Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice ...

The Republicans take issue with ABA's Standard 206, which they say requires law schools to emphasize race-based admissions and hiring processes.

The Minneapolis City Council on Monday approved an agreement with the federal government to overhaul the city's police training and use-of-force policies in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

We’ve documented actions taken on dozens of campuses to alter or eliminate jobs, offices, hiring practices, and programs amid mounting political pressure to end identity-conscious recruitment and retention of minority staff and students.

The Innocence Project works to free the innocent, prevent wrongful convictions, and create fair, compassionate, and equitable systems of justice for everyone. Founded in 1992 by Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, the organization is now an independent nonprofit. Our work is guided by science and grounded in anti-racism.

A sobering account of a little-known crime against African Americans, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today. From the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II, under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these "debts," prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Armies of "free" black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.--From publisher description

Eliminating the terms “race and ethnicity” from the American Bar Association’s law school accreditation rules will hobble longstanding efforts to bring in diverse students and faculty, critics warned in public comments on the proposal.

Various Tucson neighborhoods have rules saying non-white people can’t live there and one Midtown neighborhood association is getting rid of their rules.

On Saturdays in late ’90s, my father, a taxi driver, would pool his tips for the week and take me, a child too precocious for his own good, to a local bookstore in search of my next read. Together,…

Through listening to kids in Massachusetts and Mississippi talk about growing up in the era of Trump, this book reveals what kids today think and feel about racism in the United States-and what this might mean for the future

Upsurge in activity from white supremacists and swastika-toting extremists follows rash of anti-LGBTQ+ state laws

"This book argues that hate speech is not protected. Based on an examination of Supreme Court case law and First Amendment theory, the book finds that hate speech lies outside the Supreme Court's hierarchy of speech protection because it advances no ideas of social value"--;"Hate speech has been a societal problem for many years and has seen a resurgence recently alongside political divisiveness and technologies that ease and accelerate the spread of messages. Methods to protect individuals and groups from hate speech have eluded lawmakers as the call for restrictions or bans on such speech are confronted by claims of First Amendment protection. Problematic speech, the argument goes, should be confronted by more speech rather than by restriction. Debate over the extent of First Amendment protection is based on two bodies of law--the practical, precedent determined by the Supreme Court, and the theoretical framework of First Amendment jurisprudence. In Hate Speech is Not Free: The Case Against Constitutional Protection, W. Wat Hopkins argues that the prevailing thought that hate is protected by both case law and theory is incorrect. Within the Supreme Court's established hierarchy of speech protection, hate speech falls to the lowest level, deserving no protection as it does not advance ideas containing social value. Ultimately, the Supreme Court's cases addressing protected and unprotected speech set forth a clear rationale for excommunicating hate speech from First Amendment protection." --

"On a cold day in March of 1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a forest in Maryland. Under the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first twelve patients of the state's Hospital for the Negro Insane. For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers behind the brick walls of a Jim Crow asylum. In Madness, Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family's experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations. As Crownsville Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny city sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of America's evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and civil rights. During its peak years, the hospital's wards were overflowing with almost 2,700 patients. By the end of the 20th-century, the asylum faded from view as prisons and jails became America's new focus. In Madness, Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people's bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable"--

Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives--and How We Break Free-review

"Not White Enough is a legal and political history of anti-Asian bigotry, beginning with the California Gold Rush and ending with the infamous Supreme Court decision that upheld the imprisonment without trial of more than 100,000 innocent Americans on the spurious grounds of national security. The book demonstrates how law and politics bled into each other for decades to enable two-tiered justice, brushing aside Constitutional guarantees of equality under law. Not White Enough examines each of the key Supreme Court decisions-Wong Kim Ark, Ozawa, and Thind, for example-as expressions of political will and not simply jurisprudence. The author chronicles the political history of racism that made Japanese internment almost inevitable, including the key role San Francisco mayors James D. Phelan and Eugene Schmitz, political boss Abe Ruef, and California attorney general Ulysses Webb played in instigating, for political convenience, some of the most egregious anti-Asian legislation"--

