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A pandemic that disproportionately affected communities of color, roadblocks that obstructed efforts to expand the franchise and protect voting discrimination, a growing movement to push anti-racist curricula out of schools – events over the past year have only underscored how prevalent systemic racism and bias is in America today.

What can be done to dismantle centuries of discrimination in the U.S.? How can a more equitable society be achieved? What makes racism such a complicated problem to solve? Black History Month is a time marked for honoring and reflecting on the experience of Black Americans, and it is also an opportunity to reexamine our nation’s deeply embedded racial problems and the possible solutions that could help build a more equitable society.

Stanford scholars are tackling these issues head-on in their research from the perspectives of history, education, law and other disciplines. For example, historian Clayborne Carson is working to preserve and promote the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and religious studies scholar Lerone A. Martin has joined Stanford to continue expanding access and opportunities to learn from King’s teachings; sociologist Matthew Clair is examining how the criminal justice system can end a vicious cycle involving the disparate treatment of Black men; and education scholar Subini Ancy Annamma is studying ways to make education more equitable for historically marginalized students.

Learn more about these efforts and other projects examining racism and discrimination in areas like health and medicine, technology and the workplace below.

Update: Jan. 27, 2023: This story was originally published on Feb. 16, 2021, and has been updated on a number of occasions to include new content.

Understanding the impact of racism; advancing justice

One of the hardest elements of advancing racial justice is helping everyone understand the ways in which they are involved in a system or structure that perpetuates racism, according to Stanford legal scholar Ralph Richard Banks.

“The starting point for the center is the recognition that racial inequality and division have long been the fault line of American society. Thus, addressing racial inequity is essential to sustaining our nation, and furthering its democratic aspirations,” said Banks , the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and co-founder of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice .

This sentiment was echoed by Stanford researcher Rebecca Hetey . One of the obstacles in solving inequality is people’s attitudes towards it, Hetey said. “One of the barriers of reducing inequality is how some people justify and rationalize it.”

How people talk about race and stereotypes matters. Here is some of that scholarship.

For Black Americans, COVID-19 is quickly reversing crucial economic gains

Research co-authored by SIEPR’s Peter Klenow and Chad Jones measures the welfare gap between Black and white Americans and provides a way to analyze policies to narrow the divide.

How an ‘impact mindset’ unites activists of different races

A new study finds that people’s involvement with Black Lives Matter stems from an impulse that goes beyond identity.

For democracy to work, racial inequalities must be addressed

The Stanford Center for Racial Justice is taking a hard look at the policies perpetuating systemic racism in America today and asking how we can imagine a more equitable society.

The psychological toll of George Floyd’s murder

As the nation mourned the death of George Floyd, more Black Americans than white Americans felt angry or sad – a finding that reveals the racial disparities of grief.

Seven factors contributing to American racism

Of the seven factors the researchers identified, perhaps the most insidious is passivism or passive racism, which includes an apathy toward systems of racial advantage or denial that those systems even exist.

Scholars reflect on Black history

Humanities and social sciences scholars reflect on “Black history as American history” and its impact on their personal and professional lives.

The history of Black History Month

It's February, so many teachers and schools are taking time to celebrate Black History Month. According to Stanford historian Michael Hines, there are still misunderstandings and misconceptions about the past, present, and future of the celebration.

Numbers about inequality don’t speak for themselves

In a new research paper, Stanford scholars Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt propose new ways to talk about racial disparities that exist across society, from education to health care and criminal justice systems.

Changing how people perceive problems

Drawing on an extensive body of research, Stanford psychologist Gregory Walton lays out a roadmap to positively influence the way people think about themselves and the world around them. These changes could improve society, too.

Welfare opposition linked to threats of racial standing

Research co-authored by sociologist Robb Willer finds that when white Americans perceive threats to their status as the dominant demographic group, their resentment of minorities increases. This resentment leads to opposing welfare programs they believe will mainly benefit minority groups.

Conversations about race between Black and white friends can feel risky, but are valuable

New research about how friends approach talking about their race-related experiences with each other reveals concerns but also the potential that these conversations have to strengthen relationships and further intergroup learning.

Defusing racial bias

Research shows why understanding the source of discrimination matters.

Many white parents aren’t having ‘the talk’ about race with their kids

After George Floyd’s murder, Black parents talked about race and racism with their kids more. White parents did not and were more likely to give their kids colorblind messages.

Stereotyping makes people more likely to act badly

Even slight cues, like reading a negative stereotype about your race or gender, can have an impact.

Why white people downplay their individual racial privileges

Research shows that white Americans, when faced with evidence of racial privilege, deny that they have benefited personally.

Clayborne Carson: Looking back at a legacy

Stanford historian Clayborne Carson reflects on a career dedicated to studying and preserving the legacy of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

How race influences, amplifies backlash against outspoken women

When women break gender norms, the most negative reactions may come from people of the same race.

Examining disparities in education

Scholar Subini Ancy Annamma is studying ways to make education more equitable for historically marginalized students. Annamma’s research examines how schools contribute to the criminalization of Black youths by creating a culture of punishment that penalizes Black children more harshly than their white peers for the same behavior. Her work shows that youth of color are more likely to be closely watched, over-represented in special education, and reported to and arrested by police.

“These are all ways in which schools criminalize Black youth,” she said. “Day after day, these things start to sediment.”

That’s why Annamma has identified opportunities for teachers and administrators to intervene in these unfair practices. Below is some of that research, from Annamma and others.

New ‘Segregation Index’ shows American schools remain highly segregated by race, ethnicity, and economic status

Researchers at Stanford and USC developed a new tool to track neighborhood and school segregation in the U.S.

New evidence shows that school poverty shapes racial achievement gaps

Racial segregation leads to growing achievement gaps – but it does so entirely through differences in school poverty, according to new research from education Professor Sean Reardon, who is launching a new tool to help educators, parents and policymakers examine education trends by race and poverty level nationwide.

School closures intensify gentrification in Black neighborhoods nationwide

An analysis of census and school closure data finds that shuttering schools increases gentrification – but only in predominantly Black communities.

Ninth-grade ethnic studies helped students for years, Stanford researchers find

A new study shows that students assigned to an ethnic studies course had longer-term improvements in attendance and graduation rates.

Teaching about racism

Stanford sociologist Matthew Snipp discusses ways to educate students about race and ethnic relations in America.

Stanford scholar uncovers an early activist’s fight to get Black history into schools

In a new book, Assistant Professor Michael Hines chronicles the efforts of a Chicago schoolteacher in the 1930s who wanted to remedy the portrayal of Black history in textbooks of the time.

How disability intersects with race

Professor Alfredo J. Artiles discusses the complexities in creating inclusive policies for students with disabilities.

Access to program for black male students lowered dropout rates

New research led by Stanford education professor Thomas S. Dee provides the first evidence of effectiveness for a district-wide initiative targeted at black male high school students.

How school systems make criminals of Black youth

Stanford education professor Subini Ancy Annamma talks about the role schools play in creating a culture of punishment against Black students.

Reducing racial disparities in school discipline

Stanford psychologists find that brief exercises early in middle school can improve students’ relationships with their teachers, increase their sense of belonging and reduce teachers’ reports of discipline issues among black and Latino boys.

Science lessons through a different lens

In his new book, Science in the City, Stanford education professor Bryan A. Brown helps bridge the gap between students’ culture and the science classroom.

Teachers more likely to label black students as troublemakers, Stanford research shows

Stanford psychologists Jennifer Eberhardt and Jason Okonofua experimentally examined the psychological processes involved when teachers discipline black students more harshly than white students.

Why we need Black teachers

Travis Bristol, MA '04, talks about what it takes for schools to hire and retain teachers of color.

Understanding racism in the criminal justice system

Research has shown that time and time again, inequality is embedded into all facets of the criminal justice system. From being arrested to being charged, convicted and sentenced, people of color – particularly Black men – are disproportionately targeted by the police.

“So many reforms are needed: police accountability, judicial intervention, reducing prosecutorial power and increasing resources for public defenders are places we can start,” said sociologist Matthew Clair . “But beyond piecemeal reforms, we need to continue having critical conversations about transformation and the role of the courts in bringing about the abolition of police and prisons.”

Clair is one of several Stanford scholars who have examined the intersection of race and the criminal process and offered solutions to end the vicious cycle of racism. Here is some of that work.

Police Facebook posts disproportionately highlight crimes involving Black suspects, study finds

Researchers examined crime-related posts from 14,000 Facebook pages maintained by U.S. law enforcement agencies and found that Facebook users are exposed to posts that overrepresent Black suspects by 25% relative to local arrest rates.

Supporting students involved in the justice system

New data show that a one-page letter asking a teacher to support a youth as they navigate the difficult transition from juvenile detention back to school can reduce the likelihood that the student re-offends.

Race and mass criminalization in the U.S.

Stanford sociologist discusses how race and class inequalities are embedded in the American criminal legal system.

New Stanford research lab explores incarcerated students’ educational paths

Associate Professor Subini Annamma examines the policies and practices that push marginalized students out of school and into prisons.

Derek Chauvin verdict important, but much remains to be done

Stanford scholars Hakeem Jefferson, Robert Weisberg and Matthew Clair weigh in on the Derek Chauvin verdict, emphasizing that while the outcome is important, much work remains to be done to bring about long-lasting justice.

A ‘veil of darkness’ reduces racial bias in traffic stops

After analyzing 95 million traffic stop records, filed by officers with 21 state patrol agencies and 35 municipal police forces from 2011 to 2018, researchers concluded that “police stops and search decisions suffer from persistent racial bias.”

Stanford big data study finds racial disparities in Oakland, Calif., police behavior, offers solutions

Analyzing thousands of data points, the researchers found racial disparities in how Oakland officers treated African Americans on routine traffic and pedestrian stops. They suggest 50 measures to improve police-community relations.

Race and the death penalty

As questions about racial bias in the criminal justice system dominate the headlines, research by Stanford law Professor John J. Donohue III offers insight into one of the most fraught areas: the death penalty.

Diagnosing disparities in health, medicine

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted communities of color and has highlighted the health disparities between Black Americans, whites and other demographic groups.

As Iris Gibbs , professor of radiation oncology and associate dean of MD program admissions, pointed out at an event sponsored by Stanford Medicine: “We need more sustained attention and real action towards eliminating health inequities, educating our entire community and going beyond ‘allyship,’ because that one fizzles out. We really do need people who are truly there all the way.”

Below is some of that research as well as solutions that can address some of the disparities in the American healthcare system.

Stanford researchers testing ways to improve clinical trial diversity

The American Heart Association has provided funding to two Stanford Medicine professors to develop ways to diversify enrollment in heart disease clinical trials.

Striking inequalities in maternal and infant health

Research by SIEPR’s Petra Persson and Maya Rossin-Slater finds wealthy Black mothers and infants in the U.S. fare worse than the poorest white mothers and infants.

More racial diversity among physicians would lead to better health among black men

A clinical trial in Oakland by Stanford researchers found that black men are more likely to seek out preventive care after being seen by black doctors compared to non-black doctors.

A better measuring stick: Algorithmic approach to pain diagnosis could eliminate racial bias

Traditional approaches to pain management don’t treat all patients the same. AI could level the playing field.

5 questions: Alice Popejoy on race, ethnicity and ancestry in science

Alice Popejoy, a postdoctoral scholar who studies biomedical data sciences, speaks to the role – and pitfalls – of race, ethnicity and ancestry in research.

Stanford Medicine community calls for action against racial injustice, inequities

The event at Stanford provided a venue for health care workers and students to express their feelings about violence against African Americans and to voice their demands for change.

Racial disparity remains in heart-transplant mortality rates, Stanford study finds

African-American heart transplant patients have had persistently higher mortality rates than white patients, but exactly why still remains a mystery.

Finding the COVID-19 Victims that Big Data Misses

Widely used virus tracking data undercounts older people and people of color. Scholars propose a solution to this demographic bias.

Studying how racial stressors affect mental health

Farzana Saleem, an assistant professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education, is interested in the way Black youth and other young people of color navigate adolescence—and the racial stressors that can make the journey harder.

Infants’ race influences quality of hospital care in California

Disparities exist in how babies of different racial and ethnic origins are treated in California’s neonatal intensive care units, but this could be changed, say Stanford researchers.

Immigrants don’t move state-to-state in search of health benefits

When states expand public health insurance to include low-income, legal immigrants, it does not lead to out-of-state immigrants moving in search of benefits.

Excess mortality rates early in pandemic highest among Blacks

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been starkly uneven across race, ethnicity and geography, according to a new study led by SHP's Maria Polyakova.

Decoding bias in media, technology

Driving Artificial Intelligence are machine learning algorithms, sets of rules that tell a computer how to solve a problem, perform a task and in some cases, predict an outcome. These predictive models are based on massive datasets to recognize certain patterns, which according to communication scholar Angele Christin , sometimes come flawed with human bias . 

“Technology changes things, but perhaps not always as much as we think,” Christin said. “Social context matters a lot in shaping the actual effects of the technological tools. […] So, it’s important to understand that connection between humans and machines.”

Below is some of that research, as well as other ways discrimination unfolds across technology, in the media, and ways to counteract it.

IRS disproportionately audits Black taxpayers

A Stanford collaboration with the Department of the Treasury yields the first direct evidence of differences in audit rates by race.

Automated speech recognition less accurate for blacks

The disparity likely occurs because such technologies are based on machine learning systems that rely heavily on databases of English as spoken by white Americans.

New algorithm trains AI to avoid bad behaviors

Robots, self-driving cars and other intelligent machines could become better-behaved thanks to a new way to help machine learning designers build AI applications with safeguards against specific, undesirable outcomes such as racial and gender bias.

Stanford scholar analyzes responses to algorithms in journalism, criminal justice

In a recent study, assistant professor of communication Angèle Christin finds a gap between intended and actual uses of algorithmic tools in journalism and criminal justice fields.

Move responsibly and think about things

In the course CS 181: Computers, Ethics and Public Policy , Stanford students become computer programmers, policymakers and philosophers to examine the ethical and social impacts of technological innovation.

Homicide victims from Black and Hispanic neighborhoods devalued

Social scientists found that homicide victims killed in Chicago’s predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods received less news coverage than those killed in mostly white neighborhoods.

