Social Resources

Race

(also see Bias)

Introduction

The idea of “race” is a myth. Originally, “race” was based on skin color. Over time, “racial” categories have been ever-changing. Various groups have been defined as “non-white” for a while and then mysteriously accepted as “white.” Biologists have proven it’s absurd to divide humans into groups based on such superficial physical traits, that are due to shared ancestry, and then claim that those distinctions are meaningful. With regard to anything that’s important, such as skills and character, “race” is irrelevant. 

Rhonda V. Magee calls race “a remarkable persistent imaginary idea” that has been used to help “build a sense of ‘natural’ hierarchy in our societies.” She says racism “reduces each of us into categories” and plays into the innate tension between the tendency to “categorize and rank-order human beings” and the countervailing tendency to “minimize differences and seek equality and fair treatment across humanity... The dominant culture’s inclusion/exclusion practices obscure structural problems that threaten us all.”

Nevertheless, the American social system, the System, has promoted racism — the belief that a particular “race” is genetically superior. It has used “race” to rationalize color-based discrimination and oppression. This deeply rooted and persistent dynamic has helped justify the unequal distribution of wealth and power.  

Isabel Wilkerson writes, “In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call race... Race is the primary tool and the visible decoy, the front man, for caste. Race does the heavy lifting.” She describes caste as the “bones” and race as the “skin.” (emphasis added)

From its beginning, with the exploitation of Native Americans and the importation of African slaves in 1619 and afterward, racism has been incorporated into the American social system. Founded on a religion-based hierarchy, the American colonies soon hijacked skin color to reinforce their power structure. Unlike indentured servants, Africans could be enslaved for their lifetime and kept on the bottom rung of the new hierarchy, which solidified the hierarchy. 

Following the War of Independence, the North proclaimed egalitarian ideals while relying on Southern slavery as a major source of its economic prosperity. Moreover, racist beliefs, policies, and behaviors persisted in the North. Following the Civil War, the North quickly turned its back on human rights for emancipated African slaves. Instead, Northern Democrats allowed former slave owners to establish Jim Crow laws, racist social norms, and a sharecropping system that left Black farmers mired in extreme poverty and dependent on their former owners. Later, Northern Democrats chose not to challenge blatant racist oppression in the South in order to get support from racist Southern Democrats to pass measures such as the New Deal.

Though Jim Crow laws have been eliminated, systemic racism has persisted with methods such as:

  • After World War Two, the denial of GI-bill housing loans to Blacks and “redlining” laws legitimized housing discrimination based on skin color, thereby establishing housing segregation throughout the nation.

  • Supreme Court decisions and self-serving police unions have protected criminal police officers, resulting in an unfair disparity between the treatment of whites and people of color.

  • Public policies and social institutions such as police commissions reinforce this injustice. 

  • Prejudicial treatment within the criminal justice system has resulted in the mass incarceration of Black and Brown people and subsequent difficulty finding gainful employment.

  • Banks deny loans to deserving applicants, which leads to housing and school segregation and reduced opportunities. 

  • Deep-seated personal bias — often unconscious — results in unfair discrimination against job applicants and permeates the general public in other ways.

One result of this systemic racism is that many whites feel threatened by the U.S. becoming “majority-minority,” with whites a minority. Those who identify with America as a White nation under threat are prone to sacrifice democratic norms and institutions. Protecting their white privilege becomes more important than protecting democracy. This tendency risks the erosion of voting rights, the emergence of authoritarianism, and the threat of autocracy.

Most Americans who reject racist ideas still hold unconscious racial biases. Even if they notice and generally control these biases and don’t allow them to shape their behavior, on occasion their biases result in offensive actions that lead to hurt feelings (“microaggressions”) that may be unintentional. Ideally, those who are offended or other observers will explain the misstep with patience and compassion, a “call-in” that results in a learning experience and perhaps leads to an apology and a closer connection. On the other hand, if the offender is challenged with harsh judgments and angry labels (a “call-out”), the result can be defensiveness that undermines connection and reinforces negative feelings. Moreover, an exaggerated emphasis on thoughts and feelings can divert attention from the need to change objective realities that restrict economic and political opportunities.