""I am an eighties baby who grew to hate school. I never fully understood why. Until now. Until Bettina Love unapologetically and painstakingly chronicled the last forty years of education 'reform' in this landmark book. I hated school because it warred on me. I hated school because I loved to dream." -Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times bestselling author of How to be an Antiracist. In the tradition of Michelle Alexander, an unflinching reckoning with the impact of 40 years of racist public school policy on generations of Black lives. In Punished for Dreaming Dr. Bettina Love argues forcefully that Reagan's presidency ushered in a War on Black Children, pathologizing and penalizing them in concert with the War on Drugs. New policies punished schools with policing, closure, and loss of funding in the name of reform, as white savior, egalitarian efforts increasingly allowed private interests to infiltrate the system. These changes implicated children of color, and Black children in particular, as low performing, making it all too easy to turn a blind eye to their disproportionate conviction and incarceration. Today, there is little national conversation about a structural overhaul of American schools; cosmetic changes, rooted in anti-Blackness, are now passed off as justice. It is time to put a price tag on the miseducation of Black children. In this prequel to The New Jim Crow, Dr. Love serves up a blistering account of four decades of educational reform through the lens of the people who lived it. Punished for Dreaming lays bare the devastating effect on 25 Black Americans caught in the intersection of economic gain and racist ideology. Then, with input from leading U.S. economists, Dr. Love offers a road map for repair, arguing for reparations with transformation for all children at its core"--

"Over the span of ten years, seven high school students died in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The seven were hundreds of miles away from their families, forced to leave their reserve because there was no high school there for them to attend. Award-winning journalist Tanya Talaga delves into the history of this northern city that has come to manifest, and struggle with, human rights violations past and present against aboriginal communities."--

"In this honest and welcoming book, diversity and inclusion expert, professor, and award-winning speaker Dr. Omekongo Dibinga argues that we must embark on a massive undertaking to re-educate ourselves on the stereotypes that have proven harmful, and too often deadly, to the Black community"--

On Saturday, a white supremacist gunman killed three Black people at a store in Jacksonville, Florida, in a racially motivated attack. Authorities say the 21-year-old white gunman initially tried to enter the historically Black college Edward Waters University, but he was turned away by a security guard before driving to a nearby Dollar General and opening fire with a legally purchased attack-style rifle. America’s gun problem “makes its racism more lethal,” says Gary Younge, author of Dispatches from the Diaspora: From Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter. “There’s been a significant increase in the number of hate crimes, particularly in anti-Black hate crimes, and one has to be able to connect that to the political situation that surrounds us,” says Younge, who says the shooter’s actions are reflective of the current attacks on Black history and represent a backlash to increased racial consciousness following the murder of George Floyd.

"Unsettling is a sharp, uncompromising interrogation of the transformation of the southern edge of the United States into a zone of migrant sacrifice and suffering, which culminates in a racist mass execution of twenty-two people in August 2019 in El Paso, Texas"--;"Documents the cruel immigration policies and treatment toward border crossers on the US-Mexico border.On August 3, 2019, a far-right extremist committed a deadly mass shooting at a major shopping center in El Paso, Texas, a city on the border of the United States and Mexico. In Unsettling, Gilberto Rosas situates this devastating shooting as the latest unsettling consequence of our border crisis and currents of deeply rooted white nationalism embedded in the United States. Tracing strict immigration policies and inhumane border treatment from the Clinton era through Democratic and Republican administrations alike, Rosas shows how the rhetoric around these policies helped lead to the Trump administration's brutal crackdown on migration-and the massacre in El Paso. Rosas draws on poignant stories and compelling testimonies from workers in immigrant justice organizations, federal public defenders, immigration attorneys, and human rights activists in order to document the cruelties and indignities inflicted on border crossers. Borders, as sites of crossings and spaces long inhabited by marginalized populations, generate deep anxiety across much of the contemporary world. Rosas demonstrates how the Trump administration amplified and weaponized immigration and border policy, including family separation, torture, and murder. None of this dehumanization and violence was inevitable, however. The border zone in El Paso (which translates to "the Pass") was once a very different place, one marked by frequent and inconsequential crossings to and from both sides-and with more humane immigration policies, it could become that once again"--