Algorithms reveal changes in stereotypes

New Stanford research shows that, over the past century, linguistic changes in gender and ethnic stereotypes correlated with major social movements and demographic changes in the U.S. Census data.

AI Index Diversity Report: An Unmoving Needle

Stanford HAI’s 2021 AI Index reveals stalled progress in diversifying AI and a scarcity of the data needed to fix it.

Identifying discrimination in the workplace and economy

From who moves forward in the hiring process to who receives funding from venture capitalists, research has revealed how Blacks and other minority groups are discriminated against in the workplace and economy-at-large. 

“There is not one silver bullet here that you can walk away with. Hiring and retention with respect to employee diversity are complex problems,” said Adina Sterling , associate professor of organizational behavior at the Graduate School of Business (GSB). 

Sterling has offered a few places where employers can expand employee diversity at their companies. For example, she suggests hiring managers track data about their recruitment methods and the pools that result from those efforts, as well as examining who they ultimately hire.

Here is some of that insight.

How To: Use a Scorecard to Evaluate People More Fairly

A written framework is an easy way to hold everyone to the same standard.

Archiving Black histories of Silicon Valley

A new collection at Stanford Libraries will highlight Black Americans who helped transform California’s Silicon Valley region into a hub for innovation, ideas.

Race influences professional investors’ judgments

In their evaluations of high-performing venture capital funds, professional investors rate white-led teams more favorably than they do black-led teams with identical credentials, a new Stanford study led by Jennifer L. Eberhardt finds.

Who moves forward in the hiring process?

People whose employment histories include part-time, temporary help agency or mismatched work can face challenges during the hiring process, according to new research by Stanford sociologist David Pedulla.

How emotions may result in hiring, workplace bias

Stanford study suggests that the emotions American employers are looking for in job candidates may not match up with emotions valued by jobseekers from some cultural backgrounds – potentially leading to hiring bias.

Do VCs really favor white male founders?

A field experiment used fake emails to measure gender and racial bias among startup investors.

Can you spot diversity? (Probably not)

New research shows a “spillover effect” that might be clouding your judgment.

Can job referrals improve employee diversity?

New research looks at how referrals impact promotions of minorities and women.

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How Do We Change America?

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

The national uprising in response to the brutal murder of George Floyd , a forty-six-year-old black man, by four Minneapolis police officers, has been met with shock, elation, concern, fear, and gestures of solidarity. Its sheer scale has been surprising. Across the United States, in cities large and small, streets have filled with young, multiracial crowds who have had enough. In the largest uprisings since the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992, anger and bitterness at racist and unrestrained police violence, abuse, and even murder have finally spilled over in every corner of the United States.

More than seventeen thousand National Guard troops have been deployed—more soldiers than are currently occupying Iraq and Afghanistan—to put down the rebellion. More than ten thousand people have been arrested ; more than twelve people, mostly African-American men, have been killed. Curfews were imposed in at least thirty cities, including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Omaha, and Sioux City. Solidarity demonstrations have been organized from Accra to Dublin—in Berlin, Paris, London, and beyond. And, most surprisingly, two weeks after Floyd’s death, the protests have not ended. Last Saturday saw the largest protests so far, as tens of thousands of people gathered on the National Mall and marched down the streets of Brooklyn and Philadelphia.

The relentless fury and pace of rebellion has forced states to shrug off their stumbling efforts to subdue the novel coronavirus that continues to sicken thousands in the United States. State leaders have been much more adept in calling up the National Guard and coördinating police actions to confront marchers than they were in any of their efforts to curtail the virus. In a show of both cowardice and authoritarianism, Donald Trump threatened to call up the U.S. military to occupy American cities. “Crisis” does not begin to describe the political maelstrom that has been unleashed.

There have been planned demonstrations, and there have also been violent and explosive outbursts that can only be described as a revolt or an uprising. Riots are not only the voice of the unheard, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously said ; they are the rowdy entry of the oppressed into the political realm. They become a stage of political theatre where joy, revulsion, sadness, anger, and excitement clash wildly in a cathartic dance. They are a festival of the oppressed.

For once in their lives, many of the participants can be seen, heard, and felt in public. People are pulled from the margins into a powerful force that can no longer be ignored, beaten, or easily discarded. Offering the first tastes of real freedom, when the police are for once afraid of the crowd, the riot can be destructive, unruly, violent, and unpredictable. But within that contradictory tangle emerge demands and aspirations for a society different from the one in which we live. Not only do the rebels express their own dismay but they also showcase our entire social dilemma. As King said , of the uprisings in the late nineteen-sixties, “I am not sad that Black Americans are rebelling; this was not only inevitable but eminently desirable. Without this magnificent ferment among Negroes, the old evasions and procrastinations would have continued indefinitely. Black men have slammed the door shut on a past of deadening passivity. Except for the Reconstruction years, they have never in their long history on American soil struggled with such creativity and courage for their freedom. These are our bright years of emergence; though they are painful ones, they cannot be avoided.”

King continued, “The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”

By now, it should be clear what the demands of young black people are: an end to racism, police abuse, and violence; and the right to be free of the economic coercion of poverty and inequality.

The question is: How do we change this country? It’s not a new question; for African-Americans, it’s a question as old as the nation itself. A large part of the reason that rebels swell the streets with clenched fists and expressive eyes is the refusal or inability of this society to engage that question in a satisfying way. Instead, those asking the question are patronized with sweet-sounding speeches, made with alliterative apologia, often interspersed with recitations about the meaning of America, and ultimately in defense of the status quo. There is a palpable poverty of intellect, a lack of imagination, and a banality of ideas pervading mainstream politics today. Old and failed propositions are recycled, but proclaimed as new, reviving cynicism and dismay.

Take the recent comments of the former President Barack Obama. On Twitter, Obama counselled that “Real change requires protest to highlight a problem, and politics to implement practical solutions and laws.” He continued to say that “there are specific evidence-based reforms that would build trust, save lives, and lead to a decrease in crime, too,” including the policy proposals of his Task Force on 21st Century Policing, convened in 2015. Such a simple, plain-stated plan fails to answer the most basic question: Why do police reforms continue to fail? African-Americans have been demonstrating against police abuse and violence since the Chicago riots of 1919. The first riot directly in response to police abuse occurred in 1935, in Harlem. In 1951, a contingent of African-American activists, armed with a petition titled “We Charge Genocide,” tried to persuade the United Nations to decry the U.S. government’s murder of black people. Their petition read :

Once the classic method of lynching was the rope. Now it is the policeman’s bullet. To many an American the police are the government, certainly its most visible representative. We submit that the evidence suggests that the killing of Negroes has become police policy in the United States and that police policy is the most practical expression of government policy.

It has been the lack of response, and a lack of “practical solutions” to beatings, harassment, and murder, that has led people into the streets, to challenge the typical dominance of police in black communities.

Many have compared the national revolt today to the urban rebellions of the nineteen-sixties, but it is more immediately shaped by the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992 and the protests it unleashed across the country. The 1992 uprising grew out of the frustrated mix of growing poverty, violence generated by the drug war, and widening unemployment. By 1992, official black unemployment had reached a high of fourteen per cent, more than double that of white Americans. In South Central Los Angeles, where the uprising took hold, more than half of people over the age of sixteen were unemployed or out of the labor force. A combination of police brutality and state-sanctioned accommodation of violence against a black child ultimately lit the fuse.

We remember that, on March 3, 1991, Rodney King, a black motorist, was beaten by four L.A. police officers by the side of the freeway. But it is also true that, two weeks later, a fifteen-year-old black girl, Latasha Harlins, was shot in the head by a convenience-store owner, Soon Ja Du, after a confrontation about whether Harlins intended to pay for a bottle of orange juice. A jury found Du guilty of manslaughter and recommended the maximum sentence, but the judge in the case disagreed and sentenced Du to five years probation, community service, and a five-hundred-dollar fine. The L.A. rebellion began on April 29, 1992, when the officers who had beaten King were unexpectedly acquitted, but it was also fuelled by the fact that, a week earlier, an appeals court had upheld the lesser sentence for Du.

In the immediate aftermath of the verdict, a multiracial throng of protesters gathered outside the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department, chanting, “No justice, no peace!” and “Guilty!” As people began to gather in South Central, the police arrived and attempted to arrest them, before realizing that they were overmatched and deserting the scene. At one point, the L.A. Times recounted, at Seventy-first and Normandie streets, two hundred people “lined the intersection, many with raised fists. Chunks of asphalt and concrete were thrown at cars. Some yelled, ‘It’s a black thing.’ Others shouted, ‘This is for Rodney King.’ ” By the end of the day, more than three hundred fires burned across the city, at police headquarters and city hall, downtown, and in the white neighborhoods of Fairfax and Westwood. In Atlanta, hundreds of black young people chanted “Rodney King” as they smashed through store windows in the business district of the city. In Northern California, seven hundred students from Berkeley High School walked out of their classes in protest. In a short span of five days, the L.A. uprising emerged as the largest and most destructive riot in U.S. history, with sixty-three dead, a billion dollars in property damage, nearly twenty-four hundred injured, and seventeen thousand arrested. President George H. W. Bush invoked the Insurrection Act , to mobilize units from the U.S. Marines and Army to put down the rebellion. A black man named Terry Adams spoke to the L.A. Times , and captured the motivation and the mood. “Our people are in pain,” he said. “Why should we draw a line against violence? The judicial system doesn’t.”

The uprising in L.A. shared with the rebellions of the nineteen-sixties an igniting spark of police abuse, widespread violence, and the fury of the rebels. But, in the nineteen-sixties, the flush economy and the still-intact notion of the social contract meant that President Lyndon B. Johnson could attempt to drown the civil-rights movement and the Black Power radicalization with enormous social spending and government-program expansion, including the passage of the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, which produced the first government-backed, low-income homeownership opportunities directed at African-Americans.

By the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties, the economy was in recession and the social contract had been ripped to shreds. The rebellions of the nineteen-sixties and the enormous social spending intended to bring them under control were wielded by the right to generate a backlash against the expanded welfare state. Political conservatives argued that the market, not government intervention, could create efficiencies and innovation in the delivery of public services. This rhetoric was coupled with virulent racist characterizations of African-Americans, who relied disproportionately on welfare programs. Ronald Reagan mastered the art of color-blind racism in the post-civil-rights era with his invocations of “welfare queens.” Not only did these distortions pave the way for undermining the welfare state, they reinforced racist delusions about the state of black America that legitimized deprivation and marginalization.

The Los Angeles uprising not only exposed the police state that African-Americans were subjected to but also uncovered the hollowed-out core of the U.S. economy after the supposed economic genius of the Reagan Revolution. The rebellions of the nineteen-sixties were disparaged as race riots because they were confined almost exclusively to segregated black communities. The L.A. rebellion spread rapidly across the city: fifty-one per cent of those arrested were Latino, and only thirty-six per cent were black. A smaller number of whites were also arrested. Public officials had used racism as a crowbar to dismantle the welfare state, but the effects were felt across the board. Though African-Americans were disproportionate recipients of welfare, whites made up the majority, and they suffered, too, when cuts were imposed. As Willie Brown, who was then the speaker of the California Assembly, wrote, in the San Francisco Examiner , days after the uprising, “For the first time in American history, many of the demonstrations and much of the violence and crime, especially the looting, was multiracial—blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians were all involved.” Though typically segregated from each other socially, each group found ways to express their overlapping grievances in the furious revolt against the L.A.P.D.

The period after the L.A. rebellion didn’t usher in new initiatives to improve the quality of the lives of people who had revolted. To the contrary, the Bush White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater blamed the uprising on the social-welfare programs of previous administrations, saying, “We believe that many of the root problems that have resulted in inner-city difficulties were started in the sixties and seventies and that they have failed.” The nineteen-nineties became a moment of convergence for the political right and the Democratic Party, as the Democrats cemented their turn toward a similar agenda of harsh budget cuts to social programs and an insistence that African-American hardship was the result of non-normative family structures. In May, 1992, Bill Clinton interrupted his normal campaign activities to travel to South Central Los Angeles, where he offered his analysis of what had gone so wrong. People were looting, he said, “because they are not part of the system at all anymore. They do not share our values, and their children are growing up in a culture alien from ours, without family, without neighborhood, without church, without support.”

Democrats responded to the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion by pushing the country further down the road of punishment and retribution in its criminal-justice system. Joe Biden , the current Democratic Presidential front-runner, emerged from the fire last time brandishing a new “crime bill” that pledged to put a hundred thousand more police on the street, called for mandatory prison sentences for certain crimes, increased funding for policing and prisons, and expanded the use of the death penalty. The Democrats’ new emphasis on law and order was coupled with a relentless assault on the right to welfare assistance. By 1996, Clinton had followed through on his pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” Biden supported the legislation, arguing that “the culture of welfare must be replaced with the culture of work. The culture of dependence must be replaced with the culture of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility. And the culture of permanence must no longer be a way of life.”

The 1994 crime bill was a pillar in the phenomenon of mass incarceration and public tolerance for aggressive policing and punishment directed at African-American neighborhoods. It helped to build the world that young black people are rebelling against today. But the unyielding assaults on welfare and food stamps have also marked this latest revolt. These cuts are a large part of the reason that the coronavirus pandemic has landed so hard in the U.S., particularly in black America . These are the reasons that we do not have a viable safety net in this country, including food stamps and cash payments during hard times. The weakness of the U.S. social-welfare state has deep roots, but it was irreversibly torn when Democrats were at the helm.

The current climate can hardly be reduced to the political lessons of the past, but the legacy of the nineties dominates the political thinking of elected officials today. When Republicans insist on tying work requirements to food stamps in the midst of a pandemic, with unemployment at more than thirteen per cent, they are conjuring the punitive spirit of the policies shaped by Clinton, Biden, and other leading Democrats throughout the nineteen-nineties. So, though Biden desperately wants us to believe that he is a harbinger of change, his long record of public service says otherwise. He has claimed that Barack Obama’s selection of him as his running mate was a kind of absolution for Biden’s dealings in the Democrats’ race-baiting politics of the nineteen-nineties. But, from the excesses of the criminal-justice system and the absence of a welfare state to the inequality rooted in an unbridled, rapacious market economy, Biden has shaped much of the world that this generation has inherited and is revolting against.