Classism is the belief that social status determines human value. Casteism is a rigid top-down stratification determined by hereditary status. Individuals can change their class by moving up or down the ladder of success, but they can’t change their race or their caste. American casteism is race-based, modified classism. Both classism and casteism have been used to rationalize the oppression of the lower classes.

In Caste, Wilkerson concludes her book: “In a world without caste, being male or female, light or dark, immigrant or native-born, would have no bearing on what anyone was perceived as being capable of.” Despite the appeal of this American ideal, America directs harsh judgments against people of color — with particular intensity against Blacks by white people who deny the ongoing impact of slavery, Jim Crow, and contemporary discrimination. This denial, often guilt-ridden, leads to even stronger anti-Black thoughts and feelings, including the fear of revenge. In America, given the legacy of slavery, relations between white and Blacks are particularly charged. 

At times, economic fears drive racist opinions. Blacks and immigrants have served as major scapegoats, which diverts blame for widespread hardship away from root causes. However, with many whites, concern that affirmative-action programs and other factors will give non-whites an unfair advantage motivates this color-based fear, not the belief that Blacks, other ethnic minorities, and Native Americans are genetically inferior.  

If racism dissolved overnight, America would still face many serious problems. Blacks could be equally represented on all rungs of the oppressive wealth-and-power hierarchy. Poor individuals could still suffer severely, as did white new immigrants in regions where no Blacks were present. Racism, “the visible decoy,” is only one form of the underlying dynamic that perpetuates broad oppressive top-down domination. 

Racism has been useful to the System, and it still is. But it has not been necessary, and it still isn’t. It is possible to imagine America without racism having been so central to its development. European history demonstrates that possibility. So it’s inaccurate and counter-productive to say that America is a fundamentally, essentially racist nation. Rather, America has a serious problem with widespread racism and racist injustice.

Likewise, it’s wrong to call individuals “a racist” unless they acknowledge a belief in the inherent inferiority of particular races. Most white Americans have racist tendencies, unconscious biases, and gut reactions that are discriminatory and harmful if acted on, but they aren’t racists.

Hurling the racist label loosely undermines progress. The selection of anti-racist methods is key. Some thinking, language, and actions backfire and entrench racism more deeply. Labels can be deadly and must be used carefully. 

America is both racist and antiracist. Both racism and egalitarianism have been major American characteristics, and the nature of each has shifted over time. 

In addition to racism, America has reflected many other negative characteristics, such as the role of Big Business in government, sexism, poverty, homelessness, discrimination against multiple “out-groups,” cheating, corruption, and an elitist definition of leadership. Racism is symbolic of the System’s underlying hierarchical dynamic and a key, active tool in its perpetuation. 

At the same time, major American ideals have included the affirmation of egalitarian principles, the belief that all people are created equal, and the defense of individual liberty. Seven of the original thirteen states banned slavery early on (which set an example for the world) and many Northern whites joined with Blacks to push for slavery’s abolition in the South. The history of race in America is mixed, fluid, and checkered. 

This perspective does not deny the urgent necessity to dismantle racist oppression. Nothing is more important, though other issues are equally pressing. Undoing racism is an essential element in synergistic, holistic, and systemic transformation. 

As America’s social ladders have been racialized, racism’s pervasiveness has made it particularly damaging. Unless America dismantles racism, the transformation of this nation into a compassionate community will be impossible. 

Racist beliefs and racist policies shape and reinforce each other. Changing each is important. A commitment to fairness for all must include dissolving racist beliefs and racist structures that are established by public policies.

In the film I Am Not Your Negro, James Baldwin, who felt accepted in France, says, “If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have become so dependent on what they call ‘the Negro problem.’… What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place because I'm not a nigger, I'm a man, but if you think I'm a nigger, it means you need it.” 

With these words, Baldwin poses a key question. The answer offered here is that racism is a symptom of the urge to dominate for selfish gain, a way to help protect oppressive top-down power. Undoing the desire to dominate for selfish gain will help undo racism, and undoing racism will help undo the desire to dominate — and the willingness to submit — for selfish gain.

