SOCIAL JUSTICE

Book explores how colleges seek to increase racial diversity without relying on race in college admissions. When the Supreme Court outlawed the use of race in college admissions in June 2023, it forced colleges and universities to rethink how to maintain and increase diversity in their student bodies. It’s a topic that political science professor Lauren Foley had been exploring in her new book, “On the Basis of Race: How Higher Education Navigates Affirmative Action Policies.” Below, Foley expounds on what she sees as the future of diversity in higher education now that college admission officials can no longer consider race. Is racial diversity in higher education about to suffer? Yes, the likelihood of admission for racial minority students will suffer as a result of the nationwide ...

What do a Black scientist, nonprofit executive and filmmaker have in common? They all face racism in the ‘gray areas’ of workplace culture. American workplaces talk a lot about diversity these days. In fact, you’d have a hard time finding a company that says it doesn’t value the principle. But despite this – and despite the multibillion-dollar diversity industry – Black workers continue to face significant hiring discrimination, stall out at middle management levels and remain underrepresented in leadership roles. As a sociologist, I wanted to understand why this is. So I spent more than 10 years interviewing over 200 Black workers in a variety of roles – from the gig economy to the C-suite. I found that many of the problems they face come down to organizational culture. Too often, compani...

American Carnage: To Be Black in Trump’s America As a law student in 2004, I studied the anatomy of one of America’s most brutal inventions: the lynching. I also studied the Black people who led the fight against this form of racial terrorism, specifically Black women such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell. By doing so, I felt intimately connected to my ancestors—these impressive social justice crusaders, as well as the men in my family. In 1933, my father was a nine-year-old boy when Marylander George Armwood was brutally tortured and executed before crowds of people. It is a story I belatedly learned from him because it had been buried so deep in his psyche. In more recent years, thanks largely to the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice, l...

Ta’Kiya Young's shooting highlights sobering reality for Black pregnant women in America. Nadine Young left her home in Ohio under the crushing weight of grief. By the end of 1989, the young mother of four had lost both of her parents, a stillborn baby girl and her sister. She packed up and moved to Mississippi for nearly a decade, where she gave birth to a fifth son. She taught her boys to be respectable and to always do what police asked. “I had major, major talks with them, so if they had any encounters they complied and did whatever they needed to do so they wouldn't lose their life,” Young told The 19th. “We knew how prejudiced it was [in Mississippi] ... But when we moved back up here, we never expected this kind of mess.” Decades after she returned home to Ohio, the kind of inju...

When Confederate-glorifying monuments went up in the South, voting in Black areas went down. Confederate monuments burst into public consciousness in 2015 when a shooting at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, instigated the first broad calls for their removal. The shooter intended to start a race war and had posed with Confederate imagery in photos posted online. Monument removal efforts grew in 2017 after a counterprotester was killed at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacist groups defended the preservation of Confederate monuments. Removal movements saw widespread success in 2020 following George Floyd’s death at the hands of the police. These events linked Confederate monuments to modern racist beliefs and acts. But whe...

Justice Department launches civil rights investigation of Memphis police – 4 essential reads about holding police accountable. Seven months after the horrific beating death by police of Memphis, Tennessee, motorist Tyre Nichols, the Justice Department, on July 27, 2023, launched a civil rights investigation into allegations the Memphis Police Department routinely used excessive force and, on a systemic basis, discriminated against Black residents. Although Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said during a press conference that the investigation of the department and city of Memphis is “not based on a single incident or event,” she also said, “In January of this year, the nation witnessed the tragic death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis police.” The Justice Department, Clark...

How Black Lives Matter Changed the U.S. In the decade since it began, #BlackLivesMatter has shifted the nation's collective consciousness, whether we wanted it shifted or not. Every generation of Americans lives through a moment that captures history in hindsight, a moment so indelible—the JFK assassination, 9/11—people can describe exactly where they were and what they were doing when it happened. For 50-year-old Melina Abdullah, that moment came in 2013. “I remember where I was when George Zimmerman [tried for fatally shooting Trayvon Martin] was acquitted and he was given his gun back,” says Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African studies at Cal State, Los Angeles and director of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter Grassroots. “For me and other Black people, this is more impactf...

International African American Museum in Charleston, S.C., pays new respect to the enslaved Africans who landed on its docks. Before Congress ended the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, the Port of Charleston was the nation’s epicenter of human trafficking. Almost half of the estimated 400,000 African people imported into what became the United States were brought to that Southern city, and a substantial number took their first steps on American soil at Gadsden’s Wharf on the Cooper River. That location of once utter degradation is now the hallowed site of the International African American Museum. Pronounced “I Am” and opened in June 2023, the US$120 million project financed by state and local funds and private donations was 25 years in the making and is a memorial to not only those en...

Affirmative action lasted over 50 years: 3 essential reads explaining how it ended. Ever since U.S. President Lyndon Johnson enacted affirmative action in 1965, white conservatives have challenged the use of race in college admissions. Their arguments against such policies are typically based on the use of the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which prohibits discrimination against American citizens on the basis of their race, religion or sexuality. According to this conservative thinking, race-based solutions are discriminatory by their very definition and, as such, are unconstitutional. The question, then, is how does an institution try to offer a modern-day remedy to atone for long-standing patterns of racial discrimination? Over the years, The Conve...