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This chapter begins by recounting the experiences of Anna Jones, Carlil Pittman, and Mónica Acosta who endured a persistent emotional and psychological torture that comes from the knowledge that their lives, or the lives of their children, are not valued as much as others. It analyses how the systemic racial injustice affects communities of color across the United States, and persuades more people to listen to what people of color are saying about the challenges they face and how they should be addressed. The chapter also discusses that the residents of the communities of color share a set of common experiences, some of which are similar to the predominantly white communities, and some of which are remarkably different. The chapter then describes how, and why, ultra-wealthy leaders from Corporate America and Wall Street are the driving force behind many of the public policies that uphold systemic racism and cause severe harm to communities of color across the country. It unveils how the nation's mass criminalization and incarceration system can be traced back to the leaders of many of the largest and best-known corporations in the United States, Wall Street banks, private prison companies, and the Kochs' network of ultra-wealthy allies. Ultimately, the chapter explores how many of the same individuals and organizations have played a significant role in the creation of the extreme anti-immigrant policies that have plagued millions of migrants for decades.

This chapter explores how a praxis of accountability can build communities able to hold, address, and transform conflict and manifestations of oppression and violence. It focuses on the importance of building values of accountability into our relationships and communities within the context of movement building for social and structural change. In it, I explore practices that help cultivate our willingness to take accountability for the ways we participate in and/or are implicated within systems of oppression and privilege. They call us to recognize, challenge, and transform the impact of systemic racism and white supremacy on our identities and relationships as well as our ideas and visions for social change. Rather than avoiding how our ideas, words, and actions contribute to harm or are complicit in systemic oppression, this chapter offers practices for taking of accountability for the impact of our words and actions as a way of building caring just communities. These practices can build a community’s capacity to address the harms of interpersonal and intimate violence.

Chapter 3, “Equality,” examines the ideal of “equal education.” US citizens often view this ideal as “opportunity,” but their understanding of opportunity is narrowly focused on marketable skills and competition for unequal rewards, omitting the distinctly educational value of school learning. It also neglects the critical capabilities to recognize injustice in society and to form life goals not beholden to currently dominant values and institutions. The chapter argues for educational justice as “educational goods” (including academic, personal growth, moral and civic capacities) valuable in their own right as well as to society, that should be provided to every child. But an unjust and unequal society constrains schools’ ability to equalize educational goods. Educational justice efforts must ally with class- and race-focused initiatives to lift up families and students at the low end of the economic spectrum, curb the ability of advantaged families to hoard opportunities for themselves, and, through reparations, correct for a history of injustices against students of color. Teachers see up close the impact of poverty on their students and should not be shamed for their professionalism in recognizing and trying to mitigate poverty’s impact.

This chapter sheds some light on strategic racism and identifies who is doing it, and why. It demonstrates that while the problems Americans face are severe, they are also eminently fixable, particularly if more people remember that the injustice being engineered by the group of billionaires and multimillionaires has not been limited to people of color. The chapter introduces how powerful a tool racial injustice has been for the ultra-wealthy in advancing their economic and political interests. It reveals that while such sordid realities are rarely mentioned in the public discourse, it was nevertheless true that there was a lot of money being made off of this type of large-scale cruelty. Ultimately, the chapter argues that the horrific form of modern-day racism was not adequately captured by the term “systemic racism.” It suggests that persistent racial inequities are merely the accidental byproducts of our economic and political systems. In reality, what the ultra-wealthy have been doing was worse than that, because behind all of the billions of dollars in investments they were making in opposition to communities of color, there was intentionality. There was strategy.

This chapter cites the statement of rebellion drafted by a group of revolutionaries in the late eighteenth century. It highlights the need to address the Declaration of Interdependence following the severe challenges that the United States face today. The chapter asserts that we are far more interdependent than we are independent, and our lives are all deeply interconnected within a web of both obvious and not-so-obvious threads. It evaluates how education inequities, mass criminalization, anti-immigrant policies, and other racial justice issues do not just harm those who attend the underresourced schools, suffer the effects of overpolicing, and face the prospect of being deported. The chapter recognizes that addressing those issues does not just help the people of color who have the burden of systemic racism lifted off them, but also everyone is in a position to benefit when communities of color are able to live higher-quality lives and the rot of injustice is purged from the public systems.

