Racial Justice

Condemns Reopening Economy As “Reckless” Washington, DC (April 24, 2020) Today, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law issued a new demand letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), calling for increased transparency and immediate action in response to COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on Black communities and other communities of color.  This letter follows […]

On December 20th, Michigan-based family medicine physician Dr. Susan Moore died due to complications from COVID-19. Less than two weeks before her death, Moore shared her experience with racism at the Indiana hospital where she was being treated, showing yet another example of anti-Blackness and medical apartheid.

A half-dozen corrections agencies provide less detail than they did a year ago.

The already large racial wealth gap between white and black American households grew even wider after the Great Recession. Targeted policies are necessary to reverse this deepening divide.

The deaths of Layleen Polanco and Tony McDade highlight how Black trans Americans are treated and criminalized.

Lawmakers, local officials and public health professionals took to Massachusetts' State House's steps. "This is not an Asian-American virus, this is not a Chinese virus."

Public officials lament the way that the coronavirus is engulfing black communities. The question is, what are they prepared to do about it?

LGBTQ activists have conflicting ideas on how best to observe Pride this year, but all say the protests' missions parallel struggles for LGBTQ rights.

The medical schools in Tucson and Phoenix are engaged in several efforts related to recruitment, retention, mentoring, faculty development, curriculum, culture and more.

The coronavirus became racialized, so it’s critical that educators understand the historical context and confront racist tropes and xenophobia from students and colleagues.

Kimberly Latrice Jones is an American author and filmmaker, known for the New York Times bestselling young adult novel, I'm Not Dying With You Tonight and for the viral video How Can We Win published during the George Floyd protest. The book was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in 2020. That same year, a seven-minute video featuring Kim using a Monopoly analogy to explain the history of racism and its impact on Black Americans went viral, being shared by Trevor Noah, LeBron James, Madonna, and more. The viral video was featured on shows like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. She has subsequently signed an overall deal with Warner Brothers via her production company Push Films with her partner DeWayne “Duprano” Martin. Kim's literary roots run deep. She served on the Selection Committee for Library of Congress' 2016-2017 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, the 2015 Children’s Choice Illustrator Committee for The Children's Book Council, and the advisory board that created the Creative and Innovative Education Master’s Degree program at Georgia State University. She has been featured in Ms. Magazine, Seventeen, Paste Magazine, Bustle, Hello Giggles, Book List, Publisher’s Weekly, School Library Journal, and was Book Brahmin in an issue of Shelf Awareness. She received one of the inaugural James Patterson Holiday Bookseller Bonus grants while working at the famous children’s bookstore, Little Shop of Stories. Most recently, Kim’s bestselling novel, I’m Not Dying With You Tonight, co-authored with Gilly Segal, was nominated for an NAACP Image award, Georgia Author Of The Year award, and the Cybils Awards. I’m Not Dying With You Tonight was selected as the September 2019 book club pick for the Barnes & Noble YA book club and Overdrive’s Big Library Read.She resides in Atlanta and is the proud mother of a gifted boy. She lives for wigs and nail art, as her style icons are Dolly Parton, Chaka Khan, and Diana Ross.

ADL Center for Antisemitism Research builds upon ADL’s 100-plus years of antisemitism expertise to test, measure and identify impact to fight against this hate.

Antisemitism is often referred to as the oldest hatred, spanning nearly 2,000 years. Antisemitic hate groups seek to racialize Jewish people and vilify them as the manipulative puppet masters behind an economic, political and social scheme to undermine white people. Antisemitism also undergirds much of the far right, unifying adherents across various extremist ideologies around efforts to subvert and misconstrue the collective suffering of Jewish people in the Holocaust and cast them as conniving opportunists.

The annual report says instances of harassment, assault and propaganda are all on the rise. It warns public officials and social media stars have helped normalize longstanding antisemitic tropes.

The White House is putting forward a proposal to add a new racial category called Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) . If approved, the new designation could appear on census forms in 2020 and could have far-reaching implications for racial identity, anti-discrimination laws, and health research. Under current law, people from the Middle East are considered white, the legacy of century-old court rulings in which Syrian Americans argued that they should not be considered Asian -- because that designation would deny them citizenship under the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. But scholars and community leaders say more and more people with Middle Eastern roots find themselves caught between white, black, and Asian classifications that don't fully represent their identities. "What it does, it helps these communities feel less invisible", said Helen Samhan of the Arab American Institute, which has been advocating the change for more than 30 years. The White House Office of Management and Budget advanced the proposal with a notice in the Federal Register on September 30, 2016, asking for comments and which groups would be included. Under the proposal, the new Middle East and North African designation -- or MENA as it's called by population scholars -- is broader in concept that Arab (an ethnicity) or Muslim (a religion). It would include anyone from a region of the world stretching from Morocco to Iran, and including Syrian and Coptic Christians, Israeli Jews, and other religious minorities. Time will tell whether the new category will include Turkish, Sudanese, and Somali-Americans. As a result, this guide will slowly expand its coverage to include both Arab American and Muslima American as well as many of the other population groups from this part of the world. Dept. of Justice Affirms in 1909 Whether Syrians, Turks, and Arabs are of White or Yellow Race. Courtesy of the Arab American Historical Foundation.