More important, the ideas honed in the nineteen-eighties and nineties continue to beat at the center of Biden’s political agenda. His campaign advisers include Larry Summers, who, as Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, was an enthusiastic supporter of deregulation, and, as Obama’s chief economic adviser during the recession, endorsed the Wall Street bailout while allowing millions of Americans to default on their mortgages. They also include Rahm Emanuel, whose tenure as the mayor of Chicago ended in disgrace, when it was revealed that his administration covered up the police murder of the seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was shot sixteen times by a white police officer. But Emanuel’s damage to Chicago ran much deeper than his defense of a particularly racist and abusive police force. He also carried out the largest single closure of public schools in U.S. history—nearly fifty in one fell swoop, in 2013. After two terms, he left the city in the same broken condition he found it, with forty-five per cent of young black men in Chicago both out of school and unemployed.

This points to the importance of expanding our national discussion about what ails the country, beyond the racism and brutality of the police. We must also discuss the conditions of economic inequality that, when they intersect with racial and gender discrimination, disadvantage African-Americans while also making them vulnerable to police violence. Otherwise, we risk reducing racism to the outrageous and intentional acts of depraved individuals, while downplaying the cumulative impact of public policies and private-sector discrimination that, regardless of personal intent, have crippled the vitality of African-American life.

When the focus narrows to the barbarism of the act that stole George Floyd’s life, it allows for the likes of the former President George W. Bush to enter the conversation and claim to deplore racism. Bush wrote, in an open letter on the Floyd killing, that “it remains a shocking failure that many African Americans, especially young African American men, are harassed and threatened in their own country.” This would be laughable if George W. Bush were not the grim reaper who hid beneath a shroud he described as “compassionate conservatism.” As the governor of Texas, he oversaw a rampant and racist death-penalty system, personally signing off on the execution of a hundred and fifty-two incarcerated people, a disproportionate number of them African-American. As President, Bush oversaw the stunningly incompetent government response to Hurricane Katrina, which contributed to the deaths of nearly two thousand people and displaced tens of thousands of African-American residents of New Orleans. That Bush is able to sanctimoniously enter into a discussion about American racism while ignoring his own role in its perpetuation and sustenance speaks to the superficiality of the conversation. Although many are becoming comfortable spurting out phrases like “systemic racism,” the solutions proposed remain mired in the system that is being critiqued. The result is that the roots of oppression and inequality that constitute what many activists refer to as “racial capitalism” are left in place.

Joe Biden, in a recent, rare public appearance, came to Philadelphia to describe the leadership necessary to emerge from this current moment. His speech sounded as if it could have been made at any time in the last twenty years. He promulgated a proposal to end choke holds—even though many police departments have done that already, at least on paper. The New York Police Department is one of them, though this did not prevent Daniel Pantaleo from choking Eric Garner to death, nor did it cause Pantaleo to be sent to jail for it. Biden called for accountability, oversight, and community policing. These proposals for curbing racist policing are as old as the first declarations for reform that came out of the Kerner Commission, in 1967. Then, too, as the nation’s cities combusted into a frenzy of uprisings, federal reformers enumerated changes to police policy such as these, and, more than fifty years later, the police remain impervious to reform and often in arrogant refusal to heel. It is simply astounding that Joe Biden has not a single meaningful or new idea to offer about controlling the police.

Barack Obama, in an essay that he posted on Medium, describes voting as the road to making “real change,” although he also writes that “if we want to bring about real change, then the choice isn’t between protest and politics. We have to do both. We have to mobilize to raise awareness, and we have to organize and cast our ballots to make sure that we elect candidates who will act on reform.” Obama has developed a tendency to intervene in political debates as if he were a curious and detached observer, rather than a former officeholder of the most powerful position in the world. The Black Lives Matter movement bloomed during the final years of Obama’s Presidency. At each stage of its development, Obama seemed unable to curb the police abuses that were fuelling its development. It is easy to get bogged down in the intricacies of federalism and the constraints on executive power, given that police abuse is such a local issue. But Obama did, after all, convene a national task force aimed at providing guidance and leadership on police accountability, and we can consider its effectiveness from the standpoint of today.

Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing delivered sixty-three recommendations, including ending “racial profiling” and extending “community policing” efforts. It called for “better training” and revamping the entire criminal-justice system. But they were no more than suggestions; there was no mechanism to make the country’s eighteen thousand different law-enforcement agencies comply. The Task Force’s interim report was released on March 2, 2015. That month , police across the country killed another hundred and thirteen people, thirty more than in the previous month. On April 4th, Walter Scott, an unarmed black man running away from a white cop, Michael Slager, in North Charleston, South Carolina, was shot five times from behind. Eight days later, Freddie Gray was picked up by Baltimore police, placed in a van with no restraints, and driven recklessly around the city. When he emerged from the van, his spine was eighty-per-cent severed at his neck. He died seven days later. Baltimore exploded in rage. And Baltimore was not like Ferguson, Missouri, which was run by a white political establishment and patrolled by a white police force. From Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to a multiracial police force, Baltimore was a black-led city.

Even as the wanton violence of law enforcement has come into sharper focus in the last five years, there has been almost no consequence in terms of municipal budget allocations. Police continue to absorb absurd portions of local operating budgets—even in departments that are sources of embarrassment and abuse lawsuits. In Los Angeles, with its homelessness crisis and out-of-control rents, the police absorb an astounding fifty-three per cent of the city’s general fund. Chicago, a city with a notoriously corrupt and abusive police force, spent thirty-nine per cent of its budget on police. Philadelphia’s operating budget needed to be recalibrated because of the collapse of tax collections due to the coronavirus pandemic; the only agency that will not suffer any budget cuts is the police department. While public schools, affordable housing, violence-prevention programming, and the police-oversight board prepare for three hundred and seventy million dollars in budget cuts, the Philadelphia Police Department, which already garners sixteen per cent of the city’s funds, is slated to receive a twenty-three-million-dollar increase.

Throughout the Obama and Trump Administrations, the failures to rein in racist policing practices have been compounded by the economic stagnation in African-American communities, measured by stalled rates of homeownership and a widening racial wealth gap. Are these failures of governance and politics all Obama’s fault? Of course not, but, when you run on big promises of change and end up overseeing a brutal status quo, people draw dim conclusions from the experiment. For many poor and working-class African-Americans, who still have enormous pride in the first black President and his spouse, Michelle Obama, the conclusion is that electing the nation’s first black President was never going to change America. One might even interpret the failures of the Obama Administration as some of the small kindling that has set the nation ablaze.

We cannot insist on “real change” in the United States by continuing to use the same methods, arguments, and failed political strategies that have brought us to this moment. We cannot allow the current momentum to be stalled by a narrow discussion about reforming the police. In Obama’s essay, he wrote, “I saw an elderly black woman being interviewed today in tears because the only grocery store in her neighborhood had been trashed. If history is any guide, that store may take years to come back. So let’s not excuse violence, or rationalize it, or participate in it.” If we are thinking of these problems in big and broad strokes, or in a systemic way, we might ask: Why is there only a single grocery store in this woman’s neighborhood? That might lead to a discussion about the history of residential segregation in that neighborhood, or job discrimination or under-resourced schools in the area, which might, in turn, provide deeper insights into an alienation that is so profound in its intensity that it compels people to fight with the intensity of a riot to demand things change. And this is where the trouble actually begins. Our society cannot end these conditions without massive expenditure.

In 1968, King, in the weeks before he was assassinated, said, “In a sense, I guess you could say, we are engaged in the class struggle.” He was speaking to the costs of the programs that would be necessary to lift black people out of poverty and inequality, which were, in and of themselves, emblems of racist subjugation. Ending segregation in the South, then, was cheap compared with the huge costs necessary to end the kinds of discrimination that kept blacks locked out of the advantages of U.S. society, from well-paying jobs to well-resourced schools, good housing, and a comfortable retirement. The price of the ticket is quite steep, but, if we are to have a real conversation about how we change America, it must begin with an honest assessment of the scope of the deprivation involved. Racist and corrupt policing is the tip of the iceberg.

We have to make space for new politics, new ideas, new formations, and new people. The election of Biden may stop the misery of another Trump term, but it won’t stop the underlying issues that have brought about more than a hundred thousand COVID -19 deaths or continuous protests against police abuse and violence. Will the federal government intervene to stop the looming crisis of evictions that will disproportionately impact black women? Will it use its power and authority to punish police, and to empty prisons and jails, which not only bring about social death but are now also sites of rampant COVID -19 infection ? Will it end the war on food stamps and allow African-Americans and other residents of this country to eat in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression? Will it finance the health-care needs of tens of millions of African-Americans who have become susceptible to the worst effects of the coronavirus, and are dying as a result? Will it provide the resources to depleted public schools, allowing black children the opportunity to learn in peace? Will it redistribute the hundreds of billions of dollars necessary to rebuild devastated working-class communities? Will there be free day care and transportation?

If we are serious about ending racism and fundamentally changing the United States, we must begin with a real and serious assessment of the problems. We diminish the task by continuing to call upon the agents and actors who fuelled the crisis when they had opportunities to help solve it. But, more importantly, the quest to transform this country cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police alone. It must conquer the logic that finances police and jails at the expense of public schools and hospitals. Police should not be armed with expensive artillery intended to maim and murder civilians while nurses tie garbage sacks around their bodies and reuse masks in a futile effort to keep the coronavirus at bay.

We have the resources to remake the United States, but it will have to come at the expense of the plutocrats and the plunderers, and therein lies the three-hundred-year-old conundrum: America’s professed values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, continually undone by the reality of debt, despair, and the human degradation of racism and inequality.

The unfolding revolt in the U.S. today holds the real promise to change this country. While it reflects the history and failures of past endeavors to confront racism and police brutality, these protests cannot be reduced to them. Unlike the uprising in Los Angeles, where Korean businesses were targeted and some white bystanders were beaten, or the rebellions of the nineteen-sixties, which were confined to black neighborhoods, today’s protests are stunning in their racial solidarity. The whitest states in the country, including Maine and Idaho, have had protests involving thousands of people. And it’s not just students or activists; the demands for an end to this racist violence have mobilized a broad range of ordinary people who are fed up.

The protests are building on the incredible groundwork of a previous iteration of the Black Lives Matter movement. Today, young white people are compelled to protest not only because of their anxieties about the instability of this country and their compromised futures in it but also because of a revulsion against white supremacy and the rot of racism. Their outlooks have been shaped during the past several years by the anti-racist politics of the B.L.M. movement, which move beyond seeing racism as interpersonal or attitudinal, to understanding that it is deeply rooted in the country’s institutions and organizations.

This may account, in part, for the firm political foundation that this round of struggle has begun upon. It explains why activists and organizers have so quickly been able to gather support for demands to defund police, and in some cases introduce ideas about ending policing altogether. They have been able to quickly link bloated police budgets to the attacks on other aspects of the public sector, and to the limits on cities’ abilities to attend to the social crises that have been exposed by the COVID -19 pandemic. They have built upon the vivid memories of previous failures, and refuse to submit to empty or rhetoric-driven calls for change. This is evidence again of how struggles build upon one another and are not just recycled events from the past.

Race, Policing, and Black Lives Matter Protests

• The death of George Floyd , in context.
• The civil-rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson examines the frustration and despair behind the protests.
• Who, David Remnick asks, is the true agitator behind the racial unrest ?
• A sociologist examines the so-called pillars of whiteness that prevent white Americans from confronting racism.
• The Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi on what it would mean to defund police departments , and what comes next.
• The quest to transform the United States cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police.

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By Isaac Chotiner

How Reconstruction Still Shapes American Racism

D uring an interview with Chris Rock for my PBS series ­African American Lives 2 , we traced the ancestry of several well-known African Americans. When I told Rock that his great-great-­grandfather Julius Caesar Tingman had served in the U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War — enrolling on March 7, 1865, a little more than a month after the Confederates evacuated from Charleston, S.C. — he was brought to tears. I explained that seven years later, while still a young man in his mid-20s, this same ancestor was elected to the South Carolina house of representatives as part of that state’s Reconstruction government. Rock was flabbergasted, his pride in his ancestor rivaled only by gratitude that Julius’ story had been revealed at last. “It’s sad that all this stuff was kind of buried and that I went through a whole childhood and most of my adulthood not knowing,” Rock said. “How in the world could I not know this?”

I realized then that even descendants of black heroes of Reconstruction had lost the memory of their ancestors’ heroic achievements. I have been interested in Reconstruction and its tragic aftermath since I was an undergraduate at Yale University, and I have been teaching works by black authors from the second half of the 19th century for decades. But the urgent need for a broader public conversation about the period first struck me only in that conversation with Rock.

Reconstruction, the period in American history that followed the Civil War, was an era filled with great hope and expectations, but it proved far too short to ensure a successful transition from bondage to free labor for the almost 4 million black human beings who’d been born into slavery in the U.S. During Reconstruction, the U.S. government maintained an active presence in the former Confederate states to protect the rights of the newly freed slaves and to help them, however incompletely, on the path to becoming full citizens. A little more than a decade later, the era came to an end when the contested presidential election of 1876 was resolved by trading the electoral votes of South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida for the removal of federal troops from the last Southern statehouses.

Today, many of us know precious little about what happened during those years. But, regardless of its brevity, Reconstruction remains one of the most pivotal eras in the history of race relations in American history —­ and probably the most misunderstood.

Reconstruction was fundamentally about who got to be an American citizen. It was in that period that the Constitution was amended to establish birthright citizenship through the 14th Amendment, which also guaranteed equality before the law regardless of race. The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, barred racial discrimination in voting, thus securing the ballot for black men nationwide. As Eric Foner, the leading historian of the era, puts it, “The issues central to Reconstruction —­ citizenship, voting rights, terrorist violence, the relationship between economic and political democracy ­— continue to roil our society and ­politics today, making an understanding of Reconstruction even more vital.” A key lesson of Reconstruction, and of its violent, racist rollback, is, Foner continues, “that achievements thought permanent can be overturned and rights can never be taken for granted.”

Another lesson this era of our history teaches us is that, even when stripped of their rights by courts, legislatures and revised state constitutions, African Americans never surrendered to white supremacy. Resistance, too, is their legacy.