The epilogue asks what conclusions can be drawn from this book’s stories about white rock musicians’ engagement with Black music and politics. Hip-hop and R&B, central to anti-racist protest today, have become fundamental to debates over white cultural appropriation of Black music, debates that have shifted away from rock as the genre has become less dominant. Hip-hop and R&B are widely understood as Black genres, and white performers such as Iggy Azalea, Miley Cyrus, Eminem, and Macklemore are concerned less with adapting them into new forms than with claiming the right to perform them at all. Today, the conversation around “woke” white musicians is no longer as utopian as during the 1960s, but rather levelheaded and pragmatic, foregrounding critiques of inequality and misrepresentation. White musicians continue to benefit from systemic racism that amplifies their voices over those of others. Yet many white musicians today continue to grapple with their own role in African American political struggles as well as the opportunities and responsibilities created by Black music. As white musicians and activists attempt to find ethical approaches to racial politics in the Black Lives Matter era, efforts made during the 1960s can provide both inspiration and perspective.

By examining the Irish context, this chapter presents the favouritism continuum as the system through which racial inequalities, injustices and economic exploitations are proliferated in modern states. It outlines how the system operates through four interrelated structures. First is group favouritism, which ensures some groups are more favoured over others. The second is social acceptance, which determines where groups are placed on the continuum. Third is psychological implicit bias, which operates in racially stratified labour markets in conjunction with the continuum. Here you see how implicit bias produces explicit discrimination and how groups on lower racial strata try to circumvent its negative effect. The last structure comprises human contact – the connectors through which the racial stratification system operates. The chapter concludes by making three key arguments. First, that the favouritism continuum determines the outcome of actors by the position they occupy on the continuum. Secondly, that although racial stratification is restrictive, the outcome is fluid and changeable due to minority agency and individual mobility. Thirdly, the continuum is the machinery which maintains homogeneity in a heterogeneous labour market, thus (re)producing racial inequality.

The final chapter briefly touches on Richardson’s second divorce but focuses on her difficulties finding and keeping employment. After holding a series of jobs in various corporate and not-for-profit agencies, Richardson eventually earned a permanent civil service position with the City of New York, where she worked until the twenty-first century. In one way or another, all her jobs involved some kind of social justice. Over the last five decades, Richardson has paid close attention to social change movements, including Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, and this chapter discusses her thoughts about them, particularly her view that young people have the capability and vision to lead the nation to greater freedom, just as young people did in the 1960s. She advises them to replicate the group-centered and member-driven model student activists employed in the early 1960s and to avoid becoming ideological.

In this final chapter, the authors argue that preventing young children of color from enacting their agency at school is an act of segregation, and ultimately an operationalization of white supremacy and a means of controlling communities of color through the normalization of agency as something earned or deserved. They argue that institutional racism and white supremacy collectively normalize offering children different kinds of early learning experiences at school. This segregation is then violently justified by (falsely) insisting that agency would be available to young children at school if only they and their families would just change, earn, prove, improve, or fix themselves to fit into the expectations of whiteness. They gratefully draw upon interdisciplinary work across education by scholars of color to show how blaming teachers, young children, and families of color for the segregation that white supremacy produces and justifies will never result in actual equity. They offer ways to support young children’s enactment of agency in early schooling and revisit Ms. Bailey’s classroom to show that young children of color can use their agency for their learning in ways that are sophisticated, dynamic, and empowering if the personhood/subpersonhood line is removed.

This chapter will first summarize how the book’s review of multiracial discrimination cases reveals the enduring power of white privilege and the continued societal problem with non-whiteness in any form. Specifically, the cases illustrate the perspective that non-whiteness taints rather than the concern that racial mixture itself is worrisome. Yet this insight is lost in the midst of the multiracial-identity scholars’ singular focus on promoting mixed-race identity. Multiracial victims of discrimination will be better served by legal analyses that seek to elucidate the continued operation of white supremacy. Such a focus will also better serve all Equality Law and public policies. But this can only be done by shifting away from a focus on personal individual identity recognition to a focus on group based racial realities. The chapter concludes with a proposal for an explicit “socio-political race” lens for analyzing matters of discrimination rather than the Personal Identity Equality perspective that misapprehends the social significance of race in the assessment of equality problems. The book’s emphasis on a socio-political race perspective meaningfully preserves an individual’s ability to assert a varied personal identity, while providing a more effective tool for addressing racism and pursuing equality.

This chapter charts how a group of citizens seek to challenge systemic and institutional racism within their city by building their own datasets and tools. It looks at how some computer programmers created black data — data about the murder of black lives, data about systemic, institutional racism, and data that demands justice. The result is a Mapping Police Violence database. The database maps the deaths of people killed by the police by district, most of which happened in black neighbourhoods. This initiative then grew into a black atlas of the city, incorporating crime data, census data, and some housing and welfare data.

