize race as a mirage. It exists, but then again it doesn't exist. But it is absolutely critical that we see the mirage, because if we don't see the mirage, then we are not going to understand why certain things are happening . . . in society.

Q. Is there a role for schools in this?

A. Secondary to our parents and families, we learn ideas from schools. We spend a lot of our time there as kids. The people who are training us and delivering those ideas are teachers. . . . We have to ensure we have a teaching body teaching antiracist ideas. We not only need antiracist teachers, but we have to make sure we have a curriculum that is an expression of antiracism, so that it is not necessarily Eurocentric. It is a curriculum that showcases and represents many different cultures and groups of people that make up the United States. It doesn't apologize for anything about things that have happened in our racist past. . . . Teachers and principals and other school leaders would be trained to treat misbehavior among different racial groups equally. Black students are much more likely to be suspended and expelled than white students. What we also should do is equalize the resources of schools [between rich and poor] . . . not by taking money from schools that have a lot but giving more to schools that have little.

Q. Do you think Americans can change enough to build an antiracist society?

A. I do. The reason I do is because of my reading of history. Many people considered it impossible for those 13 small colonies to defeat the mighty British Empire in order to form the United States. In 1860, not that many people thought that five years later, slavery would be no more, that the richest and most powerful group, the Southern slave holders, would be stripped of their wealth and power. Also, philosophically, I know that in order to bring about change, we have to believe in the possibility that we can bring about change. That belief gives us the energy to create change.

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Perspective | 'We know how to be racist. We know how to pretend to be not racist. Now let's know how to be antiracist.'

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"We know how to be racist. We know how to pretend to be not racist. Now let's know how to be antiracist." That comes from the new book, " How To Be An Antiracist, " by Ibram X.

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Our relatives who defend Trump are not Trump. They are not facing a "witch hunt." In fact, Trump and his operatives have bewitched ordinary Americans into supporting his interests over their own. Our relatives are the victims of Trump's lies, of Trump's policies, of his raids on democracy, of his tax cuts for the rich, of his tariffs, of his assaults on affordable health care, of his terrorization of job-creating immigrants, of his do-nothing climate and gun policies, of his use of the presidential power to enrich himself rather than low- and middle-income Americans.

What has Trump done for our relatives who are not superrich and white and male other than entertain their destructive bigotries and fears and desires? What are we willing to do for their well-being? Who else is going to usher our relatives out of the reality show and back into reality? Relatives are best positioned to be these ushers. All this avoiding and attacking our relatives, and self-censoring around our relatives, ensures that our families remain as divided as our society.

And how can we forget the victims of Trumpism? In avoiding our relatives, we are ignoring the harm of Trump, at the same time we claim to oppose Trump, at the same time we claim to support equity and justice. In keeping the peace with our relatives, we are prolonging the war against everything and everyone we claim to hold dear in the United States of America.

But attacking our relatives' Trump stories at every turn is not the answer-even if that's what Trump does against the stories of truth. When we lecture down to relatives about everything that is wrong with them, Trump operatives are enticing them by saying that nothing is wrong with them.

We should be consistently chasing truth, even as we implore our relatives to join the chase. We must find a way to meet our loved ones where they are, on their same level, as people who are imperfect and learning, just as they are. In meeting them where they are, we should be getting to know where they are, and who they are.

Every one of our loved ones is different, even if many of them share the same Trump. Instead of avoiding or attacking them, why not figure out ways to bring them closer? Instead of holding our tongues, we should be asking questions about the lives of their minds to figure out the environment driving them away from truth and into the clutches of Trump. We should be asking about their social circles; their philosophies; their experiences; their self-interests; their alternative facts; their constructions of history, personal and societal; their problems; and who and what they blame for their problems. We should be asking these questions casually, over time, as we go on an ice run with them this weekend, as we catch a movie next week, as we grab lunch next month.

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How to Talk About the Truth and Trump at Thanksgiving

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Our relatives who defend Trump are not Trump. They are not facing a "witch hunt." In fact, Trump and his operatives have bewitched ordinary Americans into supporting his interests over their own.

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Americans don't see me, or Ahmaud Arbery, running down the road-they see their fear.

Oakmont beckoned outdoor runners-even novices like me.

We were the second family to move into Oakmont, a new housing development seven miles west of the University of Florida, when I joined the faculty in 2015. My partner and I loved how our living space wrapped around a green-dotted, open-air indoor courtyard like homes we'd seen in West Africa and Latin America. Nothing compared to being outside inside our courtyard home.

Well, maybe being outside in Oakmont-running down its newly paved roads, gazing up at stately oak trees with moss draping down, staring down into the ponds, racing all the galloping or flying animals, all to the sweet melody of quietness. Few houses. No people. Just paved roads. Just nature's sight lines.

At first, I hardly worried about cars while exercising. But the vehicles started coming. Trees were cleared. Foundations laid. New houses framed-a fascinating new picture screening every day for my curiosity.