Race Resources

Advocates/Services

  • Black Organizing Project .

    Reviving the spirit of Oakland's Black community through relationship building, leadership development, and political education.

  • Catalyst Project: Anti-Racism for Collective Liberation.

    Helps to build powerful multiracial movements that can win collective liberation. In the service of this vision, we organize, train and mentor white people to take collective action to end racism, war and empire, and to support efforts to build power in working-class communities of color.

  • Ella Baker Center.

    Named after civil rights hero Ella Baker, we organize with Black, Brown, and low-income people to build power and prosperity in our communities.

  • Essie Justice Group.

    A nonprofit organization of women with incarcerated loved ones taking on the rampant injustices created by mass incarceration. Our award-winning Healing to Advocacy Model brings women together to heal, build collective power, and drive social change. We are building a membership of fierce advocates for race and gender justice — including Black and Latinx women, formerly and currently incarcerated women, transgender women, and gender non-conforming people.

  • Resmaa: Teaching Embodied Anti-Racism.

    “Together let’s set a course for healing historical and racialized trauma carried in the body and the soul.

    Somatic Abolitionism is a living embodied Anti-Racism practice and culture building that requires endurance, agility, resource cultivation, stamina, discernment, self and communal discipline cultivation, embodied racial literacy and humility.

    These can be built, day by day, through reps. These communal life and invitational reps will temper and condition your body, your mind, and your soul to hold the charge of race.”

  • San Francisco Human Rights Commission.

    Works in service of the City’s anti-discrimination laws to further racial solidarity, equity, and healing.

Articles/Op-eds/Essays

  • Ibram X. Kendi’s Reckoning, Wade Lee Hudson

    In a lengthy New York Times Magazine profile of Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How To Be An Antiracist and many other books about racism, Rachel Poser says Kendi “faces a reckoning of his own.” Numerous critics have criticized his theories and his administration of a well-funded center at Boston University.

    Poser concludes, “In tying together racism’s two senses — the personal and the systemic — Kendi has helped many more Americans understand that they are responsible not only for the ideas in their heads but also for the impact they have on the world.”

    However, she reports,

    Kendi doesn’t like the term “systemic racism” because (he says) it turns racism into a “hidden and unknowable” force for which there’s no one to blame, so he prefers to talk about “racist policies.” He writes instead about “the ideas and psychological defenses that cause people to deny their complicity in (racism).” He affirms “individual transformation for societal transformation.”
    [read more]

  • ‘And I One of Them’, Kevin Young.

    "Nancy Cunard’s relationship with the jazz musician Henry Crowder helped inspire her years of civil rights activism. Her romance wasn’t just with him, but with Blackness... Her crowning achievement was the Negro anthology (1934), a costly, comprehensive 855-page volume celebrating Blackness and Harlem just as its Renaissance was ending. ...More written about than read, more notorious than known, the British heiress Nancy Cunard has much to tell us and warn us against... Nancy’s tragedy is that, despite her tremendous labor of love, in type and image, she ultimately couldn’t imagine an Africa beyond her youthful fantasies. Despite her emphasis on Black genius, she was still foregrounding herself as the white savior... Viewing Blackness as monolithic, her ideas about it were as large and unwieldy as the book she assembled. She urged Crowder to “be more African”; Cunard deigned to say what kind of Black was best, a problem of overfamiliarity, while refusing to admit her own views sprang from a need to outrage her own highborn origins.”

  • The World Lost a Great Philosopher This Week, Jamelle Bouie.

    "...Mills’s most famous work, The Racial Contract, published in 1997, is both an addition to and critique of the social contract tradition within Western political theory. It is an addition in that Mills, following the classic contractarians — Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant — attempts to use the conceit of a social contract to 'explain the actual genesis of the society and the state, the way society is structured, the way the government functions, and people’s moral psychology.' Mills shows how those classic contractarian theories were built on an assumption of white racial domination, a racial contract, so to speak..." (read more)

  • Did the Enlightenment Give Rise to Racism? Mark Koyama.