Starting in 2015, we made the case for ending homelessness as one of the major and compelling grand challenges that constituted a bold agenda for the social work profession. Since then, schools of social work have taken up the Grand Challenge to End Homelessness through educational innovations, research collaborations, and university–community partnerships. In this chapter, we review a number of major initiatives or advances in workforce development and research that have been implemented by schools of social work across the United States. We also review ongoing and persistent institutional and structural factors, including systemic racism and income/wealth inequality, that perpetuate or exacerbate the problem of homelessness. Much of the work that has been accomplished during the first 5 years of the Grand Challenge to End Homelessness lays the groundwork for progress over the next 5 years, but only if there are major structural changes in how homelessness is addressed.

Chapter 5 reports on the political impacts of the movement thus far, including the way it has reshaped public discourse and political meanings, transformed public opinion, and influenced public policy. This chapter contains extensive empirical data, including records of public opinion change over time, maps of where progressive prosecutors have been elected across the United States, lists of policies aimed at “defunding the police” or what abolitionist call nonreformist reforms, which emphasize divesting from police and prisons and investing in social support, policies that are under consideration or have been adopted by state and municipal legislatures.

This chapter looks at the impact of segregated housing and schools on the performance of Black children on tests of academic skills, finding them lagging far behind White children. It shows that majority-Black school districts receive significantly less funding for education than majority-White districts. It then discusses in detail the 1973 Supreme Court case of San Antonio School District v. Rodriguez, brought by Demetrio Rodriguez and other Hispanic parents of children in the Edgewood district of San Antonio, Texas, whose schools received less funding than majority-White districts because of state laws that based school funding largely on property taxes. Statistics showed that poor and largely Hispanic and Black districts with low property values could not match the funding of affluent White districts. The Supreme Court ruled 5–4 against this challenge, with Justice Lewis Powell writing for the majority in stating that Texas (and other states) need provide minority students only with “the basic minimal skills” to participate in civic affairs, with a passionate dissent by Justice Thurgood Marshall. The chapter then returns to Detroit, where Black students came in last in the nation in test scores; more than two-thirds could not even grasp fundamental skills in reading and arithmetic. This barrier to advanced education and good jobs stems from the systemic racism that places Black children far behind Whites in school readiness, raising the question: How can Blacks catch up with Whites when they start so far behind?

The theme that pervades this volume is liminality: how the musical Hamilton, the elements used to create it, and the bodies of the performers in it operate in thresholds between spaces, ideas, and aesthetic choices. Erika Fischer-Lichte applied liminality to theatrical studies in her The Transformative Power of Performance, a concept that applies to Hamilton in multiple arenas. In his A Queer Sort of Materialism, David Savran identifies the middlebrow in art “as a site of struggle,” a concept that further illuminates Hamilton’s liminality as a musical. The editors here survey the volume’s four main sections—History, Representation, Staging, and Music—in terms of their content, approach and relationship to liminality, as reflected in each chapter. They conclude by considering the show’s continuing liminality in society and the larger culture: on the internet, in its release as a film in July 2020, and in its delayed response to concern for systemic racism as expressed by the Black Lives Matter movement. An examination of Hamilton’s liminality reveals there is much to praise about the show, but also, much to critique.

Education contributes powerfully to better health and public education is a foundation for democracy. Recently, however, private capital has viewed education as a profit center that can replace revenues lost to the decline of manufacturing. This chapter analyses the ways that modern capitalism has undermined equitable access to quality early childcare, K-12 education, and college by privatizing public education, creating and mandating expensive and inadequately tested but profitable educational tests, technologies and products, and imposing debt on schools and students. A powerful lobby of wealthy individuals and corporate leaders have used their influence to promote market values within the school system. These changes undercut the health- and equity-enhancing characteristics of public education. The chapter also describes how students, parents, teachers, and communities are resisting corporate penetration of public education, rejecting the ways it reinforces systemic racism, and creating models for education that promote health, democracy, and collective success.

This chapter examines the development of Antifa in the United States as both a major political force and a continuing source of civil disturbance. It looks beyond the often simplistic explanation for this development provided by sympathetic media; namely, that in violent protests and rioting we are observing a natural, understandable response to the discovery of systemic racism in the United States. One can condemn the indefensible killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and also note that Floyd was used as a pretext for mobilizing revolutionary forces to swing into action. The result of what in some cases were planned actions was to leave inner cities devastated. Although some of this violence may have been spontaneous, Antifa and those acting in concert with it had their fingerprints on the devastation. Moreover, their demonstrations prompted similar protests, resulting in looting and the toppling of statues by antifascists in Western Europe.