By 1877 , in a climate of economic crisis, the “cost” of protecting the freedoms of African Americans became a price the American government was no longer willing to pay. The long rollback began in earnest­: the period of retrenchment, voter suppression, Jim Crow segregation and quasi re-enslavement that was called by white Southerners, ironically, “Redemption.” As a worried ­Frederick Douglass, sensing the storm clouds gathering on the horizon, put it in a speech at the Republican National Convention on June 14, 1876: “You say you have emancipated us. You have; and I thank you for it. You say you have enfranchised us; and I thank you for it. But what is your ­emancipation? — What is your enfranchisement? What does it all amount to if the black man, after having been made free by the letter of your law, is unable to exercise that freedom, and, after having been freed from the slaveholder’s lash, he is to be subject to the slaveholder’s shotgun?”

What confounds me is how much longer the rollback of Reconstruction was than Reconstruction itself, how dogged was the determination of the “Redeemed South” to obliterate any trace of the gains made by freed people. In South Carolina, for example, the state university that had been integrated during Reconstruction (indeed, Harvard’s first black college graduate, Richard T. Greener, was a professor there) was swiftly shut down and reopened three years later for whites only. That color line remained in place there until 1963.

In addition to their moves to strip African Americans of their voting rights, “Redeemer” governments across the South slashed government investments in infrastructure and social programs across the board, including those for the region’s first state-funded public-school systems, a product of Reconstruction. In doing so, they re-empowered a private sphere dominated by the white planter class. A new wave of state constitutional conventions followed, starting with Mississippi in 1890. These effectively undermined the Reconstruction Amendments, especially the right of black men to vote, in each of the former Confederate states by 1908. To take just one example: whereas in Louisiana, 130,000 black men were registered to vote before the state instituted its new constitution in 1898, by 1904 that number had been reduced to 1,342.

And at what the historian Rayford W. Logan dubbed the “nadir” of American race relations—the time of political, economic, social and legal hardening around segregation — widespread violence, disenfranchisement and lynching coincided with a hardening of racist concepts of “race.”

This painfully long period following Reconstruction saw the explosion of white-supremacist ideology across an array of media and through an extraordinary variety of forms, all designed to warp the mind toward white-supremacist beliefs. Minstrelsy and racist visual imagery were weapons in the battle over the status of African Americans in postslavery America, and some continue to be manufactured to this day.

The process of dehumanization triggered a resistance movement. Among a rising generation of the black elite, this resistance was represented after 1895 through the concept of “The New Negro,” a counter to the avalanche of racist images of black people that proliferated throughout Gilded Age American society in advertisements, posters and postcards, helped along by technological innovations that enabled the cheap mass production of multicolored prints. Not surprisingly, racist images of black people­ — characterized by exaggerated physical features, the blackest of skin tones, the whitest of eyes and the reddest of lips — were a favorite subject of these multicolored prints during the rollback of Reconstruction and the birth of Jim Crow segregation in the 1890s.

We can think of the New Negro as Black America’s first superhero, locked in combat against the white-­supremacist fiction of African Americans as “Sambos,” by nature lazy, mentally inferior, licentious and, beneath the surface, lurking sexual predators. The New Negro would undergo several transformations within the race between the mid-1890s and the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, but, in its essence, it was a trope —­ summarized by one writer in 1928 as a continuously evolving “mythological figure” — that would be drawn upon and revised over three decades by black leaders in the country’s first social-media war: the New Negro vs. Sambo.

The concept would prove to be quite volatile. Supposedly New Negroes could be supplanted by even “newer” Negroes. For example, Booker T. Washington, the conservative, accommodationist educator, would be hailed as the first New Negro in 1895, only to be dethroned exactly a decade later on the cover of the Voice of the Negro magazine by his nemesis, W.E.B. Du Bois, the Harvard-trained historian. Du Bois had globalized his version of the New Negro in a landmark photography exhibition at the 1900 Paris Exposition and then, three years later, in his monumental work, The Souls of Black Folk , mounted a ­devastating ­attack on Washington’s philosophy of race relations as dangerously complicitous with Jim Crow segregation and, especially, black male disenfranchisement. Du Bois, a founder of the militant Niagara Movement in 1905, would co-found the NAACP in 1909. And while Douglass had already seen the potential of photography to present an authentic face of black America, and thus to counteract the onslaught of negative stereotypes pervading American society, the children of Reconstruction were the ones who picked up the torch after his death in 1895.

This new generation experimented with a range of artistic mediums to carve out a space for a New Negro who would lead the race — and the country — into the rising century, one whose racial attitudes would be more modern and cosmopolitan than those of the previous century, marred by slavery and Civil War. When D.W. Griffith released his racist Lost Cause fantasy film The Birth of a Nation in 1915, New Negro activists responded not only with protest but also with support for African American artists like the pioneering independent producer and director Oscar Micheaux, whose reels of silent films exposed the horrors of white supremacy while advancing a fuller, more humanistic take on black life.

Their pushback against Redemption took many forms. Denied the ballot box, African American women and men organized­ political associations, churches, schools and social clubs, both to nurture their own culture and to speak out as forcefully as they could against the suffocating oppression unfolding around them. Though brutalized by the shockingly extensive practices of lynching and rape, reinforced by terrorism and vigilante violence, they exposed the crimes and hypocrisy of white supremacy in their own newspapers and magazines, and in marches and political rallies. But no weapon was drawn upon more frequently than images of the New Negro and what the historian Evelyn Higginbotham calls “the politics of respectability.”

Assaulted by the degrading, mass-­produced imagery of the Lost Cause, its romanticization of the Old South and stereotypes of “Sambo” and the “Old Negro,” they avidly counterpunched with their own images of modern women and men, which they widely disseminated in ­journalism, photography, literature and the arts. Drawing on the tradition of agitation epitomized by the black Reconstruction Congressmen, such as John Mercer Langston, and former abolitionists, such as the inimitable Douglass, the children of Reconstruction would lay the foundation for the civil rights revolution to come in the 20th century.

But what also seems clear to me today is that it was in that period that white-­supremacist ideology, especially as it was transmuted into powerful new forms of media, poisoned the American imagination in ways that have long outlasted its origin. You might say that anti-black racism once helped fuel an economic system, and that black crude was pumped and freighted around the world. Now, more than a century and a half since the end of slavery in the U.S., it drifts like a toxic oil slick as the supertanker lists into the sea.

When Dylann Roof murdered the Reverend Clementa Pinckney and the eight other innocents in Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. , on June 17, 2015, he didn’t need to have read any of this history; it had, unfortunately, long become part of our country’s cultural DNA and, it seems, imprinted on his own. It is important that we both celebrate the triumphs of African Americans following the Civil War and explain how the forces of white supremacy did their best to undermine those triumphs­—then and in all the years since, through to the present.

Gates is the Alphonse Fletcher university professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. His PBS series on Reconstruction airs April 9 and April 16. This essay is adapted from his new book, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow . Published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC . Copyright © 2019 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

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Dismantling racism today starts by understanding slavery’s ‘horrific’ past

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Education is the “most powerful weapon” in the world’s arsenal to combat the brutal legacy of racism playing out today, the UN chief said on Monday, as the General Assembly met to mark the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

“It is incumbent on us to fight slavery’s legacy of racism ,” the UN Secretary-General António Guterres said. “The most powerful weapon in our arsenal is education, the theme of this year’s commemoration.”

“It is crucial to invest in quality education. In a time where racism still affects our laws, systems & the descendants of its victims, education is the key to countering injustice and moving forward” @taylorcassidyj @UN #UNGA commemorative meeting on #RememberSlavery Day. https://t.co/x1mW0rGBH2 Remember Slavery rememberslavery March 27, 2023

Observed on 25 March, the international day commemorates the victims of one of history’s most horrific crimes against humanity that was legalized for more than 400 years, well into the 19th century , resulting in the forced deportation of over 15 million men, women, and children.

Long shadow of slavery

“The scars of slavery are still visible in persistent disparities in wealth, income, health, education, and opportunity,” he said, also pointing to the current resurgence of white supremacist hate .

Just as the slave trade underwrote the wealth and prosperity of the colonizers, it devastated the African continent , thwarting its development for centuries, he said.

“The long shadow of slavery still looms over the lives of people of African descent who carry with them the transgenerational trauma and who continue to confront marginalization, exclusion, and bigotry ,” he said.

Teach histories of ‘righteous defiance’

Governments everywhere should introduce lessons into school curricula on the causes, manifestations, and far-reaching consequences of the transatlantic slave trade, he said.

“We must learn and teach the horrific history of slavery, and we must learn and teach the history of Africa and the African diaspora , whose people have enriched societies wherever they went, and excelled in every field of human endeavour,” the Secretary-General said.

He pointed to examples of righteous resistance, resilience, and defiance as Queen Nanny of the Maroons, in Jamaica,  Queen Ana Nzinga of Ndongo in Angola, freedom fighter Sojourner Truth , who was born into slavery, and Toussaint Louverture of Saint-Domingue, who transformed a rebellion into a revolutionary movement and is known today as the “Father of Haiti”.

“By teaching the history of slavery, we help to guard against humanity’s most vicious impulses , and by honouring the victims of slavery, we restore some measure of dignity to those who were so mercilessly stripped of it,” he said.

Dismantle the foundations

General Assembly President Csaba Kőrösi said that while the transatlantic slave trade is over, the foundations on which it stood have not been fully dismantled, he said, adding that racism, including anti-black racism and discrimination, are still present in societies .

“Many Africans and people of African descent continue to feel that they are fighting an uphill battle for the recognition of an assault on their rights that was neither repaired nor rectified,” he said.

This is why this Day of Remembrance is so important, because it creates a space to reflect on a dark and shameful chapter of the world’s shared history, he said.

“History, the facts of which should not be distorted, must serve as a lesson for all of us,” he said. “Through education , we can confute any revisionism with undisputable facts, raise awareness of the dangers caused by misconceptions of supremacy past or present, and ensure that no one will ever experience the hell lived by the 15 million we commemorate today.”

“Through education, the painful stories of racism can be transformed into a future of peace ,” he said.

‘A more hopeful future’

During the event, Brazilian philosopher and journalist, Djamila Ribeiro, delivered the keynote address, explaining how she has been using the power of education to fight discrimination against Afro-Brazilians. Her work is reflected in her bestselling book ‘Little Anti-Racist Manual’ and her influential Instagram account, which has more than one million followers.

“It’s important to remember that Brazil was the last in the Americas to abolish slavery,” she said. “ History needs to be remembered so that, in the present, we can overcome and transform its consequences and build a more hopeful future .”

Also addressing the world body was American university student Taylor Cassidy, recognized as one of TikTok’s 2020 Top 10 Voices of Change, empowering her 2.2 million followers with uplifting videos related to Black history.

“It is crucial to invest in quality education ,” she said. “At a time when racism still affects our laws, systems and descendants of its victims, education is the key to countering injustice and moving forward .”

How the UN helps to remember the victims of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade:

• The UN Department of Global Communications Outreach Programme on the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery will host a panel discussion at UN Headquarters on Thursday to highlight efforts by museums to include the voices of people of African descent and deal with the colonial past.The featured speaker will be Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative – a non-profit working to end mass incarceration in the United States.
• A free interactive exhibition Slavery: Ten True Stories of Dutch Colonial Slavery , brought to the UN by the Rijksmuseum of the Netherlands, opened in February at the UN Headquarters’ Visitors’ Lobby, on display until 30 March.
• The UN Remember Slavery Programme has, since its inception in 2007, established a global network of partners, including from educational institutions and civil society, and developed resources and initiatives to educate the public about this dark chapter of history and promote action against racism.
• The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization ( UNESCO ) Slave Route Project focuses on breaking the silence surrounding the history of slavery, promoting the contributions of people of African descent to the general progress of humanity, and questioning the social, cultural and economic inequalities inherited from this tragedy.
• The Ark of Return , by Haitian-American architect Rodney Leon, is a permanent memorial located at UN Headquarters, and open to all visitors.
• International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Black Progress: How far we’ve come, and how far we have to go

Subscribe to governance weekly, abigail thernstrom and at abigail thernstrom senior fellow, manhattan institute stephan thernstrom st stephan thernstrom.

March 1, 1998

• 16 min read

Let’s start with a few contrasting numbers.

60 and 2.2. In 1940, 60 percent of employed black women worked as domestic servants; today the number is down to 2.2 percent, while 60 percent hold white- collar jobs.

44 and 1. In 1958, 44 percent of whites said they would move if a black family became their next door neighbor; today the figure is 1 percent.

18 and 86. In 1964, the year the great Civil Rights Act was passed, only 18 percent of whites claimed to have a friend who was black; today 86 percent say they do, while 87 percent of blacks assert they have white friends.

Progress is the largely suppressed story of race and race relations over the past half-century. And thus it’s news that more than 40 percent of African Americans now consider themselves members of the middle class. Forty-two percent own their own homes, a figure that rises to 75 percent if we look just at black married couples. Black two-parent families earn only 13 percent less than those who are white. Almost a third of the black population lives in suburbia.

Because these are facts the media seldom report, the black underclass continues to define black America in the view of much of the public. Many assume blacks live in ghettos, often in high-rise public housing projects. Crime and the welfare check are seen as their main source of income. The stereotype crosses racial lines. Blacks are even more prone than whites to exaggerate the extent to which African Americans are trapped in inner-city poverty. In a 1991 Gallup poll, about one-fifth of all whites, but almost half of black respondents, said that at least three out of four African Americans were impoverished urban residents. And yet, in reality, blacks who consider themselves to be middle class outnumber those with incomes below the poverty line by a wide margin.

A Fifty-Year March out of Poverty

Fifty years ago most blacks were indeed trapped in poverty, although they did not reside in inner cities. When Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma in 1944, most blacks lived in the South and on the land as laborers and sharecroppers. (Only one in eight owned the land on which he worked.) A trivial 5 percent of black men nationally were engaged in nonmanual, white-collar work of any kind; the vast majority held ill-paid, insecure, manual jobs—jobs that few whites would take. As already noted, six out of ten African-American women were household servants who, driven by economic desperation, often worked 12-hour days for pathetically low wages. Segregation in the South and discrimination in the North did create a sheltered market for some black businesses (funeral homes, beauty parlors, and the like) that served a black community barred from patronizing “white” establishments. But the number was minuscule.