    “Slate chief political correspondent Jamelle Bouie set off a heated online debate with a series of tweets claiming “the concept of race was birthed by the Enlightenment,” which then sparked a full-length article fleshing out his position. His key claim is that colonialism, slavery, imperialism, and racism in general were not “incidental developments or the mere remnants of earlier prejudice.”

    …Nevertheless, these arguments and the support Bouie received from numerous scholars on Twitter was surprising to me. In my research on religious intolerance I’d encountered detailed discussions of racism emerging in 15th century Spain. And I was aware of literatures on ethnocentrism in Song dynasty China, on racialist categorizations in the middle ages and in the classical antiquity.” (read more)

  • Reparations for Black Residents Are Becoming a Local Issue as Well as a National One, Giulia Heyward.

    “While legislation in Washington remains stalled, state and local governments are breathing new life into the reparations movement… In March, Evanston, Ill., a Chicago suburb, began distributing $10 million in reparations in the form of housing grants to its Black residents. In June, California became the first state to develop a reparations task force. That same month, another 11 American mayors committed to introducing reparations pilot programs for Black Americans… The coalition, known as Mayors Organizing for Reparations and Equality, plans to ‘double or even triple’ its number of cities by the end of this year..."

  • Globalization and the Myth of Human Races, Hector E. Garcia.

    “At the core of the nation’s current socio-political conditions are two underlying challenges, both have been intensified by this stage of globalization but were present before it began with the fall of the Soviet Union. One can be addressed rationally and objectively; it is the growth of inequality in wealth and income… The other challenge compounds the first one unnecessarily… It could be simpler than the first because it draws power from a centuries' old myth that was debunked by DNA science in 2002: the classification of human races, which assumes a hierarchy of moral and intellectual aptitudes related to color of skin, geographical origin, and language.” (read more)

  • “White Supremacy” Once Meant the Klan. Now It Refers to Much More, Michael Powell.

    This article examines the arguments pro and con within the Black community concerning the value of the phrase “white supremacy.” According to Powell, advocates say the phrase “speaks to the reality…of a nation built on slavery... [and] longstanding fixtures of American history and life [that are] embedded in the culture, including the law... [America has been] mired from its inception in the muck of white supremacy and racist violence. Nearly everything in the United States, (Ta-Nehisi Coates) wrote, bore the mark of a white supremacist identity... [which is] so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. (It is) a near-permanent feature of American society...

    But some Black scholars, businessmen, and activists — on the right and the left — balk at the phrase. They hear in those words a sledgehammer that shocks and accuses, rather than explains. When so much is described as white supremacy, …they say, the power of the phrase is lost... (read more)

  • Forging an Early Black Politics, Sean Wilentz.

    “The pre-Civil War North was a landscape not of unremitting white supremacy but of persistent struggles over racial justice by both Blacks and whites.

    …Today’s revisionists assert that the Civil War might better be described as a war between northern white racists and southern white racists over the expansion of slavery, which many northerners opposed in order to preserve a white man’s republic — a gruesome episode in a virtually seamless history of American white supremacy...

    This interpretation, positing racial oppression as the nation’s core principle, might sound new, and it has clearly become more influential in reaction to Donald J. Trump’s election in 2016...

    The antiracist politics that defined what is sometimes referred to as the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s originated not in the aftermath of the Civil War but at the nation’s founding, to be carried forward by two generations of Americans, Black and white, for whom the egalitarian ideals of the Declaration of Independence were anything but false…” (read more)

    Also see Letter: Slavery vs. White Supremacy, Van Gosse — a response to this essay, with a reply by Sean Wilentz.

  • Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on Identity Politics: Ezra Klein Interview.

    An important recent Ezra Klein Show podcast is the interview with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an associate professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University and the author of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which traces the origins of the term “identity politics.” In the podcast, Taylor argues that the weakening of social movements in the 1980s contributed to a distortion of the term’s original meaning. (read more)

  • White people who want to help should take small steps — but take them right now, Steven Belton.