Roark Capital and Silver Lake Management have a web of connections to the Atlanta police foundation, Cop City and surveillance in the city

The bill would create the first-ever civil rights division inside the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office.

2023 Regular Session - SB 426

(Reuters) - Descendants of Louisiana slaves sued their local government on Tuesday over land-use policies they say have led to a concentration of polluting

We asked all state systems for book policies and ban lists, then created a database for you.

In June of 2022, Michigan Department of Corrections (“MDOC”) made national news when NPR reported that non-English language dictionaries were banned in state pr

Before the Civil War, colonization schemes and black laws threatened to deport former slaves born in the United States. Birthright Citizens recovers the story of how African American activists remade national belonging through battles in legislatures, conventions, and courthouses. They faced formidable opposition, most notoriously from the US Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Still, Martha S. Jones explains, no single case defined their status. Former slaves studied law, secured allies, and conducted themselves like citizens, establishing their status through local, everyday claims. All along they argued that birth guaranteed their rights. With fresh archival sources and an ambitious reframing of constitutional law-making before the Civil War, Jones shows how the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the birthright principle, and black Americans' aspirations were realized. Birthright Citizens tells how African American activists radically transformed the terms of citizenship for all Americans.

A lighthearted social media trend encourages Black men to skip gleefully through open fields, backyards and parks. The idea sounds silly, but one expert claims it is a needed activity to combat mental health issues and societal expectations.

Gov. Katie Hobbs has signed an executive order banning racial discrimination based on a person’s hair in Arizona

A longtime English professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University says his "decision to teach and speak about racial justice" led to a parent complaining and the university terminating his contract.

While many cheered the possibility of a huge financial windfall for the city's Black residents, one civil rights leader says the proposal is a distraction from tangible efforts to redress racism.

"The Black Power movement is usually associated with heroic, iconic figures, like Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, but largely missing from stories about the Black freedom struggle are the hundreds of ordinary foot soldiers who were just as essential to the movement. Stayed on Freedom presents a new history of Black Power by focusing on two unheralded organizers: Zoharah Robinson and Michael Simmons. Robinson was born in Memphis, raised by her grandmother who told her stories of slavery and taught her the value of self-reliance. Simmons was born in Philadelphia, a child of the Great Migration. They met in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, where Robinson was one of the only woman project directors in Mississippi Freedom Summer, after she had dropped out of college to work in the movement full-time. Falling in love while organizing against the war in Vietnam and raising the call for Black Power, their simultaneous commitment to each other and social change took them from SNCC, to the Nation of Islam, to a global movement, as they fought for social justice well after the 1960s. By centering the lives of Robinson and Simmons, Stayed On Freedom offers a history of Black Power that is more expansive, complex, and personal than those previously written. Historian Dan Berger shows how Black Power linked the political futures of African Americans with those of people in Angola, Cambodia, Cuba, South Africa, and the Soviet Union, making it a global movement for workers and women's rights, for peace and popular democracy. Robinson's and Simmons's activism blurs the divides -- between North and South, faith and secular, the US and the world, and the past and the present -- typically applied to Black Power. And, in contrast to conventional surveys of the history of civil rights, Stayed on Freedom is an intimate story anchored in lives of the people who made the movements move, where heroism mingles with uncertainty over decades of intensive political commitment. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with Robinson and Simmons, their families and their friends, in addition to immense archival research, Berger weaves a joyous and intricate history of the Black Power movement, providing a powerful portrait of two people trying to make a life while working to make a better world"--

"With journalistic skill, heart, and hope, Requiem for the Massacre reckons with the racial tension in Tulsa, Oklahoma one hundred years after the most infamous act of racial violence in American history"--;"More than one hundred years ago, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, perpetrated a massacre against its Black residents. For generations, the true story was ignored, covered up, and diminished by those in power and in a position to preserve the status quo. Blending memoir and immersive journalism, RJ Young shows how, today, Tulsa combats its racist past while remaining all too tolerant of racial injustice.Requiem for the Massacre is a cultural excavation of Tulsa one hundred years after one of the worst acts of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. Young focuses on unearthing the narrative surrounding previously all-Black Greenwood district while challenging an apocryphal narrative that includes so-called Black Wall Street, Booker T. Washington, and Black exceptionalism. Young provides a firsthand account of the centennial events commemorating Tulsa's darkest day as the city attempts to reckon with its self-image, commercialization of its atrocity, and the aftermath of the massacre that shows how things have changed and how they have stayed woefully the same..." --

In eighteen oral histories, this volume tells the stories of men and women who have been needlessly swept up in the War on Terror, and who have found themselves subject to rendition and torture, to workplace discrimination, bullying, or FBI surveillance and harassment. Includes: a sixteen-year-old Muslim American seized from her home by the FBI, and forced to wear a tracking bracelet for the next three years; a mother of a missing 9/11 first responder and her husband searching for their son, even as the media hounded them and portrayed their son as a possible terrorist in hiding; a Sikh man whose brother was the first reported hate murder victim after 9/11. -- Based on publisher's description and page 4 of cover.