This session will explore strategies for challenging anti-Black racism and racial inequality in today’s society. How does the #Black Lives Matter campaign relate to historical efforts to challenge oppression? What sorts of policies might get us closer to racial equality and how might we pursue them?
Discussion Materials:
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Enduring Solidarity of Whiteness”
- Thomas Shapiro on the History of the Racial Wealth Gap
- A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice
- Frank Leon Roberts, “Five Ways of Understanding Black Lives Matter”
Discussion Questions:
- What is the problem, anti-Black racism or class inequality? How are they related?
- Are we in a moment of mass African American protest and activism? How is this moment related to past moments?
- Would the policy proposals in the Vision for Black Lives create greater racial equality? Are they possible?
Additional Resources:
- “P.S.: I Can’t Breathe”
- A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement
- Jelani Cobb, “The Matter of Black Lives,” New Yorker, March 14, 2016
- Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2016).
- Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
- Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
- John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
- Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008).
- Ibram X. Kendi, The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
- Peniel Joseph, Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama (New York: BasicCivitas Books, 2010).
- Thomas J. Sugrue, Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
