Race Archives - Page 6 of 33

Democracy

Detroit’s Project Green Light and the “New Jim Code”

Why video surveillance and digital technology intensify racism

October 1, 2020 • by Vince Carducci

————— Over the last three and a half years, the City of Detroit has greatly expanded Project Green Light, an initiative of the Detroit Police Department (DPD), along with local businesses and other organizations, to use video surveillance and digital technology to fight crime. Since the first cameras went live in ...

Detroit’s Project Green Light and the “New Jim Code”

Race

Anti Bodies

Two American Pandemics

September 24, 2020 • by Rossen Ventzislavov

------- We now live in a time when the line between being a nobody and a somebody can be drawn by an antibody. Humanity is split. And so is the screen of our double American crisis—one channel nervously tracking a global pandemic, the other crackling with eruptions of civil unrest. But ...

Higher Ed

Why Does White Fragility Never Break?

The Framing of Racism in Higher Education

September 22, 2020 • by Benjamin P. Davis

------ When I was a graduate student at Emory University in 2018, the law school suspended a professor, Paul Zwier, for using the N-word in class. Zwier’s response to the suspension was strange. Inside Higher Ed reported on a letter in which he said, “I’m not sure whether I used the ...

Media

Jessica Krug and Racial Identity Theft

Past Present Podcast, Episode 246

September 15, 2020 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: George Washington University historian Jessica Krug has been posing as a Black woman for years, and recently outed herself online. Neil referred to Martha Sandweiss’ book, Passing Strange: A Gilded Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line. Natalia ...

Activism

A New Era in America’s Racial Politics

How a racial reparations alliance can prove that Black lives matter

August 27, 2020 • by Rogers M. Smith and Desmond King

Asheville isn’t the first American city to apologize for slavery and enact new policies to repair some of the damage it has done to Black families. For example, in November 2019, Evanston, Illinois, decided to levy a tax on marijuana to expand housing and employment opportunities for the city’s African ...

Education

The Happy Talk of Diversity

How can American colleges affect real change?

July 23, 2020 • by James M. Thomas

Scholars who study diversity find that among ordinary actors, it has multiple and contested meanings. For many, diversity is enriching. The idea of people from different backgrounds coming together through shared values and working toward shared goals fits well with the ethos of America as a melting pot. Sociologists Douglas ...

Race

The Need, and the Difficulty, of Collective Apologies & Forgiveness

When saying “I’m sorry” is not enough

July 16, 2020 • by Roy L. Brooks

This point is critically important in understanding the duty to apology. So long as the perpetrator or its successor-in-interest is alive (a family or institution, for example), the transgression’s moral stain does not perish with the victims. The perpetrator still has something for which to apologize. It is only the ...

The Need, and the Difficulty, of Collective Apologies & Forgiveness

Activism

Saying Goodbye to Aunt Jemima Is Not Enough

What we really need to do to address the economic impact of systemic racism in the United States

July 9, 2020 • by Elwood Watson

When Dinah Washington recorded “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” in 1959, the blues diva managed to imbue the Tin Pan Alley lyrics with a kind of haunted hopefulness, the same kind of soulful yearning that would reappear a few years later in Sam Cooke’s monumental ode to the civil ...

Saying Goodbye to Aunt Jemima Is Not Enough

Activism

What Will It Take for Black Lives to Matter?

Nonviolent, cross-racial coalitions are the way back to a decent America

July 9, 2020 • by Todd Gitlin

I wrote the article that follows three years ago. Since it first appeared in the American Prospect, Black Lives Matter (BLM) has generated the largest protest movement in American history. What has changed? And what hasn’t? It remains true that the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) is ill-defined. It has rough edges ...

What Will It Take for Black Lives to Matter?

Politics

Harnessing Federal Power for Police Reform in America

What we can learn from Reconstruction and the Voting Rights Act of 1965

July 8, 2020 • by Richard Johnson and Desmond King

History suggests that the response to the current crisis of policing in the United States must be a stronger role for the federal government. Yet few activists within the Movement for Black Lives are demanding that the federal government flex its coercive muscle. Given the racism of the current occupant ...

Harnessing Federal Power for Police Reform in America

Education

How Elite Institutions Can Prove That Black Lives Matter

Emotional labor & the limits of interpersonal diversity work

July 2, 2020 • by Gaga Gondwe

I have been a lone Black face in mostly white spaces for most of my life. I went to college at Harvard, and law school at Yale; I clerked for a federal judge, and worked at a top law firm. I will soon embark on a new adventure, becoming a ...

How Elite Institutions Can Prove That Black Lives Matter

Activism

Toppling Andrew Jackson From His Pedestal

A racist who championed ethnic cleansing

July 2, 2020 • by Mark R. Cheathem

In today’s moment of Black Lives Matter and peaceful protests over racial injustice, more Americans than ever are tearing down statues across the country: Confederate heroes, dismantled; icons of Jim Crow, removed. Now, even former presidents aren’t immune. Consider Andrew Jackson -- one of President Trump’s personal models, who is also ...