  • “There are many ways to combat systemic racism. This is my advice… Here are five steps guaranteed to catalyze your capacity to lead and serve the work of dismantling racism. They are not easy steps, but they are essential and minimal requirements for personal transformation.

    First, select a Black neighborhood as your primary destination for personal commerce, including groceries, pharmacy, hair care and personal grooming, hardware, etc…

    Second, choose to worship at an African American church, mosque or other spiritual center and give your tithes and offerings there…

    Third, join the board of a Black-led and -missioned nonprofit in the Twin Cities where Blacks are the majority on the board. Find a cause that aligns with your skills or interests and get involved.

    Fourth, direct your personal philanthropy to Black led and missioned organizations…

    Fifth, develop personal friendships with African Americans who reside in a Black community… (read more)

  • How Privilege and Capital Warped a Movement, Talmon Joseph Smith.

    “…A fractious class tension…has heightened over the last year: the divide between the slow, hard struggle against poor policing and social injustice in the communities most afflicted by those troubles, and the dizzyingly quick pivot toward antiracism vocabulary and posture in certain white-collar workplaces and industries (even the C.I.A.)... A scattered set of culture wars and inclusion debates...[and proposed] technical solutions are not working... Things aren’t changing a lot for people economically down the ladder.

    It’s a model that, whatever her misgivings, currently works for antiracism celebrities like Ms. DiAngelo and the businesses she gives cover. Frankly, it may benefit the multiracial set of white-collar Gen Z and millennial employees like me, entering workplaces more woke and attentive to our feelings than ever. But that model, without reform, doesn’t work for most working people of any color — or the more than 1,000 people killed each year by police since 2013.” (read more)

  • How America Fractured into Four Parts, George Packer.

    Packer considers “four accounts of America’s moral identity,” including Just America, which “forces us to see the straight line that runs from slavery and segregation to the second-class life so many Black Americans live today… [However it] is concerned with language and identity more than with material conditions…” Packer argues that the result “often amounts to new forms of discrimination” [and] “inverts the old hierarchy of power into a new one: bottom rail on top…”

    Just Americans aim

    • to retell the entire story of America as the story of slavery and its consequences… 

    • Structural racism...is real. But so is individual agency…

    • Just America... a narrative of the young and well educated..., misreads or ignores the Black and Latino working classes… 

    • The fear of failing to say the right thing, the urge to level withering fire on minor faults...is a variation on the fierce competitive spirit of Smart America… 

    • This country has had great movements for justice in the past and badly needs one now. But in order to work, it has to throw its arms out wide… A way forward that tries to make us Equal Americans, all with the same rights and opportunities...

  • Recasting “Riots” as Black Rebellions, By Peniel E. Joseph.

    A review of AMERICA ON FIRE: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s. “…The biggest threat to the struggle for Black citizenship and dignity in America during this period was, as it remains in ours, the police… Offers a groundbreaking, deeply researched and profoundly heart-rending account of the origins of our national crisis of police violence against Black America… Through 10 crisply written and lucidly analytical chapters, Hinton reframes the conventional understanding of the long hot summers of the 1960s and their aftermath... Indeed, she argues, the violent clashes, often with the police, that have broken out in Black communities from the 1960s up to the present “can only be properly understood as rebellions” — part of “a sustained insurgency…in response to the racially biased policing of housing projects, public schools, parks, neighborhoods and street corners… The 1968 Kerner Commission report on the urban upheavals of the ’60s became an instant best seller that urged wholesale structural changes in policing, social welfare policies, employment, health care and more. But the commission’s recommendations were ignored in favor of equipping cities with police departments that had ‘veritable arsenals at their disposal…’” [read more]

  • America’s Refusal to Address the Roots of Violence, Khalil Gibran Muhammad.

    ”After finishing Elliott Currie’s A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America,... I realized that the details of every precious life harmed or lost this summer reveal a bigger truth about the nation. Whether the hand that pulls the trigger belongs to a white cop or to a Black citizen, the extraordinary violence against Black lives, Currie argues, is a consequence of the nation’s refusal to address the ‘longstanding structural roots of violence.’...(that) upholds ‘an essentially exploitative and discriminatory social order.

