As always, we invite you to share this post with students, colleagues, and anyone else who is interested in the legacies of slavery. A link here does not imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges.
- Linda Villarosa, “Is Nonviolent Resistance Past Its Prime?,” New York Times (June 2, 2024): LINK. In this review of Kellie Carter Jackson’s We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (LINK), the author sketches a history of Black heroes and heroines who unexpectedly owned guns: “Our culture’s fixation on nonviolence has caused us to miss entire histories of Black responses to white supremacy.”
- Kellie Carter Jackson, “Opinion: How Black Americans’ refusals of injustice have shaped our national story,” Los Angeles Times (June 3, 2024): LINK. A historian offers the key difference between resistance and refusal in African American history: “Resistance is how one responds to white supremacy; refusal is why…. Not nearly enough emphasis is placed on why resistance is so crucial to the American story.”
- Howard Husock, “Slavery in My Neighborhood and Questionable Logic of Reparations,” American Enterprise Institute (June 6, 2024): LINK. New York State has joined California and several municipalities in studying reparations as a tool for racial justice. This conservative scholar argues that, at least in his small New York town, reparations are not justified because only a small minority of white residents were enslavers.
- Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, “Stolen Lives: Redress for Slavery’s and Jim Crow’s Ongoing Theft of Lifespan,” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 10:2 (June 2024), pp. 88–112: doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2024.10.2.04. From the abstract: “Reparations proposals typically target wealth. Yet slavery’s and Jim Crow’s long echoes also steal time, such as by producing shorter Black lifespans even today. I argue that lost time should be considered an independent target for redress; identify challenges to doing so; and provide examples of what reparations redressing lost lifespan could look like.”
- Benjamin Chrisinger, “Only 1.8% of US doctors were Black in 1906 — and the legacy of inequality in medical education has not yet been erased,” The Conversation (June 6, 2024): LINK. “Many contemporary scholars and activists are looking to the past in order to increase the public’s understanding of how race has played a historical role in the health outcomes of Black Americans.”
- Charles Sanchez, et al., “Breaking the Cycle of Racial Wealth Inequities and Higher Education Outcomes,” Institute for Higher Education Policy (May 2024): LINK. This report implies that racial inequalities in medical education are also part of a larger pattern — i.e., the racial wealth gap, which is “rooted in generations of discrimination and systemic barriers to opportunity … [and] affects the college dreams of countless people from historically marginalized communities.”
- Allan Appel, “Genealogy As Activism Uncovers Black History,” New Haven Independent (June 3, 2024): LINK. A nonprofit dedicated to recovering the lives of ordinary enslaved African Americans conducts genealogical research for descendants, subsidizes the restoration of tombstones and other markers, campaigns for new street names, and helps create murals.
- Luisa Godinez-Puig and Brian D. Medley, “The New ‘White Fortress’ Cities of the American South,” Bloomberg (June 4, 2024): LINK. Researchers of racial equity have found that de facto (and sometimes de jure) secession from mixed-race cities by residents of whiter, wealthier enclaves “perpetuate[s] modern-day segregation and limit[s] opportunity for left-behind communities, a form of opportunity hoarding that [they] call ‘white fortressing.’”
- Alexandra Olson, “A Grant Program for Black Women Business Owners Is Discriminatory, Appeals Court Rules,” Chronicle of Philanthropy (June 3, 2024): LINK. “The ruling against the Atlanta-based Fearless Fund is another victory for conservative groups waging a sprawling legal battle against corporate diversity programs.”
- Sheryll Cashin, “Thurgood Marshall Was My Mentor. He’d Be Furious with the Court Today,” Politico (June 2, 2024): LINK. Seventy years after Brown v. Board, one of Justice Marshall’s law clerks looks back on the legacy of that landmark Supreme Court decision. “Marshall’s vision of [Brown] remains frustratingly distant. The 14th Amendment required dismantling of a caste system of segregated schools, he thought. That vision is betrayed daily in an America in which schools remain, in fact, separate and unequal.”
- Corey Mead, “How the Labor of Enslaved Black Men Built the White House,” Literary Hub (June 5, 2024): LINK. In this excerpt from his new book, The Hidden History of the White House (LINK), the author laments that “Despite how grueling and essential their labor was, virtually nothing is known about these hundreds of men beyond their first names.”
- Nia Prater, “‘They Slave Us’: Prison Workers on Life Behind Bars,” New York Magazine (June 3, 2024): LINK. “Forced labor under the threat of punishment. Hourly wages under a dollar an hour. Having to choose between purchasing food or personal items. These are the conditions facing incarcerated New Yorkers that advocates say are why the state should amend its constitution to bar involuntary labor.”