Six white former police officers in Mississippi who called themselves the “Goon Squad” have pleaded guilty to raiding a home on false drug charges and torturing two Black men while yelling racist slurs at them, and then trying to cover it up. We speak with Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker about how, on January 24, six deputies in Braxton, Mississippi, raided the home they were staying in and attacked them, and how they are speaking out to demand justice. Meanwhile, the deputies have been linked to at least four violent attacks on Black men since 2019, in which two of the men died. We also speak with civil rights attorney Malik Shabazz, who is representing Jenkins and Parker in a federal lawsuit against the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department. Shabazz asserts that the majority-white Rankin County, which is 20 miles away from majority-Black Jackson, Mississippi, is “infested with white supremacists” who “have decided 'Rankin County is for whites'” and seek to enforce it through state-sanctioned violence and torture, overseen and covered up by Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey. “We demand that Bryan Bailey step down,” says Shabazz. Parker adds, “We want justice for everyone that has gone through this with Rankin County.”

"In Indivisible, historian and law professor Joel Richard Paul tells how Daniel Webster, a young New Hampshire attorney turned politician, rose to national prominence through his powerful oratory and popularized the ideals of American nationalism that helped forge our nation's identity. In his speeches, Webster argued that the Constitution was not a compact made by states but an expression of the will of all Americans. As these ideas took root, they influenced future leaders, among them Abraham Lincoln, who drew on them to hold the nation together during the Civil War"--

By Marlena Okechukwu (Follow us on LinkedIn) Photo by Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash Conferences are big business. In fact, globally, the Meetings industry generates trillions of dollars annually – …

Surviving the Future is a collection of the most current ideas in radical queer movement work and revolutionary queer theory. Beset by a new pandemic, fanning the flames of global uprising, these queers cast off progressive narratives of liberal hope while building mutual networks of rebellion and care. These essays propose a militant strategy of queer survival in an ever precarious future. Starting from a position of abolition—of prisons, police, the State, identity, and racist cisheteronormative society—this collection refuses the bribes of inclusion in a system built on our expendability. Though the mainstream media saturates us with the boring norms of queer representation (with a recent focus on trans visibility), the writers in this book ditch false hope to imagine collective visions of liberation that tell different stories, build alternate worlds, and refuse the legacies of racial capitalism, anti-Blackness, and settler colonialism. The work curated in this book spans Black queer life in the time of COVID-19 and uprising, assimilation and pinkwashing settler colonial projects, subversive and deviant forms of representation, building anarchist trans/queer infrastructures, and more. Contributors include Che Gossett, Yasmin Nair, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Adrian Shanker, Kitty Stryker, Toshio Meronek, and more.

A list of reading about and for activism within academic institutions, from NYU Press.

The Library's Geography and Map Division has created a complex StoryMap that documents the nation's history of redlining and violent racism, including thousands of lynchings. The maps draw on the historical work of Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois and many others.

As international health agencies warn that COVID-19 could become a pandemic, fears over the new coronavirus' spread have activated old, racist suspicions toward Asians and Asian Americans. It's part of a longer history in the United States, in which xenophobia has often been camouflaged as a concern for public health and hygiene.

Wellness isn't just about mindfulness, exercise, or the perfect skin. Politics, media, culture, science — everything around us — interact to shape our health. On America Dissected, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed explores what's really making us sick and what we'll need to take on — be it racism, corporate capitalism, or snake oil salesmen — to keep all of us healthy. From insulin price gouging to ineffective sunscreens, America Dissected cuts deeper into the state of health in America. New episodes every Tuesday. Want to know where to start? Here are some fan-favorite episodes to search: Cannabis Capitalism with David Jernigan Weight Weight Don’t Tell me with Harriett Brown Black Scientists Matter with Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett

Become a Patron! This searchable database includes 900+ law-related documents on the Coronavirus, Racism, and the law. It does not include news articles. It was updated with 57 additional documents on January 31, 2023. Documents were gathered through an electronic database search using the following search terms: (COVID-19 or coronavirus)...