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Beginning in the 1940s, however, deep demographic and economic change, accompanied by a marked shift in white racial attitudes, started blacks down the road to much greater equality. New Deal legislation, which set minimum wages and hours and eliminated the incentive of southern employers to hire low-wage black workers, put a damper on further industrial development in the region. In addition, the trend toward mechanized agriculture and a diminished demand for American cotton in the face of international competition combined to displace blacks from the land.

As a consequence, with the shortage of workers in northern manufacturing plants following the outbreak of World War II, southern blacks in search of jobs boarded trains and buses in a Great Migration that lasted through the mid-1960s. They found what they were looking for: wages so strikingly high that in 1953 the average income for a black family in the North was almost twice that of those who remained in the South. And through much of the 1950s wages rose steadily and unemployment was low.

Thus by 1960 only one out of seven black men still labored on the land, and almost a quarter were in white-collar or skilled manual occupations. Another 24 percent had semiskilled factory jobs that meant membership in the stable working class, while the proportion of black women working as servants had been cut in half. Even those who did not move up into higher-ranking jobs were doing much better.

A decade later, the gains were even more striking. From 1940 to 1970, black men cut the income gap by about a third, and by 1970 they were earning (on average) roughly 60 percent of what white men took in. The advancement of black women was even more impressive. Black life expectancy went up dramatically, as did black homeownership rates. Black college enrollment also rose—by 1970 to about 10 percent of the total, three times the prewar figure.

In subsequent years these trends continued, although at a more leisurely pace. For instance, today more than 30 percent of black men and nearly 60 percent of black women hold white-collar jobs. Whereas in 1970 only 2.2 percent of American physicians were black, the figure is now 4.5 percent. But while the fraction of black families with middle-class incomes rose almost 40 percentage points between 1940 and 1970, it has inched up only another 10 points since then.

Affirmative Action Doesn’t Work

Rapid change in the status of blacks for several decades followed by a definite slowdown that begins just when affirmative action policies get their start: that story certainly seems to suggest that racial preferences have enjoyed an inflated reputation. “There’s one simple reason to support affirmative action,” an op-ed writer in the New York Times argued in 1995. “It works.” That is the voice of conventional wisdom.

In fact, not only did significant advances pre-date the affirmative action era, but the benefits of race-conscious politics are not clear. Important differences (a slower overall rate of economic growth, most notably) separate the pre-1970 and post-1970 periods, making comparison difficult.

We know only this: some gains are probably attributable to race-conscious educational and employment policies. The number of black college and university professors more than doubled between 1970 and 1990; the number of physicians tripled; the number of engineers almost quadrupled; and the number of attorneys increased more than sixfold. Those numbers undoubtedly do reflect the fact that the nation’s professional schools changed their admissions criteria for black applicants, accepting and often providing financial aid to African-American students whose academic records were much weaker than those of many white and Asian-American applicants whom these schools were turning down. Preferences “worked” for these beneficiaries, in that they were given seats in the classroom that they would not have won in the absence of racial double standards.

On the other hand, these professionals make up a small fraction of the total black middle class. And their numbers would have grown without preferences, the historical record strongly suggests. In addition, the greatest economic gains for African Americans since the early 1960s were in the years 1965 to 1975 and occurred mainly in the South, as economists John J. Donahue III and James Heckman have found. In fact, Donahue and Heckman discovered “virtually no improvement” in the wages of black men relative to those of white men outside of the South over the entire period from 1963 to 1987, and southern gains, they concluded, were mainly due to the powerful antidiscrimination provisions in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

With respect to federal, state, and municipal set-asides, as well, the jury is still out. In 1994 the state of Maryland decided that at least 10 percent of the contracts it awarded would go to minority- and female-owned firms. It more than met its goal. The program therefore “worked” if the goal was merely the narrow one of dispensing cash to a particular, designated group. But how well do these sheltered businesses survive long-term without extraordinary protection from free-market competition? And with almost 30 percent of black families still living in poverty, what is their trickle-down effect? On neither score is the picture reassuring. Programs are often fraudulent, with white contractors offering minority firms 15 percent of the profit with no obligation to do any of the work. Alternatively, set-asides enrich those with the right connections. In Richmond, Virginia, for instance, the main effect of the ordinance was a marriage of political convenience—a working alliance between the economically privileged of both races. The white business elite signed on to a piece-of-the-pie for blacks in order to polish its image as socially conscious and secure support for the downtown revitalization it wanted. Black politicians used the bargain to suggest their own importance to low-income constituents for whom the set-asides actually did little. Neither cared whether the policy in fact provided real economic benefits—which it didn’t.

Why Has the Engine of Progress Stalled?

In the decades since affirmative action policies were first instituted, the poverty rate has remained basically unchanged. Despite black gains by numerous other measures, close to 30 percent of black families still live below the poverty line. “There are those who say, my fellow Americans, that even good affirmative action programs are no longer needed,” President Clinton said in July 1995. But “let us consider,” he went on, that “the unemployment rate for African Americans remains about twice that of whites.” Racial preferences are the president’s answer to persistent inequality, although a quarter-century of affirmative action has done nothing whatever to close the unemployment gap.

Persistent inequality is obviously serious, and if discrimination were the primary problem, then race-conscious remedies might be appropriate. But while white racism was central to the story in 1964, today the picture is much more complicated. Thus while blacks and whites now graduate at the same rate from high school today and are almost equally likely to attend college, on average they are not equally educated. That is, looking at years of schooling in assessing the racial gap in family income tells us little about the cognitive skills whites and blacks bring to the job market. And cognitive skills obviously affect earnings.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the nation’s report card on what American students attending elementary and secondary schools know. Those tests show that African-American students, on average, are alarmingly far behind whites in math, science, reading, and writing. For instance, black students at the end of their high school career are almost four years behind white students in reading; the gap is comparable in other subjects. A study of 26- to 33-year-old men who held full-time jobs in 1991 thus found that when education was measured by years of school completed, blacks earned 19 percent less than comparably educated whites. But when word knowledge, paragraph comprehension, arithmetical reasoning, and mathematical knowledge became the yardstick, the results were reversed. Black men earned 9 percent more than white men with the same education—that is, the same performance on basic tests.

Other research suggests much the same point. For instance, the work of economists Richard J. Murnane and Frank Levy has demonstrated the increasing importance of cognitive skills in our changing economy. Employers in firms like Honda now require employees who can read and do math problems at the ninth-grade level at a minimum. And yet the 1992 NAEP math tests, for example, revealed that only 22 percent of African-American high school seniors but 58 percent of their white classmates were numerate enough for such firms to consider hiring them. And in reading, 47 percent of whites in 1992 but just 18 percent of African Americans could handle the printed word well enough to be employable in a modern automobile plant. Murnane and Levy found a clear impact on income. Not years spent in school but strong skills made for high long-term earnings.

The Widening Skills Gap

Why is there such a glaring racial gap in levels of educational attainment? It is not easy to say. The gap, in itself, is very bad news, but even more alarming is the fact that it has been widening in recent years. In 1971, the average African-American 17-year-old could read no better than the typical white child who was six years younger. The racial gap in math in 1973 was 4.3 years; in science it was 4.7 years in 1970. By the late 1980s, however, the picture was notably brighter. Black students in their final year of high school were only 2.5 years behind whites in both reading and math and 2.1 years behind on tests of writing skills.

Had the trends of those years continued, by today black pupils would be performing about as well as their white classmates. Instead, black progress came to a halt, and serious backsliding began. Between 1988 and 1994, the racial gap in reading grew from 2.5 to 3.9 years; between 1990 and 1994, the racial gap in math increased from 2.5 to 3.4 years. In both science and writing, the racial gap has widened by a full year.

There is no obvious explanation for this alarming turnaround. The early gains doubtless had much to do with the growth of the black middle class, but the black middle class did not suddenly begin to shrink in the late 1980s. The poverty rate was not dropping significantly when educational progress was occurring, nor was it on the increase when the racial gap began once again to widen. The huge rise in out-of-wedlock births and the steep and steady decline in the proportion of black children growing up with two parents do not explain the fluctuating educational performance of African-American children. It is well established that children raised in single-parent families do less well in school than others, even when all other variables, including income, are controlled. But the disintegration of the black nuclear family—presciently noted by Daniel Patrick Moynihan as early as 1965—was occurring rapidly in the period in which black scores were rising, so it cannot be invoked as the main explanation as to why scores began to fall many years later.

Some would argue that the initial educational gains were the result of increased racial integration and the growth of such federal compensatory education programs as Head Start. But neither desegregation nor compensatory education seems to have increased the cognitive skills of the black children exposed to them. In any case, the racial mix in the typical school has not changed in recent years, and the number of students in compensatory programs and the dollars spent on them have kept going up.

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What about changes in the curriculum and patterns of course selection by students? The educational reform movement that began in the late 1970s did succeed in pushing students into a “New Basics” core curriculum that included more English, science, math, and social studies courses. And there is good reason to believe that taking tougher courses contributed to the temporary rise in black test scores. But this explanation, too, nicely fits the facts for the period before the late 1980s but not the very different picture thereafter. The number of black students going through “New Basics” courses did not decline after 1988, pulling down their NAEP scores.

We are left with three tentative suggestions. First, the increased violence and disorder of inner-city lives that came with the introduction of crack cocaine and the drug-related gang wars in the mid-1980s most likely had something to do with the reversal of black educational progress. Chaos in the streets and within schools affects learning inside and outside the classroom.

In addition, an educational culture that has increasingly turned teachers into guides who help children explore whatever interests them may have affected black academic performance as well. As educational critic E. D. Hirsch, Jr., has pointed out, the “deep aversion to and contempt for factual knowledge that pervade the thinking of American educators” means that students fail to build the “intellectual capital” that is the foundation of all further learning. That will be particularly true of those students who come to school most academically disadvantaged—those whose homes are not, in effect, an additional school. The deficiencies of American education hit hardest those most in need of education.

And yet in the name of racial sensitivity, advocates for minority students too often dismiss both common academic standards and standardized tests as culturally biased and judgmental. Such advocates have plenty of company. Christopher Edley, Jr., professor of law at Harvard and President Clinton’s point man on affirmative action, for instance, has allied himself with testing critics, labeling preferences the tool colleges are forced to use “to correct the problems we’ve inflicted on ourselves with our testing standards.” Such tests can be abolished—or standards lowered—but once the disparity in cognitive skills becomes less evident, it is harder to correct.

Closing that skills gap is obviously the first task if black advancement is to continue at its once-fast pace. On the map of racial progress, education is the name of almost every road. Raise the level of black educational performance, and the gap in college graduation rates, in attendance at selective professional schools, and in earnings is likely to close as well. Moreover, with educational parity, the whole issue of racial preferences disappears.

The Road to True Equality

Black progress over the past half-century has been impressive, conventional wisdom to the contrary notwithstanding. And yet the nation has many miles to go on the road to true racial equality. “I wish I could say that racism and prejudice were only distant memories, but as I look around I see that even educated whites and African American…have lost hope in equality,” Thurgood Marshall said in 1992. A year earlier The Economist magazine had reported the problem of race as one of “shattered dreams.” In fact, all hope has not been “lost,” and “shattered” was much too strong a word, but certainly in the 1960s the civil rights community failed to anticipate just how tough the voyage would be. (Thurgood Marshall had envisioned an end to all school segregation within five years of the Supreme Court s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.) Many blacks, particularly, are now discouraged. A 1997 Gallup poll found a sharp decline in optimism since 1980; only 33 percent of blacks (versus 58 percent of whites) thought both the quality of life for blacks and race relations had gotten better.

Thus, progress—by many measures seemingly so clear—is viewed as an illusion, the sort of fantasy to which intellectuals are particularly prone. But the ahistorical sense of nothing gained is in itself bad news. Pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If all our efforts as a nation to resolve the “American dilemma” have been in vain—if we’ve been spinning our wheels in the rut of ubiquitous and permanent racism, as Derrick Bell, Andrew Hacker, and others argue—then racial equality is a hopeless task, an unattainable ideal. If both blacks and whites understand and celebrate the gains of the past, however, we will move forward with the optimism, insight, and energy that further progress surely demands.

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Racism: What it is, how it affects us and why it’s everyone’s job to do something about it

Bray lecturer Camara Jones addresses racism as a public health crisis

• Post author By Kathryn
• Post date October 5, 2020

By Kathryn Stroppel

In 2018, the CDC found a 16% difference in the mortality rates of Blacks versus whites across all ages and causes of death. This means that white Americans can sometimes live more than a decade longer than Blacks.  

In 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the discrepancy in health outcomes has only grown. Michigan’s population, for instance, is 14% Black, yet near the start of the pandemic, African Americans made up 35% of cases and 40% of deaths.  

Because of this discrepancy in health outcomes, many scientists and government officials, including former American Public Health Association President Camara Jones, MD, PhD, MPH ; more than 50 municipalities nationwide; and a handful of legislators are attempting to root out this inequality and call it what it is: A public health crisis. 

Dr. Jones, a nationally sought-after speaker and the college’s 2020 Bray Health Leadership Lecturer, has been engaged in this work for decades and says the time to act is now.  

“The seductiveness of racism denial is so strong that if people just say a thing, six months from now they may forget why they said it. But if we start acting, we won’t forget why we’re acting,” she says. “That’s why it’s important right now to move beyond just naming something or putting out a statement making a declaration, but to actually engage in some kind of action.” 

Synergies editor Kathryn Stroppel talked with Dr. Jones about this unique time in history, her work, racism’s effects on health and well-being, and what we can all do about it. 

Let’s start with definitions. What is racism and why is important to acknowledge ‘systemic’ racism in particular? 

“Racism is a system of structuring opportunity and assigning value based on the social interpretation of how one looks, which is what we call race, that unfairly disadvantages some individuals and communities, unfairly advantages other individuals and communities and saps the strength of the whole society through the waste of human resources.  

“The reason that people are using those words ‘systemic’ or ‘structural racism’ is that sometimes if you say the word racism, people think you’re talking about an individual character flaw, or a personal moral failing, when in fact racism is a system.  

“It’s not about trying to divide the room into who’s racist and who’s not. I am clear that the most profound impacts of racism happen without bias.