As I ran on by, I imagined how the framed-out houses were going to look completed. Or I imagined living in the jumbo dwellings. Or as I ran on by, I stared at the construction workers as they stared back at me.

But not on one particular day. That day, no construction workers were around this half-built wonder. No vehicles were in sight. There was just my curiosity on overdrive-pushing me into the house to feed my imagination. I did not need long. I never needed long.

Minutes later, my feet were pounding the pavement under the moss. I am Ahmaud Arbery.

Running from yesterday's acquittal, 2019. Acrylic on cotton canvas. 24" x 24" (Image courtesy of Chase Hall Studio)

On Sunday, February 23, around 1 p.m., Arbery had just peered into a half-built home, as I did so many times in Oakmont. He ran away under the falling moss near the coastal Georgia town of Brunswick. Up the block lived Gregory McMichael, a former police officer and investigator for the local district attorney, and his son, Travis. McMichael did not see a former high-school football standout who normally jogs around the neighborhood, as Arbery's family describes him. McMichael saw a black male "hauling ass" from the scene of a crime, as he told investigators.
Adam Serwer: The coronavirus was an emergency until Trump found out who was dying
Arbery could have been any "black male running down the street," as a 911 caller described him. He could have been anyone's brother, father, son, cousin, boyfriend, husband, co-worker, friend. He could have been me running down the street. As a black male-not to the people who know me or who know Arbery, but to the Americans who don't know me and think they do-I am Ahmaud Arbery. Those Americans think they know me when my curiosity gets the best of me. They think they know me when something has gone missing. They think they know me when they see me running down the road.

They don't see me wearing the same white T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers that they wore the other day. They don't see themselves in me. They certainly don't see their own innocence in me. They see only their own guilt in me-their villainous fear marking me as the villain.

They don't need to figure out who I am. All they see is what I am. A black male. And what I am pronounces who I am. A criminal. The embodiment of danger. The producer of fear.

Black males have been made into the fathers of fear. But the fears of black men are bastards. Broods we never wanted, but can't escape. All these bastards are coming after us, suspecting us continuously, terrorizing us constantly, and we can't escape. The black man can't escape the fear of the black man.

Gregory McMichael "stated he was in his front yard and saw the suspect from the break-ins 'hauling ass'" down the road, according to the police report. McMichael "stated there have been several Break-ins in the neighborhood and further the suspect was caught on surveillance video," the report said. But where is the surveillance video linking Arbery to a recent burglary? And McMichael's neighborhood had gone seven weeks without a reported burglary, a local police lieutenant recently told CNN. The last reported burglary was on January 1, when a 9-mm pistol was stolen from an unlocked truck outside the McMichaels' home.
Ibram X. Kendi: We're still living and dying in the slaveholders' republic
According to McMichael, he ran in his house and grabbed his son, Travis, and both grabbed their weapons. McMichael told police they armed themselves because they "didn't know if the male was armed or not." McMichael also told police he saw Arbery "the other night" stick his hand down his pants, which led him to believe he was armed. Arbery was not armed.

No one living knows what Arbery felt in his final moments. No one living knows what Arbery felt as he approached the white pickup truck parked on the two-lane road, blocking his way. No one living knows what he felt as he saw Gregory McMichael standing in the truck's bed and saw Travis McMichael standing outside the passenger door wielding a shotgun.

All I know is what I would have felt. If I were running under the falling moss, if two armed white men were coming after me in their pickup truck-and a third not far behind-then I would have felt the wrath of terror: racist terror.

And I know the feeling of racist terror. I know what it feels like when a white man- in my case a police officer -suspects me as an armed criminal and pursues me and clutches his gun when I'm just out running (errands). I was three years older than Arbery, who would have turned 26 on Friday. I lived, and Arbery died. Arbery could have lived, and I could have died.

And I could have been placed in a morgue near all those black bodies falling from COVID-19, at rates higher than any other racial group, in states from Georgia to Maine, from Michigan to South Carolina, from Ohio to South Dakota, according to the COVID Racial Data Tracker. We can't see the coronavirus like we can't see the fears that terrorize us, but we keep feeling their lethal effects.

I just don't think Americans fully realize how terrorizing it is to black males when we are falsely suspected as violent criminals. All Americans seem to be thinking about is their fear of us-not our fear of their fear. Black males fear racist fear because we know from experience what happens when the police are called, when the Klan is called, when faces are reddened, when purses or ropes or guns are clutched, when they cross the street away from us, or cross the street toward us clutching their police badges, or their badges of white masculinity.

It is terrifying to produce so much unwanted and unwarranted fear. And then we are harmed. And then we are killed. And then our killers claim self-defense. And then our killers cast us-the unarmed ones, the dead ones-as the aggressors, as Gregory McMichael cast Arbery in the police report, justifying his son pulling the trigger; as George Zimmerman's lawyers cast Trayvon Martin in a strikingly similar case.

