LibGuides: Antiracism and Allyship Resources: Systemic Racism

Historical Perspective

The Case for Reparations
By Ta-Nehisi Coates. "Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole."
Police Brutality: A historian explains how racist policing took over US cities
An interview with historian Khalil Muhammad about the cycle of "black criminality": historically black people are arrested to prevent them from exercising their rights; leading to the Black demographic being judged "dangerous" because of their high arrest rates; which then deprived them of their rights further and led to even more widespread policing.
"Mapping Inequality": interactive primary source
Illustrates the federal government's use of "redlining" throughout the 1930s. The government ranked and assigned "grades" to neighborhoods in cities throughout the country based on the race and ethnicity of people living there. These rankings were used by banks to decide whether or not to lend money in certain areas. Redlining directed money toward US-born white families and away from African American and immigrant families. Homeownership is an important way to build wealth from generation to generation. These redlining practices from 80 years ago helped to create wealth inequalities that still exist today.
How Race Shaped America's Roadways And Cities
The highways and public spaces that shape our cities were often intentionally built at the expense of Black, Latino and other minority Americans.
How Insurance Companies Used Bad Science to Discriminate
In 1881, Prudential announced that insurance policies held by black adults would be worth one-third less than the same plans held by whites.

Books to Read

Perilous Path : Talking Race, Inequality, and the Law by Sherrilyn Ifill, Loretta Lynch, Bryan Stevenson, & Anthony C. Thompson
Publication Date: 2018
Four of the nation's leading advocates for racial justice -- the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a former attorney general, a death penalty lawyer, and a star professor -- candidly and heatedly discuss race in the United States today.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Publication Date: 2010; updated 2020 edition
Since it was first published in 2010, this book has been cited in judicial decisions; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by its unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it."
Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates
Publication Date: 2019
The story begins with great hope, with the Emancipation Proclamation, Union victory, and the liberation of nearly 4 million enslaved African-Americans. Until 1877, the federal government, encouraged by the activism of Frederick Douglass and many others, tried at various turns to sustain their new rights. But the terror unleashed by white paramilitary groups in the former Confederacy, combined with deteriorating economic conditions and a loss of Northern will, restored "home rule" to the South. The retreat from Reconstruction was followed by one of the most violent periods in our history, with thousands of black people murdered or lynched and many more afflicted by the degrading impositions of Jim Crow segregation.

Current Events

How the School-to-Prison Pipeline Works
Harsh school disciplinary policies and law enforcement policies feed young people into the criminal punishment system. This is part of a national trend that criminalizes rather than educates students — and one that disproportionately targets black students. “Tough-on-crime” policies have resulted in millions of mostly black and brown people winding up behind bars. Nationally, since 1990, spending on prisons has increased three times as quickly as spending on education.
School Suspensions and the Racial Discipline Gap
The racial discipline gap in school suspensions has lasting educational and social effects.
The Racism of History Textbooks
How history textbooks reinforce narratives of racism, and the fight to change those books from the 1940s to the present.
New York Rolled Back Bail Reform. What Will The Rest Of The Country Do?
Once arrested and charged with a crime, people are held in jail until their court date, unless they can pay bail using their own cash or pay a fee to a commercial bond company that pays on their behalf. This creates unequal justice for rich and poor—effectively jailing un-convicted people simply because they don’t have access to money. Staying in jail has cascading effects: while in jail awaiting trial, people can’t work or take care of their families. They face pressure to plead guilty to avoid the misery of being locked up.
Barriers to homeownership still exist for people of color
"Banks are making a ton of loans to white newcomers at the same time that they’re denying a large proportion of people of color who want to buy or refinance or get a home improvement loan to stay in that same neighborhood."

Films to Watch

Films examining important facets of systemic racism in the U.S. — racial bias and financial hurdles in our court system and mass incarceration of Black Americans.

13th
WATCH FOR FREE in its entirety through Netflix. Combining archival footage with testimony from activists and scholars, director Ava DuVernay's examination of the U.S. prison system looks at how the country's history of racial inequality drives the high rate of incarceration in America.
Just Mercy
WATCH FOR FREE until the end of June! Based on the memoir by Bryan Stevenson, “Just Mercy” follows a young lawyer and his history-making battle for justice. After graduating from Harvard, Bryan heads to Alabama to defend those wrongly condemned or unable to afford proper representation. One of his first and most incendiary cases is that of Walter McMillian, who, in 1987, was sentenced to die for the notorious murder of an 18-year-old girl, despite the evidence proving his innocence and the fact that the only testimony against him came from a criminal with a motive to lie. In the years that follow, Bryan becomes embroiled in a labyrinth of legal and political maneuverings and overt and unabashed racism as he fights for Walter, and others like him, with the odds—and the system—stacked against them.