“The most profound impacts of racism are because structural racism has been institutionalized in our laws, customs and background norms. It does not require an identifiable perpetrator. And it most often manifests as inaction in the face of need.” 

Why did you want to give the 2020 Bray Lecture? 

“I’ve been doing this work for decades, and all of a sudden, now that we are recognizing the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of color, and after the murder of George Floyd and all of the other highly publicized murders that have been happening, more and more people are interested in naming racism and asking how is racism is operating here and organizing and strategizing to act. I wish I could accept every invitation.” 

What do you hope people take away from your lecture? 

“When I was president of the American Public Health Association in 2016, I launched a national campaign against racism with three tasks: To name racism; to ask, ‘how is racism operating here?’; and then to organize and strategize to act.  

“Naming racism is urgently important, especially in the context of widespread denial that racism exists. We have to say the word ‘racism’ to acknowledge that it exists, that it’s real and that it has profoundly negative impacts on the health and well-being of the nation.

“We have to be able to put together the words ‘systemic racism’ and ‘structural racism’ to able to be able to affirm that Black lives matter. That’s important and necessary, but insufficient.  

“I then equip people with tools to address how racism operates by looking at the elements of decision making, which are in our structures, policies, practices, norms and values, and the who, what, when and where of decision making, especially who’s at the table and who’s not.  

“After you have acknowledged that the problem exists, after you have some kind of understanding of what piece of it is in your wheelhouse and what lever you can pull, or who you know, you organize, strategize and collectively act.” 

You’re known for using allegory to explain racism. Why is that? 

“I use allegory because that’s how I see the world. There are two parts to it. One is that I’m observant. If I see something and if it makes me go, ‘Hmm,’ I just sort of store that away. And the second part is that I am a teacher. I’ve been telling a gardening allegory since before I started teaching at Harvard, but I later expanded that in order to help people understand how to contextualize the three levels of racism.  

“As an assistant professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, I developed its first course on race and racism. As I’m teaching students and trying to help them understand different elements, different aspects of race, racism and anti-racism, I found myself using these images naturally just to explain things, and then I recognized that allegory is sort of a superpower.  

“It makes conversations that might be otherwise difficult more accessible because we’re not talking about racism between you and me, we’re talking about these two flower pots and the pink and red seed, or we’re talking about an open or closed sign, or we’re talking about a conveyor belt or a cement factory. And so I put the image out there to suggest the ways that it can help us understand issues of race and racism. And then other people add to it or question certain parts and it becomes our collective image and our tool, not just mine.” 

What should white people in particular see as their role and responsibility in this system? 

“All of us need to recognize that racism exists, that it’s a system, that it saps the strength of the whole society through the waste of human resources, and that we can do something about it. White people in particular have to recognize that acknowledging their privilege is important – that your very being gives you the benefit of the doubt.  

“White people who don’t want to walk around oblivious to their privilege or benefit from a racist society need to understand how to use their white privilege for the struggle.”  

“An example: About six years ago now, in McKinney, Texas, outside of Dallas, we came to know that there was a group of pre-teens who wanted to celebrate a birthday at a neighborhood swimming pool. The people who were at the pool objected to them being there and called the police. And what we saw was a white police officer dragging a young Black girl by her hair, and then he sat on her, and the young Black boys were handcuffed sitting on the curb.  

“The next day on TV, I heard a young white boy who was part of the friend group saying it was almost as if he were invisible to the police. He saw what was happening to his friends and he could have run home for safety, but instead, he recognized his white skin privilege. He stood up and videotaped all that was going on.  

“So, the thing is not to deny your white skin privilege or try to shed it, the thing is to recognize it and use it. Then as you’re using it, don’t think of yourself as an ally. Think of yourself as a compatriot in the struggle to dismantle racism. We have to recognize that if you’re white, your anti-racist struggle is not for ‘them.’ It’s for all of us.” 

Why did you transition from medicine to public health? 

“Because there’s a difference between a narrow focus on the individual and a population-based approach. I started as a family physician, but then wanted to do public health because it made me sad to fix my patients up and then send them back out into the conditions that made them sick.  

“I wanted to broaden my approach and really understand those conditions that make people sick or keep them well. From there, the data doesn’t necessarily turn into policy. So, I sort of went into the policy aspect of things. And then you recognize that you can have all the policy you want, but sometimes the policy is not enacted by politicians. So now I am considering maybe moving into politics.”  

Speaking of politics, when engaging in discussions around racism and privilege, people will sometimes try to shut down the conversation for being ‘political.’ Is racism political? 

“Racism exists. It’s foundational in our nation’s history. It continues to have profoundly negative impacts on the health and well-being of the nation. To describe what is happening is not political. If people want to deny what exists, then maybe they have political reasons for doing that.” 

What are your thoughts on COVID-19 and our country’s approach to dealing with the virus?  

“The way we’ve dealt with COVID-19 is a very medical care approach. We need to have a population view where you do random samples of people you identify as asymptomatic as well as symptomatic.  

“When you have a narrow medical approach to testing, you can document the course of the pandemic, but you can’t do anything to change it.

“With a population-based approach we already know how to stop this pandemic: It’s stay-at-home orders, mask wearing, hand washing and social distancing.

“This very seductive, narrow focus on the individual is making us scoff at public health strategies that we could put in place and is hamstringing us in terms of appropriate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“In terms of race, COVID-19 is unmasking the deep disinvestment in our communities, the historical injustices and the impact of residential segregation. This is the time to name racism as the cause of those things. The overrepresentation of people of color in poverty and white people in wealth is not happenstance.” 

We have work to do. Learn how the college is transforming academia for equity .

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Hear Something, Say Something: Navigating The World Of Racial Awkwardness

Listen to this week's episode.

We've all been there — having fun relaxing with friends and family, when someone says something a little racially off. Sometimes it's subtle, like the friend who calls Thai food "exotic." Other times it's more overt, like that in-law who's always going on about "the illegals."

In any case, it can be hard to know how to respond. Even the most level-headed among us have faltered trying to navigate the fraught world of racial awkwardness.

So what exactly do you do? We delve into the issue on this week's episode of the Code Switch podcast, featuring writer Nicole Chung and Code Switch's Shereen Marisol Meraji, Gene Demby and Karen Grigsby Bates.

We also asked some folks to write about what runs through their minds during these tense moments, and how they've responded (or not). Their reactions ran the gamut from righteous indignation to total passivity, but in the wake of these uncomfortable comments, everyone seemed to walk away wishing they'd done something else.

Aaron E. Sanchez

It was the first time my dad visited me at college, and he had just dropped me off at my dorm. My suitemate walked in and sneered.

"Was that your dad?" he asked. "He looks sooo Mexican."

Aaron E. Sanchez is a Texas-based writer who focuses on issues of race, politics and popular culture from a Latino perspective. Courtesy of Aaron Sanchez hide caption

He kept laughing about it as he left my room.

I was caught off-guard. Instantly, I grew self-conscious, not because I was ashamed of my father, but because my respectability politics ran deep. My appearance was supposed to be impeccable and my manners unimpeachable to protect against stereotypes and slights. I felt exposed.

To be sure, when my dad walked into restaurants and stores, people almost always spoke to him in Spanish. He didn't mind. The fluidity of his bilingualism rarely failed him. He was unassuming. He wore his working-class past on his frame and in his actions. He enjoyed hard work and appreciated it in others. Yet others mistook him for something altogether different.

People regularly confused his humility for servility. He was mistaken for a landscape worker, a janitor, and once he sat next to a gentleman on a plane who kept referring to him as a "wetback." He was a poor Mexican-American kid who grew up in the Segundo Barrio of El Paso, Texas, for certain. But he was also an Air Force veteran who had served for 20 years. He was an electrical engineer, a proud father, an admirable storyteller, and a pretty decent fisherman.

I didn't respond to my suitemate. To him, my father was a funny caricature, a curio he could pick up, purchase and discard. And as much as it was hidden beneath my elite, liberal arts education, I was a novelty to him too, an even rarer one at that. Instead of a serape, I came wrapped in the trappings of middle-classness, a costume I was trying desperately to wear convincingly.

That night, I realized that no clothing or ill-fitting costume could cover us. Our bodies were incongruous to our surroundings. No matter how comfortable we were in our skins, our presence would make others uncomfortable.

Karen Good Marable

When the Q train pulled into the Cortelyou Road station, it was dark and I was tired. Another nine hours in New York City, working in the madness that is Midtown as a fact-checker at a fashion magazine. All day long, I researched and confirmed information relating to beauty, fashion and celebrity, and, at least once a day, suffered an editor who was openly annoyed that I'd discovered an error. Then, the crush of the rush-hour subway, and a dinner obligation I had to fulfill before heading home to my cat.

Karen Good Marable is a writer living in New York City. Her work has been featured in publications like The Undefeated and The New Yorker. Courtesy of Karen Good Marable hide caption

The train doors opened and I turned the corner to walk up the stairs. Coming down were two girls — free, white and in their 20s . They were dancing as they descended, complete with necks rolling, mouths pursed — a poor affectation of black girls — and rapping as they passed me:

Now I ain't sayin she a golddigger/But she ain't messin' with no broke niggas!

That last part — broke niggas — was actually less rap, more squeals that dissolved into giggles. These white girls were thrilled to say the word publicly — joyously, even — with the permission of Kanye West.

I stopped, turned around and stared at them. I envisioned kicking them both squarely in their backs. God didn't give me telekinetic powers for just this reason. I willed them to turn around and face me, but they did not dare. They bopped on down the stairs and onto the platform, not evening knowing the rest of the rhyme.

Listen: I'm a black woman from the South. I was born in the '70s and raised by parents — both educators — who marched for their civil rights. I never could get used to nigga being bandied about — not by the black kids and certainly not by white folks. I blamed the girls' parents for not taking over where common sense had clearly failed. Hell, even radio didn't play the nigga part.

I especially blamed Kanye West for not only making the damn song, but for having the nerve to make nigga a part of the damn hook.

Life in NYC is full of moments like this, where something happens and you wonder if you should speak up or stay silent (which can also feel like complicity). I am the type who will speak up . Boys (or men) cussing incessantly in my presence? Girls on the train cussing around my 70-year-old mama? C'mon, y'all. Do you see me? Do you hear yourselves? Please. Stop.

But on this day, I just didn't feel like running down the stairs to tap those girls on the shoulder and school them on what they damn well already knew. On this day, I just sighed a great sigh, walked up the stairs, past the turnstiles and into the night.

Robyn Henderson-Espinoza

When I was 5 or 6, my mother asked me a question: "Does anyone ever make fun of you for the color of your skin?"

This surprised me. I was born to a Mexican woman who had married an Anglo man, and I was fairly light-skinned compared to the earth-brown hue of my mother. When she asked me that question, I began to understand that I was different.

Robyn Henderson-Espinoza is a visiting assistant professor of ethics at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif. Courtesy of Robyn Henderson-Espinoza hide caption

Following my parents' divorce in the early 1980s, I spent a considerable amount of time with my father and my paternal grandparents. One day in May of 1989, I was sitting at my grandparents' dinner table in West Texas. I was 12. The adults were talking about the need for more laborers on my grandfather's farm, and my dad said this:

"Mexicans are lazy."

He called the undocumented workers he employed on his 40 acres "wetbacks." Again and again, I heard from him that Mexicans always had to be told what to do. He and friends would say this when I was within earshot. I felt uncomfortable. Why would my father say these things about people like me?

But I remained silent.

It haunts me that I didn't speak up. Not then. Not ever. I still hear his words, 10 years since he passed away, and wonder whether he thought I was a lazy Mexican, too. I wish I could have found the courage to tell him that Mexicans are some of the hardest-working people I know; that those brown bodies who worked on his property made his lifestyle possible.

As I grew in experience and understanding, I was able to find language that described what he was doing: stereotyping, undermining, demonizing. I found my voice in the academy and in the movement for black and brown lives.

Still, the silence haunts me.

Channing Kennedy

My 20s were defined in no small part by a friendship with a guy I never met. For years, over email and chat, we shared everything with each other, and we made great jokes. Those jokes — made for each other only — were a foundational part of our relationship and our identities. No matter what happened, we could make each other laugh.

Channing Kennedy is an Oakland-based writer, performer, media producer and racial equity trainer. Courtesy of Channing Kennedy hide caption

It helped, also, that we were slackers with spare time, but eventually we both found callings. I started working in the social justice sector, and he gained recognition in the field of indie comics. I was proud of my new job and approached it seriously, if not gracefully. Before I took the job, I was the type of white dude who'd make casually racist comments in front of people I considered friends. Now, I had laid a new foundation for myself and was ready to undo the harm I'd done pre-wokeness.

And I was proud of him, too, if cautious. The indie comics scene is full of bravely offensive work: the power fantasies of straight white men with grievances against their nonexistent censors, put on defiant display. But he was my friend, and he wouldn't fall for that.

One day he emailed me a rough script to get my feedback. At my desk, on a break from deleting racist, threatening Facebook comments directed at my co-workers, I opened it up for a change of pace.

I got none. His script was a top-tier, irredeemable power fantasy — sex trafficking, disability jokes, gendered violence, every scene's background packed with commentary-devoid, racist caricatures. It also had a pop culture gag on top, to guarantee clicks.

I asked him why he'd written it. He said it felt "important." I suggested he shelve it. He suggested that that would be a form of censorship. And I realized this: My dear friend had created a racist power fantasy about dismembering women, and he considered it bravely offensive.

I could have said that there was nothing brave about catering to the established tastes of other straight white comics dudes. I could have dropped any number of half-understood factoids about structural racism, the finishing move of the recently woke. I could have just said the jokes were weak.

Instead, I became cruel to him, with a dedication I'd previously reserved for myself.

Over months, I redirected every bit of our old creativity. I goaded him into arguments I knew would leave him shaken and unable to work. I positioned myself as a surrogate parent (so I could tell myself I was still a concerned ally) then laughed at him. I got him to escalate. And, privately, I told myself it was me who was under attack, the one with the grievance, and I cried about how my friend was betraying me.

I wanted to erase him (I realized years later) not because his script offended me, but because it made me laugh. It was full of the sense of humor we'd spent years on — not the jokes verbatim, but the pacing, structure, reveals, go-to gags. It had my DNA and it was funny. I thought I had become a monster-slayer, but this comic was a monster with my hands and mouth.