If I was chased by armed white men on an afternoon jog, then I would have thought they were trying to lynch me. I might not have run past their pickup truck, especially if they had been pursuing me for some time, especially if one of them was standing outside the car holding a gun. I would have thought he had gotten out of the car to shoot me. I would have feared that if I ran past the car, he'd shoot me in the back. I would have felt the need to disarm him to save my life.

But then again, armed white men have fashioned a racist existence wherein I'm unable to stand my ground against their violence. When white men murder men like me, they call it self-defense. And they are believed. When men like me defend ourselves against violent white men, they call us the aggressors. And they are believed.

Self-defense, like the Second Amendment, like stand-your-ground laws, has been colonized by white men. These rights are not for black women such as Marissa Alexander or Catina Curley, nor for white women such as Francine Hughes or Jennifer Schlecht, who defend themselves against domestic abusers. They are not for Latinos fleeing state-sponsored xenophobia, Native warriors fighting off white invaders, or Asians warding off coronavirus hate. They are not for Muslims or Jews defending themselves against crusading neo-Nazis. The human instinct to defend one's right to life is considered divinely human in white men, and bestial in the rest of us. When I defend myself as a human, I am not seen as human. I am seen as a beast.

Arbery did not just die. His version of the events died with him. His ability to defend his right to live died with him.

But there are black men who have survived the terror of being wrongly suspected. There are black men who know what it feels like to be avoided like we are beasts, or to be "literally hunted" like we are beasts, to use the words of LeBron James. There are black men who know what it feels like to fear the fear.

But there are also black men who know what it feels like to have courage: to acknowledge our fears-and all the fears about us-and still muster the strength to do what's right in the face of this pandemic of fear. We can build a different existence for black men-for all feared peoples-as we all run under the moss draping down for Ahmaud Arbery.

We can build an existence wherein when people don't know us, they recognize that they don't know us. An existence wherein people see our tattoos, hair, flash, lyrics as our art. An existence wherein people see us as unarmed when we are unarmed. An existence wherein people see us as armed for self-defense. An existence wherein when people see us speeding recklessly down the road like Sean Reed, they see us in a mental-health crisis. An existence wherein when people see us wearing masks, they see us protecting ourselves and them from infection. An existence wherein when we are not wearing masks, people give us masks to wear out of care.

What I am-a black male-should not matter. Who I am should matter.

We can build an existence wherein the fearful stop fearing me, and terrorizing me with their fear. Wherein they strive to get to know who I am, to get to know Ahmaud Arbery.

Or they don't. They just wave. They just let him run on by.

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Americans don't see me, or Ahmaud Arbery, running down the road-they see their fear.

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Show About Race Podcast with Anna Holmes, Baratunde Thurston, Raquel Cepeda, and Tanner Colby. Plus special guests!

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Listen to ‘1619,’ a Podcast From The New York Times (Published 2020)

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An audio series on how slavery has transformed America, connecting past and present through the oldest form of storytelling.

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

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

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

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

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87 Pages Posted: 31 Aug 2006

Abstract

Issues regarding race and racial identity as well as questions pertaining to property rights and ownership have been prominent in much public discourse in the United States. In this article, Professor Harris contributes to this discussion by positing that racial identity and property are deeply interrelated concepts. Professor Harris examines how whiteness, initially constructed as a form of racial identity, evolved into a form of property, historically and presently acknowledged and protected in American law. Professor Harris traces the origins of whiteness as property in the parallel systems of domination of Black and Native American peoples out of which were created racially contingent forms of property and property rights. Following the period of slavery and conquest, whiteness became the basis of racialized privilege - a type of status in which white racial identity provided the basis for allocating societal benefits both private and public in character. These arrangements were ratified and legitimated in law as a type of status property. Even as legal segregation was overturned, whiteness as property continued to serve as a barrier to effective change as the system of racial classification operated to protect entrenched power.

Next, Professor Harris examines how the concept of whiteness as property persists in current perceptions of racial identity, in the law's misperception of group identity and in the Court's reasoning and decisions in the arena of affirmative action. Professor Harris concludes by arguing that distortions in affirmative action doctrine can only be addressed by confronting and exposing the property interest in whiteness and by acknowledging the distributive justification and function of affirmative action as central to that task.

Keywords: race and racial identity, property, perceptions of racial identity, affirmative action, racialized prvilege

Harris, Cheryl I., Whiteness as Property. Harvard Law Review, Vol. 106, No. 8, p. 1707, 1993, UCLA School of Law Research Paper No. 06-35, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=927850

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87 Pages Posted: 31 Aug 2006 Issues regarding race and racial identity as well as questions pertaining to property rights and ownership have been prominent in much public discourse in the United States. In this article, Professor Harris contributes to this discussion by positing that racial identity and property are deeply interrelated concepts.

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American slavery began 400 years ago this month. This is referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s true origin.

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White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

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White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

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

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

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Decoded | Season 7 Episodes (TV Series) | MTV

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Comedian and activist Franchesca Ramsey tackles race, pop culture and other issues through thought-provoking sketch comedy and vlogging.