Welcome Black Collections, a new archival repository within the Community-Driven Archives Initiative at ASU Library, focused on creating a robust community collection dedicated to documenting the lived experiences of Black people living and thriving in Arizona. As part of the award-winning CDA Initiative established in 2017 with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Black Collections seeks to establish and implement programs and services that will engage, educate and empower Arizona’s Black community to preserve currently silenced narratives and history. Building this infrastructure and relationships with historically marginalized communities takes time and patience, a deep desire and passion to create change and highly trained students, staff and professionals. , Why create Black Collections? “I want Black Collections to be an important collection that the Black community of Phoenix and Arizona are proud of. Everybody deserves to have their stories documented and the ability to see themselves within the archival record. Black Collections is about working with community to preserve Black history and stories in Arizona.” – Jessica Salow, assistant archivist of Black Collections , Highlighted Collection J. Eugene Grigsby Jr. Documents the work and legacy of artist, educator and mentor of generations of young artists, Dr. Jefferson Eugene Grigsby, Jr. Visit the finding aid for the J. Eugene Grigsby Jr. Papers   , LIFT Initiative elevates Black Collections Black Collections was created as part of ASU’s LIFT (Listen, Invest, Facilitate, Teach) Initiative. In the fall of 2020, President Crow’s office shared a list of 25 actions to support Black students, faculty and staff. On point 23, the action reads, “ASU has committed to providing funding to sustain the Community-Driven Archives initiative in the ASU Library in order to enhance the historical record of and the university’s and library’s engagement with underrepresented communities.” You can help CDA and Black Collections recover ASU’s Black history to reflect the scholarship and academic accomplishments of the Black community. Make a gift today. , Information Access the collection Materials in this collection can be viewed by appointment in the Wurzburger Reading Room at Hayden Library (rm. 138). Please make an appointment at least five business days prior to your visit by contacting Ask an Archivist or call 480-965-4932 for more information. Questions? Ask an Archivist Jessica Salow Assistant Archivist of Black Collections jessica.salow@asu.edu , Resources Black Collections Symposium LibGuide Arizona Archives Online ASU Digital Repository ASU Distinctive Collections Policies Camera Use Agreement Using our collections in publications Connect with us Follow Community-Driven Archives on social media!     , News and blog More news Department of English celebrates 125th anniversary with special events, including a history exhibit Read more about the "Department of English celebrates 125th anniversary with special events, including a history exhibit" article Local athletes get crash course on Black history in Arizona Read more about the "Local athletes get crash course on Black history in Arizona" article ASU Library collection captures robust history of Arizona Read more about the "ASU Library collection captures robust history of Arizona" article University Archives chronicles more than 140 years of Sun Devil history Read more about the "University Archives chronicles more than 140 years of Sun Devil history" article , ASU Events

An Associated Press analysis finds that the number of Black students enrolling at many elite colleges has dropped in the two years since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in admissions.

The American Bar Association remains committed to its long-time policies and positions that reject the use of racial profiling in law enforcement and immigration enforcement activities.

Beverly Daniel Tatum on antisemitism, ‘the hardest in the US’, and DEI as the White House targets higher education

In September 2025, John Roberts Jr. will mark the 20th anniversary of his confirmation as Chief Justice of the United States. Roberts and his conservative colleagues on the court thus far have etched legacies in a number of areas of the law, but only one has major implications for democracy’s future.

Writing that it “wants out of this abhorrent system of racial discrimination,” Louisiana on Wednesday told the Supreme Court in the case of Louisiana v. Callais to leave in place […]

Season 1, Episode 2

The move comes after Ivy League universities Columbia and Brown struck settlements that require them to release information about applicants’ race.

In the 2021-22 school year, RWU Law co-sponsored, along with the City University of New York School of Law and Jurist, an ongoing Integrating Doctrine & Diversity Speaker Series.

Today, Statistics Canada is releasing data on students from Canadian colleges and universities (cohorts of 2014 to 2022) by Indigenous identity and racialized group. This release includes information on the number of Canadian new students, enrolled students and graduates by Indigenous identity and racialized group, educational qualification, field of study, age group and gender. Data are available at the national, provincial and territorial levels.