    [. . .] Material poverty therefore is not the issue; moral poverty is, or so the thinking goes... Currie debunks the idea that violence is rooted in Blackness by turning to research that links economic inequality, poverty and disadvantage to higher violence rates in low-income white communities than in higher-income white communities... His solutions include a jobs guarantee with living wages and meaningful work. He calls for huge investments in hiring to rebuild the public infrastructure of schools, hospitals, transportation and environmental remediation akin to a Green New Deal for Black America.” [read more]

  • ‘White Fragility Is Everywhere. But Does Antiracism Training Work? Daniel Bergner.

    “Robin DiAngelo’s best seller is giving white Americans a new way to talk about race. Do those conversations actually serve the cause of equality?… White fragility, in DiAngelo’s formulation, is far from weakness. It is “weaponized.” Its evasions are...a means of protecting a frail moral ego...and, ultimately, perpetuating racial hierarchies.

    Frank Dobbin [. . .] suggests that anti-bias training can backfire, with adverse effects especially on Black people, perhaps, he speculated, because training, whether consciously or subconsciously, “activates stereotypes.” ...He emphasized an additional finding from his data: the likelihood of backlash “if people feel that they’re being forced to go to diversity training.” 

    If the aim is...to redistribute power and influence, I asked them...do the messages of today’s antiracism training risk undermining the goal by depicting an overwhelmingly rigged society in which white people control nearly all the outcomes, by inculcating the idea that the traditional skills needed to succeed in school and in the upper levels of the workplace are somehow inherently white, by spreading the notion that teachers shouldn’t expect traditional skills as much from their Black students, by unwittingly teaching white people that Black people require allowances, warrant extraordinary empathy and can’t really shape their own destinies?

  • Racism Is Literally Bad For Your Health, Michel Martin.

    “Most people can acknowledge that discrimination has an insidious effect on the lives of minorities, even when it's unintentional. Those effects can include being passed over for jobs for which they are qualified or shut out of housing they can afford. And most people are painfully aware of the tensions between African-Americans and police….” But discrimination can also lead to a less obvious result: tangible, measurable negative effects on health. [read more]

  • There’s No Scientific Basis for Race — It's a Made-Up Label, Elizabeth Kolbert.

    “It's been used to define and separate people for millennia. But the concept of race is not grounded in genetics….” Skin color is highly variable. Much of the difference correlates with latitude….The visible [ between peoples…reflect how our ancestors dealt with sun exposure, and not much else. (read more]

  • Questions of Bias in Covid-19 Treatment Add to the Mourning for Black Families, John Eligon and Audra D. S. Burch.

    “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have advised health professionals to be on the lookout for medical bias. [. . .] Decades of research shows that black patients receive inferior medical care to white patients.”

  • It Was Never About Busing, Nikole Hannah-Jones (see Podcasts, The Myth That Busing Failed, The Daily interview with Nikole Hannah-Jones)

  • Racial Healing: Rhonda Magee.

    “Racism continues to inflict enormous suffering. Rhonda V. Magee, an African-American law professor, reports, ‘I often notice a lingering feeling that I might be in danger—that I could, at any time, be discounted, rejected, disrespected, injured, or even killed for no reason other than my perceived ‘blackness.’”

  • Why was I-94 built through St. Paul's Rondo neighborhood?, James Walsh.

    “The highway connected Minneapolis and St. Paul, but its construction tore a hole through a thriving, historic Black neighborhood…. Rondo residents, he said, didn't have pockets deep enough to alter or reroute the project — something predominantly white neighborhoods would at least partly achieve years later.... planners knew they could get land cheap while facing minimal political opposition.” This story reflects a common pattern: “redevelopment” projects that destroyed Black neighborhoods in many cities throughout the country.

  • Why Did Racial Progress Stall in America?,

    “The answer may show us the path out of our fractured and polarized present.... It is difficult to say which came first — white backlash against racial realignment or the broader shift from ‘we’ to ‘I.’”

  • America’s Racial Karma, Interview with Larry Ward by Julie Flynn Badal.