After years as the best of friends and as the bitterest of exes, we finally had a chance to meet in person. We were little more than acquaintances with sunk costs at that point, but we met anyway. Maybe we both wanted forgiveness, or an apology, or to see if we still had some jokes. Instead, I lectured him about electoral politics and race in a bar and never smiled.

• code switch

After George Floyd's death, many declared racism a public health crisis. How much changed?

As the summer of 2020 heated up, the nation's racial divides were once again laid bare.

The COVID-19 pandemic rapidly spread across the country, disproportionately sickening and killing people of color, while protests fueled by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers raged in the streets nationwide.

Protesters in the Golden State demanded change. In response, the governing board of California's San Bernardino County declared racism a public health crisis, joining a wave of municipalities vowing to address long-standing racial inequities.

The four years since – in California and elsewhere – have been a meticulous process, consisting of gathering data and managing expectations, Diane Alexander, San Bernardino County’s assistant executive director, told USA TODAY. Though some say progress is slow-going, Alexander still believes change can happen.

Eventually.

"People need to understand that we've been fighting since slavery to do this work, and people want Rome to be built in a day,” Alexander said. “It’s not going to happen.”

Plus, some of the declarations have run into new opposition amid a wave of backlash targeting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives .

“Progress is steady but slow. But I think that's to be expected when we're talking about making major shifts in policy and an impact,” said Dawn Hunter, a public health lawyer based in Florida who has analyzed the declarations.

Why is racism a public health crisis?

Centuries of racist policies and practices created barriers to housing, education, wealth and employment – called the social determinants of health – which continue to drive disparities in health outcomes for minorities, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention .

Racial and ethnic minority groups have significantly lower life expectancies and experience higher rates of illness and death from conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity, asthma and heart disease . Awareness of racism's impact on public health isn't new — the American Public Health Association's first resolution regarding race as a public health issue came in the 1960s and a handful of communities including Pittsburgh , Cook County, Illinois , and Milwaukee County, Wisconsin were among the first to declare racism a public health crisis and began addressing it in 2019.

But the coronavirus pandemic highlighted and exacerbated those disparities as people of color experienced  higher rates of infection, hospitalization and death  and  lower vaccination rates . Floyd's murder in Minneapolis acted as a beacon, drawing attention to how racism permeates society, according to city Mayor Jacob Frey.

"I think what Floyd's murder started was a global recognition that yeah, racism is all-encompassing," Frey told USA TODAY.

More declarations followed in 2020 and 2021 . By 2022, more than 300 local and state officials acknowledged the crisis, according to a report from The Institute For Healing Justice and Equity, a research institute based at Saint Louis University in Missouri focused on systemic oppression. Though experts said the pace of these declarations has slowed considerably, the trend has continued. In March, for example, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors in California voted unanimously to approve a resolution by the county’s health department declaring racism a public health crisis.

“For a long time, we did not recognize that racism had a direct impact on health,” said Tia Williams, director of the Center for Public Health Policy at the American Public Health Association, which tracks the declarations. “And so by making these declarations, communities and leaders are acknowledging racism as a driving force for the disparities in health and overall life outcomes.”

What did the declarations do?

Williams said the declarations are a “critical first step” in addressing the disparities, but they vary greatly in what they pledged to do.

A 2021 APHA analysis of 209 of these declarations found 21 included 10 or more specific actions like increasing leadership, staffing and contractor diversity, or working with grassroots groups; 145 included fewer than 10 actions, and 32 included no actions beyond declaring racism as a public health crisis. Williams said the proposed actions typically fell into four categories: data and accountability, policies and programs, community engagement and funding.

In Minneapolis, Frey said the declaration meant ensuring that mental health access is equitable throughout the city and recognizing the effects gun violence has on minority communities and how it creates generational trauma.

"It's about finding ways to prevent long-standing trauma that these communities have faced," Frey said.

One of the data-focused initiatives was San Bernardino County's equity element group comprised of 16 Black people from various community groups, which Alexander said researched the disparities African Americans in the county face. She advised other local governments to take a similar approach and to address inequities with data first. Now, Alexander’s group is developing paid internship placements in community organizations, workshops on grant applications and using consultants to bridge communication gaps.

"We did a whole lot of trying to build and develop this team to understand ways that we could confront racism," Alexander said. "We can declare it's a public health crisis but also get people at tables."

Collecting data was also an important step in North Carolina's Buncombe County, according to Chief Equity and Human Rights Officer Noreal Armstrong. Armstrong is the project lead from the county on the historic Community Reparations Commission , which was formed in July 2020 after the city council in Asheville became one of the first locales to pass a resolution supporting community reparations for Black residents.

One of the first actions taken by the group, which is in the process of making recommendations to local elected officials, including guaranteed income, was to commission an audit to assess harms done to Black residents in the city and county by existing policies, practices and programs.

"I think a lot of people in the community felt like, 'Yeah, we know what's happening, what's going on with all these harms that have been done, because we live it every day'...and the Cease the Harm audit was able to put that into data form and to codify it," Armstrong said.

In King County, Washington, funding was one of the first short-term goals for the committee tasked with addressing racism as a public health crisis, according to Abigail Echo-Hawk, director of the Urban Indian Health Institute. She was apprehensive when she was asked to join the group, having seen too many "tokenizing efforts" nationwide with little follow through, she said.

With assurances things would be different in King County, Echo-Hawk helped form the Gathering Collaborative, a fluctuating group of predominantly Black and Indigenous community members dedicated to undoing the harms of systemic racism. In 2023, the group was able to award $25 million in grants to 123 nonprofits, community organizations, and small businesses to address the crisis.

"The $25 million is a good step, a beginning step but it's also - as we call it in the Gathering Collaborative - it's 'budget dust,'" she said. "It is the tiniest little portion of the overall budget of King County, and we need to see more investments that are looking to undo racism."

Declarations have ‘become a really polarizing issue’

Leadership changes within communities that have declared racism as a public health crisis have led to a handful of rescinded or walked-back commitments, as well as other controversies, said Ruqaiijah Yearby, professor of health law at Ohio State University. She mentioned Virginia as an example. 

In 2021, Virginia became the first Southern state to declare racism a public health crisis, according to APHA's map of declarations . The following year, then-state Health Commissioner Colin Greene told the Washington Post he opposed the declaration, saying, “If you say ‘racism,’ you’re blaming white people.” Though Greene apologized, he was later ousted by the Virginia Senate, the Post reported. The Virginia Department of Health did not immediately respond to a request for comment from USA TODAY.

“It has become a really polarizing issue around racism as a public health crisis because we tend to focus on the fact that we feel people are being blamed, when we need to understand that it is part of the structure of the system of the U.S. and it impacts all of us negatively,” Yearby said. 

In Holyoke, Massachusetts, former acting Mayor Terence Murphy issued an executive order in June 2021, rescinding the city’s declaration because no action had been taken on the plans, according to city documents . Murphy, a former councilman, stepped into the acting role after former Mayor Alex Morse resigned for a job in a different town, according to city council minutes .

Stephen Fay, aide to current Mayor Joshua Garcia, sent USA TODAY a 2021 news story about Holyoke rescinding its declaration in response to an interview request for current Mayor Joshua Garcia. 

The pushback to the declarations is not unlike the growing backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education and the private sector growing ahead of the 2024 presidential election , experts said. But racial equity work can still be done, even in communities that haven't made an official declaration or have faced opposition to doing so, according to Hunter, the public health lawyer and leader of the Collaborative for Anti-Racism and Equity .

"It's a benefit to have done it. It helps to drive action," she said. "But it certainly isn't a necessary requirement to still be doing health equity work."

What more needs to be done?

The CDC declared racism a public health threat in April 2021 and President Joe Biden has issued several executive orders aimed at addressing racial disparities, but more legislative action is needed, Yearby said.

Democratic legislators in both the House and Senate have continually reintroduced resolutions declaring racism a public health crisis. Yearby said she hopes any federal legislation would go beyond a symbolic statement by providing funding for state or local officials working on the issue and allowing people to challenge the continued health impacts of racial discrimination.

"If done right, it could be used as another Civil Rights Act,” she said.

Ultimately, the long-term goal is not just eliminating public health disparities but eliminating racism altogether, said Echo-Hawk in King County. She doesn't want her grandchildren battling this same crisis, but she knows the work will take time.

"These systems of oppression have been being built for 500-plus years. It's gonna take us some time to undo those," she said.

Contributing: Sarah Honosky , Asheville Citizen Times ; Sam Woodward, USA TODAY.

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Public’s Positive Economic Ratings Slip; Inflation Still Widely Viewed as Major Problem

2. top problems facing the u.s., table of contents.

• Views of top problems facing the nation
• Americans’ views of the state of the nation
• Similar shares in both parties view personal financial situation positively
• Americans’ views on the future of the economy and their financial situation
• Changes in views of the country’s top problems
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• The American Trends Panel survey methodology

Inflation and the affordability of health care top the public’s list of the biggest problems facing the country, with 62% of Americans describing inflation as a very big problem and 60% saying this about health care costs.

Narrower majorities say that partisan cooperation (57%), drug addiction (55%) and gun violence (53%) are very big problems in the country today.

And roughly half say that violent crime (51%), the federal budget deficit (49%), the state of moral values (48%) and the quality of public K-12 schools (46%) are each very big problems.

Illegal immigration, climate change and racism each rate lower on the public’s list of the country’s top problems, though majorities rate these and several other issues included in the survey as at least moderately big problems.

Inflation ranked as the country’s top issue in Pew Research Center surveys from 2023 and 2022 , though its perceived importance is lower than it was in 2022. Today, 62% of Americans say inflation is a very big problem, down from 70% in 2022.

Partisan differences in views of inflation

• Eight-in-ten Republicans and independents who lean to the Republican Party say that inflation is a very big problem. A far smaller share of Democrats and Democratic leaners – 46% – say the same.
• The share of Republicans who see inflation as a big problem is up slightly over the past year (from 77% to 80%). In contrast, the share of Democrats seeing inflation as a very big problem for the country has decreased by 6 percentage points over this period.

Federal budget deficit

A narrow majority of the public (53%) says the federal budget deficit is a very big problem. This is little changed in recent years.

Since Joe Biden took office in 2021, Republicans have consistently been about twice as likely as Democrats to describe the federal budget deficit as a very big problem for the country. Roughly seven-in-ten Republicans (71%) say this, compared with 35% of Democrats. During the Trump administration, there was no partisan gap in these views.

Unemployment

Just a quarter of Americans – including similar shares of Republicans (27%) and Democrats (22%) – describe unemployment as a very big problem. The share who view unemployment as a very big problem is essentially unchanged since 2022.

Illegal immigration

The share of the public that views illegal immigration as a very big problem has increased slightly in the past year, to 51% from 47%.

Nearly eight-in-ten Republicans (78%) say illegal immigration is a very big problem, up from 70% a year ago. In contrast, just 27% of Democrats say this, almost unchanged from the 25% of Democrats who said illegal immigration was a very big problem a year ago.

Crime and gun violence

Americans are less likely to view both gun violence and violent crime as very big problems than they were a year ago. The shares of both Republicans and Democrats who describe each of these as a very big problem are down somewhat over this period.

Democrats are still far more likely than Republicans to see gun violence as a very big problem (68% of Democrats say this vs. 27% of Republicans). And it ranks as one of the top national problems seen by Democrats (as it did in 2023).

And Republicans continue to be more likely than Democrats (56% vs. 39%) to view violent crime as a very big problem for the country.

Climate change

About a third of Americans (36%) say climate change is a very big problem, down 11 points since 2021.

Democrats are 13 points less likely to say this than they were in 2021, when 71% of Democrats described climate change as a very big problem. Republicans’ views of the importance of climate change have declined by 7 points since 2021.

Overall, 29% of Americans say racism is a very big problem. This is a substantial decline since 2021, when 45% said this. Among Democrats, the decline is particularly steep: 42% of Democrats now say that racism is a very big problem in the country today, down from 67% in 2021.

(For Republicans’ and Democrats’ views of all problems asked about in this survey, please visit the overview of this report .)

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The struggles and breakthroughs of Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong

John Yang John Yang

Winston Wilde Winston Wilde

Satvi Sunkara Satvi Sunkara

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Hearst newsreel footage courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Packard Humanities Institute.  Additional photos provided by Everett Collection and Brendon Wilde.

Anna May Wong was a pioneering actress considered to be the first major Asian American film star, despite the limits imposed by Hollywood’s racism. As this year’s Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month draws to a close, we bring you her story as part of our “Hidden Histories” series.

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Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

As this year's Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month draws to a close, we bring you the story of a pioneering actress considered to be the first major Asian American star despite the limits imposed by Hollywood's racism.

John Yang (voice-over):

Before there was Lucy Liu, Awkwafina.

She will make that check. They do that around here.

Or Michelle Yeoh. There was Anna May Wong considered Hollywood's first Asian American film star. She appeared in more than 60 movies beginning of the silent era. But racism meant that in most of them she played stereotyped supporting roles while white actresses in yellow face got top billing.

It wasn't until she went to Europe in the late 1920s that she was cast as a leading lady starring in British French and German films. Wong Liu Tsong was born in Los Angeles in 1905, one of seven children of American born owners and operators have a laundry business.

As a teenager she skipped school to go to the movies and to watch scenes being shot on the streets of Chinatown. She landed a role as an extra and quickly rose through the ranks. Over her parents objections she dropped out of high school to pursue an acting career.

When she was 17, Wong landed her first major role was in a largely forgotten silent retelling of Puccini's Madame Butterfly called the Toll of the Sea. That's one of the first films made using an early version of Technicolor. Her big breakthrough came when Douglas Fairbanks the biggest matinee idol of the day, cast her in the classic swashbuckling film The Thief of Baghdad.

But after that the roles Hollywood gave her were limited to exotic dragon ladies or stereotypically submissive characters. Off screen, Wong was nothing like those roles. She was an all American 1920s flapper right down to her signature banks, but on screen limitations led her to abandon Hollywood for Europe where her race didn't matter.