"Sarah Lewis deciphers the hugely popular nineteenth-century images that failed to dislodge Americans' faith in the mythical white homeland of the Caucasus. Actual Caucasians little resemble race science's ideals of whiteness, so Americans learned to manipulate their visual regime-and visual media-to suppress evidence of race's incoherence."--;"In a masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation's racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen--until now. The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War--the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War--revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive 'Caucasian' for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized these fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them. To acknowledge the falsehood at the core of racial order proved unthinkable, especially as Jim Crow and segregation took hold. Sight became a form of racial sculpture, vision a knife excising what no longer served the stability of racial hierarchy. That stability was shaped, crucially, by what was left out, what we have been conditioned not to see. Groundbreaking and profoundly resonant, The Unseen Truth shows how visual tactics have long secured our regime of racial hierarchy in spite of its false foundations--and offers a way to begin to dismantle it." --

"Beginning with a jaw-dropping rumination on a centuries-old painting featuring a white man with a Black man's leg surgically attached (with the expired Black leg-donor in the foreground), contracts law scholar and celebrated journalist Patricia J. Williams uses the lens of the law to take on core questions of identity, ethics, and race. With her trademark elegant prose and critical legal studies wisdom, Williams brings to bear a keen analytic eye and a lawyer's training to chapters exploring the ways we have legislated the ownership of everything from body parts to gene sequences--and the particular ways in which our laws in these areas isolate nonnormative looks, minority cultures, and out-of-the-box thinkers. At the heart of 'Wrongful Birth' is a lawsuit in which a white couple who use a sperm bank sue when their child 'comes out Black'; 'Bodies in Law' explores the service of genetic ancestry testing companies to answer the question of who owns DNA. And 'Hot Cheeto Girl' examines the way that algorithms give rise to new predictive categories of human assortment, layered with market-inflected cages of assigned destiny. In the spirit of Dorothy Roberts, Rebecca Skloot, and Anne Fadiman, The Miracle of the Black Leg offers a brilliant meditation on the tricky place where law, science, ethics, and cultural slippage collide"--

"From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an empire that doesn't consider you fully human. On October 25th, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: "One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this." This tweet was viewed more than ten million times. One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture that has occurred for Black, brown, Indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in Western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse"--

A new analysis by the National Women's Law Center captures how President Trump's mass job cuts are chipping away at the diversity of the federal workforce.

A new policy in Hennepin County, Minnesota, that allows prosecutors to consider racial identity in plea deals has led to a probe by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Feinberg Series Address by Dr. Timothy K. EatmanHow do the legacies of slavery and colonialism continue to constrict possibilities for Black and Indigenous c...

Racist covenants once impacted where minority families in Tucson could live.

This semester, 12 clinical law students, representing six law schools, participated in our Spring 2024 Movement Lawyering Clinical Cohort. Through the work in the cohort, their skills were used to advance the campaigns of four of our beloved movement partners. The cohort's reach extended from the Northeast to the Midwest and down to the South, showcasing the broad impact of our collective work. The students' work and research shared the common theme of "Ending Criminalization and Building Thriving Black Communities Our Way."

"In 1997, this groundbreaking book made a powerful entrance into the national conversation on race. In a media landscape dominated by racially biased images of welfare queens and crack babies, Killing the black body exposed America's systemic abuse of Black women's bodies. From slave masters' economic stake in bonded women's fertility to government programs that coerced thousands of poor Black women into being sterilized as late as the 1970s, these abuses pointed to the devaluation of Black motherhood--and the neglect of Black women's reproductive needs in mainstream feminist and civil rights agendas. Now, some two decades later, Killing the Black body remains as crucial as ever--a rallying cry for education, awareness, and action on extending reproductive justice to all women"--Page 4 of cover.

In a recently published piece in the Nation magazine, author and scholar Barbara Smith proposes a a comprehensive racial justice program even more sweeping than the Marshall Plan to combat white supremacy and resulting systemic racism. Smith talks to HMM correspondent Corinne Carey about her proposa

In this episode, Mike talks about race, both in America generally and the legal system specifically. He uses the story of Italian internment in World War II to explore the idea of "otherness." Out of preferences and perceptions, as well as a history of identifying white culture with professionalism, the legal industry has created a context that's hostile to African Americans. Resolving that distance will only come after first owning our ugly history.   Episode Resources Connect with Mike Whelan    White Lawyering by Russell G Pearce:   Why the US Needs Black Lawyers:   Police killings can be captured in data. The terror police create cannot.   Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior:  

“Listen In” to Allison Manswell as she talks with Vanessa Kelly about her impactful book on race relations: “Listen In: Crucial Conversations on Race in the Workplace,” its relevance today, and...