    “Buddhist teacher Larry Ward’s new book invites us to heal from the karma of racism.”

  • Chicago Race Riot of 1919, The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

    “It is important for our white citizens always to remember that the Negroes alone of all our immigrants came to America against their will by the special compelling invitation of the whites, that the institution of slavery was introduced, expanded, and maintained by the United States by the white people and for their own benefit; and they likewise created the conditions that followed emancipation. Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro’s making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence."

  • The Price We Have Paid for Not Confronting Racism, Mitch Landrieu.

    “We will remain trapped in a cycle of anger and hopelessness until more white Americans come to grips with our past…. Some 52 years ago, the bipartisan National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders — better known as the Kerner Commission, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson — released a report after researching and analyzing the causes that had led to over 150 race-related riots in 1967. …one of the main conclusions of the report was that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” And this growing segregation and inequality was fueling unrest.

  • Movement for Black Live 2020 Policy Platform.

    “We are relaunching the Vision for Black Lives 2020. We will be rolling out revised, updated, and expanded policy briefs for each of the six planks of the platform over the coming months, leading up to a National Black Convention in August of 2020.”

  • Race and History, Bryan Stevenson.

    Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption author Bryan Stevenson discusses his organization’s efforts to build a museum examining the legacy of slavery, racial terrorism, segregation, and police violence.

  • Resources to Combat Structural Racism in America, Christen Cromer and Azalea Millan.

    “The Aspen Institute is committed to building a free, just, and equitable society. This requires us to focus on sustainable solutions to combat structural racism, police violence, and inequitable economic, health care, and education systems.”

  • The Equality That Wasn’t Enough, Jamelle Bouie.

    The most radical Radical Republicans had a better idea of how to cast the 15th Amendment. We should have listened to them.

  • The 1619 Project, The New York Times.

  • I’m a Black Feminist. I Think Call-Out Culture Is Toxic, Loretta Ross.

  • When the Culture War Comes for the Kids, George Packer.

  • Integration vs. White Intransigence, Thomas B. Edsall.

  • Want to Be Less Racist? Move to Hawaii, Moises Velasquez-Manoff.

  • A Better Solution for Starbucks, Phillip Atiba Goff.

  • Black People’s Land Was Stolen, Andrew W. Kahrl.

  • U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee.

  • The American Dream and the American Negro, James Baldwin.

  • A Vision for Black Lives, The Movement for Black Lives.

  • Don’t Feed the Troll in the Oval Office, Thomas B. Edsall.

    [see Civility, Racism, and the Red Hen]

  • State of Black America, National Urban League.

  • The Dispossessed, Lizzie Presser.

  • Don’t really get all the BLM stuff?, Anonymous Facebook post.

  • The Matter of Black Lives, Jelani Cobb.

    “A new kind of movement found its moment. What will its future be?” A history as of March 2016.HOLC “redlining”

  • Maps: The Persistent Structure of Segregation and Economic Inequality, Bruce Mitchell, Ph. D.and Juan Franco.

  • The Devaluation of Assets in Black Neighborhoods, Andre M. Perry, Jonathan Rothwell, and David Harshbarger (2018).

  • The Changing Meaning of Affirmative Action, Louis Menand.

  • The Injustice of This Moment Is Not an ‘Aberration’, Michelle Alexander.

  • How to Break the Poverty Cycle, David L. Kirp.

  • The ‘Lost Cause’ That Built Jim Crow, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  • What Ails the Right Isn’t (Just) Racism, Conor Friedersdorf.

  • We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is, Thomas B. Edsall.

More Racism Articles/Essays/Op-eds

Books

  • Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson.

    Wilkerson argues that underlying and predating racism is a hidden system of social domination: a structure that ranks people based on neutral human differences, as with Nazi Germany, Indian castism, and American racism.

  • The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation’s Upheaval and Racial Reckoning, Resmaa Menakem.

    Through the coordinated repetition of lies, anti-democratic elements in American society are working to incite mass radicalization, widespread chaos, and a collective trauma response in tens of millions of American bodies.