Despite her success overseas, Wong returned home to find that little had changed. During the planning for the 1937 film version of pearl bucks novel The Good Earth, which is set in China, Wong was mentioned for the lead, but the role went to German actress Louise Reiner who won an Oscar for her performance in Yellow Face. She left Hollywood for a year-long tour of China, but she found herself criticized there for her stereotype roles rejected in Hollywood for being too Asian she later lamented, and in China for being too American.

She returned to the United States and found modest success in the infancy of television starring as a crime solving art gallery owner in The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong, the first show to star an Asian American woman that lasted one season. She found more work in television but years of heavy drinking had led to poor health. She was about to appear in the movie version of Rodgers and Hammerstein Flower Drum Song when she died of a heart attack at age 56.

Today, Wong is largely forgotten beyond her image on a quarter and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, both first for an Asian American woman. But her refusal to accept a career of stereotype supporting roles laid the groundwork for today's Asian American actors and the push for representation in Hollywood films.

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John Yang is the anchor of PBS News Weekend and a correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. He covered the first year of the Trump administration and is currently reporting on major national issues from Washington, DC, and across the country.

Winston Wilde is a coordinating producer at PBS News Weekend.

Satvi Sunkara is a production assistant for PBS News Weekend.

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On Campus, a New Social Litmus Test: Zionist or Not?

Some Jewish students say they’ve been dropped by old roommates and sorority sisters and ostracized from campus clubs and teams because of their views — which are sometimes assumed.

By Joseph Bernstein

Last fall, a Barnard College sophomore named Sophie Fisher reached out to her freshman year roommate to catch up over coffee. Her old friend’s response was tepid, and Ms. Fisher wondered why. The two had been close enough that the roommate had come to the bar mitzvah of Ms. Fisher’s brother.

Several months later, the reason became clear.

Over Instagram, Ms. Fisher’s roommate wrote to her that they couldn’t be friends anymore because she had been posting in support of Israel since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. In other words, she was a Zionist. Ms. Fisher thought she had been careful to avoid inflammatory posts, but the roommate, Ms. Fisher said, accused her of racism.

Then she blocked Ms. Fisher.

Around the same time, Ms. Fisher noticed something else strange. Her “big” — a mentor in her sorority — had stopped talking to her. When they were in the same room, Ms. Fisher said, the big wouldn’t make eye contact with her. Ms. Fisher said that her big often posted about Students for Justice in Palestine, the campus group that Columbia had suspended in November for violating campus policies. Ms. Fisher remains in the sorority, but the two haven’t spoken in months.

“She was supposed to be my big sister,” she said.

This spring, college campuses became the main stage for the American protest movement against Israel’s seven-month-old war in Gaza. In April and May, dozens of pro-Palestinian encampments sprang up at universities around the country, as students called for institutional divestment from (and, at times, for the total dismantling of) Israel.

The protests have been characterized by heated rhetoric around the term “Zionist,” a word that typically refers to people who believe Jews have a right to a state in their ancestral homeland in present-day Israel (regardless of how they may feel about the war in Gaza). Many Palestinians and those who support them associate the word with mass displacement during the 1948 war triggered by the creation of Israel, as well as the killings over the past months of thousands of civilians and the decimation of Gaza.

Through chants, statements and sometimes physical obstruction , many protesters have made clear they don’t want to share space with people they consider Zionists — and indeed, that they find the ideology unacceptable. At the University of California, Los Angeles, pro-Palestinian students blocked peers who identified themselves as Zionists from parts of campus. Given that a large majority of American Jews say caring about Israel is an important part of their Jewish identity, these instances of exclusion have led to a debate over whether the encampments are de facto antisemitic. (Complicating matters, some of the most outspoken anti-Zionist protesters are Jewish.)

The Litmus Test

Some Jewish students on campus believe these dynamics amount to a kind of litmus test: If you support Palestine, you’re in. If you support the existence of or aren’t ready to denounce Israel, you’re out. And they say this is not limited to pro-Palestine protests. It is, instead, merely the most pointed form of a new social pressure that has started to drip down from the public square onto the fabric of everyday campus life, seeping into spaces that would seem to have little to do with Middle East politics: club sports, casual friendships, dance troupes.

Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, the incoming executive director of Harvard Hillel, said the more explicit litmus tests of the protests were “making visible and physical something that’s happening in a lot of places.”

This pressure, some students say, has forced them to choose between their belief in the right of the Jewish state to exist and full participation in campus social life. It is brought to bear not only on outwardly Zionist Jews, for whom the choice is in some sense already made, but to Jews on campus who may be ambivalent about Israel.

The mandate to take a stand on Israel-Gaza — and for it to be seen as the right one — is often implicit, these students say, and sometimes it is pressed on them by people who aren’t campus activists, but friends and mentors.

And ultimate Frisbee coaches. This month, a senior at Northwestern University walked into the office of the school’s Hillel executive director, Michael Simon, to tell him about a disturbing experience he’d just had.

Days before, the senior, a team captain who requested anonymity because he feared future professional consequences, had learned of a voluntary team meeting to discuss the war in Gaza. Beforehand, over a video call, the team’s coach, Penelope Wu, shared with the captains a presentation that she planned to share at the meeting.

It raised and dismissed several potential objections to the idea of a club Frisbee team holding a meeting about Mideast politics. Assertions like “Lake Effect is just a sports team” and “I’m not involved in this” were countered by the statements “Sports are political” and “Neutrality is inherently supportive of the oppressor.”

It also included an agenda item called “Judaism vs. Zionism,” featuring material from Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist Jewish activist group.

The student said he had voiced an objection to the material because he thought it presented a one-sided view of the war and Zionism. (The J.V.P. material was later replaced with several paragraphs from the Wikipedia entry for “Zionism.”)

After the meeting, he said, the coach spoke to him.

According to the student — who identifies as a liberal Zionist — Ms. Wu told him that she respected him as a Frisbee player, but that his pro-Israel attitude was wrong, and that it could be an obstacle in the future as he sought to make friends and get a job. (The fear of long-term professional consequences has also been a theme among pro-Palestine protesters since the beginning of the war. Shortly after Oct. 7, a conservative watchdog group called Accuracy in Media hired billboard trucks to publicly shame college students they accused of anti-Israel sentiment, mobilizations that were widely seen as an attempt to harm these students’ career prospects.)

In an email to The New York Times, Ms. Wu wrote that the student had “mischaracterized or misremembered certain things I said.”

The captain didn’t attend the meeting, instead writing a letter to his teammates describing his impression of the presentation.

“It will be a call for activism against Israel at all costs, and at least implicitly it will be a call for a dismantling, and/or annihilation, of the one Jewish state,” he wrote in the letter. (The student said a few of his teammates wrote him back, but most did not.)

Around the country, Jewish students found their identities questioned in a variety of previously welcoming communities.

At Rice University, a freshman named Michael Busch said he felt unwelcome at a campus L.G.B.T.Q. group, after he was heckled in an associated group chat for saying that he was in favor of a two-state solution and that he believed Israel accepted queer people more than other Middle Eastern countries.

“If that makes me a Zionist, I’m a Zionist,” he said. “That was the initial litmus test. From there, I found myself shut out of a lot of communities.”

Mr. Busch said that afterward, he was ostracized by the members of other campus affinity groups to which he belonged, including one for Middle Eastern students and one for Hispanic students.

At Barnard College, a senior named Batya Tropper said she was upset after her hip-hop dance team announced its intention to join a coalition of student groups pressuring Columbia University to divest from Israel. According to Ms. Tropper, who is Israeli American, team leaders rejected her attempt to discuss the decision.

Ms. Tropper, who had danced for the troupe for four years, said she was quietly removed from the team’s WhatsApp channel a few weeks after it officially signed on to the divestment group.

At Yale College, a Jewish junior said she was discouraged from joining a secret society she had been admitted to when members began to suspect she was a Zionist after she mentioned attending an event at the Slifka Center, Yale’s main hub for Jewish life. The student, who asked to remain anonymous because she feared social ramifications on campus, said she was not a Zionist, and thought that members of the society, Ceres Athena, had come to the conclusion that she was by misconstruing old social media posts related to Israel — though none reached out to ask her directly. (Members of Ceres Athena did not respond to emails from The Times.)

And at Columbia University, a senior named Dessa Gerger — who says she is often “put off” by peers who are quick to label anti-Zionism as antisemitism and feels that “the story about Jewish students feeling unsafe on campus is overplayed” — decided not to continue her participation in college radio after a member of the station’s board expressed ambivalence about the idea of a program that featured Israeli music.

“I didn’t do the radio show this semester because I don’t feel any kind of desire to be in a political organization,” Ms. Gerger said. “I want to be in a radio station.”

Of course, for pro-Palestinian activists who support a cultural and academic boycott of Israel, there can be no such thing as Israeli music without politics. According to its website, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement operates according to the principle of “anti-normalization,” which forbids joint events or projects between Arabs and Jewish Israelis who do not, among other things, recognize Palestinians’ right of return to the land they were forced from in 1948.

“For Palestinians and those in solidarity, the problem is Zionism and what it’s meant to Palestinians,” said Yousef Munayyer, the head of the Palestine-Israel program at the Arab Center in Washington. “That’s going to put people in the Jewish community who are dealing with these tensions in an uncomfortable situation. They’re going to be asked to pick between a commitment to justice and a commitment to Zionism.”

For Layla Saliba, a Palestinian American student at the Columbia School of Social Work, not wanting to be friends with Zionists on campus comes down to the way she said she had been treated by some on campus: with offensive chants like “terrorist go home,” and jeering when she has spoken out about family she has lost in Gaza.

“We’re not treated as human,” said Ms. Saliba, 24, who works for the Columbia divestiture coalition. “I don’t want to be friends with people who don’t view me as human, as somebody who is worthy of respect.”

Ms. Saliba added that the social cost of being vocally pro-Palestinian was also significant: Her activism is detailed in an entry on Canary Mission, a site that documents and denounces anti-Zionists on campuses around the country.

“If Zionists are complaining about losing a friend, that’s completely trivial compared to what the Palestinians are facing,” said Mike Miccioli, 25, a physics Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago and a member of Students for Justice in Palestine there. He said he hoped that Zionism would become socially toxic on campus.

“I think anyone who subscribes to the Zionist ideology should be viewed as you would view one who proclaims to be a white supremacist,” he said.

Feeling the Squeeze From All Sides

At times, the pressure to choose is reinforced from above. At Northwestern, some instructors had asked students to attend campus protests, according to a recent email from Liz Trubey, the associate dean for undergraduate affairs at the school’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She admonished these instructors, saying, “this is an inappropriate use of authority.”

“The anti-normalization of Zionism that’s happening all over campus is an affront to the Jewish community,” said Brian Cohen, the executive director of Columbia Hillel. “It makes people in parts of campus not accept Jews. And it divides the Jewish community. Those who promote it know that’s what it does.”

But the pressure to choose a side isn’t only coming from pro-Palestinian activists.

For college-age Jews who strongly identify with Zionism, the loss of friends and extracurricular activities may be upsetting, but they have a natural community to turn to in campus organizations like Hillel and Chabad. For Jews with conflicted feelings about Israel, though, establishment Jewish groups may mirror the social pressure coming from anti-Zionists.

This month, a widely circulated letter signed by hundreds of Jews at Columbia pushed back against anti-Zionist Jews on campus, calling them tokens and questioning their Jewishness.

“Contrary to what many have tried to sell you — no, Judaism cannot be separated from Israel,” the letter read. “Zionism is, simply put, the manifestation of that belief.”

Aliza Abusch-Magder, a Columbia senior who participated in Jews for Ceasefire, said she was “uncomfortable” protesting alongside members of the encampment because of the chant “All Zionists off campus now.”

At the same time, she said she had found that “the Jewish community on campus, which I took pride in calling my own, is not interested or is struggling to accept Jews who are anything but very Zionist.”

Recently, Ms. Abusch-Magder confessed to a rabbi at Hillel that she felt the group was not a welcoming space for Jews who aren’t ardently pro-Israel. She said the rabbi, Yonah Hain, told her that Hillel wasn’t supposed to be a resource for Jewish students who don’t support Israel.

He called her and other ambivalent Jews “korban,” a Hebrew word that refers to a sacrifice to God among the ancient Hebrews.

(Hillel International’s “ Israel Guidelines ” reject partnerships with “organizations, groups or speakers” who “deny the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state”; support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions; or “delegitimize, demonize or apply a double standard to Israel.”)

Ms. Abusch-Magder said she believed Mr. Hain was implying that “we’re the people who don’t have a place on earth,” though she conceded that she might be misinterpreting his use of the word.

(In a text message, Mr. Hain declined to comment.)

After Mr. Hain and Ms. Abusch-Magder’s interaction, Hillel sponsored an event to encourage dialogue between Jews with different perspectives on Israel, which Ms. Abusch-Magder felt was little more than a fig leaf.

These black-or-white pressures — to remove anti-Zionists from some Jewish communities, and to remove Zionists from parts of campus life — seem likely to shrink a middle ground where people with fiercely differing beliefs can learn from one another. And that, according to some Jews caught in the middle, is a real loss.

“It’s harder and it takes more mental effort,” said Ms. Gerger, the Columbia senior. “But there aren’t deeper conversations going on.”

Joseph Bernstein is a Times reporter who writes feature stories for the Styles section. More about Joseph Bernstein

The Campus Protests Over the Gaza War

News and Analysis

​​A union for academic workers in the University of California system announced that an ongoing strike challenging the system’s handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations would extend to two more campuses , U.C.L.A. and U.C. Davis.

​​With speeches canceled , students at the City University of New York School of Law ceremony chanted, carried signs and walked out .

​​Hundreds of students walked out of Harvard’s commencement ceremony , while hundreds of others chanted “Let them walk!”, a reference to 13 student protesters who were not allowed to graduate.

A Complex Summer:  Many university leaders and officials may be confronting federal investigations, disputes over student discipline  — and the prospect that the protests start all over again in the fall.

Graduation’s Pomp Goes On:  Commencement is the rare American ritual that still has rules. That’s why it’s ripe for disruption .

A New Litmus Test:  Some Jewish students say their views on Zionism — which are sometimes assumed — have affected their social life on campus .

College President Openings:  Presidential posts are available at U.C.L.A., Yale, Harvard, Cornell, Penn and many others. But the job is not what it used to be .