Just what is going on with white people? Police shootings of unarmed African Americans. Acts of domestic terrorism by white supremacists. The renewed embrace of raw, undisguised white-identity politics. Unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring. Some of this feels new, but in truth it’s an old story. Why? Where did the notion of “whiteness” come from? What does it mean? What is whiteness for? Scene on Radio host and producer John Biewen took a deep dive into these questions, along with an array of leading scholars and regular guest Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika, in this fourteen-part documentary series, released between February and August 2017. The series editor is Loretta Williams.

Three African American ER physicians in Washington, D.C., recount experiences on their wards, where Black patients make up the vast majority of the city's COVID-19 fatalities.

I’m breathing deeply as I write this. What I’m writing about is charged. I feel this energy in my body. It’s a heat in my throat and a rumbling in my belly. It’s an intensity that’s frustrated that…

NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro speaks with Jay Caspian Kang and William Garcia-Medina on the complex issues surrounding race relations within Asian and Latino communities and movements for Black Lives.

"Recent events have brought to the fore longstanding concerns about the nature of policing in the United States and how it undermines racial equity. As an institution policing needs significant reconsideration. It is time to rethink the structure and governance of policing. It is also time to engage in a deeper conversation about the meaning of public safety. In the meantime however the following is a list of urgently-needed reforms compiled by a small group of law school faculty each of whom runs or is associated with an academic center devoted to policing and the criminal justice system. The reforms are not intended as an entire agenda for what ought to happen around policing or what American policing should look like. Rather they offer immediate concrete steps federal state and local governments can take to address enduring problems in policing. The authors are scholars who are also deeply involved in the daily practice of policing and included among them are the Reporters for the American Law Institute's Principles of the Law: Policing which works with advisers from across the ideological spectrum in drafting high-level principles to govern policing though the recommendations here go beyond the scope of the ALI project."

"This article argues that "race" is an unnecessary and potentially pernicious concept. As evidenced by the history of slavery segregation the Holocaust and other human tragedies the idea of "race" can perpetuate prejudices and misconceptions and serve as justification for systematic persecution. "Race" suggests that human beings can be divided into subspecies some of which are morally and intellectually inferior to others. The law has important symbolic and expressive value and is often efficacious as a force that shapes public ideology. Consequently it must undermine the notion that "race" is a legitimate mechanism by which to categorize human beings. Furthermore the focus on rigid "racial" classifications obfuscates political discussion concerning affirmative action scientific research and social inequities. When we speak of "racial" diversity discrimination or inequality it is unclear whether we are referring to color socioeconomic status continent of origin or some other factor. Because the term "race" subsumes so many different ideas in people's minds it is not a useful platform for social discourse."

"In her evocative masterpiece The Alchemy of Race and Rights published in 1991 Patricia Williams captured a moment in American legal thought that marked a turning point in expressions about race and power and the implications for social equality. It contained lessons extending beyond America's unique race history to the general social and political dynamics in liberal democracy that create conditions of privilege and exclusion. She invited us to think about the place of law in the social and institutional practices that sustain status quo hierarchies despite proclaimed civil rights commitments to justice. She also inspired hope that the role of the lawyer could be one of mutinous agitator—struggling from the inside using the tools and skills of practice to support the causes of identifiable communities and social movements."

"American jurisprudence and law have profoundly shaped defined and constrained the lives of Black people for over 400 years. Racial inequality has extremely deep roots in American society and our Constitution statutes court cases and regulations not only bear witness to this but are often the source of it. This timeline provides an overview of some of these laws beginning with the first known case marking the legal difference between Africans and Europeans in 1640 in Virginia and continuing with laws recently introduced in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans. While not exhaustive the timeline focuses on a number of key legal events and actions that have structured and systematized racism in America."