    Currently, most of us are utterly unprepared for this potential mayhem. This book can help prepare us—and possibly prevent further destruction.

    In The Quaking of America, therapist and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem takes readers through somatic processes addressing the growing threat of white-supremacist political violence.

    This preparation focuses not on strategy or politics, but on practices that can help us

    Build presence and discernment in our bodies

    Settle our bodies during the heat of conflict

    Maintain our safety, sanity, and stability in dangerous situations

    Heal our personal and collective racialized trauma

    Practice embodied social action

    Turn toward instead of on one another

    The Quaking of America is a unique and perfectly timed guide to help us navigate our widespread upheaval and build an antiracist culture.

  • The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, Carol Anderson.

    “In The Second, historian and award-winning, bestselling author of White Rage Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. The Second is neither a “pro-gun” nor an “anti-gun” book; the lens is the citizenship rights and human rights of African Americans.

    From the seventeenth century, when it was encoded into law that the enslaved could not own, carry, or use a firearm whatsoever, until today, with measures to expand and curtail gun ownership aimed disproportionately at the African American population, the right to bear arms has been consistently used as a weapon to keep African Americans powerless--revealing that armed or unarmed, Blackness, it would seem, is the threat that must be neutralized and punished.

    Throughout American history to the twenty-first century, regardless of the laws, court decisions, and changing political environment, the Second has consistently meant this: That the second a Black person exercises this right, the second they pick up a gun to protect themselves (or the second that they don't), their life--as surely as Philando Castile's, Tamir Rice's, Alton Sterling's--may be snatched away in that single, fatal second. Through compelling historical narrative merging into the unfolding events of today, Anderson's penetrating investigation shows that the Second Amendment is not about guns but about anti-Blackness, shedding shocking new light on another dimension of racism in America.”

  • White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, Carol Anderson.

    “As Ferguson, Missouri erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as ‘black rage,’ historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in The Washington Post suggesting that this was, instead, ‘white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames,’ she argued, ‘everyone had ignored the kindling.’

    Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House, and then the election of America's first black President, led to the expression of white rage that has been as relentless as it has been brutal.

    Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage. Compelling and dramatic in the unimpeachable history it relates, White Rage will add an important new dimension to the national conversation about race in America.”

  • State of Emergency: How We Win in the Country We Built, Tamika D. Mallory.

    “Drawn from a lifetime of frontline culture-shifting advocacy, organizing, and fighting for equal justice, State of Emergency makes Mallory’s demand for change and shares the keys to effective activism both for those new to and long-committed to the defense of Black lives.

    From Minneapolis to Louisville, to Portland, Kenosha, and Washington, DC, America’s reckoning with its unmet promises on race and class is at a boiling point not seen since the 1960s. While conversations around pathways to progress take place on social media and cable TV, history tells us that meaningful change only comes with radical legislation and boots-on-the-ground activism. Here, Mallory shares her unique personal experience building coalitions, speaking truth to power, and winning over hearts and minds in the struggle for shared prosperity and safety.

    Forward-looking, steeped in history, and rich with stories from life on the margins of American life, State of Emergency is a revelatory examination of the challenges we face, of the forces we must overcome, and a blueprint for all who maintain hope for social equity and a better tomorrow.”

  • I Am Not Your Negro: A Major Motion Picture — James Baldwin, 2017, Raoul Peck.

  • The Racial Contract, Charles Mills.

  • The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness, Rhonda V. Magee.

Film

Podcasts

Video

How to Deconstruct Racism, One Headline at a Time, Baratunde.

Websites

  • White Supremacy Culture, Tema Okun.

    “This website is offering one way of understanding white supremacy culture, not the way. May this be a small contribution to a larger understanding.

    Many other people have been and are writing about white supremacy culture; you will find links to many of them on this website. You will also find a list of some of those resources on the What Is It? page.

    My hope is that this website offers something useful and that you, the reader, take what you find and develop it further. Please take whatever wisdom you find here and make it grow, correct whatever mistakes you find, create something deeper, wiser, better, and put it out in the world to help us all.” [read more]

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